POLITICS: Bill Maher catches Adam Schiff in Obama war powers hypocrisy on live television – USSA News

Sen. Adam Schiff walked right into it. On Friday’s episode of “Real Time,” host Bill Maher read a statement to the California Democrat and asked him to react to its claim about presidential war powers.

Maher quoted what he described as an administration position:

“The president had the constitutional authority to direct the use of military force because he could reasonably determine that such use of force was in the national interest.”

Schiff called it “totally vague.” Maher asked if it was too vague. Then he delivered the punchline.

“Okay. Because that’s from Obama about Libya.”

The full quote came from the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel, dated April 1, 2011, issued to justify President Barack Obama’s military intervention in Libya without congressional authorization. Word for word, it is the exact legal reasoning Schiff now finds unacceptable when a Republican occupies the White House.

The pivot that told the whole story

Caught flat-footed, Schiff did what every seasoned politician does when the ground shifts beneath them: he changed the subject. He pivoted to Syria, acknowledging that Obama initially argued he could “go into Syria without an authorization” but ultimately declined to act against former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Schiff’s defense of Obama was revealing in its logic. He said Obama backed off the Syria strike “because he thought he may lose the vote in Congress,” then added:

“But I respect the fact that — that was important to him, and the fact that he did not have the support of Congress meant that we weren’t going to go forward.”

Think about what Schiff is actually praising here. Obama claimed unilateral authority to strike Syria. He only stopped because the votes weren’t there. Schiff frames this as constitutional restraint. It wasn’t restraint. It was arithmetic. Obama wanted the authority, asserted the authority, and only relented when Congress signaled it would embarrass him. That’s not deference to the legislative branch. That’s political survival dressed up as principle, as Fox News reports.

And on Libya, Obama didn’t even bother with the arithmetic. He just acted. The Office of Legal Counsel provided the justification, Congress was sidelined, and Schiff apparently had no objections at the time.

The standard that only applies in one direction

Schiff then turned his fire toward the current administration, declaring that “we are unquestionably at war now” and invoking Alexander Hamilton’s warning that presidents would grow “too fond of making war.” He listed a series of military actions:

“After Venezuela, after the earlier Iran conflict, after bombing Nigeria and Iraq and Syria, [Trump’s] grown too fond of this.”

He then argued that Congress “needs to step up, assert its role, or it’s going to be gone for good,” warning that without legislative pushback, any president would “for any reason, anywhere in the world, for any length of time” feel free to make war.

This is a perfectly reasonable constitutional argument. War powers should reside with Congress. The Founders designed it that way for serious reasons. The problem isn’t the argument. The problem is the man making it.

Adam Schiff served in Congress during the Obama administration’s Libya campaign. He watched a Democratic president bypass Congress using the exact legal reasoning he now calls “totally vague.” He did not sound alarms about Hamilton’s warnings. He did not demand Congress assert its role. He respected the “fact” that Obama eventually decided not to repeat the trick in Syria, as if declining to do something unconstitutional a second time earns a merit badge.

Congress and the Iran vote

The broader context makes Schiff’s selective constitutionalism even harder to take seriously. On Thursday, the House of Representatives narrowly voted to allow President Trump to continue Operation Epic Fury in Iran. A bipartisan resolution led by Reps. Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna aimed to block the use of Armed Forces in the joint U.S.-Israeli operation in Iran. It failed 212 to 219, with four Democrats joining most Republicans to sink the measure.

The Trump administration, along with the majority of Republicans in Congress, have insisted that the president has acted within his authority. That is a debate worth having on the merits. Serious people can disagree about where the line falls between executive flexibility and congressional prerogative in military matters.

But that debate requires intellectual honesty from both sides. It requires participants who apply the same standard regardless of which party holds the White House. Schiff, confronted with Obama’s own legal reasoning and unable to distinguish it from what he now opposes, does not meet that threshold.

The real lesson Maher exposed

Credit where it’s due: Bill Maher, no conservative himself, did something most of the media refuses to do. He forced a Democrat to confront his own side’s precedent before criticizing the other side’s actions. The result was instant incoherence. Schiff went from “totally vague” to defending the man who authored the vagueness in under sixty seconds.

This is the pattern. Democrats invoke constitutional structure when it’s useful and ignore it when it’s inconvenient. They cite the Founders when a Republican is in office and discover executive flexibility when one of their own needs it. The principles don’t change between administrations. The partisanship does.

Maher didn’t need to editorialize. He just read the quote and named the source. The hypocrisy spoke for itself.