Sixty Words Passed in 2001 Still Carry America's Wars, and That Is a Problem

Most of what Congress passes in a year is too long to read. The bill that has authorized more American combat than any other in the twenty-first century is the reverse: one sentence, short enough to fit on an index card, passed in a week of grief and fear, with one dissenting vote in the House and none in the Senate. It has been cited as legal authority for operations in a number of countries, against groups that did not exist when it passed, under Presidents of both parties. It was not repealed when Congress repealed the 2002 Iraq authorization in December 2025, and it has never been rewritten.

A conservative can believe in the war on those who attacked us. A conservative can also believe that Article I of the Constitution means what it says. This post argues that those two beliefs point to the same conclusion: Congress should replace the 2001 authorization with a new, bounded one, and the sooner the better.

The text

The measure is Public Law 107-40, signed by President Bush on September 18, 2001, a week after the attacks. It is formally the Authorization for Use of Military Force, known by its initials, the AUMF. Its operative sentence is this:

"That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."

I counted. It runs sixty words. Read the sentence as a lawyer would, clause by clause, because the clauses matter.

1. "all necessary and appropriate force." The power is broad as to means. It is not limited to particular weapons, places or durations.
2. "against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines..." The target is defined by the President's determination. The phrase "he determines" is a delegation of the decision about who falls within the class.
3. "planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons." The class is defined by connection to a specific event. It is a backward-looking test: did they have a hand in September 11, or shelter those who did?
4. "in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons." The purpose is forward-looking, but note the last words: "by such nations, organizations or persons." The future acts to be prevented are acts by the same class defined in clause three.

There is no expiration date, no geographic limit, no reporting requirement, and no list of named enemies. There is a second operative subsection, which says that the measure is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution, the 1973 law that sets a sixty-day clock on presidential military action. That is a significant sentence, because it means that Congress triggered the clock and then waived it.

The votes

The House passed the resolution on September 14, 2001, by a vote of 420 to 1. The sole opponent was Representative Barbara Lee of California, who said she could not support a blank check, and who was widely criticized and widely praised for it. The Senate passed it the same day by 98 to 0. The President signed it four days later.

Those numbers record a national mood, and they should be read with a certain sympathy for the legislators. Congress was meeting a few days after the worst attack on American soil in the nation's history, with the Capitol evacuated on September 11 and anthrax letters arriving a few weeks later. Under those conditions the demand to act quickly was irresistible, and nobody who lived through that week should look down on the members who voted yes.

There is a piece of the story that deserves to be remembered. The administration's initial draft was broader. It sought authority to use force to deter and preempt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States, language that would not have been tied to the September 11 attackers at all. Congress cut that language back and tied the authority to the attacks and those responsible for them. Senator Tom Daschle, then the Majority Leader, later wrote, in a 2005 Washington Post article, about how the administration's requests for broader wording had been resisted. It was an act of legislative discipline, and it is the reason the text reads as it does. The irony is that the limits Congress insisted on have been read, over time, out of the text.

Stretching the sentence

The text refers to the perpetrators of September 11. The authority that has been drawn from it is far larger. The progression runs, roughly, as follows.

Afghanistan and al-Qaeda. The first use was the obvious one: the war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban government that sheltered it, begun in October 2001. This is the core of the authorization and nobody disputes it.

Associated forces. Over the years, the executive branch, through the Bush and Obama administrations, read the authorization to cover not only al-Qaeda and the Taliban but also "associated forces," a category that includes groups fighting alongside them. Congress incorporated a version of the phrase into the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2012, in a provision about detention, but did not define it for use of force generally.

New groups. The strain became obvious when the Obama administration began military operations against the Islamic State in 2014. The Islamic State had grown out of al-Qaeda in Iraq, a group that did not exist on September 11, 2001, and that had fought with and then broken with the al-Qaeda leadership in early 2014. The administration's legal theory relied on the 2001 authorization, on the 2002 Iraq authorization, and on the President's own constitutional powers, and argued that the Islamic State was the successor of an organization that had been an al-Qaeda affiliate. Whatever one thinks of the theory, it is a long way from "those who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the attacks."

Other places. The same authorization has been cited in operations in Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Syria, the Philippines and elsewhere, against groups with local grievances and no role in the attacks, on the theory that they are associated forces. Under the report requirements of the War Powers Resolution, the administrations of both parties have listed the countries in which they operate under the authority. The lists are long.

The 2002 Iraq authorization

The 2001 text was not the only old war powers law in use. The Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002, Public Law 107-243, was signed on October 16, 2002. It passed the House 296 to 133 and the Senate 77 to 23. It authorized the President to use the armed forces as he determined necessary and appropriate to defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq, and to enforce the relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.

Its stated purposes were tied to a particular regime. That regime ended in 2003. The law, however, remained on the books and was cited by successive administrations as secondary authority for operations against groups in Iraq and, by extension, in the region. A 2020 strike on an Iranian general in Baghdad was defended, among other grounds, by reference to the 2002 authorization and the President's powers under Article II. Congress repealed the 2002 authorization, together with the 1991 Gulf War authorization, in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2026, which President Trump signed on December 18, 2025. That left the 2001 authorization as the one that matters.

A conservative case for a new authorization

Now to the argument. I will make it in numbered premises.

1. Article I, section 8, clause 11 gives Congress the power to declare war. The Framers placed the power with the legislature because they feared what happens when a single person controls both the decision to start a war and the means of waging it. Madison's notes from the Convention record that the change from "make" to "declare" was meant to leave the President the power to repel sudden attacks, not to initiate wars of choice.
2. An authorization is a delegation, and a delegation should be bounded. A sixty-word sentence with no expiration, no geography and no list of enemies is not a bounded delegation. It is a standing grant that each President can read as broadly as the facts allow, and the facts, by the nature of the world, keep producing new groups.
3. The text no longer matches the enemy. The people who planned the attacks of September 11 are, for the most part, dead or imprisoned. A statute that authorizes force against those who "planned, authorized, committed, or aided" those attacks cannot honestly be read to authorize force against groups that had not yet been formed in 2001. When the executive has to supply a new theory of "association" to stay within the statute, the statute has run out.
4. Congress is the branch accountable to voters for war. A President who fights under an old authorization does so without a fresh vote by the people's representatives. A war that has not been voted on recently is a war that members can avoid owning. That is convenient for incumbents and bad for the republic.
5. The remedy is within Congress's power, and has been proposed before. Members of both parties have introduced bills to replace the old authorizations with new text. The obstacle is not constitutional. It is political: a vote on war is a vote that can be used against a member, and many would prefer to leave the matter alone.

What would a good authorization look like? Without writing the statute, the conservative principles point to a few features. It should name the enemy groups, so that the authority attaches to identified organizations and not to a category the executive defines. It should say where it applies and require notice when operations extend. It should have a sunset, say after a fixed number of years, so that Congress must vote again to renew. It should require regular reports to the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees. And it should leave the President free, under Article II, to repel a sudden attack without waiting for a vote, which is a power no statute need grant and no statute can take away.

The strongest objection, answered

The best objection to a new authorization has three parts. First, the old authorization works, and a conflict with an adaptable enemy requires an adaptable law. Second, opening the question in Congress invites a messy debate in which an authorization might be narrowed in ways that tie the President's hands at a bad moment. Third, a new law might concede that the old operations were illegal, giving critics a reason to challenge them.

Here is the reply, in turn.

1. Adaptability is a virtue in tactics and a vice in law. The executive has the Article II power to defend the country, and nothing in a bounded authorization takes it away. What a bounded law does is to force the executive to come to Congress when the enemy changes, which is when a debate is most needed. If the enemy is new, so should be the vote.
2. A messy debate is the system working. The Founders intended the decision to go to war to be difficult. A rule that makes it easy for a President to widen a war without a vote is a rule that makes it cheap, and cheap wars are the ones that run on for twenty years. See the record laid out in Why Did We Lose in Afghanistan? Twelve Questions the Record Can Answer.
3. The claim that a new law admits illegality is a legal tactic, not a constitutional argument. A Congress that wanted to preserve the legal basis for past operations could say so in the text of a new law. The question is whether the nation will keep operating on a stale delegation or will do the work of governing.

I will add that the argument is not partisan. The same authority has been used by Republican and Democratic Presidents. A conservative who is comfortable with a Republican President's reading of it should ask whether he would be comfortable with the identical reading in the hands of the other party's President. If the answer is no, then the problem is the breadth of the text, not the occupant of the office.

The record in the larger frame

The question of who decides on war has a long history. The Case-Church Amendment of 1973, told in How Congress Ended a War with the Purse, the Case-Church Story of 1973, showed that Congress can use the purse to end a war. The Prize Cases and Youngstown, discussed in The Prize Cases of 1863 and How Lincoln Fought a War Before Congress Met and Youngstown Sheet and Tube Is the Case That Tells a President No in Wartime, show the limits of presidential power when Congress has spoken or stayed silent. The 2001 authorization is the case in which Congress spoke once, very broadly, and has been silent since. The pattern is a dangerous one, because the speech is old and the silence is permanent.

There is, finally, a point about the soldiers. Young Americans have deployed under an authorization that was passed before many of them could read. They are entitled to know that the representatives who sent them have voted, in their own time, to approve the mission. The authority to send them is Congress's. The responsibility to vote again, when the circumstances change, is also Congress's.

The case in brief

1. The Authorization for Use of Military Force of September 18, 2001 is a single sixty-word sentence, passed 420 to 1 in the House and 98 to 0 in the Senate, authorizing force against those who planned, authorized, committed or aided the September 11 attacks or harbored them.
2. Presidents of both parties have stretched it to groups that did not exist in 2001, through the idea of associated forces and successor organizations, and the 2002 Iraq authorization was used the same way until Congress repealed it in December 2025.
3. Article I, section 8 places the power to declare war with Congress, and a delegation without a sunset, a geographic limit or a list of enemies is a standing grant that no one voted to give.
4. A new authorization should name the enemies, bound the geography, require reports and expire unless renewed, while leaving the President his Article II power to repel a sudden attack.
5. Congress should do its own work, and a conservative who believes in the Constitution should want that done regardless of who holds the White House.

What you can do: look up the status of Public Law 107-40 on Congress.gov, then write your senators and representative asking them to sponsor or support a bounded replacement.