War authorizations: Joe Biden supports new war powers vote in Congress

The White House said in March 2021 that President Joe Biden supports repealing existing authorizations for the use of military force and replacing them with a narrower framework, according to Yahoo News, marking the first time as president Biden had publicly backed jettisoning the war powers resolutions passed by Congress decades earlier.

Ensure that the authorizations for the use of military force currently on the books are replaced with a narrow and specific framework that will ensure we can protect Americans from terrorist threats while ending the forever wars.

That statement, attributed to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, framed the repeal effort around ending the U.S. military's broadest legal justifications for open-ended conflict while preserving a mechanism to respond to terrorist threats, per Yahoo News' reporting.

The bipartisan push behind it

Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., and Todd Young, R-Ind., led a bipartisan effort to repeal the 2002 authorization for the Iraq War and the 1991 authorization that preceded the first Gulf War, Yahoo News reported. Kaine's office said the senator was "already in bipartisan discussion with his colleagues and the administration" on the effort.

The Syria strikes that raised the stakes

The administration's announcement followed Biden's decision to order retaliatory airstrikes against Iran-backed militia groups in Syria without first seeking congressional approval, which Yahoo News said reignited bipartisan concern that Congress had ceded its constitutional war-declaration authority to the executive branch. The Pentagon justified those strikes under the president's Article II commander-in-chief powers and the United Nations Charter's Article 51 right of self-defense, rather than citing the existing war-powers authorizations, per the report.

What it signals

Biden endorsing repeal so soon after ordering strikes that bypassed Congress entirely underscored the gap between the administration's stated preference for a narrower war-powers framework and its immediate practice of relying on independent executive authority when it acted. Yahoo News noted that a similar effort under President Barack Obama had failed to produce bipartisan consensus on replacement language, a precedent that left the 2021 effort's odds of actually reaching a floor vote uncertain even with early administration support.

US In News compiled this archived account from contemporaneous coverage by Yahoo News. It restores a story originally published on this site in March 2021; figures are as reported at the time.