Senator Adam Schiff says he will force Republicans to vote again on ending the war with Iran following the collapse of the ceasefire. That may be politically inconvenient for Republicans, but the constitutional question is not complicated. Congress never authorized this war in the first place.
The Hill reports that Schiff is introducing another War Powers Resolution intended to terminate American involvement in the conflict. He stated that the war has increased costs for Americans and described it as an unlawful “war of choice.” This comes after the United States resumed major strikes against Iran when the temporary ceasefire collapsed.
Let us stop pretending that this is some technical disagreement between lawyers. Article I of the Constitution gives Congress the authority to declare war. The president is commander in chief of the armed forces, but that does not grant him the power to initiate an open-ended war wherever Washington’s foreign-policy establishment chooses.
There was no congressional declaration of war against Iran. There was no specific Authorization for Use of Military Force against Iran. Congress did not vote beforehand to send the United States into another Middle Eastern conflict. The war began first and Congress was consulted later.
This has become standard procedure in Washington. Presidents from both parties launch military operations, announce that they are defending national security, and then dare Congress to stop them. Congress holds hearings, introduces resolutions, gives speeches, and eventually votes on whether the president should end a war that Congress never approved.
That turns the Constitution completely upside down. The burden should never be on Congress to gather enough votes to stop an unauthorized war. The president should be required to obtain congressional approval before beginning one, except when an immediate attack requires defensive action. Iran did not invade the continental United States on February 28. The administration made a deliberate decision to enter hostilities alongside Israel after negotiations failed. Lawmakers from both parties immediately challenged those strikes as unauthorized acts of war.
The War Powers Resolution was supposed to restrain precisely this type of abuse. It requires the president to report the introduction of American forces into hostilities and generally provides a 60-day period for Congress to authorize continued involvement. Yet Washington has treated the 60-day limitation not as a restriction, but almost as a complimentary trial period for presidential war.
The Senate initially rejected an effort to require congressional permission for the Iran campaign by a vote of 52 to 47. Rand Paul was the only Republican supporting that particular resolution, while John Fetterman was the only Democrat opposing it. The proposal would have ended unauthorized hostilities while preserving the ability of the United States and Israel to defend themselves against an Iranian attack.
That vote exposed the hypocrisy in Washington. Many senators claim to defend the Constitution until constitutional limits interfere with the foreign-policy agenda of their own party.
The Senate later approved a war-powers measure directing the removal of American forces from unauthorized hostilities against Iran. The official Senate description was explicit: these were hostilities “that have not been authorized by Congress.” One such recorded vote passed 50 to 47, and a later Senate resolution reportedly passed 50 to 48 with support from several Republicans.
But even those votes did not retroactively authorize the war. They confirmed the opposite. Congress was attempting to terminate military action for which the president had never received permission.
The administration later asked Congress for $87.6 billion in supplemental funding, including approximately $67.1 billion connected to the Iran conflict and $21 billion for munitions and the defense-industrial base. So Washington once again placed the American people in the familiar position of being ordered to finance a war their elected representatives never approved before the bombing began.
Once the first bomb falls, the political establishment argues that it is too late to debate whether the bomb should have fallen at all. Schiff is correct on the narrow constitutional issue, regardless of what anyone thinks of him politically. Republicans would have been screaming about executive tyranny had a Democratic president launched the same war without authorization. Democrats have also ignored congressional war powers when presidents from their own party were bombing foreign countries.
The Founders placed the war power in Congress because they understood that executives throughout history have used foreign conflict to expand domestic power, suppress opposition, increase taxation, and bury their own failures.
If Congress cannot decide whether America goes to war, then Congress has surrendered one of its most important constitutional functions. At that point, elections become little more than a ceremony. The United States was established as a republic precisely to prevent this.