When President Barack Obama wanted to bomb Syria in 2013 following reports that Bashar al-Assad was using chemical weapons on his own people, Rep. Tim Walz, D-Minn., who represented a rural district in southern Minnesota, went to a local grocery store.
Walz stood outside the store and asked everybody that came out whether they supported bombing Syria. Every single person said no.
“He was clearly stunned because he told us that story the next time we talked to him,” said Cathy Murphy, president of the Minnesota Peace Project, which has lobbied Walz on a range of foreign policy issues over the years. “It’s like, ‘The people in my area, they do not want more war.’ And that really impacted the way he voted.”
During his time in Congress, Walz, now at the top of the Democratic ticket as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, was a vocal advocate against a new war in Syria and evolved into a strong defender of congressional war powers. He ran for the House in 2006 on an anti-Iraq war platform, was active in multiple efforts to prevent the U.S. from waging a new war in Syria, and co-sponsored every war powers resolution aimed at imposing congressional authority on the U.S. role in the war on Yemen, among other pieces of legislation related to American intervention abroad.
Walz and Harris constitute the first presidential ticket in U.S. history to be unified in support of key legal interpretations that have significant implications for war powers. Since the debacle of the Iraq War, Democrats have staked out stronger positions against the Bush administration’s notion of unchecked presidential powers to make war. As Obama took power, however, the administration undertook a program of more limited adventurism but never renounced the claims of expansive powers it inherited through Bush administration precedents.
Walz and Harris, on the other hand, took on-the-record stances in favor of using legislation to limit those powers.
They were both early supporters of the Yemen War Powers Resolution, which directed the president to remove U.S. troops from hostilities “in or affecting” Yemen. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 was passed to reassert Congress’s constitutional role in deciding whether to go to war. Under the Vietnam-era law, the president can’t send troops overseas into hostilities unless it has been authorized by Congress.
The 2019 Yemen war powers resolution went on to become the first since the advent of the law to pass both chambers of Congress. (Harris also voted for an Iran war powers resolution following President Donald Trump’s assassination of a top Iranian military commander.)
In addition to opposing various interventions, Walz has, for his part, also supported efforts to revoke and reissue more restrained versions of the 2001 and 2002 authorizations for the use of military force, or AUMFs, that formed a shaky legal foundation for a worldwide “war on terror.”
Today, with Israel’s war in Gaza leading to U.S bombings of Yemen, advocates for humanitarian relief say having a presidential ticket recognize the limits of war-making powers is as important as ever.
“They need to show us, the public, that they support these issues because that’s their principle, that they do believe in the value of the War Powers Resolution,” said Dr. Aisha Jumaan, president of the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation, “and that we need to have oversight of wars, especially now given the risk of escalation In the Middle East.”
Following Anti-War Constituents
Walz opposed war in Syria during both major pushes for a robust U.S. role in the conflict: the 2013 effort when Obama was seeking authorization, and in 2016 when hawks were pushing for more involvement.
In 2016, Walz helped lead a group of House Democrats that urged Obama, successfully, to resist the mounting pressure. After more than 50 State Department officials came out urging Obama to carry out strikes on Syria, Walz — who served 24 years in the Army National Guard and retired in 2005 — led a letter with fellow veterans Reps. John Conyers, D-Mich., and Seth Moulton, D-Mass., calling on the president to keep pursuing diplomatic negotiations.
During the national conversation about intervening in 2013, he was also one of 18 Democrats to sign on to a Republican-led letter to Obama, written by Rep. Scott Rigell, R-Va., saying that striking Syria without congressional approval would be unconstitutional.
“We have to challenge the administration,” Walz said in 2013. “If we’re being true to who we are, it is about the constitutional responsibility of the House and it should not matter who is the occupant of the White House.”
Walz told the Star Tribune that he was representing the anti-war views of his constituents, which were unanimous. “After 12 years of war, the American public has every right to weigh in and expect that their views be represented in Congress,” Walz said.
Like most Democrats, Walz did side with the Obama administration in voting against an abrupt end to the Libya intervention in 2011. After the civil war in Libya became mired in disaster — with even Obama agreeing that the U.S. intervention was the “worst mistake” of his presidency — Walz’s trajectory became clear. He emerged as a defender of congressional war powers. He went on to support legislation aiming to block an attack on North Korea without congressional authorization when President Donald Trump was threatening “fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
In 2017, Walz co-sponsored a bill that would have repealed the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs and replaced them with a narrower authorization with a three-year sunset. The 2001 AUMF, which was passed after the September 11 attacks and has served as the legal basis of the U.S. war on terror, was intended to authorize war against the orchestrators of the attack. The decades-old authorization, however, has been stretched to wage war in at least a dozen countries without additional authority from Congress.
A senior Democratic aide who has been involved in recent efforts to rein in presidential war powers said Walz and Harris have taken a “pretty strong and consistent position” on Congress having the sole authority over the offensive use of force. “This is a breath of fresh air,” said the aide, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press. “If they remain consistent with their voting records and if they respond to popular engagement on this, it could promise a much more peaceful and constitutionally sound foreign policy.”
Murphy, of the Minnesota Peace Project, said Walz was receptive to her group’s views and willing to change his position if he realized he was wrong. “I don’t think Tim Walz would have supported that but over time he basically said, ‘I want to repeal the AUMF,’” she recalled. “He supported repealing it simply because he could see this thing was being used in ways it was not supposed to be used. He really understood the constitutional requirement that Congress declares war, that Congress controls whether or not the president can just willy-nilly go into somewhere.”
War Powers Resolutions
Section 8(c) of the War Powers Resolution defines the introduction of armed forces into hostilities to include “the assignment of members of such armed forces to command, coordinate, participate in the movement of or accompany” the military forces of any foreign country when those military forces are engaged in hostilities or potentially engaged in hostilities.
A Senate report on the War Powers Resolution explained how the language was intended to “prevent secret, unauthorized military support activities and to prevent a repetition of many of the most controversial and regrettable actions in Indochina” — an engagement that started with “advisors” on the ground and bloomed into the full-on catastrophe of the Vietnam War and its attendant secret campaigns.
The Yemen war powers resolutions co-sponsored by both Harris and Walz harnessed this broader legal interpretation of the term “hostilities” — expansive enough to include the crucial support the U.S. was providing to the Saudi-led coalition bombing Yemen.
Though the Obama and Trump administrations argued that the U.S. was not participating in hostilities against Ansar Allah, the rebel group known as the Houthis, the U.S. role was still vital to the brutal campaign — the worst humanitarian crisis in the world before Gaza.
At the time, the U.S. was providing ongoing maintenance and spare parts for bomber jets, intelligence for strikes, and mid-air refueling — a service Saudi Arabia has been delinquent in paying for. Its support role included U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia, both in the “joint coordination planning cell” and on Saudi air bases. Walz and Harris didn’t hesitate to say that these activities constituted unauthorized “hostilities” under U.S. law.
The perspective on “hostilities” in the war powers resolutions is especially salient today. The Obama era saw a transition away from George W. Bush-style invasions, into a worldwide secret drone program. Eventually, U.S. military adventurism took the shape of proxy wars: With the war in Ukraine, Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, and the U.S. ramping up its militarization of the South China Sea and Taiwan, using proxies became a more convenient and inconspicuous way to wage wars that Americans would never support.
Walz and Harris aren’t destined to maintain the same positions on presidential war-making powers if they take the White House. The dynamics and entrenched power of long-serving bureaucrats in the executive branch could change the calculus and influence their approach.
Their records, however, provide a reason for advocates of restraint to be hopeful, as well as a basis for holding them accountable if they stray from their previous stances. Sens. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and Chris Coons, D-Del., also supporters of the Yemen war powers resolution, have been floated as options for secretary of state.
“As legislators, both Harris and Walz have explicitly supported Congress’s original intent of the War Powers Resolution, but we will work to ensure whoever occupies the White House acts according to the Constitution and the law,” said Cavan Kharrazian, a foreign policy adviser at Demand Progress, a left-leaning group that helped lead the coalition that passed the Yemen war powers resolution.
In contrast, Biden, as the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, as the Democratic staff director of the committee, suppressed dissident views related to war powers and worked to give the Bush administration broad power to go to war with Iraq.