Congress has rendered itself powerless to start and stop wars, despite the Constitution.
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As far as voters are concerned, the verdict is in: President Donald Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran has become a disaster.
So it is unsurprising that some anxious Republican candidates who previously supported the war — including Senate contenders Mike Rogers in Michigan and Ashley Hinson in Iowa — are calling for it to come to an end.
But they are stopping short of saying how that should happen. Nor are they directly criticizing the commander in chief who launched the conflict without making a case for it to the public or consulting Congress before starting what he dubbed “Operation Epic Fury.”
It is not clear these restrained calls from a handful of GOP candidates will win over voters furious about a war for which there is no outcome in sight.
Republicans “need to say it shouldn’t have started,” said former senator Jeff Flake (R-Arizona), a Trump critic. But he added that “there’s no currency for that” in a party has made itself subservient to Trump’s will and whims.
Nor has the Republican-led Congress, the institution invested by the nation’s founders with the sole power to declare war, stepped up to reclaim a prerogative that lawmakers in both parties have ceded for decades.
The most the two houses have done is repeatedly pass symbolic rebukes of Trump’s handling of the war via nonbinding resolutions supported by only a handful of Republicans.
On Thursday, the Senate’s latest measure calling for the conflict to end — the 14th time it has put the question to a vote — failed 50-49. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) was the only GOP senator facing a tight reelection race to vote in favor of the resolution.
“Senate Republicans aren’t really serious right now about actually solving the problem,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) said Wednesday. “Because if they were, they would march right down to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and tell their boss to end this war.”
Almost seven months into a conflict Trump promised would end within weeks, measures of public opinion show lopsided disapproval. A new CNN poll, which tracks with what other surveys are showing lately, finds close to two-thirds of adults say the United States is not winning it; 7 in 10 say it has hurt this country and its interests; three-quarters say it is not worth the toll it has taken in American lives and the financial burden it has put on the U.S. government.
Even normally loyal Republicans are souring as the war spikes the price of gas, diesel and other goods. In March, 73 percent of Republicans approved of the way Trump was handling the war. Now, that share has fallen to 60 percent.
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“It turns out Trump’s base is not generally inclined to support a foreign intervention, whatever it’s for,” said Matthew Baum, a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School who specializes in the domestic politics of international conflict. He added that the administration “set themselves up for a bad situation.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s words and actions have only reinforced the view of three-quarters of Americans that he has no clear plan for handling the war.
“I have a big decision to make. Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before?” the president told leaders at the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, repeating threats he made before. “Or do I annihilate the Islamic republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?”
And what about the midterm election, where Trump’s party could lose both chambers? “I gave absolutely no credence and will not give credence to the election when it comes to Iran,” Trump said. “It doesn’t even enter my mind. The only thing that does is that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.”
At the same time, the president claimed Iran is “waiting to see how I do in the midterm election,” and predicted it will strike a deal shortly afterward.
A week into the war, Trump wrote on social media: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” However, as U.S. stockpiles of key weapons have diminished, the tactics and goals have shifted to pressuring Iran economically and reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Trump no longer talks, as he once did, of the U.S. coming to the aid of anti-government dissidents.
The current situation exemplifies how much power Congress has handed to the executive branch when it comes to warmaking, in large part because “it is reluctant to share blame when things go bad,” Flake said.
It becomes more difficult for Congress to act once military action is underway. “I can understand if they’re saying: ‘We don’t want to be in the war. We don’t think it should have been started. It was not constitutional, but we’re in a war,’” said former congressman Mickey Edwards (R-Oklahoma), who has long been a leading voice arguing for Congress to reclaim an array of powers it has ceded to the executive. “‘We have people at our bases, and they’re attacking us, and we can’t just walk away.’”
The War Powers Resolution, passed by Congress over Richard M. Nixon’s veto in 1973, was meant to require the president to obtain the legislative branch’s approval for extended combat operations.
But its provision for Congress to act unilaterally to take back authority it has granted to the president was rendered largely toothless by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1983 decision in an unrelated immigration case, Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha. So it takes a veto-proof majority — two-thirds — for Congress to put an end to military action a president has already taken.
As Morton H. Halperin, who held senior national security posts under presidents from Lyndon B. Johnson to Barack Obama, put it: Unless Congress is consulted and acts in advance of a war, it has no power to assert. “It’s all a waste of time,” he said.
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