Congress Must Force the President to Post One TikTok Video Every Three Months Explaining the War

Reasserting control

Photo by John Parsons, Jr.

What, exactly, are our goals in Iran? What plans are in place for various contingencies? Do our tactics match our goals? We need answers to these questions, and so far, none have been forthcoming: The president announced the war in a pre-recorded statement released in the middle of the night, and the administration has said little since then.

Democrats are advancing a bill to force Trump to consult with Congress, but it won’t pass – they don’t have enough votes to override a veto. The 1973 War Powers Resolution – the law meant to limit the president’s war powers – is never enforced. The constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, but modern notions of what constitutes “war” and decades of shifting custom have functionally delegated the war power to the president.

Congress must reassert its authority. But a new law needs to be practical; one reason the War Powers Act is functionally dead is that its scope is too broad for modern air campaigns. And both parties fear constraining the president in a way that compromises national security. So, we need a law that rolls back the president’s absolute power but fits with modern notions of the balance of power between Congress and the President.

With that in mind, I propose this: The president must submit one TikTok video of at least two minutes in length every three months explaining the war. No more than 90 seconds of the video can be dancing. And in that video, the president must explain:

1. Which country we are at war with;

2. Whether or not this is the kind of war where Americans die; and

3. How the war is going on a scale from Platoon (bad) to Top Gun (awesome).

This would be a huge shift in how we do things. Right now, events just happen, we’re informed of them after-the-fact, and there is virtually no discussion of logic or goals. Under this law, we would receive a watershed of information – relatively speaking – once every solstice. And a nifty side benefit would be that when the president posts his quarterly war TikTok, it would serve as a reminder to change the filters in your HVAC system.

Long ago, presidents would address Congress requesting a declaration of war. I’m sure we can all agree: That sounds boring as hell. Information today travels in short bytes – in the social media age, even FDR’s “day that will live in infamy” speech would do far better as this meme:

Image via Getty.

Many will feel that forcing the president to record at least eight minutes of video a year is too burdensome. They’ll say that the president’s reporting requirements should be limited to a once-every-six-months tweet, or an annual .gif of a clip from The Office in which Jim’s facial expression conveys how the war is going. But I’m a stickler about the constitution; Article One clearly gives the war power to Congress. And therefore, we must accept nothing less than a now-and-again Cliff Notes update released on an app built for spying and child abuse.

It’s imperative that Congress assert itself. But not in a nutso way – nobody wants members of Congress to have to cast tough votes that could cause them to get primaried. And of course we must preserve the filibuster, which helps prevent tyranny by rendering the legislature impotent and punting the governmental project to an executive with God-like powers. But within those constraints, I propose the maximum limit possible, i.e. a little video sometimes maybe containing a factoid or two. That is what the Founders envisioned. And if we can’t insist on that, then we shouldn’t back the war in Iran or any other place where we might be waging war right now.

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