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war powers act
'Congress Can't Sit Back': Anti-War Groups Call on Senate to Invoke War Powers Act in Friday Vote
More than 41,000 people have signed a petition calling on Congress to invoke the War Powers Act to limit Trump's ability to strike Iran without congressional authorization.
Jun 27, 2025
The U.S. Senate will vote Friday evening on whether to invoke the War Powers Act, limiting President Donald Trump's ability to launch a war with Iran.
With the vote looming, anti-war groups are turning up the pressure, urging their senators to reassert Congress's ability to check the president's power after he unilaterally inserted the U.S. into Israel's war with Iran by launching airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear sites last weekend.
More than 41,000 people have signed a petition launched by the progressive group MoveOn Civic Action, which calls on Congress to vote for the resolutions introduced in both the House and Senate in recent weeks.
"By launching strikes on Iran without congressional approval, Trump endangered civilians in the U.S. and around the world, while dragging our country closer to another endless war," said MoveOn spokesperson Britt Jacovich. "Congress has a responsibility to the people who elected them to check this abuse of power and take urgent action to prevent the U.S. from being pulled into another deadly and costly conflict."
The vote on the Senate resolution, introduced by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), will take place Friday at 6:00 pm Eastern time. A vote on the House resolution introduced by Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) has not yet been scheduled.
The War Powers resolution, which would require Trump to receive congressional approval for future strikes on Iran, has overwhelming support from Senate Democrats. However, according to reporting from Punchbowl News Friday, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), a notorious pro-Israel hawk, is expected to vote no.
If all other Democrats vote yes, they'd still need five Republicans to join them. The libertarian Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has also signaled his support for the resolution. But the rest, including seven who voted for a similar resolution in 2020, have remained tight-lipped about Friday's vote.
The majority of Americans, 56%, said they disapproved of Trump's weekend strikes against Iran in a YouGov poll published Tuesday. They are even more strongly opposed to further escalations, with 84% saying in a Reuters/Ipsos poll that closed Monday that they were worried about growing conflict between the U.S. and Iran.
On Monday, Trump announced that a cease-fire had been brokered between Israel and Iran. But with the two countries accusing one another of violating the truce, doubt remains about whether it will hold.
Cavan Kharrazian, a senior policy advisor for the group Demand Progress, said that uncertainty is all the more reason Congress must assert itself to stop further escalations from the United States.
"In just days, we've gone from a supposed two-week decision window to immediate U.S. airstrikes, a brief cease-fire, Israel and Iran trading fire again, and now another fragile pause," Kharrazian said. "We strongly support diplomatic efforts to end this crisis—but Congress can't sit back and hope for the best while the risk of U.S. involvement in unauthorized hostilities remains."
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President Trump’s War on Iran Was Illegal and Unconstitutional—Congress Must Act Like It
Without a change, we will only continue to see presidents launch more and larger wars whenever and wherever they want and for whatever reason they choose.
Jun 26, 2025
As a fragile cease-fire takes hold between Israel, Iran, and the United States, many questions remain.
With Iran’s nuclear program unquestionably damaged but likely not fully destroyed, will the Iranian government now race toward a bomb? Having repeatedly broken recent cease-fires in Lebanon and Gaza, will Prime Minister Netanyahu honor this one? And after having twice taken direct military action against Iran, will President Donald Trump pursue the peace he claims to seek or once again choose war?
Meanwhile, Congress is currently debating whether and how to rein in Trump's war making power, with votes possible by the end of this week. There are two competing House bills, one bipartisan War Powers Resolution (WPR) sponsored by Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Tom Massie (R-Ky.), and another by Reps. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.), Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and Jim Himes (D-Conn.). Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) introduced a Senate version, and that one is likely to get a vote by Friday.
If one person alone decides when the nation goes to war, wars will inevitably be about one person’s grievances, politics, and personal interests.
Time will tell whether these measures will pass or have any effect on current events, but on one point, there is absolute certainty. President Trump’s war on Iran was illegal and unconstitutional.
When it comes to who has the legal authority to declare war, the Constitution is unequivocal. The power to declare war rests solely with Congress. Once authorized, the president is the commander-in-chief, but the title does not confer on him the authority to decide where, when, or against whom the country goes to war, simply to oversee the prosecution of wars once they have been authorized.
For the Constitution’s framers, these weren’t hypothetical arguments, and we don’t have to guess at their reasoning or intention. They lived in an age when wars were fought at the whims of monarchs, sometimes for lofty imperial goals but sometimes for petty personal grievances. Indeed their own revolution had been based, in part, over frustration with the massive taxation required to pay down King George’s war debts. Instead, they sought to create a system in which the people who would pay the war’s costs in blood and treasure would decide whether or not their nation goes to war.
To accomplish this, they put this awesome power in the branch of government most accountable to the people, Congress. They did so with the hope and intention that this would make going to war difficult. If one person alone decides when the nation goes to war, wars will inevitably be about one person’s grievances, politics, and personal interests. By requiring Congress to publicly come together and navigate their myriad differences, the hope was that consensus would be difficult to obtain and wars would thus only be launched when there was a clear, overwhelming, and genuine national interest in doing so.
And of course, if members of Congress failed to exercise their authority responsibly, they’d regularly face elections where they could be replaced.
It was and remains an inspiring decision to impose a massive check on the most awesome power of the state. Unfortunately, as Donald Trump’s decision to wage war on Iran reminds us, this system of war powers is deeply broken and prone to abuse.
For starters, Iran posed no imminent threat to the United States that required military action in self-defense. To the extent any such claims are being made, they are based on a hypothetical future threat that must be prevented, namely an Iranian nuclear weapon. Such claims, of course, are a disturbing echo of the Iraq War, and even then they amount to arguments for preventative wars, not genuine preemption of an imminent threat. While this may seem like a small distinction, it is in fact a massive one.
In a letter to Congress justifying his war-making, President Trump makes no claim that the Iranian government was preparing an attack against the United States that he needed to preempt. Instead, he argues he was simply acting to “protect United States citizens at home and abroad” as well as stating repeatedly he is acting to “advance vital United States national interests.” Nowhere in this justification or his public remarks does the president make any claim that he is acting to defend against an imminent attack. Rather, he is simply claiming the unilateral right to both decide what is in the national interest and then to use military force in pursuit of that interest. Even if one agrees with his definition of interests and belief that military force will achieve them (something of which this author and others are deeply skeptical), it does not negate the need for constitutionally required authorization before resorting to war.
Similarly, the president’s claim in the letter that he was acting “in collective self-defense of our ally, Israel” is not an invocation of any actual legal authority to wage war. What Trump is attempting here is a sleight of hand in which the president’s right to use military force in self-defense of the United States is, without any legal authority, bestowed upon another country. Sadly, Trump may have learned this trick from Joe Biden who absurdly also made this claim to justify his use of military force in Somalia. To be clear, international law does allow for using military force in collective self-defense, but international law is not a replacement for the Constitution’s requirements of congressional authority to go to war. For the U.S. president to send the U.S. military into war, they ultimately need authority under U.S. law, and U.S. law simply does not provide existing authority for using military force in defense of Israel.
Of course, Trump isn’t the first president to try to unilaterally expand his authority to wage war. After the disastrous U.S. experience in Vietnam in which the mission grew from a small advisory effort in support of the French and then South Vietnamese forces to hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops fighting a deadly and ultimately unsuccessful major war, Congress attempted to get ahead of this growing problem and place limits on presidents in the 1973 War Powers Act. While perhaps no law in history has been more misunderstood or misinterpreted, WPR reaffirmed Congress’ sole constitutional right to declare war and created a framework to force presidents to remove the military from situations in which they may become engaged in wars Congress had not authorized.
The goal was simple: If it seemed like the U.S. might end up in war, the WPR required the president to remove forces to prevent that from happening. It also gave Congress fast-track procedures to consider legislation to force the president to comply. Indeed, in the coming days Congress may consider this with the various versions offered in both the House and Senate. This is exactly what happened in 2020 following Trump’s assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassam Soleimani, when Congress passed a resolution blocking further military action against Iran.
The fate of that resolution, however, also revealed the fundamental flaws in the current system. Trump ultimately vetoed that 2020 WPR legislation, and no doubt will do so again if Congress passes such legislation in the coming days. Thus, without a two-thirds supermajority, the system creates the conditions for presidential impunity when violating the Constitution’s separation of powers. This is, of course, exactly the opposite of what the framers intended. Their goal was that a majority of both houses of Congress would be required to go to war, not that a super majority of Congress would be required to prevent a president from going to war. The current system is thus an absurd perversion of the plain text and obvious intention of the Constitution.
Thankfully, some in Congress are trying to repair this dangerous situation. Bipartisan groups in both the House and Senate have recently introduced legislation to return the balance of power to Congress, and by extension to the American public, preventing the kind of unilateral war-making President Trump has repeatedly engaged in. This legislation likely faces long odds, but such reforms are deeply necessary in the long run. Without a change, we will only continue to see presidents launch more and larger wars whenever and wherever they want and for whatever reason they choose.
While the worst-case scenarios of a spiraling, escalating war may (or may not) have been avoided in this case, there is no guarantee that future presidential war-making will be so limited. Thankfully, the Constitution was drafted to prevent just such disasters. The only question left is if we’ll continue to allow presidents to violate it and act like kings.
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'I Haven't Taken a Look at It': Jeffries Blows Off Resolution to Limit Trump's Iran War
"Who is going to primary this guy?" said one critic. "Please. I am begging someone to step up."
Jun 24, 2025
U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries shocked war opponents Monday when he told reporters he had not looked at a bipartisan resolution that would require congressional approval for military action against Iran.
As U.S. President Donald Trump has beat the drums for war with Iran in recent weeks, Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) introduced a resolution to invoke the War Powers Act of 1973, which would require the president to seek congressional approval before taking military action.
The resolution to put a check on Trump's war-making powers in Iran had 59 Democratic co-sponsors. A group of 12 House Democrats—all military veterans, most of whom had not been initial co-sponsors—also voiced their support for the resolution in a letter on Monday. A similar resolution, introduced by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), has gained traction in the Senate.
In a press conference Monday, Jeffries (D-N.Y.) agreed that the Trump administration should "have to come before Congress and explain their justification" for its "offensive military strike" against Iran over the weekend. But when a reporter asked whether he supported Khanna and Massie's resolution, Jeffries brushed off the question.
"I haven't taken a look at it," Jeffries said, before quickly moving to the next question.
The resolution was released six days before Jeffries' comment and is less than 400 words long.
Conflict with Iran is extraordinarily unpopular with the public. A YouGov poll conducted Sunday—hours after Trump announced strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities—found that 85% of American adults, including 92% of Democrats, did not want the U.S. to be at war with Iran.
Jeffries was already facing criticism for what many viewed as a weak response to Trump's push to war. His failure to address the War Powers proposal only fueled that anger.
"Look at my opposition party dawg," wrote independent journalist Ken Klippenstein, who posted the viral clip on social media.
Jeffries' answer quickly drew more angry rebukes from war critics.
"Hey, not like this is an urgent matter with lives on the line. He'll get to it," quipped Reason Magazine commentator Zach Weissmueller.
Krystal Ball, the left-wing co-host of the Breaking Points podcast, was dismayed, calling for new Democratic leadership.
"Who is going to primary this guy?" Ball tweeted. "Please. I am begging someone to step up."
She noted that even Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)—one of the Democratic Party's staunchest defenders of Israel—had also voiced support for using the War Powers Act following Trump's strikes.
Jeffries' response also reignited scrutiny on his support from the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which has been one of the strongest advocates for Trump's aggressive actions against Iran.
Commenting on the video, the group Track AIPAC, which monitors donations by pro-Israel lobbyists, shared a graphic showing the large sums Jeffries has received from such groups.
According to OpenSecrets, Jeffries was the top recipient of money from pro-Israel lobbying groups in the House of Representatives during the 2023-24 election cycle, receiving more than $1.1 million. AIPAC was also Jeffries' top contributor.
As Michael Arria wrote for Mondoweiss Monday, many of Jeffries' comments have closely mirrored AIPAC's talking points, including reiterating that U.S. support for Israel is "ironclad" and his claim that Iran "poses a grave threat to the entire free world."
"Many prominent Democrats who have expressed concerns about Trump’s process have effectively endorsed his rationale," Arria wrote.
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