House Majority Leader Eric Cantor on Thursday said it appears increasingly likely that Republicans will join anti-war Democrats Friday in demanding an end to U.S. involvement in the civil war in Libya.

The House is expected to take up a resolution by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) calling for an end to the U.S. operations in the NATO-led campaign in Libya.

House Republicans are set to meet Thursday afternoon to discuss Libya and whether they should back Kucinich. Cantor said GOP support is clearly driven by the lack of a clear mission and the “seeming disregard of the role that Congress plays under the Constitution. I think that’s very real for our Members.”

In an interview with Roll Call on Thursday morning, the Virginia Republican said support for the resolution “could go either way” and that he bluntly warned President Barack Obama of the situation Wednesday morning during a meeting on the debt limit.

“I told the president, ‘you have a real problem with our members in Libya.’ I told him ‘the Kucinich resolution is coming up and frankly I wouldn’t be surprised if it passes, because people are upset,’” Cantor said. ~Roll Call

The strange thing about the way the administration has handled this since March is that Congress would have likely signed off on the Libyan war if it had been asked to debate and vote on it. There must normally be enough Republican hawks and reliable Democratic partisans that they could have pushed through an authorizing resolution without too much difficulty. The remarkable thing is that the sheer contempt that the administration has shown for our law and representative institutions may have finally alienated enough people to turn them against a military intervention that they might otherwise have supported.

Members of Congress haven’t been clamoring to go on record before now, but as the war drags on, and as more people realize that the decision to intervene was unwise and unrelated to American security, there seems to be more of an interest in taking a public stand. Bypassing Congress may have been temporarily useful at the time, but the administration failed to consider the possibility that Congress might assert itself and seriously complicate matters later on. Presidents have become so accustomed to paying Congress little more than lip service in matters of war that the administration seems to have thought that it could get away with ignoring Congress almost completely. It would be very encouraging if this is not the case.

If the Kucinich resolution passed, that would be great news, but I have to wonder if it would change anything in the near term. The administration would have a problem if it just ignored it and flouted it, but it is already ignoring and flouting the law, so why wouldn’t they do the same to the Kucinich resolution? The resolution directs Obama to withdraw U.S. forces from the war within a specified period of time, but the administration clearly pays no heed to deadlines set by Congress. I suppose at that point the war’s defenders would have a harder time making excuses for the illegality of the war, but the war is already blatantly illegal and it hasn’t stopped them yet. The war continues to be funded out of the Pentagon budget that has already been appropriated, and presumably the administration will just keep doing that for as long as it can. It would be extremely embarrassing for Obama if the resolution passed, but the administration’s contempt for the law is such that I doubt it would actually end U.S. involvement. Then we’ll see how far members of Congress are really willing to go to reclaim some of their lost authority.

Update: Politico reports that the House GOP leadership is drafting an alternative to the Kucinich resolution, and there will be a vote on it tomorrow.

Second Update: The Pentagon is complaining that passing the resolution would “send an unhelpful message of disunity.” Perhaps the civilian leadership in this administration should have thought of that before launching an arbitrary, illegal war.