WASHINGTON — The U.S. Congress is about to launch a war powers debate over President Donald Trump's authority to bomb Iran under largely unusual circumstances — he has already done it, and the country is essentially already at war.
Bombs are falling, people are dying and vows of revenge and retribution are being lobbed in escalating threats, all while untold taxpayer dollars are being spent on a military strategy that's expected to continue for weeks with an undefined goal and conclusion. Unlike the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003, which included long debates in Congress in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, or the more recent U.S. military strikes on Venezuela that proved to be limited, the joint U.S.-Israel military attack on Iran, called Operation Epic Fury, is well underway, with no foreseeable end in sight.
At least four U.S. military personnel have been killed, and Trump warned on Sunday "there will likely be more."
The moment is a defining one for Congress, which alone has the authority under the U.S. Constitution to declare war, and for the Republican president, who has consistently seized power during his second term with an apparent limitless view of his own executive reach.
“The Constitution is intended to prevent the accumulation of power in any one branch of government — and in any one person in government,” said David Janovsky, acting director of The Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog organization.
“Congress is the people’s representatives in a way that the president isn’t, even though we tend to focus on the president,” he said. "We need the people's representatives to weigh in on whether we, the people, are going to war right now."
War powers as a check on presidential power
In the U.S., the Congress would need to affirmatively approve wartime operations, with a declaration of war, or with an authorization for the use of military force, to essentially approve of the actions. But this rarely happens.
In fact, Congress has declared war just five times in the nation's history, most recently in 1941, to enter World War II a day after the Pearl Harbor attack. Congress approved an AUMF for the 1990 Gulf War and did so again in 2001 and 2002 to launch the 9/11-era wars into Afghanistan and then Iraq.
But Congress also created the war powers resolution during the Vietnam War-era, as something of a tool of last resort — deployed to slap back a president who had embarked on military excursions without congressional approval.
Both the House and the Senate have prepared war powers resolutions for votes this week.
Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Trump, as president, “does not have the right to do this on his own.”
“When the president commits American forces to a war of choice, he needs to come before Congress and the American people and ask for a declaration of war,” Warner said on CNN's “State of the Union.”
While lawmakers have criticized the Iranian regime and its nuclear ambitions, Democrats said Trump has not provided a rationale for the war or outlined its strategy for what comes next, and Trump's MAGA coalition is splintering over what it sees as the president's failure to keep his "America First" campaign promise by leading the U.S. toward an overseas war. Many lawmakers are wary of a longer entanglement as the operation killed Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and hundreds of people in the region.
White House officials are scheduled to brief congressional leaders and lawmakers this week, but the question-and-answer sessions will be behind closed doors, without a watchful public.
Power of the purse can stop wars
Over time, presidents of both major political parties have accumulated vast authority to engage in what are often more limited U.S. military strikes to accomplish strategic national security goals without approval from Congress. Democrat Barack Obama's military operations over Libya and Republican George H.W. Bush's incursions into Panama were conducted without the nod from Congress.
But restraining a president’s war powers is something lawmakers past and present have rarely been able to accomplish. Even if Congress is able to pass a war powers resolution to curb Trump in Iran, the House and the Senate would be unlikely to tally the two-thirds majority needed to overcome a presidential veto.
Trump has shrugged at the power of Congress to dictate what he can and can’t do, in war and other matters. He made only a brief mention of Iran in his State of the Union address last week, treating lawmakers' support as an afterthought.
John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said the Founding Fathers set up a constitutional system in which the president and Congress would battle it out over these issues — but with Congress having one particularly powerful tool, because it controls the federal funding.
“Congress, they know how to stop this if they want to,” said Yoo, who helped draft the Bush administration's 2001 and 2002 use of force authorizations. The Vietnam War ended once Congress pulled funding, he said.
But Congress is controlled by a Republican majority that largely shares Trump's view of focusing military power against Iran, and it recently approved massive new funds for the Pentagon, some $175 billion, in the big tax cuts bill that he signed into law last yar.
With the Republican president's party in power in the House and the Senate, it's no surprise they are unlikely to object, Yoo said: “They agree with him.”
Debate in Congress begins
Ahead of debates, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Trump already laid out his vision for Iran.
Cotton said Sunday that Trump has made it clear the U.S. won't be sending ground forces inside Iran. Instead, Americans should expect to see an “extended air and naval campaign” in the region, which could result in pilots being shot down, though he said the military personnel would be recovered.
He expects a weekslong campaign as Iran names a new leader and determines how it will react to the U.S. attack.
“There’s no simple answer for what’s going to come next,” Cotton said on CBS' “Face the Nation.”
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