Does anyone else remember how the Democrats' McResistance considers President Trump to be a tyrant and a fascist, and that he must be stopped because of this? A couple months ago Democrats in Congress went out of their way to give this scary guy domestic spying powers that would make Orwell turn over in his grave.

It was a very unusual way to "resist" Trump.

With a newly proposed AUMF, Democrats have decided that "resisting" Trump requires giving him yet more dictatorship-like powers.



But now, incredibly enough, a bipartisan group of six lawmakers, led by Sens. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and Tim Kaine, D-Va., is proposing a new AUMF that would greatly expand who the president can place in indefinite military detention, all in the name of restricting presidential power. If the Corker-Kaine bill becomes law as currently written, any president, including Donald Trump, could plausibly claim extraordinarily broad power to order the military to imprison any U.S. citizen, captured in America or not, and hold them without charges essentially forever.

...thanks to a combination of sloppy drafting and clear reluctance to take the executive branch head-on, Corker and Kaine’s proposed AUMF could do the opposite, handing genuinely tyrannical powers over to the president. Christopher Anders of the ACLU characterizes the bill as “a legislative dumpster fire.”

That's clearly how you "resist" a tyrant - by surrendering to him.

Make no mistake, this is a bipartisan bill.



The new AUMF is co-sponsored by Democrats Tim Kaine of Virginia, Chris Coons of Delaware and Bill Nelson of Florida, and Republicans Jeff Flake of Arizona and Todd Young of Indiana.

But wait, there's more.

As if giving Trump powers to lock up Americans without charges forever wasn't enough, the AUMF basically removes Congress entirely from congressional war decisions and gives them all to the presidency.



It is clear upon reading the AUMF, put forward by Senators Tim Kaine and Bob Corker, that it gives nearly unlimited power to this or any other president to be at war whenever he or she wants, with minimal justification and no prior specific authority.

The new Kaine/Corker AUMF declares war on at least the following places and people: the Taliban, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, ISIS anywhere, al-Shabaab in Somalia and elsewhere, al-Qaeda in Syria, al-Nusra in Syria, the Haqqani network in Pakistan and Afghanistan, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, in Niger, Algeria, Libya, and Nigeria, and associated forces (as defined by the president) around the globe. That is simply breathtaking. Previous AUMFs have never included “associated forces,” and with good reason. Yet the Kaine/Corker AUMF not only codifies military action against those associated forces, but by conservative estimates authorizes war in over 20 nations.

It's amazing that when Kaine proposed this bill he said “for too long Congress has given presidents a blank check to wage war.” So the solution, I guess, is to personally write that check.

It should be noted that the AUMF expressly prohibits designating nation states as “associated forces”. However, it doesn't take much imagination to see how a president can get around that in order to, say, bomb Iran.

The immediate effect of this AUMF is that as many as 15 countries being added to U.S. theaters of war as well as up to seven groups of enemy combatants.



It grants political cover to the executive branch: both retroactively and preemptively.

...If “endless war” is light hyperbole, then the proposals in this AUMF are as close to becoming as literally endless as it can possibly get.

This "resisting" thing looks a whole lot like not resisting. Maybe it's more of that 11th dimensional chess that Obama was so good at.