Neoliberalism and the Democratic Party: welfare "reform"

Since the Democratic Party's remarkable cave-in during the January government shutdown crisis, I've been thinking a lot about important turning points for the Democratic Party that created such a strong sense among the party's Congressional representatives that they have to continually surrender to Republicans on important matters of policy. Even as the Republicans have become more and more aggressive in jamming their their preferred policies through, even when it means altering the rules of the game, both formal and informal.

One of the main programs identified with the Clinton Administration, even its "signature legislative achievement," (Jordan Weissmann) was called welfare reform. Not only was it substantively important. It also was a major concession in which the Democratic Party accepted the long-time conservative and Republican framing of a critical social and economic issue.

"Welfare" is one of those words that are benign in its routine daily usages but can take on negative political connotations in a polemical context. If someone says, "Parents have to take care for the welfare of their children," that has a straightforward meaning, a benign one of well-being. But "welfare" as applied to any kind of social program has a very negative connotation for conservatives, e.g. "loafers," "lazy black people."

The term has generally been applied to income-support payments for the poor. But the Republicans are trying now to expand the (for them) pejorative term to unemployment insurance, Medicaid, Medicare and even Social Security. The term "entitlement programs" also has a similar connotation for them. The latter term was a conscious propaganda innovation of conservatives. Both "welfare" and "entitlement programs" are used to promote an unfavorable attitude toward any kind of program that provides some kind of solidarity or economic support in hard times for ordinary working people.

And, like so much in American politics, criticism of "welfare" was highly racialized, with white conservatives (and some liberals) portraying it a program used and abused by black people. Even though a majority of "welfare" recipients were always white.

The Clinton reform, signed into law in 1996 and taking effect in 1997, replaced an income-support program for parents of minor children called Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). The replacement program was known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). One of the features of the bill that achieved an important conservative goal is that it gave states much more discretion of the amounts and qualifications for receiving TANF assistance.

The 2016 "Retro" video from The New York Times recounts the history of the 1996 reform from the perspective of its 20th anniversary, Welfare and the Politics of Poverty 06/07/2016. Unfortunately, YouTube is not allowing the video to be embedded at this writing. The video provides numerous examples of the kind of polemical rhetoric used at the time. And the narrator's script appears to be sympathetic to it, despite it's being associated with the "liberal" New York Times. And, of course, there's some Both Sides Do It thrown in.

It quotes St. Reagan declaring, "Welfare has proliferated and grown into a Leviathan of unsupportable dimensions." And it shows Bill Clinton adopting a similar framing, if less hysterically expressed: "Welfare should be a second chance, not a way of life." It was also the case that Clinton emphasized the importance of work opportunities for welfare recipients. In theory, that was a position that liberals and progressives could share. But in practice, any kind of active job programs were not a serious part of the policy mix.

It's important in the context of its effects on Democrats to note that Clinton twice vetoed Republican-backed welfare reform bills on the grounds they were too punitive. But in 1996, he signed one that was quite draconian in its terms and effects. The video quotes Ron Haskins, who was one of the drafters of the Republican bill that Clinton signed, still praising Bill Clinton two decades later for signing it (after 4:00). "Think of a Democratic President that would sign a welfare reform bill like that. President Gore wouldn'a done it. Kennedys would never have done it. There are many Republicans that wouldn'a done a bill as tough as the one that was passed in 1996."

Notice that the narrator in this 2016 film refers to the pre-1996 AFDC as a "once sacred entitlement." Who had considered it sacred is not clear. Conservatives were never among them.

Jared Bernstein recalled the various themes in the welfare reform debate in Reforming Welfare Reform The American Prospect 12/19/2001:

What was Congress trying to achieve? Different people had different goals, and the law reflects these differing views. For some the 1996 law was largely about cutting welfare caseloads or reducing spending; for some it was about promoting work; for some it was about broadening state flexibility, reducing federal authority, and curtailing individual rights; and for some it was about reducing out-of-wedlock births. For much of the public, though, the goal was that people who were able to work should do so. Many in the progressive community shared this goal but feared that the law's approach--freezing federal spending, ending individual rights, imposing time limits, creating strong incentives to cut caseloads--would mean that instead of helping parents enter and progress in the labor force, states would simply restrict assistance for families that needed help. And many progressives feared the consequences if public assistance was denied to families with the weakest labor market prospects in a low-wage labor market that was already failing many of its participants.

Throughout the 1996 debates, discussion of one goal was conspicuously lacking: There was much talk about the need to promote work and reduce welfare, but little discussion of the need to reduce poverty and promote the well-being of low-income families. Instead, both conservatives and, to a great extent, the Clinton administration, created a picture in which the principal problem was seen as too many families on welfare for too long. The obvious solution was to cut caseloads by getting families to leave welfare. [my emphasis]

Apart from any considerations of social solidarity or humanitarian concern, one of the benefits of such income-support programs is that they have "countercyclical" effects. When the economy is expanding, as it was doing in the mid-1990 with the tech bubble and further in the 2000s with the real estate bubble, more people can get jobs and the payments on income-support programs act as a restraint on what economists and the business press like to call "overheating" of the economy. During recessions, the payments expand and provide a stimulative effect to the economy, helping to prevent deflation and shortening the length of the recession. The human and economic-policy cost of the TANF reform became very evident during the Great Recession.

Analyses on the destructive economic effects of the Clinton welfare reforms are in no shortage.

Jordan Weissmann, The Failure of Welfare Reform Slate 06/01/2016:

Despite being home to one of the nation’s most crushing child poverty rates, the state [of Arizona] has all but stopped giving cash assistance to its needy. During 2014, for every 100 poor families with children in Arizona, just 8 families received aid. And even that tiny fraction is likely to shrink. Last year, while trying to chip away at a $1 billion budget deficit, lawmakers lowered the maximum amount of time Arizonans could receive welfare payments before being kicked off the rolls permanently — it’s now just 12 months. ...

The death of welfare in Arizona isn’t an exception; the program has shriveled just as badly in many other states, especially across the Deep South and West. Even in most of the states that are more generous than Arizona about giving benefits to the poor, welfare has still dwindled during the postrecession era. That’s because its funding was never designed to grow along with inflation—or with the U.S. population. For all intents and purposes, welfare is becoming a zombie system rather than the bridge from poverty to work that its reformers envisioned.

And, of course, it was the signature legislative achievement of Bill Clinton’s presidency. [my emphasis]

After 10:35 in the video, we hear Bill Clinton express the vain hope by which he justified signing the bill to Democrats: "After I sign my name this bill [TANF], welfare will no longer be a political issue." Which was true in the sense that the Democratic President had stopped fighting for Democratic priorities and Democratic constituents on "welfare," instead surrendering to the Republican side. A segment from 2014 shows Clinton in 2014 saying that he couldn't have foreseen that there would be a Tea Party movement that would try to scapegoat poor people, i.e., "that would believe, one more time, that poor people are the problem in America."

Which I would have to say if laughably unconvincing. Especially since there were plenty of Democrats in 1996 who did foresee such a thing. It didn't require any special visionary talent to do so. And in the real world, it did nothing of consequence to slow down the radicalization of the Republican Party. If anything, such a consequential surrender on Clinton's part only encouraged it.

But Clinton in that same segment still insisted in 2014 that TANF "did far more good than harm."

The 1996 welfare "reform" was a major step in the neoliberal neutering of the Democratic Party. That was one of the most significant steps on the road that led the Democrats to the historic losses at all levels in 2016. Including Hillary Clinton losing the Electoral College vote to the Orange Clown.

This week in the politics of sex scandals in the US

Michael Tomasky on the suddenly fashionable notion among some Democratic liberals that Bill clinton should have resigned over the Monica Lewinsky affair (Hell No, Bill Clinton Shouldn’t Have Resigned Daily Beast 11/21/2017):

The idea that Clinton should have resigned is insane. It’s insane from the perspective of the historical record, which in no way supports the idea that he should have quit his job. And it’s insane for political purposes today, given that it remains one of the top priorities of the right to smear and discredit both Clintons in the history books, a project that liberals should in no way, shape, or form be abetting.

The fact that we are actively discussing the Bill Clinton cheating scandals of the 1990s is a major sign that the Republicans are way, way better at exploiting such scandals politically than Democrats are.

And that's in very large part because they are much savvier than Democrats about what suckers the corporate media are for not only sex stories and stories about anyone named Clinton, but also their obsession with the false equivalence of Both Sides Do It on every issue and practice all the time.

I'm tempted to say that it's a sign of progress that it a whole week, more-or-less, for the credible claims made by numerous women about sleazy and even violent behavior of Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore toward teenage girls when he was in his 30s to be replaced by a return to the media' Great Clinton Penis Hunt that they loved so much during the 1990s.

Tomasky says of the Clinton impeachment:

The most important point is that the Republican effort to remove Clinton from office was a constitutional coup d’etat. If you’re young—all this hatred you see today, this right-wing rage machine (which does have its much smaller counterpart on the left); it all started then. The right hated Bill Clinton pretty much because he was a liberal (a moderate-liberal, but as they saw him, a dangerous leftist) from the Woodstock generation who had the effrontery to beat a Republican incumbent at a time when conservatives thought the presidency was theirs for life. Literally from the day he won, some people were plotting how to undo the voters’ verdict. And finally, years later, he handed them some rope.

That is what liberals were confronting. The right’s aim was to nullify a presidential election. Two of them. If Clinton had acquiesced in that, having obviously committed no high crime or misdemeanor, the precedent would have been chilling. No Democratic president after him would have been safe from a similar assault. They would have gone straight after President Gore, on the slightly dodgy fund-raising stuff, and they’d have had the added talking point that Gore’s presidency was especially illegitimate because unlike Clinton he wasn’t even elected. I’m not saying they could have driven Gore from office. I am saying they’d have tried, and they’d have tried with Barack Obama or whatever Democrat came next in that timeline, too. There is no way on earth Clinton should have opened that door. [my emphasis]

That's a good point. No matter that they hated him dearly, the Republicans never seriously tried to impeach Barack Obama.

I agree with Tomasky's judgment, "And it’s insane for political purposes today, given that it remains one of the top priorities of the right to smear and discredit both Clintons in the history books." Although he adds at the end, "a project that liberals should in no way, shape, or form be abetting." That last part goes a little far from my perspective. There is a lot about the Clinton deregulation policies and military interventions that deserve to be responsibly criticized. The Clinton Administration's policies toward Russia are looking more and more dubious all the time, including the ham-handed intervention in the Russian election of 1996:

But Democrats definitely need to up their game on how to deal with such scandals. Starting with remembering how bogus the criminal allegations against Bill and Hillary Clinton were that were so extensively investigated during his Presidency. Once again, the link to the Final Report of the Special Counsel investigating the Whitewater pseudoscandal, Final Report of the Independent Counsel in Re Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan Association Regarding Monica Lewinsky and Others 03/06/2002.

Jill Abramson also looks at the politics of the current sex scandals in Have we reached zero tolerance for sexual misconduct Guardian 11/19/2017:

Casting out Al Franken, who has been a passionate, zealous defender of women’s rights in a Senate grown ever more hostile to them, could remove an important weapon in the embattled Democratic arsenal.

A reassessment of Bill Clinton’s behavior era could have the same counter-productive effect. His accusers already signed up to help Donald Trump get elected when they appeared with him before one of the presidential debates. They have all made a devil’s bargain with various Republican creeps, including Roger Stone.

One of Trump’s key political advisers recently told me that the appearance of the Clinton accusers with Trump “completely blunted the damage of the Access Hollywood tape. It was a very important turning point in the campaign.” The Clinton accusers helped elect a different sexual predator. And unlike Clinton, who was an ally of the women’s movement, Trump is its mortal enemy. [my emphasis]

Kosovo and Libya Wars

The Kosovo War is a model for the Libya War in a number of ways. One thing to keep in mind about the Kosovo War, which is rightly seen as a NATO success, is that it took place in 1999. Today, in 2011, in a friendly ("permissive" in military jargon) environment for NATO after a successful war, the presence of a small number of NATO forces is still requires. As the NATO website reports (n.d., accessing 03/20/2011):

NATO has been leading a peace support operation in Kosovo since June 1999 in support of wider international efforts to build peace and stability in the area.

Today, some 8,700 troops from the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR), provided by 32 countries (24 NATO and 8 non-NATO), are still deployed in Kosovo to help maintain a safe and secure environment and freedom of movement for all citizens, irrespective of their ethnic origin.

John Mearsheimer rightly characterizes the Obama Administration's general foreign policy approach as the liberal imperialist variant of a "global dominance" strategy, which the Clinton Administration also pursued. The Cheney-Bush Administration's version of the global dominance strategy was more a neoconservative-militarist one.

One distinction of the liberal-imperialist approach to war is touched on by The Atlantic's James Fallows in On Libya: 'What Happens Then?' 03/20/2011:

[I]t cannot reassure anyone who cares about America's viability as a republic that it is entering another war with essentially zero Congressional consultation or "buy-in," and with very little serious debate outside the Executive Branch itself. And there the debate was, apparently, mostly about changing the President's own mind. I recognize that there are times when national safety requires an Administration to respond quickly, without enduring the posturing and institutionalized dysfunction that is the modern Congress. Without going through all the arguments, I assert that this is not such a moment. To be more precise: the Administration has not made the public case that the humanitarian and strategic stakes in Libya are so unique as to compel intervention there (even as part of a coalition), versus the many other injustices and tragedies we deplore but do not go to war to prevent. I can think of several examples in my current part of the world. [He's writing from China.] [my emphasis]

None of these observations in themselves imply ill-will among the policymakers. Experience shows that ill-will and unworthy are never lacking in decisions to go to war. But the effects of these actions are not dependent on the goodwill or lack thereof of the policymakers.

Andrew Bacevich in " Neglected Trinity: Kosovo and the Crisis in U.S. Civil-Military Relations", his essay in the collection War Over Kosovo (2001), edited by himself and Eliot Cohen, talks about the "remarkable trinity" identified by the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), whose work enjoys something like canonical stature with the US military today. For Clausewitz, this trinity of "reason, primordial violence, and chance" (Bacevich's summary) were three major tendencies affecting war.

Bacevich in that essay picks up a different "trinity" from a separate essay by Cohen and talks about how that played out in the US conduct of the Kosovo War. In Bacevich's short version, the new trinity was (1) the "geopolitical upheaval caused by the end of the Cold War," which among other things allowed the US to assert a far bigger military role in the Arab world; (2) "a redefinition of U.S. grand strategy," i.e., the strategy of global dominance begun by the Old Man Bush Administration and continued by the three succeeding Presidential Administrations; and, (3) "a novel conception of warfare that itself is a product of powerful technological and cultural influences have all contributed to this transformation," which in practice involved heavy reliance on airpower.

The latter consideration is focused on the idea of minimizing US casualties. This comes from a flawed but widespread assumption among military and foreign policy theorists that US casualties are the main reason the US public turns against wars, maybe the only reason. As Bacevich describes the approach that played out in several military situations but most especially in the Kosovo War:

... Clinton the commander in chief fashioned doctrine for employing American military power that bridges the gap between his grand strategic objectives and the public's limited willingness to exert itself on behalf of those objectives. The military component of Clinton's strategy requires minimal blood and only modest treasure - indeed, the cash flow on balance may be positive. And it does not unduly tax the nation's attention span. Finessing the deficit between ends and means, the new postliberal civil-military relationship that Clinton ushered into existence seemingly reconciles the irreconcilable. For this achievement, Bill Clinton, in his own way, deserves to rank alongside FDR and Reagan as one of the most influential commanders in chief in modern American history.

Initially, it appears to me that the Obama Administration is trying to pull off something like this in Libya. I doubt it will work very well.

Another similarity to the Clinton Administration's procedure on the Kosovo War: The Kosovo War occurred in 1999. In March 1999, the House voted a nonbinding concurrent resolution to authorize US peacekeepers for Kosovo. The Senate passed a nonbinding concurrent resolution authorizing air and missile operations against Serbia. "The war against Yugoslavia began on March 24 without any statutory or constitutional support," wrote Louis Fisher in Presidential War Power, 2nd edition (2004).

Republican Congressman Ernest Istook of Oklahoma said at the time, "President Clinton asked many nations to agree to attack Yugoslavia, but he failed to get permission from one crucial country, America."

Tags: andrew bacevich, clinton administration, kosovo, kosovo war, us foreign policy, war powers

Debating spending on Republican terms, unfortunately

Joe Conason observed last week that in Washington these days, "nearly every elected official is eager to prove that he or she is a single-minded accountant with the same mindless mindset as the Tea Party." (Need To Reduce The National Debt? Just Ask Clinton. New York Observer 02/10/2011)

This competition to slow the economy at the start of a very weak recovery by cutting government expenses is a result of the Republican narrative that government spending is the problem with the economy dominating in Washington with the Democratic President eagerly reinforcing it. One of the crazy things about that narrative is that Republican Presidents Reagan and Bush II showed vividly in practice that they didn't care at all about the debt or about deficits or high government spending as such. Tax cuts for the wealthiest are always priorities for the Republicans.

Which is the point of Conason's column:

Clinton isn't shy about explaining what happened on his watch. The budget deals he made with the Congressional Republicans were significant, but not nearly as significant as the tax increase on the wealthy that he passed, without a single Republican vote, in his first budget in 1993.

I actually take the still-unconventional view of the federal deficit that Jamie Galbraith advocates in his book, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008). So I see the federal deficits and surpluses as driven primarily by the accounting equivalence by which combined public and private deficits will match the external trade deficit, rather than directly by budget-balancing efforts by the federal government itself.

But Conason's argument is nevertheless an important one. As long as the national debate over taxes and spending is fought on Republican terms of the virtues of deficit reduction, Democrats need to do as much as possible to make sure the revenue side of the equation is fully recognized along with the spending side.

He also has some acid comments on some of the "stupid ideas to restore fiscal order" that are being put forward with straight faces by supposedly serious political leaders:

Then there is the House Republican plan to slash domestic discretionary spending and then freeze it for the next ten years at the same level as 2006, which sounds reasonable until you realize that would require reductions of more than 40 per cent in essential government services like border security, federal law enforcement, food safety, education and environmental protection.

For politicians who are more or less on the payroll of the coal industry or the meat packing cartel, that doesn't necessarily sound so bad. As long as nobody is dying from E coli poisoning in the Capitol Hill cafeterias, maybe they believe we can afford to lay off half of our agricultural inspectors for the next ten years. Meanwhile the rest of us belong to the special interest group that breathes the air, drinks the water, and wonders what hellish bugs lurk in that package of hamburger. [my emphasis]

Tags: clinton administration, joe conason, republican party

Gen. Hugh Shelton and the "Clinton Rules"

Retired Gen. Hugh Shelton, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), has published a memoir, Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior (2010). Shelton appeared on ABC's This Week on Sunday, and among other things complained about the Obama Administration's deadline for beginning withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. (Joshua Miller, Fmr. Top General: Afghanistan Deadline May Be 'A Bridge too Far' ABC News undated; 10/25/2010 ?)

David Hoffman in What's Missing Foreign Policy 10/22/2010 calls attention to a scary, strange - and scarcely credible - claim Shelton makes in his book:

The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired Gen. Hugh Shelton, says in his just-published memoir, Without Hesitation: The Odyssey of an American Warrior, that President Bill Clinton’s White House lost the "presidential authorization codes" for launching a nuclear strike, and they were missing "for months." Shelton writes, "This is a big deal—a gargantuan deal -- and we dodged a silver bullet.”

Shelton says the system "failed" and asks "how in the hell could we have lost the codes and not known it?"

Hoffman points out that the story hardly makes any sense. And on the face of it is unlikely in the extreme. This seems to be a case of the General playing by the famous Clinton Rules: you can say whatever you want, as long as you say it about the Clintons.

Shelton leaves the impression that President Clinton went for months without the ability to order a nuclear strike in an emergency. Grim as it is, that is still a key part of American defense strategy. But:

It doesn't add up.

The president does not possess the actual codes to authorize the launch of nuclear weapons. What the president does carry (or an aide) is a small laminated card which is used to authenticate the president's identity in the event of an emergency. The cards contain date-time groups and alphanumeric codes in columns and rows, according to Bruce Blair, president of the World Security Institute who has written several books on nuclear command and control. In an emergency, a president would use this laminated card to verify that he is the commander in chief making decisions.

Is this the "code" that the Pentagon checker was looking for, and was somehow lost? Well, if Clinton misplaced one, or an aide did, then it would not have been difficult to replace -- immediately, not months later. The Defense Department was the custodian of the system. [my emphasis]

Would a former JCS Chairman be unaware that the President doesn't have the actual codes? If the card was what was supposedly missing, why did he not say that?

In addition to the laminated card, the president is also accompanied by a military aide carrying the "football," the briefcase which contains war plans and decision guides for a president in the event of an alert. The football is carried everywhere a president goes. It is a symbol, and a potent one, of the nuclear age. Shelton knows about the football, and describes it earlier in his book. Is this what he means by the lost codes? The device is a critical link in our system of command and control, is handled by a military aide, and if it were missing, I am certain it would have been noticed -- immediately, not months later.

So, what was actually lost? Shelton may have a story to tell here, but so far, it does not hold together. [my emphasis]

As Hoffman notes, even if it were the card rather than the codes that were missing, it would be a big deal. But why is a JCS Chairman making the claim of such a significant problem in a way that doesn't hang together?

Hoffman uses the report to remind us that we still have a long way to go in minimize and ultimately eliminating the threat of nuclear weapons in the world:

There is one lesson to be taken away from this, relevant today. Both Russia and the United States still keep nuclear-armed missiles poised on launch-ready alert. The land-based U.S. missiles can be launched within four minutes of an order from the president. Keeping missiles on such high alert may have provided an extra edge for deterrence in a time of intense superpower confrontation, but it is not needed today, nearly two decades after the end of the Cold War. Both countries should find a way to de-alert those land-based missiles, building in some kind of pause, say hours or days before the missiles could be launched, giving a president some extra time to avoid a mistake, such as a launch based on a false alarm. In a crisis, finding the president's authenticator card ought to be the least of his concerns.

Tags: clinton administration, hugh shelton, nuclear nonproliferation

Restraining Executive war powers

I don't want to get overoptimistic here. But restraining Presidential power to make war is an important priority. A goal that's likely to have more success in an Obama administration than in a McCain government.

But no President is likely to volunteer to give up war powers that have accrued to Presidents over the years. With the exception in Obama's case of blatantly illegal and immoral things like the torture policy, which Cheney and Bush justified as part of the President's war powers. Not even that can be expected from McCain, who believes "America is the greatest force for good in the history of the world", as he said in his 10/07/08 debate with Obama.

Louis Fisher in the 2nd edition of his Presidential War Power (2004) discusses military interventions during the Clinton administration that deserve a fresh look by the Democratic base in the light of the Cheney-Bush foreign policy disasters. Fisher's focus is on the Constitutional issues of Executive authority on war. Whether or not the action was taken in a Constitutional way is not the same as whether a military action was advisable or not.

It does affect consideration of whether an action is moral. Classical Just War theory considers one of the key elements of a just war is that the war must be prosecuted by a legitimate, duly-consituted authority. If the President is prosecuting a war without Constitutional authority to do so, that is grounds for arguing that the war is not a just one. (Today's Republicans, of course, sneer at the concept of "just war". But that's another story.)

Clinton maintained the no-fly zones of questionable legitimacy that Bush had established over northern and southern Iraq that involved more-or-less continuous bombing of that country. The Gulf War of 1991 left long-standing commitments in its wake, which contributed to the events leading to the Iraq War of 2003-????, in no small part by effectively institutionalizing the notion that US military action against Iraq was neeeded. On the other hand, these no-fly zones were also a part of the successful disarming of Iraq of its "weapons of mass destruction". But, as we know only too well now, this didn't stop Cheney and Bush from invading Iraq under false claims about those WMDs anyway.

Clinton launched cruise missiles onto Baghdad in 1993 in retaliation for an alleged Iraqi plot to assassinate Old Man Bush. Twenty-three cruise Tomahawk missiles were aimed against Iraqi intelligence headquarters in Baghdad. There was no Cogressional approval and no prior consultation with Congress by the Clinton administration.

Old Man Bush began the intervention in Somalia in 1992 with no prior Congressional approval. Congress in February 1993 failed to pass a joint resolution approving of the intervention. Again, a military commitment had been created and the Clinton administration judged it necessary to prolong it. Once the notorious "Black Hawk Down" incident occurred in Mogadishu, Congressional Republicans began demanding immediate withdrawal of American troops. In October 1993 (the month of the incident), Clinton set a date for withdrawal of combat troops by the end of October 1994. He compromised with Congress on appropriation language specifying that withdrawal timeline.

Clinton initiated an humanitarian mission to Haiti in 1993. Congress passed a non-binding "sense of Congress" resolution that prior Congressional approval would be needed to send combat troops, with qualifying language for emergencies. In 1994, Congress passed another nonbinding resolution with an even broader exception clause for "national security".

In September 1993, Clinton announced he was ready to use force in Haiti. A hostile landing of American forces was averted only by the last-minute success of a Jimmy Carter-led peace mission. Congress passed legislation effectively saying Clinton's intention to use force was unauthorized, saying "the President should have sought and welcomed Congressional approval before deploying United States forices to Haiti".

NATO air strikes in Bosnia began in 1995. Congress passed another nonbinding sense-of-Congress resolution in 1993 saying Clinton should seek Congressional approval before committing US forces to enforce a Bosnian peace deal. In February 1994, US jets shot down four Serbian bombers. In April 1994, the US began air strikes against Bosnian Serb forces. When the NATO air strikes began in 1995, Clinton claimed United Nations authority for US participation in the action.

Clinton decided in 1995 to commit ground troops to Bosnia. Congress passed some non-binding limits. Clinton sent 20,000 troops in December. Some troops remained there until 2004. Congress did not formally authorize the action.

The Clinton administration launched more cruise missiles against Iraq in 1996. They claimed a highly dubious Congressional authority based on the 1991 Gulf War statute.

The spectacularly ill-named Operation Desert Fox took place in December, 1998. Mark Conversino of the Air War College writes in some detail about that operation in Operation DESERT FOX: Effectiveness With Unintended Effects Air & Space Power Journal 07/13/05. He calls the 4-day heavy bombardment a "major armed confrontation" between the US/Britain and Iraq. I posted about the operation in The secret and not-so-secret air war against Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion 02/22/07.

After Operation Desert Fox, writes Fisher, "the United States and Britain conducted repeated air strikes against Iraq, firing more missiles and hitting more targets than during the four-day operation in December 1998".

The infamously ill-fated cruise-missile attack on a chemical factory in the Sudan took place in 1998, based on very sloppy intelligence.

Clinton launched a major cruise missile attack on Afghanistan in 1998, attempting thereby essentially to assassinate Osama bin Laden.

Clinton in late 1998 authorized NATO to bomb in suport of Kosovars in Serbia (Kosovo was then part of Serbia). Italy, Germany and other parliaments voted to authorize their countries' approval. The German debate was very serious. By contrast, writes Fisher, "The U.S. Congress, supposedly the strongest legislature in the world, watched from the sidelines".

The Kosovo War occurred in 1999. In March 1999, the House voted a nonbinding concurrent resolution to authorize US peacekeepers for Kosovo. The Senate passed a nonbinding concurrent resolution authorizing air and missile operations against Serbia. "The war against Yugoslavia began on March 24 without any statutory or constitutional support," writes Fisher.

Republican Congressman Ernest Istook of Oklahoma said at the time, "President Clinton asked many nations to agree to attack Yugoslavia, but he failed to get permission from one crucial country, America."

Fisher summarizes, "Clinton's military initiatives were remarkable both for their frequency and the absence of any institutional checks, either legislative or judicial."

Tags: clinton administration, war powers