Democratic US senator Cory Booker has criticized both his own political party as well as its Republican counterpart for being “feckless” in ceding congressional war powers to Donald Trump, saying that their decision could embolden the president to unilaterally attack Cuba, North Korea and other countries.
“I’m going to be one of those Democrats [who] say I think both parties have been feckless in allowing the growth of the power of the presidency,” Booker said on Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.
The New Jersey senator said nothing Barack Obama did while in the White House – or that even Trump did before his first presidency ended in defeat to Joe Biden – was “in any way related to what we’re seeing right now”.
Booker’s comments alluded to US military strikes Trump has ordered in Nigeria, Venezuela and Iran since Christmas. He called the war that the US and Israel started in Iran on 28 February – when a missile strike killed Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – “the biggest military engagement of our country since the war in Afghanistan”.
Meanwhile, during that stretch, Trump has also renewed threats to seize Greenland for the US by military force if necessary.
Booker’s fellow Democrats in the US House put forth a measure calling for a stop to US military action in Iran. But without support from members of Trump’s Republican party, the measure failed, and the military campaign in Iran has continued.
One day prior, the US Senate rejected a war powers resolution in a 47-53 vote that largely followed party lines.
Booker pointed to how the spiraling conflict has not only roiled regional stability but oil markets as well. The strait of Hormuz, a waterway crucial to world trade, has been closed for two weeks as of Sunday.
“Literally, you see with what’s going on in the strait of Hormuz right now as the biggest gumming up of the oil markets we have ever seen,” Booker said to CNN. “The consequences strategically for us moving so many assets in the region means that we’re endangering the assets we have necessarily and potentially in other areas.”
Booker alluded to the deaths of 13 US military members amid reported as of Sunday amid the Iran conflict, saying: “This is a massive military undertaking, costing American taxpayers billions and billions of dollars and tragically costing 13 lives.”
He recognized that previous presidents had strayed from limits on their power to engage in war but maintained Trump’s Iran campaign had exceeded that precedent.
“At this magnitude, at this cost, why is Congress just laying down and doing nothing?” Booker said. “Because, if we allow this to happen, then we give Trump the permission to say, ‘OK, finished with Venezuela, I went to Iran, now I’m going to go to Cuba, now I’m going to go to North Korea.’
“It is outrageous and never conceived of that we could have this level of a military engagement without the people’s house, Congress, doing something about it.”
