Obama, Republicans and the media concur: it's time for war with Isis - The Guardian

After more than six months of virtually ignoring the fact that the war against Isis was illegal by almost anyone’s standards – given Congress’s cowardly refusal vote on it and the White House’s refusal to ask them first – the Obama administration has finally submitted a draft war authorization against Isis to Congress.

That means the media can go back to doing what it does best: creating a “debate” over how many countries we should invade, without any discussion of how our invasions created the very situation in which we feel we have to contemplate more invasions. It’s like the early Bush years all over again.

On its face, the White House’s draft looks like a limited war authority that would need to be renewed in three years, only it contains vague wording and legal loopholes that, as legal scholar Ryan Goodman writes, could allow “the next president the power to embroil America in conflicts and in countries that no current member of Congress could predict.” Worse yet, the White House is decidedly not trying to reform or sunset the 2001 authorization to fight the perpetrators of 9/11, which it has also used as legal rationale to conduct its operations against Isis (Isis didn’t exist when the AUMF was passed and has been al-Qaida’s sworn enemy for some time now).

And, as New York Times’ Peter Baker noted matter-of-factly on CBS this Sunday: “[the authorization] is not going to change what’s happening on the ground. President Obama has made clear whether it passes or not, he’s going to continue to do the exact same thing.”

The only thing more farcical than the White House’s position is the Republican party’s: after months ofhyperbolic grandstanding over Obama’s supposed abuses of executive power when it comes to immigration, health care, net neutrality or anything else, his political opposition has suddenly decided that they won’t agree to pass anything that doesn’t give the president absolutely unlimited authority to engage in a forever war with Isis.  Read More 
Obama, Republicans and the media concur: it's time for war with Isis