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Barbara Lees Long War on the War on Terror
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Slate
Posted: August 14th, 2017
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...
The House Appropriations Committees voice vote on June 29, to approve an amendment repealing the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, came as a surprise to congressional leaders; reporters on Capitol Hill; and the amendments sponsor, Rep. Barbara Lee. The AUMF is the controversial legal authority under which most U.S. counterterrorism activities are conducted. Lee has been on a mission to repeal it since Sept. 14, 2001, when she cast the one and only vote in Congress against the original authorization. In the 16 years that followed, Lee has sponsored numerous bills ... intended to overturn the authorization, to no avail. The vote in June, the first time a congressional committee had passed an AUMF repeal, showed that shes finally no longer alone in believing that the authorization she describes as a blank check is no good. In the end, the House Rules Committee stripped Lees amendment out of the bill. History has vindicated many of Lees concerns about the AUMF: It has, as she warned, dramatically expanded the presidents power to use military force, reduced congressional oversight, and vastly grown the U.S. military footprint around the world with no end in sight to the escalation. The measure includes no time or geographic distinctions, and three presidential administrations have taken full advantage of that ambiguity. A 2016 Congressional Research Service report found that the AUMFs authority had been invoked 37 times for operations in 14 countries.
Note: Read more on Rep. Lee's ongoing fight to repeal the AUMF. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.
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