When Congress enacted the War Powers Resolution in November 1973, overriding President Nixon’s veto by the constitutionally required two-thirds majority in each chamber, its intention was historically legible. The Vietnam War had consumed more than 58,000 American lives, prosecuted for years without a formal declaration of war. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964, passed on the basis of factual claims later shown to be false or exaggerated, had been used to justify an open-ended military commitment that the country spent a decade trying to escape. Congress intended that no president would again commit American forces to armed conflict without the collective judgment of the legislative branch bearing on the decision.
For 53 years, the Resolution’s practical effect was close to nil. Every administration from Nixon’s onward contested its constitutionality. Every major military commitment, from Reagan’s invasion of Grenada to Clinton’s air campaign in Kosovo to Obama’s intervention in Libya, was conducted by presidents who treated the Resolution as an advisory document at most and an irritant at worst. No concurrent resolution invoking its procedures had ever cleared both chambers of Congress. The mechanism designed to restore balance between the branches had become, in effect, a dead letter.
On Tuesday, the Senate voted 50 to 48 to pass a concurrent resolution directing President Trump to remove American armed forces from hostilities against Iran. The House passed an identical measure earlier this month. It is the first time in the Resolution’s history that both chambers have cleared such a measure. Whatever one thinks of the underlying policy, that is a constitutional inflection point, and it deserves more serious treatment than it has received in most of the reporting surrounding it.
The resolution will not, in any immediate practical sense, end the Iran conflict. The White House correctly observed that the measure has no binding legal force and will not go to the president’s desk for signature. The Supreme Court’s 1983 ruling in INS v. Chadha cast significant doubt on the constitutional validity of the legislative veto mechanism the Resolution relies upon. These are not trivial legal objections. But symbols in constitutional law have a way of hardening into precedents, and precedents have a way of constraining future presidents in ways that are difficult to undo. The vote is the first of its kind. It will not be the last.
What makes the vote particularly significant is the political context in which it occurred. The United States launched Operation Epic Fury on February 28, striking Iranian military infrastructure, IRGC command structures, and ballistic missile production and storage facilities in a joint operation with Israel. The mission achieved substantial results. Forty-eight senior Iranian regime figures were killed. Iran’s naval capacity in the Persian Gulf was degraded. Its ballistic missile program was damaged significantly, with CIA assessments suggesting the stockpile remains at roughly 70 percent of prewar capacity. The Strait of Hormuz, through which approximately one-fifth of the world’s oil supply normally passes, was closed by Iran in retaliation and has only partially reopened under a fragile ceasefire framework negotiated through Pakistani and Qatari mediators.
The ceasefire itself has generated as much Republican opposition as the war powers vote did, and from a largely overlapping cast of characters. The 14-point memorandum of understanding signed by Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on June 17 commits the parties to 60 days of negotiations toward a final agreement, reopens the Strait of Hormuz on a toll-free basis, and begins the process of lifting American sanctions on Iranian oil exports. It also contemplates a $300 billion reconstruction fund, drawn from private international investors rather than American taxpayers, for Iranian economic development. The agreement does not address Iran’s ballistic missile program, which remains substantially intact. It does not include a verified mechanism for dismantling Iran’s nuclear enrichment infrastructure or its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. It does not require Iran to cease funding its network of proxies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker of Mississippi described the agreement as one that “negotiates away the victories of Operation Epic Fury in ways that are completely out of step with the President’s goals,” adding that the $300 billion reconstruction commitment “would make Iran’s payoff under President Obama’s 2015 deal look like a pittance by comparison.” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who in 2015 co-signed an open letter from 47 Republican senators to Iran’s leadership denouncing precisely the kind of sanctions relief now on the table, said the president was receiving “some really bad advice on this deal.” Senator John Cornyn of Texas warned that the agreement left Iran free to block the Strait of Hormuz again “basically at will.” These are not fringe voices. They are the senior Republican foreign policy establishment, and they are largely right on the substance.
Yet those same senators voted against the war powers resolution on Tuesday. The four Republicans who supported it, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, represent meaningfully different motivations. Murkowski and Collins are institutionalists who have broken with the administration on a range of issues. Cassidy has been a consistent critic of the Iran deal’s terms. Paul’s opposition to the war derives from constitutional principle rather than strategic disagreement: he has argued from the beginning that Congress must formally authorize armed conflict rather than ratify it post hoc, a position that has genuine constitutional grounding and a serious intellectual tradition behind it. James Madison, who wrote in Federalist No. 51 that the Constitution lodged the war power in the legislature precisely to guard against executive adventurism, would recognize the argument. The problem is that it produced, at this particular moment, the same vote as the Democrats who believe the war was a strategic catastrophe and should be ended as quickly as possible on any available terms. A principled argument and a cynical one can produce an identical result.
The lone Democrat to vote against the resolution was Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who has consistently supported the Iran mission and refused to join his caucus in using the war powers mechanism as a weekly procedural weapon against the administration. His was the only vote on the Democratic side that reflected a coherent, independent assessment of American strategic interests rather than partisan positioning. It deserves to be acknowledged as such.
The larger question the week’s events raise is whether the Republican Senate conference has the coherence and conviction to do two things simultaneously: hold the administration accountable for the terms of a ceasefire deal that many of its senior members believe is dangerously permissive, and resist the temptation to use the war powers mechanism as a vehicle for doing so. These are different problems that require different tools. A floor speech or a committee hearing or a funding condition is not the same instrument as a concurrent resolution directing the withdrawal of American forces from an active theater. Conflating them, as Tuesday’s vote did, produces a signal to Tehran that congressional support for American strategic objectives is fractured. Whether that signal serves American interests, at a moment when the administration is attempting to negotiate a final agreement with Iran over its nuclear program, is a question that deserves a serious and honest answer from the senators who produced it.
Hannah Nelson is the Vice President of American Faith Media. Any opinions expressed within the follow piece are held solely by the author and are not a direct reflection of the organization, its publishers, or its affiliates.
