A Conversation with Sen. Tom Udall about War Powers

War on the Rocks

News, Politics

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2019

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ryan sat down for a conversation Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico to talk about an issue that matters a lot to them and should matter a lot to you: war powers. In her contribution to a new roundtable on war powers, Oona Hathaway has a perfect lede: "The U.S. Congress has not approved a use of force since 2002. And yet the United States certainly has not been at peace in the years since."

Military operations all across the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa are ongoing and expanding. As Hathaway writes elegantly they are all "grounded in capacious readings of Congress' 2001 and 2002 authorizations for use of military force." Edward Corwin described the way foreign relations powers are divvied up in the constitution as an "invitation to struggle". But — as the years since these aging authorizations have demonstrated — it's not a fair fight, is it?

Don't miss this episode, which pairs well with the new war powers roundtable in the Texas National Security Review.

Transcript

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0:16.0	You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs. My name is Ryan Evans. I'm the CEO of War on the Rocks. In this episode I sat down with
0:20.0	Senator Tom U-Dall of New Mexico to talk about an issue near and dear to both of our hearts.
0:25.4	War powers and their use and abuse.
0:28.7	I should say before I get into the interview that most of my smart questions were heavily
0:32.3	informed by a policy
0:33.8	roundtable we published at our sister publication the Texas National
0:37.3	Security Review that's TNSR.org on war powers this roundtable features
0:42.3	test Bridgman and Stephen Pomper as chairs,
0:45.2	along with Matthew Waxman, Scott Anderson, and Una Hathaway as contributors.
0:49.0	You should definitely check it out. It pairs really well with this interview.
1:01.0	You're one of a pretty small number of leaders in the House and Senate that have taken on war powers as a key issue. What attracted you personally to championing this issue?
1:04.0	Well, the first thing is the concern about the Constitution, I think, which is a major
1:11.6	concern. And then I've talked to a lot of veterans both in my state and then there's an
1:17.5	organization called vote vets and with many of the
1:22.0	conflicts we're in many of the conflicts we're in, many of them have real questions as to why we haven't
1:27.0	ended them, why we haven't done more to bring to a close the conflicts that were in.
1:35.0	And especially in light of the objectives we laid out before we went in,
1:39.4	for example, in Afghanistan,
1:42.4	when George W Bush said we're you know we're going to go in for
1:46.6	three reasons we're going to do everything we can to house the government which was sponsoring the terrorism there, in the training
1:56.5	camps and capture Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.
2:01.3	And so there was a real sense there that we could have done that in 60 to 90 days.
	...

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