Democrats bashing President Trump for striking Iran without congressional consent are bumping into an inconvenient history: Democratic presidents have done the same thing for decades.

From Bill Clinton, to Barack Obama, to (most recently) Joe Biden, every Democratic president of the modern era has employed U.S. military forces to attack targets overseas, including strikes in Bosnia, Syria, Libya and Yemen. While they sought approval from Capitol Hill in some of those cases, Congress never provided it.

That history has muddled the Democrats' current argument that Trump, in striking three Iranian nuclear facilities last weekend, violated the Constitution by acting on his own, without the formal approval of Congress.

The dynamic has not been overlooked by Republican leaders, who have hailed the strikes on Iran as a national security necessity and defended Trump's powers to launch them unilaterally. Those voices are pointing specifically to the actions of Clinton, Obama and Biden to bolster their arguments.

"Since [World War II] we've had more than 125 military operations from Korea and Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. They have occurred without a Declaration of War by Congress," House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told reporters after the strikes. "Presidents of both parties have exercised that authority frequently."

Johnson ticked off a few examples under the most recent Democratic administrations. Biden, he noted, ordered strikes against terrorist groups in Yemen, Syria and Iraq. Obama sustained a months-long bombing campaign in Libya. And Clinton had bombed parts of the former Yugoslavia during the Bosnian war of the mid-1990s.

"Every one of those actions were taken unilaterally and without prior authorization from Congress," Johnson said.

That background is forcing Democrats to reckon with that past just as many of them are now demanding that Trump cease all military operations in Iran without explicit congressional approval. Some of them are quick to acknowledge the incongruity, voicing something like regret that Congress didn’t stand more firm in the face of those........

© The Hill