Unfit For Office

What Blows Up Must Come Down by Nancy Ohanian

Clearly, Trump does at least one thing every day that shows him unfit for office. Yesterday, for example, it revolved around his corrupt relationship with the state of New York. A few weeks ago Trump had cut off the state's access to the Global Entry and other "trusted traveler" programs that allow travelers shorter airport lines and faster border crossings. If you travel a lot, it's a big deal. It's very inconvenient for travelers, many of whom are wealthy and influential, to be denied that in New York (and only New York).

No one believed Trump when he claimed he was singling out New York because they allow undocumented residents to apply for driver's licenses (as do many states). But yesterday the truth came out when Trump tweeted at Governor Cuomo that if he wants to trusted traveler programs back, the state would have to-- well in his own words: "New York must stop all of its unnecessary lawsuits & harrassment, start cleaning itself up, and lowering taxes." Sounds like blackmail to me, no?

While Trump was on Twitter fighting like a 9 year old girl with Mini-Mike, General Kelly and Andrew Cuomo, the U.S. Senate based bipartisan legislation to prevent him from starting a war with Iran. The vote was 55-45 against the Trumpets position. That should have been the vote for calling witnesses at the impeachment trial. The 8 Republicans who crossed the aisle to vote with all the Democrats were Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Susan Collins (R-ME), Mike Lee (R-UT), Jerry Moran (R-KS), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Rand Paul (R-KY), and Todd Young (R-IN). (Yes, Mitt's back to ass-kissing mode.)

Reporting for the Washington Post, Karoun Demirjian that it was "a bipartisan rebuke of his administration’s resistance to involving the legislative branch in decisions that some fear could lead to all-out war... Trump will almost certainly veto the measure once it passes the House, and neither chamber of Congress has the votes to override that veto... The number of GOP senators willing to cross Trump over his Iran policy has risen in the wake of the strike last month that killed top Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani, amid the possibility that it could have triggered a wider war without any congressional involvement."

New to the group willing to stand up to Trump on Iran and war-powers resolutions were Lamar Alexander and Bill Cassidy.

Presidents of both parties, including George W. Bush, Obama and Trump, have said they have the right to order military action as a matter of self-defense when they see threats they define as “imminent.” But some lawmakers say the executive branch has expanded its war powers to the detriment of Congress, particularly when it invokes congressional authorizations passed in 2001 and 2002 to support action in conflicts never envisioned at that time.

National security adviser Robert C. O’Brien said the strike on Soleimani was justified by Congress’s 2002 authorization of the war on Iraq.

Efforts in Congress to repeal the old authorizations or write new ones have failed, amid the divide between lawmakers who want to bring troops home and those who want to provide fresh authorization for current campaigns.

The debate over Iran has also been fueled by many lawmakers’ frustration at what they see as a lack of candor from administration officials about what prompted the strike on Soleimani. Officials have offered shifting explanations of the basis for the strike, including that Soleimani posed an imminent threat to U.S. personnel in the Middle East and that it was retaliation for an attack on a U.S. base in Iraq that killed a U.S. contractor.

Lee, one of the Republican senators who openly criticized the administration for its mixed and limited messages, insisted this week that voting to reassert Congress’s war powers “should not be controversial” and that reclaiming such ground from the executive branch “doesn’t show weakness, that shows strength.”

It is not clear that the bipartisan nature of vote in the House will be as strong as it was in the Senate. The House must take up Kaine’s resolution before it can be sent to Trump’s desk-- something House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) promised Thursday to do “in the coming weeks.”

Last month, the House passed a similar but nonbinding Iran war-powers resolution by a vote of 224 to 194. Only three Republicans joined most of the Democrats to support that measure-- far fewer than joined Democrats in 2019 to back measures preventing Trump from using federal funds to conduct operations against Iran and invoking Congress’s war powers to pull back support for the Saudi-led campaign in Yemen.

One of those Republicans, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), is a close ally of Trump’s and a leading voice in his party for reasserting Congress’s war powers and ending endless wars. In the wake of the House’s vote last month, he told Politico that he suspected he had been kept off the president’s team of defenders during his impeachment trial as retaliation for his vote to constrain Trump’s actions against Iran.