Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris, like Psaki, are on the record questioning the legal basis of airstrikes that former president Donald Trump ordered in 2017 and 2019. Critics right and left jumped on these statements to accuse the administration of hypocrisy.
Several Democratic members of Congress, including senators Tim Kaine and Chris Murphy and Representative Ro Khanna, criticized the airstrikes and demanded that Congress be briefed on the matter. “Congress should hold this administration to the same standard it did prior administrations, and require clear legal justifications for military action, especially inside theaters like Syria,
where Congress has not explicitly authorized any American military action,” Murphy stated.
As these strikes were retaliatory and not in response to any imminent threat, Murphy argued, they were not legal without specific congressional authorization.
Biden is now the third president to order attacks in Syria without congressional approval since the start of that country’s civil war almost exactly a decade ago. Former president Barack Obama sought Congress’s permission to intervene and punish Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad for the use of chemical weapons against civilians in 2013, but that resolution never got a vote.