Debate over a new authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) against the Islamic State (ISIL) stalled this week in the House, despite the Obama administration’s announcement Wednesday that it will be sending 450 more troops to Iraq.
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) acknowledged to reporters on Thursday that drafting a new AUMF has been pushed to the back burner—or rather, shoved off the stovetop—just as US involvement in the conflict is set to ramp up yet again.
“We don’t discuss it on the floor of the House,” Pelosi said of new war legislation that would define and set the parameters of ongoing US military action in Iraq and Syria.
American forces started conducted airstrikes on ISIL targets in those two countries last summer.
Pelosi did say that the decision should motivate Congress to debate a new AUMF, but that the issue isn’t exactly a new one, and won’t be resolved soon.
“It’s no use talking about day-to-day. We have to talk about the authority,” she told reporters, noting that it was “almost a year ago” when members of her caucus began urging Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) to bring up a new authorization.
In February, the White House introduced a draft ISIL-specific AUMF to Congress. Since then, however, in Pelosi’s words, “nothing happened.”
The proposal received a chilly response from both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill. From the left, lawmakers objected to the authorization’s lack of geographic limits, and its vague definitions of “associated forces” and when and how long a deployment of ground forces could be triggered. Conservatives, meanwhile, claimed that it was too limiting.
Leaders in both parties have, in the meantime, effectively accepted the administration’s tenuous legal justification for the ongoing military campaign. The White House has said that the post-9/11 AUMF passed in 2001 grants it all the authority its needs to fight the ISIL, a group which didn’t exist at the time.
Prospects for an ISIL-specific war authorization are dim in the upper chamber as well. An attempt by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) to insert new AUMF into a State Department policy bill was rebuffed this week by the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker (R-Tenn.).
“It’s inexcusable that Congress has let 10 months of war go by without authorizing the US mission against ISIL,” Sen. Kaine said in a statement on Monday.
