00:00So how on earth are we at war with Iran when Congress didn't declare it?
00:04The answer is that presidents have been exploiting a loophole in the Constitution for years.
00:08To understand what's going on, you need to know three things.
00:10The framers of the Constitution understood that going to war was a huge deal,
00:13and so they thought it should only happen if the people authorized it.
00:17In the early years of the Republic, there was no way for a president realistically to go to war without
00:21Congress
00:22because there was no standing army, and so you couldn't fight for long with just a handful of troops.
00:26You needed Congress to raise the army, and you also needed Congress to pay for the war,
00:30at a time when there was no big Department of Defense or big army in the background.
00:33But after World War II, we got an enormous military,
00:36and the president with nuclear weapons could also end the world at the push of a button.
00:40After Richard Nixon secretly bombed Cambodia and Laos, extending the Vietnam War,
00:44Congress passed the War Powers Resolution.
00:46That's a law that says that if the president initiates hostilities,
00:49he's got two days to tell Congress about it, and then 60 days to get Congress to authorize it.
00:54And if he doesn't get that authorization, the war becomes illegal.
00:56The loophole is that if the president doesn't listen to Congress,
00:59there's really not much that Congress can actually do about it.
01:01Bill Clinton continued to bomb Kosovo for an extra two weeks after the War Powers dates had expired.
01:07Congress didn't like it, but they couldn't do anything about it.
01:09Astonishingly, when Barack Obama wanted to bomb Libya to take out their leader,
01:13he didn't get authorization from Congress.
01:15And then his State Department convinced him of a legal theory according to which,
01:19if we're bombing a country from the air, that doesn't count as hostilities against that country
01:24for purposes of the War Powers Resolution, because they said,
01:28well, there's not that much chance of retaliation since we're up there in the air,
01:30and it'll be time limited, and there won't be escalation.
01:33That Obama interpretation is legally indefensible.
01:36But Donald Trump has been able to rely on it, first in Venezuela, where he took out the leader,
01:40and now in starting this war against Iran.
01:42And Iran shows you how ridiculous the Obama legal position was,
01:45because, of course, even though we bombed Iran from the air, we're now in a regional war with them.
01:50The Democrats are trying to pass a War Powers Resolution now that would say that Donald Trump
01:54has to stop the war in Iran.
01:57They won't succeed realistically, because even if they somehow got a majority in the House and the Senate,
02:01Trump would veto.
02:03And we're a long way from the olden days when Congress actually passed the original War Powers Resolution
02:08over Richard Nixon's veto.
02:09The solution we need is for Congress to tighten the War Powers Resolution,
02:12to make it clear that it does include bombing a country.
02:15And then we need bipartisan consensus that the president should not be able to take us into a war
02:20without our consent.
02:22It doesn't matter how nasty the leadership of the country is that we're taking out.
02:26The issue is the balance of powers on our side.
02:29Trump has done more than any other president in history to govern on his own
02:33and try to get around the law and sometimes just flat out break it.
02:36But this problem does not go back just to Trump.
02:38It goes back further in the past.
02:40We've changed the separation of powers and not for the better.
02:43We need to get back on the right track.
02:45We need to get back on the right track.
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