President Donald Trump became the latest in a decades-long pattern of presidents not waiting for Congress to weigh in on war plans when he approved June 21 U.S. military strikes on Iranian nuclear sites.
Some members of Congress from both political parties balked at Trump skirting Congress’ role.
Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, released a statement saying the strikes were a “clear violation of the Constitution.”
Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who chaired the Intelligence Committee when he served in the House, wrote“In the absence of evidence that Iran was imminently breaking out to build a bomb, and without congressional approval, this operation should have never been ordered. To have done so is unconstitutional and moves us closer to another forever war. That must not happen.”
In the days before the strikes, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky.and Late. Tim Kaine, D-VA.pushed resolutions that would require congressional authorization of a Iran strike. When the Trump administration publicly announced the operation was complete, Massie wrote on X“This is not Constitutional.”
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The Trump administration disagreed. In a June 22 press conference, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the Trump administration “complied with the notification requirements” of the War Powers Act, saying members of Congress were notified “after the planes were safely out.”
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Vice President JD Vance said Trump acted within his power “to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,” and the “surgical strike” was not intended to lead to a protracted war.
“We’re not at war with Iran,” Vance said. “We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program.”
President Donald Trump speaks from the White House on June 21, 2025, after the U.S. military struck three Iranian nuclear and military sites, as Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth listen. (AP)
It’s unclear if and when the Massie and Kaine resolutions might receive a vote (the Senate bill would be eligible for consideration starting June 27), whether they would pass, whether they can survive an expected presidential veto if passed by both Republican-controlled chambers, and, if they are enacted, whether they will have any practical effect.
That’s because when it comes to war powers, the reality is that there are “overlapping authorities,” Joshua C. Huder, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute, told PolitiFact in the days before the U.S. strike on Iran.
Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution assigns Congress the right to declare war. But the last time Congress declared war was at the beginning of World War II, when Franklin Roosevelt was president.
Since then, presidents have generally initiated military action using their constitutionally granted powers as commander in chief without an official declaration of war.
In August 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson asked Congress to back his effort to widen the U.S. role in Vietnam. He received it with enactment of the Tonkin Gulf Resolutionwhich passed both chambers of Congress, including the Senate, with only two dissenting votes.
As the Vietnam War turned sour, lawmakers became increasingly frustrated at their secondary role in sending U.S. troops abroad. So in 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Resolutionwhich was enacted over President Richard Nixon’s veto.
The resolution required that, in the absence of a declaration of war, the president must report to Congress within 48 hours of introducing armed forces into hostilities and must terminate the use of U.S. armed forces within 60 days unless Congress permits otherwise. If approval is not granted and the president deems it an emergency, then an additional 30 days are granted for ending operations.
Presidents have not been eager to cede their presidential power to Congress, so they have generally followed the act’s requirements while framing any entreaties to Congress about military force as a voluntary bid to secure “support” for military action — action that’s often under way or planned imminently — rather than “permission.”
In recent decades, congressional consent has usually been accomplished by the passage of an “authorization for the use of military force,” a legislative vehicle that “has become the modern version of a declaration of war,” said Mark F. Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a national security think tank.
Presidents who have received such authorizing legislation include Ronald Reagan (to oversee the handover of the Sinai Peninsula from Israel to Egypt, and separately to participate in a deployment to Lebanon that ended with a suicide attack that killed 241 American service members); George H.W. Bush (to oust Iraq’s Saddam Hussein from Kuwait); Bill Clinton (for military action in Somalia); and George W. Bush (to enter Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, and separately to oust Hussein from power in what would become the Iraq War).
The post-9/11 authorization from 2001 is among the most controversial, because presidents of both parties have used its broad wording to support military action against a wide array of targetsusing language that approves efforts “to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States.”
Almost a quarter century later, the 2001 authorization remains in force, despite being repealed in 2023 by the Senate in a bipartisan 66-30 vote. (The House did not concur.)
Ultimately, congressional reaction “is determined largely by the majority party,” said Lance Janda, a military historian at Cameron University. So with Republican control of both chambers until at least 2026, Janda doesn’t envision Congress restricting Trump’s authority any time soon.
One new wrinkle in the lead-up to the Trump-ordered attacks on Iranian nuclear sites: CNN reported that the White House informed top Republican leaders in Congress before the attack but kept Democrats in the dark. Himes told CNN that he learned about the strike from Trump’s social media post.
This would break with longstanding precedent of informing the “Gang of Eight” — the top Democrat and Republican in the House and Senate, and the top Republican and Democrat on the chambers’ respective intelligence committees — before undertaking sensitive intelligence activities.
This process, which is enshrined in federal lawsays the eight lawmakers “are to receive prior notice of particularly sensitive covert action programs” and does not say that only one party’s officials are to be briefed.
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