Graham: Trump ‘had all the authority he needs under the Constitution’ for Iran strikes

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in a Sunday morning interview pushed back on claims that President Trump acted outside his Constitutional authority by ordering strikes on Iran.

“No, he was within his Article II authority,” Graham said in an interview on NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” when asked if Trump violated the U.S. Constitution by “acting unilaterally.”

“Congress can declare war or cut off funding,” Graham continued. “We can’t be the commander in chief. You can’t have 535 commander in chiefs.”

“If you don’t like what the president does, in terms of war, you can cut off the funding. But declaring war is left of the Congress. We’ve declared war five times in the history of America. All of these other military operations were lawful.”

“He had all the authority he needs under the Constitution. They are wrong,” he added, referring to critics who say Trump should have sought congressional approval before ordering strikes on the three Iranian nuclear sites this weekend.

Since you ran away from your other thread, seems appropriate to rub your face in it here...Linda is one of the Congresscritters Turley is pointing at, but Jonathan's reasoned conclusion is correct.

You know, if you really were a RandFan, you would know that he's been told to stfu, er, discretion is the better part of valor; and the one and only thing Ron Paul's son has done since President Trump bombed bombed bombed Iran is to retweet an article by Jonathan Turley, pre-eminent Constitutional scholar.
Said article -- written just before the MOP mopped up Ferdow -- not even remotely critical of Trump's (impending) actions or ending Iran's nuclear program, but rather the duplicity of Congress and Congresscritters, which since WWII have rendered the WPA null and moot.
If he wages war unilaterally, Trump will only be the latest of many presidents to do so
"...Some Democratic members would move to expand presidential powers to launch attacks without approval. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), the drafter of the current legislation to limit Trump’s authority, drafted legislation in 2018 to put the authorization for use of military force on virtual autopilot.
...Congress became increasingly passive in the face of popular military engagements, using ambiguous “authorizations” to preserve the ability to later insist that they were never really in support of wars.
...the Iraq War, politicians like then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) were all-in on the invasion. Yet, when he ran for president, Biden insisted that he had opposed the long, drawn-out war.
Then there was Sen. John Kerry. During the Democratic primary in 2004, Kerry portrayed himself as against the Iraq War, even though he had also voted for it...“I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it.”
Congress has only declared 11 wars while allowing more than 125 military operations, including Vietnam, Korea and Afghanistan. Congress has not declared war in the 80 years since World War II.
Both Congress and the courts have effectively amended the Constitution to remove the requirement of war declarations.
Trump can cite the fact that Iran has killed or wounded thousands of Americans directly or through surrogates, including attacks on U.S. shipping through its Houthi proxy forces in Yemen.
More importantly, he can cite decades of judicial and congressional acquiescence. That is why Trump is unlikely to go to Congress and, as a matter of precedent, he does not have to. He will assume the same power his predecessors enjoyed...With that history and politics on his side, Trump could turn Fordow into the most expensive hole in history."

As I posted last night ...

Declarations of war pretty much became meaningless after the Civil War. That's because the U.S. had almost no standing army from the ratification of the U.S. Constitution up until the Civil War. Under the Constitution, a declaration of war by Congress was the legal mechanism for the federal government to compel states to have their militia units serve under the command of the President.

Once the state militias were eliminated after the Civil War, nothing really stops a president from doing whatever the hell he wants with the active-duty military personnel.

And Lindsey Graham is flat-out lying when he says: "If you don’t like what the president does, in terms of war, you can cut off the funding." This is exactly what Congress did in the 1980s to cut off U.S. support of the Contras in Nicaragua, but that didn't stop the Reagan administration from embarking on its own renegade operation to raise money through the sale of weapons to (ironically) Iran. Nobody was ever held accountable for that in any meaningful way.

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