Rep. Barbara Lee: The AUMF gives US presidents a “blank check” to wage war

Rep. Barbara Lee voted against the Iraq War in 2002 and she was the only member of Congress to vote against authorizing the war in Afghanistan just three days after 9/11. Those were both politically unpopular votes at the time but they catapulted her into anti-war hero status in the years that followed, as more evidence emerged of the Bush administration's misleading of the public in the run-up to the war. “You don’t make decisions when you're grieving, when you're mourning, when you're angry. It was just a rush to do something given the horrific tragedy,” says Rep. Lee. The Congresswoman has been working to repeal the broad authorities granted by the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that was used to authorize the war in Iraq - and which has been used by all U.S. presidents since to pursue other military activities abroad. “That authorization set the stage for any president to use force anywhere in the world and kept Congress out of the mix. We’ve been missing in action,” Lee says.March 19, 2023