This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, June 20th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

As pressure ramps up on the President to take the United States to war with Iran,

just what legal justifications are members of the administration

using in trying to circumvent Congress.

Look no further than the 2001 Authorization of the Use of Force after 9-11. And if that decades-old

A-U-M-F is such as slam-dunk, why are the arguments only being presented in

private? Cato's Gene Healy comments. The administration apparently thinks that they have the authority already to go to war with Iran,

and that's apparently based on this all-purpose resolution, the 2001 Authorization for the Use of

Military Force, the law that Congress passed three days after 9-11, nearly 18 years ago, that was designed to target the perpetrators of 9-11 and those who harbored or aided them.

Now, nearly two decades later, they seem to be contemplating that they already have authorization

for war with Iran.

We learned that last, they haven't quite said that in so many words in public, but we weren't, we learned last week from several members of the House Armed Services Committee that Secretary of State Pompeo had given them a classified

briefing at which there was a formal presentation on how the AUMF might

authorize war with Iran today.

This has been a bit more than Pompeo has been willing to say in public so far.

There's an earlier hearing on the Senate side where in April where

Senator Rand Paul asked the Secretary of State if he thought the 2001 AUMF

covered war with Iran and Pompeo said, well, I'd prefer to just leave that to the lawyers, which is kind of funny when you realize that Pompeo graduated from Harvard Law School, but in private apparently

he has told members of Congress that this law that's been rightly described as a something that's been turned

into a blank check for war without end. The 2001 U.M.F.

Pompeo's theory is that this blank check is broad enough to cover war with Iran now.

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