Trump Wages War Wherever and Whenever He Wants: New at Reason

The day before Donald Trump ordered a missile attack on three sites tied to chemical weapons production in Syria, House Speaker Paul Ryan made it clear that the president needn’t worry about getting permission from Congress. “He has the authority under the existing AUMF,” Ryan said, referring to the Authorization for the Use of Military Force against the perpetrators of “the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.”

That eyebrow-raising assertion—which seemed to suggest that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had helped Al Qaeda, his archenemy, crash jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—was striking evidence of Ryan’s cognitive dissonance, Jacob Sullum writes. Ryan and most of his colleagues are happy to let the president do whatever he wants with the country’s armed forces, Sullum says, as long as they can pretend that Congress is still ultimately in charge.