Congress has the duty to adopt the resolutions of the war powers and to assert its primacy in matters of war and peace.
Protesters gather at Federal Plaza on February 28, 2026 in Chicago, Illinois, to demonstrate against the joint U.S. and Israeli military operation in Iran.
(Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images) On Saturday morning, after President Trump launched an unnecessary, unauthorized, and unconstitutional attack on Iran, U.S. Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie did their jobs as members of Congress.
The California Democrat and Kentucky Republican previously co-sponsored a War Powers Act resolution in hopes of thwarting a rush to war with Iran. Now it was war. Bombs were falling, missiles were flying and people were dying. The bipartisan team therefore demanded that Congress step up its efforts. Khanna immediately announcement”Trump launched an illegal war for regime change in Iran, endangering American lives. Congress is scheduled to meet Monday to vote on U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie.[’s] & My [War Powers Resolution] to stop this.
Seeking to force a debate in Congress on the war — as Khanna and Massie are doing in the House, and as Tim Kaine (D-VA) has proposed in the Senate — is a critical first step in fighting Trump.
It won’t be easy. Despite a notable level of congressional opposition to Trump’s new war, efforts to establish even the most basic checks and balances on the presidential war will face overwhelming obstacles. House Speaker Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican who keeps Trump respected in the chamber, will do everything in his power to thwart any significant effort to renew Congress’s constitutionally mandated role as arbiter of matters of war and peace. The same goes for the president.
Yet this does not change the fact that Khanna, Massie and Kaine are fulfilling their constitutional duty.
Like all House members, Khanna and Massie took office only after taking an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” By reaffirming Congress’s role as a check and balance in waging the presidential war, they are honoring that oath.
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The question at this point is whether enough House members and their Senate colleagues will join them and use their authority under the Constitution to oppose Trump’s unrestricted attack before it metastasizes into a broader war that could engulf the Middle East.
Even as apologists for executive overreach in general – and this president in particular – make their self-serving arguments regarding war powers, the constitutional primacy of Congress in matters of war and peace is not up for debate. Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the United States Constitution reads clearly“Congress shall have power…to declare war.” »
No mention of the president is made in this essential statement from the initiators of the American experiment. And in case you need even more proof that this is indeed what the framers of the Constitution intended, just look at the notes from the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
Roger Sherman, a delegate from Connecticut, proposed that nothing in their exposition of the executive powers of the federal government that they were establishing should be intended as authorizing the president to “make war.”
“The executive must be able to push back and not start war” explain Sherman. The resolution was largely approved by Congress.
Pennsylvania Delegate James Wilson confirmed this assessment: explaining”This system will not precipitate us into war; it is calculated to protect us from it. It will not be in the power of a single man, or a single group of men, to lead us into such distress.”
This should have solved the problem: an executive could assume the role of commander-in-chief, but only to defend the country; never wage a royal war on a whim – as Trump did in Iran.
But what about the War Powers Act of 1973? Tortured readings of the law by successive Democratic and Republican administrations have attempted to suggest that the measure gives presidents some flexibility on war matters. But this flexibility is explicitly limited. According to an evaluation of the Act by the Congressional Research Service, “the powers of the President as commander in chief to introduce the United States armed forces into hostilities are limited, ‘exercised only pursuant to’ a declaration of war or other specific statutory authorization of Congress, or a ‘national emergency created by an attack against’ the United States or its armed forces.
It is a no-brainer to say that Trump’s war on Iran does not meet these criteria. In announcing the attack, Trump asserted: “Our goal is to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime, a vicious group of very harsh and terrible people.” But instead of talking about “imminent threats,” he recalled complaints that, in some cases, were decades old.
Like CNN explain“The United States and Israel launched this attack without obvious provocation.” Even after Saturday’s confirmation of the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the president still struggled to formulate a mission statement.
So where does this leave us? When request by Time magazine to explain whether Trump’s strikes against Iran were legally justified, David Janovsky of the Constitution Project at Government Oversight Projectreplied,
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The short answer is no. There is no indication that any circumstance exists that would give the president unilateral authority to order military action. It is true that presidents have some inherent authority to deploy the military as commander in chief, but that is really limited to true emergency circumstances where there is an attack in progress that must be repelled, or perhaps an extremely clear imminent attack. But there is nothing to suggest that is the case today – that would make strikes illegal.
Bottom line: This is an illegitimate and illegal war in which Iranian civilians – including many schoolchildren – and American soldiers have already been killed, and in which more deaths are tragically foreseeable.
“There is nothing in the Constitution that authorizes the president to do this,” Massie said of Trump’s war. “If we’re going to put lives at risk, we need to define what the boundaries of engagement are and what success looks like, so they can go home when the engagement is over, when we’ve achieved our goals. »
This is the sworn duty of Congress.
President Johnson may refuse to acknowledge this fact. The same goes for Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD).
But Massie is right when he says: “This is not our war. Even if it were, Congress must decide these issues in accordance with our Constitution.”
John Nichols John Nichols is the editor-in-chief of The Nation. He was previously the magazine’s national affairs correspondent and Washington correspondent. Nichols has written, co-authored or edited more than a dozen books on topics ranging from the history of American socialism and the Democratic Party to analyzes of American and global media systems. His latest, co-written with Senator Bernie Sanders, is the New York Times bestseller It’s okay to be angry at capitalism.