In the span of two days, the U.S. bombed three nuclear sites in Iran, Iran retaliated and President Donald Trump declared a ceasefire in the region — all without Congress ever having a say.
Lawmakers are used to it.
In interviews, members of both parties responded to the weekend’s events as spectators rather than participants in the government’s decisions about war. Republicans mostly supported Trump, and some Democrats said he’d made the right move, too. Others repeated calls for Congress to be more active in these decisions — the same calls that have gone unanswered for more than two decades, as presidents of both parties have waged myriad foreign conflicts, without any new declarations of war from Congress or specific authorizations for the use of military force.
Senators on Monday night weren’t surprised by their own irrelevance, despite Congress’ constitutional power to declare war, or the 1973 war powers resolution requiring presidents to consult with lawmakers before entering into conflicts abroad.
“Since we’re not doing ground troops,” Sen. Cynthia Lummis told NOTUS, “I think he’s still OK.”
“We’re not going to war with Iran,” she added. “We are just trying to take out their nuclear weapons.”
Trump joined the conflict after Israel launched initial strikes 12 days ago to end Iran’s nuclear program.
Sen. Mike Rounds, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said it was within Trump’s constitutional right to strike Iran.
“The president did what he thought was correct in this case, and I happen to agree with him,” he said.
Sen. John Kennedy agreed: “There’s always a tension between Congress’s power to declare war and the president’s power as commander in chief, but I think the White House contacted as many people as it could,” Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, told NOTUS on Monday night.
“Some wouldn’t be happy unless the president called all 500-plus members of Congress,” he continued, “but we all know that if he’d done that, the mission would have leaked.”
Trump administration officials have denied that America was taking part in a war at all, despite bombing Iranian nuclear facilities. They see it as a more selective operation than an all-out conflict.
“This is not a war against Iran,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Sunday on Fox News. Vice President JD Vance said Sunday that the U.S. was at war with “Iran’s nuclear program,” not the country itself.
Now that President Donald Trump has announced a ceasefire, the episode isn’t likely to prompt much earnest soul-searching among lawmakers about Congress’ role in declaring war anytime soon.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, said he believed a nuclear-armed Iran is a threat to the world, and that America should stand with Israel in their conflict. But he acknowledged that “the combined actions seem to be the use of military force in waging war.”
“The Constitution requires the president to come to Congress, inform us and seek approval, which he has not done,” Blumenthal said.
He told NOTUS lawmakers are sitting on the sidelines largely because of the “increased and expanded power of the presidency.”
But, he continued, “it’s also the nature of modern warfare. Because it’s literally minutes, maybe even seconds, or hours. Not even days, the way war used to happen.”
Sen. Tim Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL, was one of the few Republican senators who said “it’s time that Congress reasserts its authority over military action.”
“We haven’t declared war since World War II, and I think it’s time, as a legislative branch, we start reasserting ourselves,” he told reporters. Even so, he said he sees the weekend’s conflict as a “poor example” for demanding reform: “We’ve been in open warfare with Iran for 46 years.”
“They’ve been actively targeting and killing Americans,” Sheehy said of Iran. “This is not a new front to a new war. This is the continuation of open hostilities that we’ve had, arguably the longest war in America’s history.”
Democrats said they will push the administration for answers about the conflict at briefings this week.
“The use of military force, which is offensive in nature, must be approved by the House and the Senate,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters Monday. “That’s according to the Constitution. It’s not optional, Donald. It’s not.”
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Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS.
Tinashe Chingarande and John T. Seward, NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows, contributed to this report.