Jack Goldsmith

An op-ed by By Jack Goldsmith, Ryan Goodman and Steve Vladeck. President Obama has stated that he wants “to begin engaging Congress” over a new Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against the Islamic State and also that he wants to “right-size and update” the 2001 AUMF “to suit the current fight, rather than previous fights.” It appears that Congress, too, is finally getting serious about putting U.S. counterterrorism operations on a contemporary and more rigorous statutory footing. There are many politically contested questions about how the government should accomplish these goals — about, for example, whether U.S. ground troops should be banned from Syria and Iraq, how the fight against the Islamic State should be conducted consistent with U.S. policy against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and what rules should govern the targeted killing of U.S. citizens abroad...We differ among ourselves on some questions. We nonetheless believe that, however they are resolved, an important foundational consensus can be reached — across branches and parties — on five core principles that should guide any new or revised authorization of force related to counterterrorism.

If Congress got what it deserved, the Capitol Dome would never have been permitted to be the backdrop for Tuesday’s Concert for Valor on the Mall honoring Veterans Day. Why? The 535 lawmakers who work there have cravenly dodged their constitutional responsibility to make the tough decision about whether President Obama is right to lead the country into war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria...Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith, a former special counsel to the Defense Department, said that when he testified before Congress last year, he was stunned by key senators’ lack of knowledge about U.S. military operations, such as drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan. “It was remarkable how little the members of the Senate Armed Services Committee knew about where we were fighting and against whom,” Goldsmith said. “They don’t even know where it’s going on.”

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith and Matthew Waxman. Late in the summer of 2013, President Barack Obama pulled back from his announced plans to use unilateral military force against Syria and stated that he would instead seek Congress’s approval. “I believe our democracy is stronger when the president acts with the support of Congress,” and “America acts more effectively abroad when we stand together,” he said. “This is especially true after a decade that put more and more war-making power in the hands of the president … while sidelining the people’s representatives from the critical decisions about when we use force.” Congress never authorized Obama to use force in Syria, and Russian President Vladimir Putin gave him an out by brokering a deal to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons. But Obama’s statement on the need for congressional consent, and the noted contrast with his predecessor, are nonetheless clarifying in their irony.

After spending nearly six years of his presidency installing a series of constraints on U.S. counterterrorism operations, President Obama has launched a broad military offensive against Islamist groups in Syria that stretches the limits of those legal and policy enclosures....“There are a lot of lines that he’s drawn in the sand. Just about every one of which he seems to have crossed now,” said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard University law professor and senior Justice Department official in the Bush administration, who attributed the outcome in part to the nature of Obama’s job. “The reality is that security threats are his first responsibility,” Goldsmith said. “Between past statements and pretty-sounding principles on the one hand, and the reality of security threats on the other, every president will always address the security threats and discard the principles.”

Two Harvard Law School professors critiqued the legal grounds of President Obama’s military strategy against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria during a lecture Monday. Speaking to an audience of nearly 200 people at the Law School, professors Jack L. Goldsmith and Noah R. Feldman ’92 analyzed the Obama administration’s legal justifications for the increased use of U.S. military force against ISIS.

As lawmakers grapple with President Obama’s claim that he already has congressional authorization for airstrikes against the Islamic State, legal specialists are saying that even legislative inaction could create a precedent leaving the executive branch with greater war-making powers....Still, the Obama administration’s broad claims, and the fact that “Congress has done nothing to push back,” may become a precedent that the executive branch could use for future interpretations of statutory authorizations to use military force, said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former Justice Department official.

An op-ed by Jack Goldsmith. Future historians will ask why George W. Bush sought and received express congressional authorization for his wars (against al Qaeda and Iraq) and his successor did not. They will puzzle over how Barack Obama the prudent war-powers constitutionalist transformed into a matchless war-powers unilateralist. And they will wonder why he claimed to “welcome congressional support” for his new military initiative against the Islamic State but did not insist on it in order to ensure clear political and legal legitimacy for the tough battle that promised to consume his last two years in office and define his presidency.

When President Obama summoned his closest advisers to the Oval Office a year ago this week to tell them he was holding off on a missile strike against Syria, one of his arguments was that if he acted without Congress, he might not get congressional backing for military intervention the next time he needed it…Such an authorization, said Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who served in the Bush administration and has written extensively about this debate, could be a political victory for Mr. Obama, giving him much-needed backing for a long, potentially arduous military campaign. “It doesn’t guarantee him a political blank check,” Mr. Goldsmith said in an interview, “but it gives him so much more political legitimacy and cover in case things go wrong.”

.By contrast, Harvard professor Jack Goldsmith points out that the president cannot enter a treaty on his own. He can make agreements with foreign leaders until he is blue in the face, but those agreements can’t force a reduction in U.S. emissions unless Congress passes a law saying so. Goldsmith sees the president’s action as symbolic, a way to stake out a legacy and inspire his base. So which is it, gauzy PR or yet another step toward dictatorship?

The Obama administration has told the United Nations that Ahmed Abu Khattala, the suspected ringleader of the 2012 attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was plotting additional attacks on Americans and that the United States conducted the weekend raid that seized him under its right to self-defense…Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor who was a senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration, wrote Wednesday that the critics “don’t have a legal leg to stand on” and that “civilian trial appears to be the only legally available option.”

Republicans have reacted harshly to the Obama administration’s decision to swap five top former Taliban commanders for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was the sole American prisoner of war in Afghanistan. When it comes to the legality of the decision to do so, they have a point…The fact that the law doesn’t address “a time-sensitive prisoner-exchange negotiation of this sort,” Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith argues, doesn’t mean Obama was within the law when he approved the transfer. “I don’t think it accurate or useful to say that the statute doesn’t address the Bergdahl situation, since it imposes a requirement without exception,” Goldsmith writes.

A little over a year ago, HLS Professor Jack Goldsmith, Benjamin Wittes and Robert Chesney ’97 decided almost on a whim to put their collective experience…