How we stop Trump's disastrous war

Now is the time to stand against this madness

I can’t believe we are doing this again.

Last night, Trump launched an illegal war that is practically guaranteed to have catastrophic effects — for U.S. service members, Iranian civilians, regional and global stability, and America’s capacity to support its own citizens at home.

There is no moral, strategic, or reality-based justification for this war. You don’t need to take my word on this — here’s what someone who’s seen the intelligence has to say:

This war is madness. And now is the time to stand against it.

What can we do? Well, first, a quick primer on the law. Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power “to declare war.” It does not grant this power to the president. It does not grant this power to the prime minister of Israel. It grants this power to Congress.

To be clear: Trump is acting illegally. And we need our Congressional leaders to stop him.

Senator Tim Kaine and Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie have introduced respective War Powers Resolutions in the Senate and House that would block Trump from taking further military action without authorization from Congress. These resolutions are privileged, meaning Congressional Republican leadership cannot stop them from going to the floor — they will be brought up for a vote. And there are likely enough Republicans who oppose this entanglement (Thomas Massie, one of the House sponsors, is a Republican) that if Democrats can form a united front against this war, there’s no reason to think the resolutions couldn’t pass.

So our immediate job is to get Democrats to support the Khanna/Massie and Kaine resolutions. If you want to take action on this, you should, today, check to see if your representatives have signed on, and if they haven’t, you should start sending them emails and leaving them voicemails asking them to do so. If you’re looking for sample language, here are the texts I sent to my Congressman, Gabe Amo — one on Thursday and another this morning. I still haven’t heard anything back. (Disclaimer: Gabe won his seat via a 12-way primary in which I was the second-place runner up.)

I wasn’t exaggerating in my text when I said this issue is going to be a defining one. I don’t how any Democrat voted on any other piece of legislation from 2003, but I sure as hell know which Democrats voted for the disastrous war in Iraq and which Democrats opposed it. I think the Kaine and Khanna/Massie resolutions will function similarly. And so we should be pushing our Democratic leaders as hard as we can on this, including those we support and want to succeed — because it would be a big career mistake for any Democrat to fail to stand against this disastrous war. (Just ask Hillary Clinton, whose loss to Obama in the 2008 presidential primary largely came down to her support for the war in Iraq.)

But what does “pushing as hard as we can” look like? Last night, when I first heard the news of Trump’s illegal strikes, I rage-tweeted this:

I didn’t know how I would feel about this message by the time my anger cooled off this morning. I’m generally not a big fan of longshot primary challenges — my usual position is that if you’re going to ask people to contribute their time and money to a campaign, you should first make sure there’s a plausible path to actually winning. But today, though I’ve cooled down, I still essentially agree with my rage-tweet.

In addition to emails, calls, and — I hope — major mobilizations and demonstrations against this illegal war, I can’t think of anything more likely to push Democrats to get onto the right side of history than a wave of people across the country threatening to primary their representatives if they won’t support these War Powers Resolutions. If you’re someone who’d consider this kind of action, please send me an email — I’m happy to help talk it through with you.

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To end this rant, I wanted to share a word about the name of this Substack, as I’ve gotten a number of questions about it, and this seems like as appropriate a moment as any for an explanation.

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell” is a phrase that I have tattooed on my arm.

It comes from a novel you may have heard of called Huckleberry Finn.

Huckleberry Finn is a controversial book. There are several very dumb reasons for its controversiality, and several very good reasons, including most significantly that the last third of the novel is total garbage. But its first two-thirds include, in my opinion, some of the best pages in all of American literature. And as all the Huckheads out there will know, the title of this Substack comes from the moral climax of Huckleberry’s story.

Throughout the book, Huck’s been struggling between his own moral intuition that he should help his friend Jim escape from slavery, and the twisted morality he’s been taught by the deformed society around him — that helping an enslaved person run away is a serious sin. Huck at last decides to stop “sinning” and writes a letter to rat Jim out to his former slaveowner. At first he feels overcome with relief at avoiding what he genuinely believed would be his damnation. But then he has a change of heart.

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking — thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time; in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him agin in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and would always do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell” — and tore it up.

It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head; and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.

Many who had the vision to oppose the Iraq War were publicly damned for their moral clarity. The stakes are much lower this time around — in 2003 a majority of Americans supported Bush’s war; today strong majorities oppose Trump’s. But the Trump regime, and others, are still working to manufacture consent. We’re going to hear a lot of crazy arguments — “If you oppose the way women are treated in Iran, you should support military strikes that will kill thousands of these women and their children.” But we need to stay true to what we know is right. And as long as we’re in, and in for good, we might as well go the whole hog.