With Washington distracted by the health care debate, President Donald Trump has quietly overseen an expansion in the administration’s war-making powers, giving the Department of Defense greater autonomy to conduct military operations independent of the White House.

Already, the Pentagon has used this expanded authority in Yemen, where the U.S. has recently conducted significant air operations against AQAP, an Al Qaeda offshoot. And on Friday, Trump extended the authority to parts of Somalia where the U.S. is targeting Shabab, a terrorist group. In military terms, Yemen and Somalia are now “areas of active hostility,” a bureaucratic way of saying that the U.S. is conducting military operations there, with little input or oversight from either the White House or Congress.

This expanded bombing campaign, though, could be just the tip of the iceberg. In early March, The Guardian reported that the White House is considering a secret Pentagon proposal to designate temporary areas of active hostility in which the military could launch what amounts to six-month wars without congressional approval. Under the proposal, once the president signs off on a temporary battlefield, commanders would be given “the same latitude to launch strikes, raids and campaigns” as they now have in active U.S. warzones like Iraq. Protections for civilians would also be scaled back.

These temporary battlefields, as The Guardian dubbed them, are not exactly new; the Obama administration already applied the label to conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. But the proposal Trump is considering would expand and formalize that decision, stretching the temporary battlefield designation to cover entire countries in which the United States is technically not at war. Despite the bureaucratic language, Trump’s plan, if implemented, is a flagrant perversion of the Constitution, redoubling the worst excesses of the Obama administration and further undercutting the rule of law.

To understand the recklessness of this proposal, a little history is in order. Though it names the president as “Commander in Chief” of the U.S. military, the Constitution explicitly delegates the power to “declare war” to Congress. The choice of the word “declare” was a careful one, as James Madison’s notes from the Constitutional Convention reveal. Originally written as the power to “make war,” it was amended to communicate that while the executive is permitted “the power to repel sudden attacks” on American soil, it is not allowed to “commence war” independent of the legislature.

George Mason, the “father of the Bill of Rights,” was against “giving the power of war to the Executive, because [it was not] safely to be trusted with it,” Madison records, and Mason supported using “declare” as a means of “clogging rather than facilitating war [and instead] facilitating peace.”

In the years since the Constitution’s ratification, perhaps few of its provisions have been so thoroughly gutted of such well-established original intent as the War Powers Clause. The United States has engaged in military conflict in nearly every year of her existence, but just five times has Congress made a formal declaration of war: the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, and World War II.

Following the U.S.’s declaration of war against the Axis nations in 1941, Congress has all but abandoned its constitutional role in foreign policy. In 1973, the War Powers Act was passed in a half-hearted attempt to regain some portion of the war authority seized by an already-overgrown executive. It provided that the president could commence war on his own, but he must notify Congress within 48 hours and withdraw U.S. troops from battle within 90 days if Congress declined to declare war or at least pass an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) in that timespan.

Since then, executive war-making has been the norm. From Korea to Vietnam, Bosnia to Kuwait, and into the modern war on terror, none of America’s near-constant military operations in the post-World War era have been subject to an official congressional declaration of war. Obama’s tenure saw a further solidification of this status quo, thanks to a Congress unwilling to enforce the War Powers Act.

Today, the U.S. military is engaged in Yemen, Syria, Libya, and Somalia with neither a formal declaration or an AUMF, and the AUMFs authorizing action in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and especially the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq are strained beyond all reasonable limits. These theaters of the war on terror are, in Washington’s telling, made legal by the 2001 AUMF that preceded the invasion of Afghanistan or the 2002 AUMF that preceded the invasion of Iraq. These documents clearly do not describe—and therefore cannot authorize—the current fight, which deals with territories and organizations substantially unrelated to the 9/11 attackers and the Hussein regime. ISIS was only founded in 2013, AQAP in 2009, and Somalia’s al Shabaab in 2006. How can AUMFs written before such organizations’ existence authorize these fights? Our Congress may have many talents, but seeing the future is not among them.

With this “temporary battlefields” idea, the White House once again strips Congress of what was left of its responsibility for our military, taking unilateral control of foreign policy for the foreseeable future.

What specifically makes this new plan different from the operations of administrations past is the new autonomy it gives the military from civilian control, not only in terms of congressional oversight but also in terms of presidential direction. In Obama’s scheme, which was already far afield from the constitutional war powers framework, the president and his top national security advisers remained intimately involved in the approval process for U.S. strikes outside of active war zones in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. With the new plan, military commanders would be able to make these decisions independently during 180-day periods. This puts major foreign policy decisions one step further away from congressional influence and civilian control.

Defense Secretary James Mattis seems to understand the importance of constitutional congressional authority over military action. “Following more than a decade of fighting for poorly articulated political goals,” he wrote in a 2015 op-ed about ISIS, “the Congress needs to restore clarity to our policy if we are to gain the American people’s confidence and enlist the assistance of potential allies, while sending a chilling note that we mean business to our enemies.”

Mattis reiterated this point at a recent Senate committee meeting. “I would take no issue with the Congress stepping forward with an AUMF," he said. "I thought the same thing for the last several years, I might add, and have not understood why the Congress hasn't come forward with this, at least to debate."

The Trump administration need not maintain Obama’s policies and procedures—in fact, it should not—but this proposal is regression, not reform. It demolishes the last remnants of one our Founders’ most necessary constitutional protections, and it opens the gate to a host of dangerous, imprudent military interventions with no demonstrable connection to U.S. national security interests.

After the last 15-plus years of imprudent executive war-making, what we need is not less oversight of our foreign policy, but more—more open debate about our goals and strategy, more realistic risk analysis, and more careful determination of what political outcomes we can achieve through military force.

Bonnie Kristian is a fellow at Defense Priorities. She is a weekend editor at The Week and a columnist at Rare, and her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, Politico, Relevant Magazine, The Hill, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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