The United States committed multiple acts of war over the weekend against the sovereign nation of Iran.
That it did so with the goal of preventing a brutal and unpredictable regime from acquiring nuclear weapons no doubt provided justification aplenty for many in the U.S. and around the world. And given the potentially apocalyptic stakes, that argument clearly has merit.
But in deciding to take the country to a war footing without congressional authorization, President Donald Trump denied the American people their right to debate and decide that question through their elected representatives. And in so doing, he crossed a constitutional red line that separates presidential duties from those of Congress.
As U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie, a conservative Republican from Kentucky, made clear just hours after the bombers cleared Iranian airspace, respecting the Constitution’s separation of powers isn’t a partisan issue.
“In the first Iraq War, the second Iraq War and the war in Afghanistan, Congress first got the briefings, Congress met and debated,” Massie said on CBS’s Face The Nation. “We haven’t had that. This has been turned upside down, the process.”
Of course, to a generation of Americans raised in a post-9/11 world of presidentially ordered airstrikes and ground assaults, concerns about the lack of congressional approval for Trump’s undeclared war on Iran may sound like so much legal nitpicking.
But to the authors of the American Constitution, Congress’s exclusive power to decide questions of war and peace wasn’t a technicality. In fact, it was an essential feature of our new republic, as James Madison, the principal architect of our constitutional system of checks and balances, noted in a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1798.
“The Constitution supposes what the history of all governments demonstrates — that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it,” Madison wrote. “It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the legislature.”
That presidents, including Jefferson, have spent much of the past 236 years finding ever-more-creative ways to get around that clear constitutional mandate only proves Madison’s point. It is the executive who’s most interested in, and prone to, war — as we saw so clearly once again this week.
As we write these words, America’s war in Iran is only a few short days old. Perhaps it will be over by the time you read this — a “splendid little war” that kept one of the world’s worst regimes from obtaining some of the world’s most terrifying weapons. Or maybe buses and trains will be exploding from Cairo to Copenhagen to Cleveland.
We pray it’s the former. But after watching a generation of American misadventures in the Middle East, we know not to order our “Mission Accomplished” banners prematurely — which it seems Trump did shortly after the attack by saying, “the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
We’ll see. For now, all we can say with any real certainty is that the Founders would not have approved of Trump’s unilateral path to war. After all, they’d just fought a long, hard revolution. They’d seen the awful price paid in blood and treasure. And as a result, they carefully put the power to make war in the hands of the branch that’s the least — not most — prone to use it.
Congress must now act quickly to authorize this war — or end it.
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
