Congress's Control Over the Military
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 17 September 2020
⏱️ 51 minutes
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Summary
In recent years, Congress has taken unprecedented steps to push back against the Trump administration's efforts to pull U.S. troops from certain long-standing deployments overseas. The most recent such provision is contained in the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2021 that is currently being debated and would prohibit the president from reducing U.S. troop levels in Germany and Europe unless certain conditions are met.
But does Congress have the authority to direct these deployments, or does doing so interfere with the president's constitutional authority as commander-in-chief? To discuss these issues, Scott R. Anderson sat down with two legal experts who have written extensively on the subject: Ashley Deeks of the University of Virginia School of Law and Zachary Price of the UC Hastings College of Law. They discussed the legal limits on Congress's authority over the military, what the president's commander-in-chief authority actually entails and what it all means for the future of U.S. troop deployments overseas.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
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| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:30.6 | A quick note before we begin, while the LawFair podcast usually runs our Arpreters of Truth |
| 0:35.5 | mini-series on disinformation on Thursdays, they are taking this week off. |
| 0:40.1 | But don't worry, they'll be back on this feed per usual next Thursday. |
| 0:50.3 | The executive's view is that once Congress has given the president troops, it is for the |
| 0:55.6 | president to say where to place the troops, to best advance the national security of the |
| 1:00.8 | United States. |
| 1:02.1 | You know, President Bush, at the first, at one point said that Congress could not restrict |
| 1:06.5 | his ability to relocate personnel away from a military base in Spain because that was |
| 1:12.1 | inconsistent with his judgment about the best way to advance U.S. national security |
| 1:17.0 | and diplomacy. |
| 1:18.4 | That continues through to the Trump administration's Justice Department as well, where you see |
| 1:24.1 | the language saying that Congress cannot require the Secretary of the Navy to assign a |
| 1:29.1 | particular ship a home port in the United States. |
| 1:32.5 | This is this claim that the executive really gets to decide when to fight, when to withdraw. |
| 1:38.4 | And I think it links back to the president's Repel Attacks power. |
| 1:42.9 | I'm Scott R. Anderson, and this is the LawFair Podcast for September 17th, 2020. |
| 1:49.7 | In recent years, Congress has taken unprecedented steps to push back against the Trump administration's |
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