The House leadership is feigning interest in its constitutional responsibilities:

Speaker Paul D. Ryan has ordered the House majority leader and the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to begin talking to members about the feasibility of a measure that would authorize war against the Islamic State militant group.

I suppose Speaker Ryan deserves a little credit for making even this minimal effort, but it doesn’t seem as if it will matter. If the House passes a new authorization specifically for the war on ISIS, that still requires the Senate to do something with it. All signs are that McConnell and the Senate Republicans have no desire to take this up this year (or ever). The report confirms this:

Mr. McConnell has repeatedly rejected the idea of a new authorization, saying he does not wish to restrain the next president with such a measure.

So whatever resolution the House produces, it will likely languish in the Senate for months or longer. Even if both chambers passed an authorization in a timely fashion, it would merely endorse a war that Obama has already been waging illegally for the past sixteen months. The administration doesn’t think it needs a new authorization, and it is content to claim that the 2001 AUMF gives them the authority they require. In order to pass the House, the authorization would probably have to be broader and more open-ended than even the White House would like, and that would guarantee the opposition of almost everyone in the president’s party. Many of the hawks in both chambers don’t think a new vote is warranted and might not support the resolution no matter how lacking in restrictions it was.

Each time that someone talks about pursuing a new AUMF for the war on ISIS, we are reminded of how unwilling most members of Congress are to do their jobs. We are also reminded of how irrelevant Congress has become to the process of deciding how and whether the U.S. should go to war. Even if there is a vote on a new AUMF, there is not much chance that the merits of the war are going to be seriously debated. All that will be considered is how long and how far the U.S. will go in prosecuting it. Since there seems to be little chance that this or any future Congress will actually check executive power in matters of war, it makes little difference if Congress votes on this authorization or not.