Democratic senator Tim Kaine had some harsh words for the White House over its failure to secure congressional authority for the U.S. war against the Islamic State, calling it ”the height of public immorality.”
The Virginia lawmaker spoke Wednesday at the D.C.-based Wilson Center, during an event concerning the expansion of executive war-making powers in the Obama years. Kaine described what he saw as “a symbiotic pathology between executive overreach and congressional abdication,” which has led to presidents increasingly going it alone.
While expressing concern about the constitutional separation of powers, the senator also explained the moral implications of such a system. “If we don’t do it the way the Framers intended — if we allow war to be done unilaterally by a president, with a Congress that stands back and says, ‘Oh, we don’t really want to get involved, there’s a midterm coming up, we don’t want to make people mad’ — then we’re asking people to risk their lives.”
“How dare we ask people to risk that, if we’re not wiling to do our job? To have a debate in front of the American public, and then put our thumbprint on the mission and say, ‘This is in the national interest?’” he asked. “That seems to me to be the height of public immorality. Bribery is bad, a whole lot of things are bad. What could you do that could be more publicly immoral than ordering people to risk their lives without, like, having a discussion about whether the mission is worth it or not?”
Elected in 2012, Kaine is already being floated as a possible vice-presidential contender in 2016 — particularly if Hillary Clinton, with her more hawkish views on executive authority, wins the nomination.
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