• United States

June 25, 2025, 12:01 AM View Comments ()

Once it became clear that U.S. President Donald Trump was planning to drop bunker-busting bombs on Iran, some legislators in both parties expressed concerns that he would engage in an act of war without consulting Capitol Hill. After U.S. warplanes dropped the bombs, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth rejected accusations that Congress had been left out of the loop: “They were notified after the planes were safely out.”

“This is not Constitutional,” Republican Rep. Thomas Massie wrote on X. Massie has teamed up with Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna to push a bipartisan resolution limiting Trump’s hand in Iran. “Stopping Iran from having a nuclear bomb is a top priority, but dragging the U.S. into another Middle East war is not the solution,” Khanna warned in a statement. “Trump’s strikes are unconstitutional and put Americans, especially our troops, at risk.”

Many legal scholars agree with the lawmakers. “This is, in my view, illegal under both international law and U.S. domestic law,” noted Oona Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale Law School.

Given Trump’s willingness to violate formal and informal guardrails and that most congressional Republicans will support almost anything he wants, Massie and Khanna’s prospects for succeeding in reforming the warmaking process in the short term are minimal at best.

Nonetheless, the president’s unilateral action raises an important question: What happened to the 1973 War Powers Act? When Richard Nixon was president, a bipartisan coalition of Democrats and Republicans passed legislation that addressed many of the same questions being raised today and that promised to restore the constitutional balance of power.

Yet something went wrong.

The U.S. Constitution created a problem by dividing the responsibilities for handling military operations. Article 1 grants Congress the power to declare war, raise armed forces, and regulate troop deployment. Article 2 deems the president the commander in chief of the armed forces. Until 1950, the government did a relatively good job of figuring out how to navigate these ambiguities. In 1917 and 1941, Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt respectively requested a formal declaration of war from Congress before sending troops into combat. In both cases, Congress deliberated and voted to declare war.

Things changed dramatically during the early Cold War. In 1950, President Harry Truman sent troops into Korea without seeking congressional authority. The president classified the mobilization as a “police action” conducted in response to the United Nations. Although President Dwight D. Eisenhower was critical of his predecessor, his administration authorized secret military operations in Iran and Guatemala.

The pressure to reform the warmaking powers grew out of the turmoil of Vietnam. A turning point occurred in 1964, when Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution without almost any dissent. The Tonkin Resolution granted President Lyndon B. Johnson sweeping authority to conduct military operations in Southeast Asia. (Johnson joked that it was “like grandma’s nightshirt—it covers everything.”) The president rapidly escalated the nation’s involvement in the war between North and South Vietnam, first conducting a massive bombing campaign and then sending ground troops in the spring of 1965. In 1970, Nixon, who promised to end the war during his campaign for president, revealed that he had authorized a secret military attack on Cambodia without consulting Congress.

In 1973, a bipartisan coalition of legislators that included Democratic Sen. Thomas Eagleton, Sen. John C. Stennis, and Rep. Clement Zablocki and Republican Sen. Jacob Javits pushed for reform in response to nine years of what they believed to be presidents abusing their power. “If we have learned but one lesson from the tragedy in Vietnam,” Democratic Rep. Spark Matsunaga argued, “I believe it is that we need definitive, unmistakable procedures to prevent future undeclared wars. ‘No more Vietnams’ should be our objective in setting up such procedures.”

Although there were divisions about the final compromise (with some proponents such as Eagleton believing that the legislation was dangerously flawed by granting excessive power to the president), the War Powers Act passed with bipartisan supermajorities: 75 to 20 in the Senate and 238 to 123 in the House. Republicans were not especially enthusiastic, but several voted for the bill. “If the President can deal with Arabs, Israelis, and the Soviet Union, he ought to be willing to deal with the Congress of the United States,” Democratic House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill said.

On Oct. 24, Nixon vetoed the measure. “While I am in accord with the desire of the Congress to assert its proper role in the conduct of our foreign affairs,” Nixon wrote in his veto letter, “the restrictions which this resolution would impose upon the authority of the President are both unconstitutional and dangerous to the best interests of our Nation.” His warnings went unheeded. The House overrode the veto by a vote of 284 to 135, and the Senate did the same, 75 to 18.

The War Powers Act, also called the War Powers Resolution, established new rules that presidents had to follow as commander in chief. Presidents were required to consult with Congress “in every possible instance” before sending armed forces into hostile situations. Within 48 hours of deploying troops, moreover, “into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated,” presidents had to submit an official report to Congress explaining why they took the action, the legal basis for their action, and how long they expected the operations to last. Unless Congress voted to declare war or authorize the use of force, the president had to withdraw forces within 60 days (which could be extended to 90).

The War Powers Act failed to achieve its goals. The president has retained massive authority to conduct military operations abroad, and Congress rarely challenges the president once operations are underway. Rather than a measure to protect institutional prerogatives, both sides of the aisle have used the reform as a cudgel to attack the other party’s president while usually remaining silent about their side.

Presidents have certainly not felt very constrained. During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan sent troops to Lebanon and Grenada. While Congress invoked the War Powers Act in 1983 with Lebanon, lawmakers extended the deadline for several months, and a reckoning over war powers never occurred. In April 1986, the Reagan administration informed Congress that “planes are in the air” headed to bomb Libya. Not much consultation. President George H.W. Bush invaded Panama in 1989 and the next year sought a vote from the U.N. Security Council, rather than Congress, to gain the authority to use force against Iraq following its invasion of Kuwait. In January 1991, Bush eventually sought a congressional vote to support his deployment of troops. He made it clear that he was not ceding any authority. The request, he explained, “does not constitute any change in the long-standing positions of the executive branch on either the President’s constitutional authority to use the Armed Forces to defend vital U.S. interests or the constitutionality of the War Powers Resolution.” President Bill Clinton used military force in Haiti based on a U.N. Security Council resolution and then in Bosnia and Kosovo. In 2011, President Barack Obama conducted airstrikes against Libya based on a tenuous interpretation of “hostilities” that allowed the administration to continue its operations after the statutory deadline. Many of these presidents have conduced more limited strikes, from missiles, to special operations, to drones, without giving much thought to Capitol Hill.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of how presidents expanded their power took place with congressional approval under President George W. Bush in 2001. In response to 9/11, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), granting the president sweeping military authority to use force against “those nations, organizations, or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks.” The language was so broad that it left the United States on a permanent wartime footing, granting presidents wide latitude to use force as long as it was tenuously connected to the post-9/11 mission. Trump cited AUMF powers when launching missile strikes against Syria in 2017 and again when authorizing a drone strike to kill Iranian military leader Qassem Suleimani in 2020. President Joe Biden based a series of military actions on the AUMF, including in Iraq, though he did file reports to Congress within 48 hours.

Within the Justice Department, historian Mary Dudziak has shown, the Office of Legal Counsel has gradually eroded the effectiveness of the War Powers Act by justifying legal interpretations of separation of power based on what presidents and Congress have done. Moreover, within conservative circles, the “unitary executive” theory has influenced several generations of federal judges who don’t believe there should be many constraints on the presidency.

In Presidential War Power, scholar Louis Fisher argues that a big part of the problem was that the War Powers Act was flawed from the start. By design, it left too much power in the hands of the president and would never work. For example, presidents retained expansive power to send troops into conflict for 60-90 days. Once troops were on the ground or a bombing campaign was underway, many legislators would be reluctant to challenge the operation. The enforcement provisions were also weak. Meanwhile, federal courts have been unwilling to adjudicate these so-called political questions when legislators have taken different presidents to court on the issue.

In recent decades, the challenges to legislative authority on warmaking have only intensified. Besides the sweeping military authority that remains in the aftermath of 9/11, intense political polarization makes it much less likely that lawmakers of the same party will do anything to undermine the president’s authority. Congressional majorities are often happy to let presidents make the decisions so that when things go poorly, which frequently happens, the leader in the Oval Office will shoulder the blame. Moreover, the fragmented and partisan media ecosystem makes it easy to spread disinformation and manipulated facts that place the president’s congressional opponents on weak footing.

To be sure, the War Powers Act was not irrelevant. According to Brookings’ Scott Anderson, it legitimized the constitutional role of Congress in warmaking. Though presidents have challenged specific parts of the measure, they have not taken on its overall constitutionality. One effort to repeal the act in 1995 failed.

Moreover, in most cases, presidents have requested authorization to use force from Congress and have abided by the timetable for short-term operations.  While falling short of a declaration of war, the resolutions have forced legislators to put themselves on record as to whether the use of force is acceptable.

But these accomplishments seem small when stacked up next to constant presidential assertions of warmaking authority, including the recent bombing of Iran.

There are good reasons to reform the War Powers Act. Ideally, the legislation should be more specific about the conditions under which presidents can be granted the flexibility to deploy troops without Congress declaring war. Revised legislation could impose better enforcement mechanisms and stiffer penalties for presidents violating the rules.

However, Trump has revealed that no statute, however carefully written, can constrain a president who is determined to ignore the law and a Congress that won’t challenge him. If a president is willing to ignore the law, the ability of the courts to enforce their decision is limited.

The most powerful reform would be for Congress to have the courage to use its authority. Besides the War Powers Act, the House and Senate have many tools. Congress retains the power over the purse and can cut funds, as occurred between 1973 and 1975 with Vietnam. It can use its oversight power to hold hearings that expose problems and build public pressure on the administration—such as Arkansas Democratic Senator William Fulbright’s hearings about Vietnam in 1966. And it can be more assertive about ensuring that the War Powers Act on the books is not ignored.

Presidential power is important, especially when there are threats to national security, but in the wrong hands, it can be dangerous. The founders created a system that understood the dangers that could emerge from tyrannical leaders willing to do whatever is necessary to maintain power and advance their agenda. Now the United States has entered into a fraught situation where the potential for the Middle East to explode into war is very real, as is the potential for U.S. troops to be drawn deeper into the conflict.

If Americans are serious about preventing another decade of undeclared wars and military operations, they must pressure Congress to examine and, more importantly, fix the War Powers Act. Congress must also realize its historical obligation to act.