Adam Schiff’s shifty memory

Last week on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, comments from the from California’s Democratic junior senator, Adam Schiff, perfectly illustrated why we are where we are when it comes to the executive branch’s near unilateral authority over military force. In the first episode since the administration launched Operation Epic Fury, Maher pulled a fast one on Schiff by asking: “This statement from the administration: ‘The president had the constitutional authority to direct the use of military force because he could reasonably determine that such use of force was in the national interest….’ That’s too vague for you?” Schiff replied, “Totally vague.” Then came the gotcha moment when Maher said, “Okay. Because that’s [a statement from President Barack] Obama about Libya [from 2011]….”

There were subsequent parts of this conversation worth examining, but let’s explore this for a moment. As I have mentioned in several of my previous columns, presidents for the past several decades have skirted congressional approval and undergone military action at a time of their choosing. Obama launched military strikes against the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. In a NATO campaign dubbed “Operation Unified Protector,” U.S. and allied militaries conducted a months-long campaign against the forces of the Gaddafi regime. This was despite the fact that the U.S. House of Representatives voted against a resolution to authorize “the limited use of the United States Armed Forces in support of the NATO mission in Libya.” Perhaps I’m splitting hairs, but a months-long campaign that resulted in the overthrow of a 43-year-old regime is a lot of things; but it isn’t limited. It is important to note that then-Congressman Schiff voted in favor of the resolution to authorize continued military action against Gaddafi; despite the fact that, fifteen years later, he would call the Obama administration’s rationale for the intervention “vague.” Another “aye” vote on the 2011 Libya resolution came from Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). This past week, Pelos said, in an attempt to differentiate between the current Iran strikes and those in Libya, “What Obama did was limited military force. This [Epic Fury] is beyond that. It was limited military force.” Again, I ask, where is the consensus on “limited” force? 

Circling back to the Real Time exchange, Schiff seemed to ignore Maher’s Libya comments and instead pivoted to a set of talking points regarding Syria in 2013: “Ultimately, he [Obama] did not go forward with going after [Syrian former President Bashar al-Assad], even though Assad was gassing his own people, because he thought he may lose the vote in Congress.” To unpack this, let’s look at what preceded the events that Schiff describes. On August 21, 2013, the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons in a Damascus suburb held by opposition forces. Some 1,500 Syrians perished in unspeakable fashion. Eight days later, the Obama administration was ready to act unilaterally as it had in Libya. However, when the British House of Commons voted that day against a motion to authorize joint U.K.-U.S. strikes, Obama got cold feet. After a walk that afternoon with his Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, Obama decided to seek congressional authorization for a strike against Assad. Before such a vote was cast, the Obama administration reached a deal with the Russians to force Assad to hand over his regime’s chemical weapons. Five years later, this “deal” proved to be for naught when Assad once again used chemical weapons against his own populace. 

Schiff’s suggestion that Obama was being a responsible constitutionalist over Syria is more than a bit disingenuous. As reporting from the time suggests, Obama was more than willing to conduct strikes against Assad without congressional approval (as President Donald Trump later would in 2018). But, faced with a harsh rebuke in the British House of Commons and pushback from his chief of staff, Obama blinked. Now, some will say that Obama found religion in the summer of 2013 and realized that his role as commander-in-chief should be to seek formal approval from Congress before embarking on major international or domestic action. But less than a year later, it was Obama who adopted the infamous “pen-and-phone” strategy when it came to enacting his agenda. Faced with a less than cooperative Congress, Obama declared, “One of the things that I will be emphasizing in this [January 2014 cabinet] meeting is the fact that we are not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we are providing Americans the kind of help that they need.” So if Obama did really have an epiphany on his walk in August 2013, it was a brutally short-lived one. 

Schiff’s historical revisionism came after both the House of Representatives as well as the Senate voted against invoking the War Powers Resolution regarding the Trump administration’s actions in Iran. Three Democrats in the House (Jared Golden [D-ME], Henry Cuellar [D-TX], and Greg Landsman [D-OH]) and one in the Senate (John Fetterman [D-PA]) joined most elected GOP House and Senate members in refusing to limit Trump’s capacity to conduct strikes on Iran. Say what you will about the administration’s justification for Operation Epic Fury (and Lord knows I have), it seems that it has the congressional justification to keep up the campaign. 

What irks me most about Schiff, Pelosi, and their fellow revisionists is their insistence on pretending that we are somehow in uncharted and unforeseen waters. For decades, Congress has outsourced its checks on the executive to… the executive. This is especially true regarding military action. Schiff’s performance on Maher was a masterclass of “it was OK so long as we were doing it.” The same type of hypocrisies of which Democrats accuse Republicans were put on full display by Schiff and Pelosi this past week. A common (and often justified) refrain thrown at GOP lawmakers in the Trump era is: “If Obama did this, you’d be up in arms!” Well to that, I say to Adam Schiff: “If Obama did this, you would be singing ‘hallelujah.’” Cheers to Bill Maher for having the stones to call a spade a spade. 

Jim Pomeroy, raised in Bucks County and a former congressional aide, works in higher education. He is the author of Alliances & Armor: Communist Diplomacy and Armored Warfare during the War in Vietnam.