Congress has taken an important symbolic step toward reasserting its authority over the war powers. But there is still much to do.
Marco Rubio, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth during a cabinet meeting at the White House, May 27, 2026.
(Samuel Corum / Daughter / Bloomberg via Getty Images) The anti-war cause scored a rare and encouraging victory Wednesday when the House of Representatives passed a measure, the Iran War Powers Resolution, calling on Donald Trump to “withdraw United States armed forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran.” The resolution passed 215-208, winning bipartisan support from 211 Democrats and four Republicans who broke with the president: Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Tom Barrett of Michigan and Warren Davidson of Ohio. While Massie and Davidson have long been known as staunchly anti-interventionist libertarians, the defections of the other two Republicans are significant because they are moderates who represent swing districts.
Fitzpatrick and Madison were surely motivated in part by the fact that the war in Iran is extremely unpopular. A new survey carried out by The economist/YouGov watch that 68% of voters think Trump “should make a deal to end the war in Iran as quickly as possible.” They and the bill’s other supporters did well to pass a resolution that not only reflects popular opinion but also reaffirms Congress’s constitutional role in waging war.
However, it is easier to adopt a resolution than to enforce it.
As The New York Times reports:
The House vote was just the first step in a complicated and likely difficult path to resolution. The bill now goes to the Senate which, under the War Powers Act, must consider it within about two and a half weeks. It does not require a presidential signature, but even if Congress were to approve the measure, its legal force would remain uncertain.
Getting the measure through the Senate could be difficult, but it’s not impossible. Last month, the Senate pass a similar resolution by a vote of 50 to 47, with four Republicans joining almost all Democrats (John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, now an infamous buffoon, being the only member of his party to vote against the resolution).
If the House and Senate pass the resolution, it will not need the president’s support because it will be what is known as a “concurrent resolution” – in effect, a legislative veto. But what happens next is less certain, because it’s unclear whether a concurrent resolution used in this way is constitutional.
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The Constitution we couldn’t be more explicit that the responsibility for declaring war rests with Congress. Yet in practice this power has been eroded by the massive expansion of the national security state, which has led to a centralization of power within the executive branch. The result is an imperial presidency that often wages war with minimal congressional consultation, let alone explicit authorization.
In 1973, in response to the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon’s abuse of power, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution. Under Section 5(c) of this Act, a concurrent resolution should be sufficient to end a war.
But a decade after the passage of the War Powers Resolution, the Supreme Court ruled against the legislative veto in the case of INS v. Chadha (1983). Although dealing strictly with an immigration case, the decision had a considerable impact. Within the Reagan administration, an anonymous memo on the affair (possibly written by future Chief Justice John Roberts) jubilee that “this is a historic decision in favor of the executive branch. There are nearly 200 pieces of legislation containing legislative vetoes. Some prominent examples include the War Powers Act…”
This view has persisted. In January, Vice President JD Vance declared that “every president, Democrat or Republican, believes that the War Powers Act is fundamentally a false and unconstitutional law.” Although Vance did not name the Chadha decision, that was clearly what he had in mind. (As is often the case in politics, Vance is a naked hypocrite here, since in 2023 he argued that the War Powers Resolution should be used to limit Joe Biden’s support for Ukraine).
But Vance counted his chickens before the eggs hatched. The impact of Chadha on the War Powers Resolution has not yet been tested. In a test In Just safetylegal scholar Michael J. Glennon points out that there were significant disagreements between three judges in the context of the Chadha cases: Chief Justice Warren Burger (who wrote the majority opinion), Lewis Powell (who wrote a dissent), and Byron White (who wrote a dissent). As Glennon observes:
The veto at issue in Chadha was the most common variation: Congress delegates its power to the executive and then reserves the right to withdraw it.
But Section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution is structurally distinct. The resolution does not delegate anything. It explicitly provides that nothing in this text “can be interpreted as conferring any authority on the President… that he would not have had” in his absence. Section 5(c) does not withdraw delegated authority: it mobilizes Congress’s own constitutional power against an executive exercise of overlapping—or, in the terminology of the Framers’ conception, competing—constitutional authority.
Justice Lewis Powell recognized this distinction. Okay separatelyPowell refused to address the broad constitutional question addressed by Burger’s majority. He explicitly referenced the War Powers Resolution and observed that the validity of a legislative veto “may well depend on the particular context in which it is exercised.” He would hesitate, he said, to conclude that each [legislative] the veto is unconstitutional based on the unusual example presented in this litigation. Justice White also pointed out, in dissent, that the war powers context was categorically different.
Glennon also argues that there are reasons to cancel Chadha as inconsistent with subsequent court decisions. A similar analysis appeared on the podcast of Leverage News.
This means that the Iran War Powers Resolution is not just a foreign policy issue but also a constitutional one – and it is likely that the Supreme Court will have the final say on the matter.
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Unfortunately, there is little reason to be optimistic about a legal victory. It is not even certain that the courts will take up this issue. Moreover, the current version of the Supreme Court, which has been too willing to support an expansive view of presidential power (unless it involves cases where big business preferences are at stake, as in the case of tariffs), cannot be counted on to support the legislature in this case.
The Iran War Powers Resolution will therefore likely simply be a symbolic victory. The Imperial presidency runs deep and will require Congress to continue to fight the executive usurpation of power on many fronts. A promising path would be to use its financial power to limit and guide military spending. But the fight to limit presidential militarism will not be easy and will require antiwar forces in Congress to be stronger than they currently are.
A properly functioning constitutional democracy would give Congress real power to start and end wars. The fact that this power is more than symbolic is a scandal. The challenge is finding ways to reclaim the powers Congress lost.
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Damn Lord Jeet Heer is national affairs correspondent for The nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, Time of the Monsters. He also writes the monthly column “Morbid symptoms.” The author of Art lovers: the adventures of Françoise Mouly in comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: reviews, essays and profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American perspective, The guardian, The New RepublicAnd The Boston Globe.