US Senate defeats bill hitting Obama on Libya

Anti-war protesters at White House © AFP/File Jewel Samad

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US Senate on Tuesday easily swept aside a symbolic but politically potent measure declaring that President Barack Obama’s decision to intervene militarily in Libya violated the US Constitution.

Lawmakers voted 90-10 to table, or kill, a resolution by Republican Senator Rand Paul that attacked Obama using his own words about the US Congress’s constitutional prerogative to declare war.

The measure recycled Obama’s contention in 2007 when he was a senator and White House contender that “the president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

Paul warned ahead of the vote that “Congress has become a doormat to be stepped upon, to be ignored, and basically to be treated as irrelevant” on the issue of US forces going to war.

Paul and Republican Senator Mike Lee had vowed to block action on a small business bill unless he got a vote on his resolution.

The US Constitution reserves to Congress the right to declare war, though US presidents have often deployed forces without first getting lawmakers’ explicit say-so, despite a 1973 law that aimed to curtail their ability to do so.

The War Powers Act allows the president to use force in response to an attack on the United States, its territories, or its armed forces, but calls for notifying congress within 48 hours and says US troops must start to withdraw 60 days later unless specifically authorized to remain by lawmakers.

The vote was the US Senate’s second on Libya: On March 1 it unanimously passed a non-binding resolution urging the world impose a no-fly zone over Libya and Moamer Kadhafi’s bloody crackdown on protests against his rule.

© AFP — Published at Activist Post with license