Barbara Lee's Lone Vote Against the 2001 War Authorization

Three days after the September 11 attacks, Barbara Lee went to the memorial service at Washington National Cathedral before she went to the House floor. The country was in shock. The ruins at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were still burning, and the field in Pennsylvania where the fourth plane came down was still a crime scene. Congress was about to vote on a joint resolution authorizing the President to use force against those responsible. Lee, a Democrat who represented Oakland and Berkeley, had spent the previous days reading the resolution and talking to people she trusted, and she had decided she could not support it. She later said she had heard something at the cathedral that settled her mind, from a member of the clergy who prayed that as we act, we not become the evil we deplore. That afternoon, she stood up and spoke for less than two minutes. When the votes were counted on September 14, 2001, the resolution had passed the House 420 to 1. The Senate had already passed it 98 to 0. Lee was the one.

In short: Barbara Lee was the only member of Congress to vote against the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force. Her warning was that its broad language would hand open-ended war powers to any president. Over the next two decades, administrations of both parties used it to justify military action against groups that did not exist in 2001, in countries far from Afghanistan, and it remains on the books.

Sixty words

The authorization that Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed on September 18, 2001, is remarkably short. Its operative section runs to about sixty words. It authorizes the President to use "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons," in order to prevent future acts of international terrorism against the United States by them.

Read in the light of September 2001, the target was obvious: al-Qaeda, which had carried out the attacks, and the Taliban government in Afghanistan, which had sheltered it. Nobody in Congress doubted that the United States would act against them, and very few doubted that it should.

But the words had features that a careful reader could see. There was no time limit. There was no geographic limit. And the key judgment, which groups and nations were connected to the attacks, belonged to the President alone: "he determines." The resolution did not name al-Qaeda or Afghanistan. It named a relationship to the attacks and let the executive decide who fit it.

The administration had asked for even more. Its first draft would have authorized force to deter and pre-empt any future terrorism against the United States, with no link to September 11 at all. Congressional negotiators narrowed that language. Lee thought the narrowed version still gave away too much.

What she said

Lee's floor statement was brief and is worth knowing in outline. She said she was voting with a heavy heart. She said the attacks were unspeakable and that the country was grieving and wanted justice and security. She said that military action alone would not prevent further acts of terrorism, and that Congress should not give the President a blank cheque to attack anyone involved in the events of September 11, anywhere, in any country, without regard to long-term foreign policy, economic and national security interests, and without a time limit. She said someone had to say: let us use restraint. And she repeated the words from the cathedral.

She did not say the United States should not respond. She did not excuse the attackers. Her argument was about Congress's role. Granting a president an open-ended war power, she believed, was precisely what Congress had done with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, and the country should not make that mistake again.

The response was immediate and ugly. Lee's office was flooded with calls and messages, many of them furious, and she received death threats serious enough that she needed security protection. Some newspapers attacked her by name. She also received many messages of support, and some of her colleagues later told her privately that they had wished they had voted with her. But in September 2001, standing alone carried a real price.

Where the conviction came from

Lee did not arrive in Congress by a conventional route, and her background helps explain why she was willing to stand alone.

She was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1946, and grew up partly there and partly in California, where her family moved when she was a teenager. As a young single mother of two sons she relied for a time on public assistance while she studied. She earned her undergraduate degree at Mills College in Oakland and a master's degree in social work at the University of California, Berkeley. In those years she volunteered with community programs in Oakland, including those run by the Black Panther Party, and she worked on Shirley Chisholm's 1972 presidential campaign, an experience she has often credited with drawing her into electoral politics.

Her political apprenticeship was with Ron Dellums, the Berkeley and Oakland congressman who was one of the most outspoken critics of military spending and of the Vietnam war in his era. She worked on his staff for years, then won seats in the California Assembly and the state Senate. When Dellums retired from Congress, Lee won a special election in 1998 to succeed him.

That history matters to the vote. Lee came out of a political tradition in the East Bay that had long questioned the use of military force and asked who bore its costs. She had been trained by a congressman who took Congress's war powers seriously as a constitutional matter. And she had a social worker's habit of thinking about what policy decisions do to people several steps away from the room where they are made. In September 2001, those habits told her that a law written in grief and fear, without limits, would be used in ways nobody voting for it could foresee.

How the law was stretched

The first use of the authorization was the one everyone expected. In October 2001 the United States began military operations in Afghanistan, toppling the Taliban government and attacking al-Qaeda. Few would have disputed that this fit the law's terms.

What followed went much further.

The Bush administration relied on the authorization, alongside the President's constitutional powers, to detain people captured abroad as enemy combatants, including at the prison at Guantanamo Bay. In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld in 2004, a plurality of the Supreme Court agreed that the authorization permitted detaining a person captured fighting for the Taliban in Afghanistan, while insisting that an American citizen held that way was entitled to a meaningful chance to challenge his detention. The administration also invoked the authorization to defend a secret program of warrantless electronic surveillance inside the United States, a reading many legal scholars, including some conservatives, found implausible.

Over the years, successive administrations read the law to cover "associated forces" of al-Qaeda, groups that had not existed in 2001 or had no role in the attacks, on the theory that they had joined al-Qaeda's fight against the United States. On that basis the authorization was cited for strikes and operations in Yemen, Somalia, Libya and elsewhere.

The most striking stretch came in 2014. When the Obama administration began airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, it cited the 2001 authorization as legal authority. The Islamic State had grown out of al-Qaeda's Iraqi affiliate, but by 2014 it had openly broken with al-Qaeda's leadership and was fighting al-Qaeda's own Syrian branch. The theory that a law aimed at the September 11 plotters covered a group at war with them struck many in Congress, in both parties, as a reach. Obama himself asked Congress for a new, specific authorization against the Islamic State. Congress never passed one, and the strikes continued under the old law.

By the time American forces left Afghanistan in August 2021, the authorization had been in force for nearly twenty years and had been cited, according to congressional researchers, dozens of times, across multiple countries and against groups the original Congress never named. It remains law.

Lee's twenty-year campaign

Lee did not treat her vote as a single act. For two decades she introduced legislation to repeal or replace the 2001 authorization, Congress after Congress.

In 2017 she came closer than ever. During a markup of the defence spending bill in the House Appropriations Committee, she offered an amendment that would have repealed the 2001 authorization after a delay, giving Congress time to debate a replacement. To the surprise of many, the Republican-led committee adopted it by voice vote, with support from members of both parties. House leaders later removed it from the bill before it reached the floor. The episode showed both how much quiet support existed for revisiting the law and how firmly leadership in both parties preferred not to.

Lee also pressed for repeal of the separate 2002 authorization for the Iraq war, which she had also opposed. The House voted to repeal the 2002 law in 2021, and the Senate voted to repeal it in 2023, but the two chambers did not complete the job together that Congress.

Meanwhile Lee rose within the House. She chaired the Congressional Black Caucus, and she became a senior member of the Appropriations Committee, where she worked on global health, foreign aid and programs to fight HIV and AIDS, an issue she had championed for years. She ran for the Senate in California in 2024 and did not advance from the primary. In 2025 she was elected mayor of Oakland, the city she had represented for more than a quarter century.

The fair case for the 420

It is important to give the majority its due, and most of the 420 deserve respect, not scorn.

In September 2001, the country had just suffered the deadliest attack on its soil in its history. Al-Qaeda had shown it could kill thousands of Americans and had every intention of doing it again. A fast, united response from Congress sent a message to the attackers and to the world that the country would act together. Members had good reason to believe the President would use the authority against those responsible, and in the first instance he did. Many of the members who voted yes were people of conscience who had opposed other wars and would oppose the Iraq war a year later.

The trouble was not that they voted to respond. It was that they accepted language without limits. The lesson of Lee's vote is not that she alone cared about justice. It is that a law should say what Congress means, because the President will use what it says.

What her dissent still teaches

There is a temptation to turn Lee into a symbol and leave it there. The more useful thing is to take her argument seriously as a matter of law and institutions.

Her point was that Congress's power to authorize war is only real if Congress uses it with care, defining who the enemy is, where force may be used, and when the authority ends. An authorization without those limits does not keep war powers with Congress. It transfers them. And once transferred, they are very hard to take back, because any repeal can be vetoed and needs two-thirds of both chambers to override.

Reformers across the spectrum have proposed versions of the same fix: authorizations that name specific enemies, that sunset after a set number of years unless renewed, and that require regular reporting. Lee's own repeal bills generally paired repeal with time for Congress to debate a replacement. That is not a pacifist's agenda. It is a legislator's.

There is also a lesson here about time. Laws passed in an emergency are written for the emergency, but they stay on the books long after it passes, and the people who wrote them retire, lose elections or die. The members who voted in September 2001 could not have imagined most of the conflicts their words would later cover. A sunset clause is a way of admitting that, and of making a future Congress decide again with the facts in front of it.

The new Congress that convenes in January 2027 will inherit the 2001 authorization, still in force a quarter of a century on. Whether it finally replaces it with something narrower is a choice members will make. We follow the debate on our Pentagon and militarism page, and Lee's career alongside those of other progressive figures on our progressive leaders page.

It takes a particular kind of courage to be the only one. Lee has said she did not feel brave; she felt she had no other choice consistent with her oath. The rest of us do not usually face votes like that. We do face smaller versions: the moment when everyone around us agrees, and something about the words in front of us is wrong.

What you can do

• Ask your members of Congress about the 2001 authorization. Find your representative and senators, with their phone numbers, contact forms and recent votes, at find your representatives. Ask whether they support repealing or replacing the 2001 authorization with one that has clear limits and an end date.
• See who stands with the Progressive Caucus on war powers. The Progressive Caucus page lists the Congressional Progressive Caucus members and the Democratic leaders, and the Congress page shows bills and recorded votes.
• Find the organizations working on it. Veterans' groups, faith-based peace groups and civil liberties organizations have long pushed for repeal; search by cause and state in our organizations directory.