POINT: Efforts To Rein in Trump's War Powers Will Backfire COUNTERPOINT: Iran Conflict Illustrates Why We Have a President. War Powers Resolution Ties Trump's Hands

Jake Novak to CNBC wrote:

[center]

The last seven days in world events have created a new political paradigm.

Call it "Trump Unleashed."

That's because the attempts by President Donald Trump's opponents to rein him in after his decision to take down Iranian general Qasem Soleimani are likely to have the opposite effect.

This came to a head Thursday night. Six days after a successful U.S. strike to take out a major terrorist army leader, and one day after Trump announced his intention to pursue economic sanctions over further military action, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opted to hold a vote on a War Powers Act resolution to restrict Trump's military options going forward against Iran.

But just as that vote was in the works, we may have reached peak "bash Trump" levels when some of the president's opponents decided to publicly blame him for Iran's apparent shooting down of the Ukrainian passenger jet over Tehran Thursday morning. That included California Democrat Congresswoman Jackie Speier, who said as much during a live interview on CNN, and Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg who at least suggested as much in a tweet last night:

Yet in the midst of these attacks, Trump's polls still aren't going down across the board. This brings to mind the moment when Hillary Clinton released a campaign video to her supporters in 2016 she where she asked, "why aren't I 50 points ahead?" in the polls over Trump. But her question should have spurred Trump's opponents to look closer at how the strategy of throwing the kitchen sink at him doesn't really work. Instead, it appears they've spent the last few years doubling and tripling down on that strategy while at the same time doing whatever they can not to look inward.

It's not that Trump's poll numbers are historically good for an incumbent president. They're not. But it's extremely telling for a president to suffer no consistent drop in the polls even after being impeached, pilloried in the news media on an hourly basis, and reflexively blamed for just about everything.

How Democrats can win in 2020

But what can the Democrats do? Won't they suffer a loss of support from their own base if they don't keep up that constant attack mode against the president?

To win in 2020 and to make enduring gains in the polls, the Democrats must give the voters a vision of something more than just a blank space to replace Trump's image. Whether his actions are popular or not, the best response to a person of action is to promote actions of your own.

Every time Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, or any Democrat in Congress criticizes one of Trump's policies, they should be starting their sentences with phrases like, "While we're looking to reduce health costs or promote policy X, President Trump is pursuing, etc."

Right now, the Democratic Congressional leaders never seem to get past focusing only on what President Trump is doing or what they accuse him of doing.

The Democrats running for president are doing a bit of a better job on that score. At least a few of them are trying to make policies like Medicare for All or student loan forgiveness a feature of their campaigns. But the fact is, most of the candidates' messages are focused on bashing Trump as opposed to offering a very clear alternative on a policy level as well as a personal one.

All of this is counterintuitively providing President Trump a tremendous amount of political freedom. In a world where his domestic opponents are actually blaming him for a rogue regime's shooting down of a civilian aircraft, why should he bother with the impossible task of trying to win them over? The short answer is he won't.

Without the votes in Congress to pass any new bills, this new level of political freedom will not result in any sweeping new legislation. But expect President Trump to pursue more foreign policy initiatives as he takes a cue from President Obama's famous "I have a pen and a phone" pronouncement in 2014. Remember that Thursday's War Powers vote by the House is just symbolic without Senate support. Plus, the War Powers Act as a whole has never been fully backed by the courts, giving any president ample room to evade its checks on U.S. military activities.

In the end that means unless the polls really start to turn downward for the president, his hands now seem freer than ever to pursue old and new agendas. By making it all about opposing him, Democrats have only made President Trump stronger.

Kent Ingle to FOX News wrote:The 224-194 vote Thursday by the House of Representatives to approve a nonbinding resolution calling on President Trump to get authorization from Congress for further military action against Iran was counterproductive.

[center]

Tying the president’s hands to make it harder for him to respond to threats to our national security could increase the chances that other nations and terrorist groups will take hostile action to harm our citizens and our nation itself.

Today and in the future, the president of the United States – whether a Democrat or a Republican – will at times be required to act swiftly and decisively to defend our nation. The president’s power to take such action helps deter our adversaries from attacking us.

Following a missile attack and other threats that have arisen from Iran, many Americans and some of our allies continue to criticize President Trump’s order last week to kill Iranian terrorist Gen. Qassem Soleimani, a mass murderer responsible for thousands of deaths – including over 600 Americans.

The president and top national security officials have said Soleimani was in the process of planning deadly attacks on Americans and had to be stopped. President Trump gave the order to kill Soleimani to save American lives – something we should all be able to agree is the job of the president.

After thousands of Iranians gathered in recent days to mourn the death of Soleimani, Iran’s leaders vowed “severe revenge” on the U.S.

Iran retaliated early Wednesday with missile strikes at two bases in Iraq housing U.S. troops. Fortunately, there were no American casualties. President Trump indicated Wednesday that for now the U.S. will not respond militarily to the missile strikes, but said he has tightened U.S. economic sanctions on Iran.

Our world today is dangerous and unpredictable. It is simply not practical to require the president to go through a long process of winning congressional approval to respond to every incident. This would not only delay any response but would give our adversaries time to prepare for any U.S. military action.

Imagine if when President Barack Obama made the wise decision to kill Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden that he had to propose the action to Congress and sit back for weeks or even months of debate over the plan. Bin Laden might still be alive today, because he would have been alerted to take new precautions against an attack.

With every threat and in moments of crisis facing our nation, there could be an endless discussion of what should be done. Trump’s decision to target Soleimani and Obama’s decision to target bin Laden were tough calls that could not have been made collectively.

The Constitution created the office of president because we need one person at the head of our government who can make tough decisions quickly and under extreme pressure. No president is infallible, of course. But it is simply impractical to have the 535 members of Congress run government on a day-to-day basis.

President Trump has acted boldly and courageously to respond to Iran’s state sponsorship of international terrorism and its efforts to produce nuclear weapons by imposing tough economic sanctions on the country. He should be applauded for his action.

And without the president’s decisive move to take out Soleimani, we might have to eventually face an Iranian attack like the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks or Pearl Harbor. President Trump sent a clear message to Iran with the killing of Soleimani: if you attack us, you will pay a heavy price.

If Iranian leaders are smart, they will not dare attack Americans again.

No one should mourn Soleimani. He was the mastermind of the attack in Iraq last month that killed a U.S. contractor and injured several members of our military, and of the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad shortly afterward. And his long murderous record over many decades made him the worst living terrorist on the planet until he was killed.

In a recent Fox News interview on Hannity Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said of Soleimani: “We caught him, we stopped him and it’s a good thing for the world.”

Pompeo described the strike against Soleimani as an “all-of-government effort, directed and led by Trump,” because our government identified a serious risk. Pompeo spoke of Soleimani’s future plans, saying the terrorist was traveling all around the region and planning “the big attack.”

“This is an attack that would have been some scale,” Pompeo said. “We can’t talk much about the details, but suffice it to say that the decision that President Trump made, to take Qassem Soleimani down, saved American lives.”

Critical moments of decision and responses in office, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis or 9/11, are often marked as defining moments for our nation. Although these moments are rare (and God willing, will continue to be), they are critical times of decision for the president. They are the defining moments for America and its future.

It is easy for us at home to sit back, watch developments on TV and criticize the president for his responses to national security threats. And as the old saying goes, hindsight is 20/20. But a president – any president – cannot be paralyzed by “what if” questions and endless deliberations. Sometimes, action is called for. President Trump knows this and he has met the test with his order to kill Soleimani and his continuing campaign of maximum pressure on the Iranian regime.