Once again, lawmakers are trying to claw back their responsibility under the Constitution to declare war. On Wednesday, the House passed legislation that would repeal two authorizations for use of military force from 1991 and 2002 passed prior to the Persian Gulf and Iraq wars.
The issue of how much power the president has to wage war has become increasingly relevant after President Donald Trump ordered the U.S. military to destroy a boat in the Caribbean that was believed to be smuggling drugs. When asked later what legal authority the military used to justify the Sept. 2 strike, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters, “Every boatload of any form of drug that poisons the American people is an imminent threat, and at the DoD, our job is to defeat imminent threats.”
Hegseth’s invoking of “imminent threat” joins the legal murkiness around military force of the past 25 years, when successive presidents have had close to carte blanche authority to order military operations. Congress ceded most of its war powers to the executive branch through authorizations of military force prior to the 1991 Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq.
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The 2002 authorization, which gave the president the power to “defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq,” has been invoked long after U.S. troops deposed former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003.
President Barack Obama used the authorization for use of military force to justify airstrikes against the Islamic State group, or ISIS; and President Trump later cited the authorization as the legal basis for the January 2020 U.S. airstrike that killed Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force.
This week’s amendment to repeal the 1991 and 2002 authorizations, tucked into a version of the fiscal year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act, was sponsored by Rep. Greg Meeks (D-N.Y.), and it includes the same language as legislation that Meeks and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) introduced earlier this year.
“We don’t need to have Congress effectively modern-day declaring war and leaving it in place for a quarter of a freaking century, or in this case, 34 years,” Roy said recently, according to Politico. “We can do better.”
On Thursday, Meeks issued a statement saying he was encouraged that his amendment to repeal the 1991 and 2002 authorizations was included in the House version of the defense policy bill, even though he voted against the legislation, which he said included “partisan provisions.”
“These Iraq war authorizations are long obsolete, yet administrations of both parties have exploited them to bypass Congress,” Meeks said in the statement. “Ending them is an important step toward restoring congressional oversight and ensuring that decisions about war are made responsibly.”
The final version of the National Defense Authorization Act will be negotiated by members of the House and Senate. It is unclear if the final legislation will include the repeal of the two authorizations.
Past attempts to rescind the 2002 authorization have failed, including most recently when the Senate voted to repeal the legislation in 2023, but the House failed to do so.
Even if lawmakers repeal the 1991 and 2002 authorizations, presidents will still have other reasons to justify using the military at their own discretion, said David Janovsky, acting director of the Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight, a non-partisan watchdog group.
For example, shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress gave the president sweeping authority to prevent future acts of terrorism. President Obama later used that authorization as the legal justification for airstrikes against ISIS in Syria, Libya, and elsewhere.
Still, the most recent move to repeal the 1991 and 2002 authorizations for use of military force could be seen as the beginning of a “revival of Congressional interest in its role in the war powers debate,” Janovsky told Task & Purpose.
“If the goal is to get Congress really back in the mix and how the United States uses its military in counterterrorism scenarios, the 2001 AUMF [authorization for use of military force] would have to be the next part of that conversation,” Janovsky.
