Congress can stop Iraq War, experts tell lawmakers

Congress has the power to end the war in Iraq, a former Bush administration attorney and other high-powered legal experts told a Senate hearing on Jan. 30. With many lawmakers poised to confront President Bush by voting disapproval of his war policy in the coming days, four of five experts called before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee said Congress could go further and restrict or stop US involvement if it chose. "I think the constitutional scheme does give Congress broad authority to terminate a war," said Bradford Berenson, a Washington lawyer and former White House associate counsel under Bush from 2001 to 2003. "It is ultimately Congress that decides the size, scope and duration of the use of military force," said Walter Dellinger, former acting solicitor general–the government's chief advocate before the Supreme Court–in 1996-97, and an assistant attorney general three years before that. The experts said that while the Constitution makes the president commander-in-chief of US forces, Congress' constitutional power to declare war and fund US forces also gave it the power to stop what it had set in motion. Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania argued that under the Constitution, the president shared his powers with Congress. "I would respectfully suggest to the president that he is not the sole 'decider,'" said Specter, the head of the Judiciary Committee until Democrats won control from Republicans in November. "The decider is a shared and joint responsibility." The hearing was frequently punctuated by outbursts from more than a dozen anti-war protesters, who were asked several times to be quiet but were not thrown out.