WASHINGTON — The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday voted to pass a bill authored by Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA) that includes amendments by Reps. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Ro Khanna (D-CA) which would repeal legislation that authorizes the president to use military force as “necessary and appropriate” against threats from Iraq following the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001.
The main text of the bill authored by Garamendi, who represents portions of Lake County in California’s 3rd congressional district, is unrelated to the 2002 Iraq War Authorization for Use of Military Force which the added amendments would repeal. The bill—H.R. 550, which would award the Congressional Gold Medal to American merchant mariners of World War II—passed both the House and Senate in 2019 with bipartisan support, but was sent back to the House because the Senate made changes to its language.
The Lee and Khanna amendments were added this month to H.R. 550, which following Thursday’s vote in the House now returns to the Senate, where it faces an uncertain future—Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has declined to take up hundreds of bills passed by the House, said Garamendi Communications Director Eric Olsen.
Rep. Lee gained notoriety in 2001 as the only member of Congress to vote “no” on the Iraq AUMF. Her amendment, approved by a House vote of 236-166 to be included in Garamendi’s bill, would repeal the AUMF. Rep. Khanna’s amendment, which would deny the Pentagon funding to launch military operations against Iran that were not authorized by Congress, was added to H.R. 550 after a 228-175 vote in its favor, reports legislative news service Roll Call.
“In 2002, I stood here and urged us not to rush into war,” Lee said on the House floor Thursday. “I offered an amendment to the AUMF that was presented that would have prevented the war by requiring the inspectors to allow verifiable information with regard to the alleged weapons of mass destruction before we took military action. That amendment received 17 votes, but had it passed, it would have exposed the false intelligence that the war was passed on. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”
The House voted 236-166 in favor of H.R. 550 with the Lee and Khanna amendments.
In a statement, Garamendi’s office on Thursday wrote following the vote that the 2002 AUMF authorized the war “against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. It permitted the President to use the armed forces as ‘necessary and appropriate’ to ‘defend U.S. national security against the continuing threat posed by Iraq’ and to ‘enforce all relevant Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.’”
Hussein’s regime was overthrown in 2003, and the U.S. mission in Iraq was ended in 2011, the statement notes.
Speaking on the House floor Thursday, Garamendi called the AUMF “a very open-ended authorization for the president to do virtually anything he wants.” Garamendi claimed lawyers at the Pentagon have said the AUMF “allows the president to do anything, with any threat that emanates from Iraq…There could be no more powerful reason for us, then, to terminate the 2002 AUMF with regard to Iraq and come to our senses. When there’s an issue, bring it to the floor and allow us to debate how we should deal with Iraq or Iran, or any other threat in that area.”
Khanna and Garamendi have both asserted that the legislation passed on Thursday does not diminish the president’s ability to respond to imminent threats to national security under the War Powers Resolution of 1973.
The White House issued a statement earlier this week that warned it planned to veto the Khanna and Lee bills, which have been included in H.R. 550. The White House claimed that the bills’ adoption “would undermine the administration’s reestablishment of deterrence with Iran, which could perversely make violent conflict with Iran more likely.”
