The 'cracks' are showing: Behind the battle for who leads the GOP when Trump is gone

The Post revealed Sunday that American spy agencies intercepted phone calls between Iranian officials who said the US bombing of that country’s nuclear facilities wasn’t as bad as they expected it to be.

The president has said, and continues to say, that the bombing two weekends ago had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, but Donald Trump’s lips were moving, so he was lying.

Yesterday’s report piggybacks on reporting from last week by most of the major news outlets about an internal Pengaon assessment that found that Iran’s nuclear programs had been set back by a few months, not decades, and certainly not to the extent the White House claims.

That there wasn’t much damage explains Iran’s tepid response to the bombing. It launched rockets at US troops stationed in Qatar, but they were easily shot down. The attack was little more than face-saving.

It also explains Trump’s cavalier attitude toward Iran’s counterstrike. Evidently, the Iranians told him they’d fire rockets at a certain time on a certain day, and Trump, by his own admission, said that’d be “fine.”

The president wanted a made-for-TV ending and Iran’s feeble counterstrike was an empty gesture befitting of a made-for-TV war.

But empty gestures don’t hold together ceasefires.

The Iranians have more incentive to pursue a nuclear weapon. That gives the Israelis more incentive to restart their war. So the prospect of broader conflict in the Middle East is very much alive, no matter how much Trump boasts to the world about being a peacemaker.

Which brings me to my recent interview with Steve Millies and what he thinks the Democrats in the Congress can do to constrain Trump.

A political scientist who is a professor of theology at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, Millies told me that while the Democrats play to their base with talk of impeachment, they could be driving a wedge between Republicans over funding of war with Iran.

“Trump is in a more precarious political position than most presidents have been when they've ordered the military into action,” he told me.

“I think there's a good opportunity here for Democrats.”

Below is the first part of my interview with Professor Millies. Later, I will publish the second part, where he explains how the technological forces that corroded the Republicans also corroded the Democrats.

The Democrats reacted to Trump's decision to bomb Iran in the usual norms-and-institutions kind of way we can expect from them. You have said they can do more, especially in the Senate.

They're right to call [his conduct] impeachable. The trouble is that there is so much other impeachable conduct and none of it's going anywhere. Republican majorities won't allow it. So it's futile, but more importantly, I want to say that only norms and institutions will save us.

That all being said, I think the Iran attack offers a different sort of opportunity. We know the GOP is fractured over this bombing anyway – look at Marjorie Taylor Greene. Introducing an amendment modeled on the Case-Church amendment that ended the Vietnam War, an amendment to prohibit funding combat operations in Iran, has some interesting political possibilities. It can fracture the GOP while they're struggling to cobble together a budget that can pass under the Byrd rule. Even if an amendment fails, it means the GOP owns the war.

That seems like a much better way to approach this problem.

So far the Democrats seem to be limiting themselves to demands for congressional approval of war powers. Talk about that part.

War powers are a tricky problem. There hasn't been a congressional declaration since 1941. There have been various kinds of congressional authorizations since. Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist Papers 69 that the president is commander-in-chief only in time of actual war, and presumably that means when Congress says there is one.

But modern warfare has made that approach impractical. That's why Congress passed the War Powers Resolution in 1973. But that law founders on interbranch conflict. Presidents have insisted that it is an encroachment on executive power, specifically the president's power as commander-in-chief, which is exclusively a presidential power.

In our time, war powers are a constitutional stalemate, but because the executive is the energetic branch that has the military, presidents have the advantage. The only real power the Congress has here (unless they want to impeach) is the power of the purse, which is exclusively a legislative power. Congress can refuse to fund combat operations, which is what the Case-Church amendment did in 1973.

In those days, it was controversial, because it meant abandoning US forces on the field. Today, when war is conducted from 50,000 feet or from a video screen in Nevada, it's harder to play that card. Combat is more susceptible to being defunded if Congress wants to do it.

I think the GOP leadership would want to line up behind the president. But it won't be easy. Their members are fractured. Even if they manage to block an amendment, they'll have taken full responsibility for a war.

In other words, Trump is in a more precarious political position than most presidents have been when they've ordered the military into action. I think there's a good opportunity here for Democrats.

What's frustrating is to watch them (I think) playing to their base and talking about impeachment without being focused on the very promising opportunity this situation seems to have given them.

Do you think the cracks in the GOP over military intervention are real? They'll have to be if the Democrats are going to exploit them.

That's the big question. It's the first time we've seen MAGA fracture over anything. Trump has had an eerie power to defy political gravity for 10 years, and maybe he'll defy gravity here too despite all of the political vulnerability I see – vulnerability that I want to emphasize is unlike any other modern use of military power I can think of.

Maybe they'll all swallow their doubts and fall back in line, especially if a ceasefire holds and it starts to look like Trump has brought us peace.

But the other thing I think is important is that people like Greene and Thomas Massie are (it seems to me) floating trial balloons about the future. Trump is a 79-year-old man and at least for now, we think, he is term-limited. The biggest question in the Republican Party is the one nobody talks about – who leads the GOP when Trump is gone?

I have been thinking some of the fracturing we are seeing is a quiet exploration of that question, especially because what Trump has done flies against America-first isolationism that’s foundational to MAGA.

If any potential successors hope to take his place one day, one good place to stand is on the ground of isolationism. So I'm not sure the cracks over Iran are real, no. But I am sure these questions about the future are. They're the kinds of things politicians think about.