On several occasions over the past year, congressional Democrats have tried to use War Powers Act resolutions to curb Donald Trump’s interventionist policies abroad, and in every instance, Republicans have stood with the president and his demands for power. This week, after the White House launched an unpopular war in Iran, there were some hopes that the next such effort might lead to a different outcome.
Those hopes were soon dashed. The GOP-led House and Senate both rejected resolutions this week, with votes that fell largely along partisan lines.
One of the key takeaways from the votes is that the Republican Party, as a political matter, now owns this conflict. But as the debate on Capitol Hill unfolded in recent days, it was also striking to see the degree to which GOP lawmakers rejected the very idea of the legislative branch playing a role in the process.
Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota expressed irritation on Thursday, insisting that holding a vote on war powers during a war represented “terrible” timing. A day earlier, House Speaker Mike Johnson said it would be “dangerous” for Congress to exercise its powers.
Similarly, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin appeared on NPR, where host Steve Inskeep reminded him that in 2011, the senator insisted that the Obama administration should’ve sought congressional approval ahead of a military mission.
Asked if he still agreed with his own stated position, Johnson not only reversed course, but he also endorsed a specific governing model: “It’s just simply unworkable to have 535 members as commander in chiefs. It simply will not work. Our founders understood that.”
The GOP senator was referring to the nation’s Founding Fathers — who specifically gave Congress authority over declaring war.
Indeed, at the heart of the Republican Party’s position was a simple and radical proposition: Questions over war and peace must be left in the hands of one person: a scandal-plagued and unpopular president who doesn’t appear to know much of anything about foreign policy, and who didn’t bother to make the case for the conflict to the citizens of his own country.
Our system of government was not designed to work this way, but in 2026, nearly all GOP lawmakers are perfectly comfortable surrendering their own legal authority to the White House without a fight.
Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, one of a small handful of GOP members who supported the effort to limit the president’s power, lamented during the debate: “This is a Congress without really a belief structure in defending legislative prerogative. They just are a rubber stamp for whatever a president tells them to do.”
The New York Times’ Charlie Savage wrote a smart piece, which echoes the thesis of Rachel Maddow’s first book, explaining that, in the wake of World War II, presidents from both parties have ordered military attacks while circumventing the Constitution’s constraints on their power, but Trump’s offensive in Iran “threatens to gut nearly all of what little remains.” From the analysis:
Mr. Trump has already established a new precedent. His Iran war expands the scope of the kinds of “major combat operations” that presidents in the modern era have demonstrated they can start on their own authority. Executive branch lawyers will be able to cite this moment as support for blessing future unilateral presidential war-making. […]
Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law professor and former senior Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration, said Mr. Trump’s unilateral launch of the Iran war may be remembered as the death of any pretense that law and executive branch lawyers can be counted on to meaningfully constrain a president who wants to use military force on his own.
“By using the military on such a large and dangerous scale with foreseeable U.S. casualties, this operation kills the idea of any effective legal constraint on the president’s use of force,” Goldsmith said.
In our Madisonian system, there have long been disputes over institutional powers and limits, with lawmakers and presidents engaged in push-and-pull fights over authority.
But nearly a week into the U.S.’ latest war in the Middle East, the nation is confronting an awkward dynamic in which the legislative branch’s majority party is choosing impotence and irrelevance, content to let the executive branch do as it pleases.
To paraphrase Ron Johnson, the nation’s Founding Fathers would not understand that.
