Conservatives are right to celebrate last week’s Republican victories. The new Senate majority in particular is an opportunity to further check the Obama administration—and showcase conservative policies ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Videos By Rare
But for those of us who think an authentically conservative foreign policy is a restrained and realistic one, these gains do come with one downside: the GOP’s biggest hawks now have more power. The Daily Beast’s Eli Lake suggests the elections could be the neoconservatives’ revenge.
John McCain is the incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Devin Nunes, the California Republican who called Justin Amash al Qaeda’s best friend in Congress, is in line to chair the House Intelligence Committee. The reliably hawkish Tom Cotton will be one of the highest-profile Senate freshmen. Confrontation abroad is currently high on the Republican agenda.
This has many antiwar Republicans feeling glum. “Republican control of the Senate = expanded neocon wars in Iraq and Syria,” Ron Paul tweeted. The Washington Times published a story headlined, “Republican Senate takeover gives neocons, war hawks bully pulpit.” The accompanying photo shows McCain conferring with freshly reelected Lindsey Graham.
None of this means there aren’t opportunities for antiwar Republicans in the new majority, however. The new Congress is a bully pulpit for them as well, and the public—while as distrustful of President Obama’s diplomacy as everything else he does—is closer to their side on questions like boots on the ground.
Rand Paul is already taking the initiative. He has published an op-ed arguing that Obama’s war against ISIS is currently illegal. Why? Because he is waging it without congressional authorization in the absence of an imminent threat to the United States. (The word “imminent” is important here: ISIS may well metastasize into something that could attack the U.S., but there is no clear intelligence it has done so yet and the administration isn’t claiming that it has.)
In his column, Senator Paul does two things. It reminds limited-government conservatives what the Constitution says about the power to declare war. And it calls out liberal Democrats who opposed war and untrammeled executive power when George W. Bush was in office but are silent today.
“Where have those Democratic protectors of the constitutional authority of Congress gone?” Paul asked. “Was it always just a partisan attack on Republican presidents?”
In fact, senators across the political spectrum recognize how shoddy the legal basis of the ISIS war is. McCain, to his credit, has called for a new authorization of force. Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy has challenged Obama’s constitutional authority to send more troops to Iraq without a vote by Congress.
Why should antiwar conservatives and libertarians care about such process questions if even hawks like McCain support a congressional vote (and if even Rand Paul takes a more hawkish line against ISIS than they do)? Not only does the legality of a war matter for its own sake, separate from the question of whether a war is wise or just. A bipartisan authorization resolution would likely limit the use of force more than what Obama or McCain would do on their own.
Paul, while not minimizing the dangers of allowing jihadist lunatics to broaden their base of operation in Iraq and Syria, may be the key to securing such a resolution. And as someone who opposed the original Iraq invasion when Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer were all still on board with it, Paul can learn from the mistakes of those who tried and failed to limit the scope of that mission.
Getting Congress back into the discussion of war and peace has already averted one war under Obama: the proposed military intervention in Syria, which would have involved us in the Syrian civil war earlier—but on the opposite side of the one we are fighting on now.
Could it stop a war again? Or at least force the president to publicly think through his strategy for dealing with ISIS?
It is also important to link the conservative critique of Obama’s use of executive power on issues like immigration and Obamacare to foreign policy. This can get conservatives thinking of limited government all the time, not just when big government does things they don’t like.
Congressional war powers are just the tip of the iceberg, however. Conservative skeptics of interventionism need to keep looking for opportunities to change the terms of the debate, much like the stand with Rand filibuster did with drones and extrajudicial killings. The hawks didn’t give up after a few relatively dovish Republicans were elected.
Republicans who don’t like the McCain-Graham foreign policy need to stop sulking and starting offering a real alternative. This is their party, and their majority, too.