By admin 
President Donald Trump crushed a looming congressional revolt against the war in Iran last week, though the rebellion was more posed than real and would likely have petered out on its own.
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The reason is that the War Powers Act, the 1973 law that slim majorities in the House and Senate invoked in a joint resolution, has rarely been taken seriously on Capitol Hill. In fact, except for the first few years after the passage of the act—which was meant to put muscle and teeth on the legislature’s responsibilities under Article 1 of the Constitution—it has never been taken seriously enough to matter.
When the act was passed, the Vietnam War was unwinding, and Richard Nixon’s presidency was collapsing in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Sentiment against the war—and against excessive executive power—was so widespread and deep that after Nixon vetoed the War Powers Act, both houses of Congress mustered the two-thirds majority to override the veto.
The following year, Nixon would resign to avoid impeachment, and Democrats would enlarge their veto-proof majorities in Congress. Soon after, they would stop the flow of money to the war in Southeast Asia, bar the use of funds to fight communist rebels in Angola, and place restraints on the CIA and the National Security Agency.
But that was pretty much it. The War Powers Act requires presidents to notify Congress when they send troops into battle. Presidents have done so 132 times; each time, Congress has assented or at least not objected in any tangible way. President Barack Obama went past the 60-day limit in Libya, but argued that the act didn’t apply because authority had been transferred to NATO. President Bill Clinton exceeded the deadline in his bombing campaign against Kosovo, but he said Congress had funded the bombing, which he took as authorization for the war. A Republican congressman sued the president, but a D.C. Circuit judge, in , ruled that this was a political matter, not to be decided by the judiciary. (The courts have consistently ruled in favor of the president, citing his powers under Article 2 of the Constitution.)
The fact is, most members of Congress don’t want the responsibility of weighing in on matters of war and peace. They especially don’t want to be blamed if the war goes south. Even during the height of the Iraq War, after the 2006 midterm elections, when Democrats recaptured the House and Senate, mainly because of disfavor over George W. Bush’s war, Congress voted down several measures to cut, much less end, funding for the war—thus declining their constitutional power of the purse.
To quell the impending flak over the Iran war, in which four Republican senators had joined all but one Democrat, Trump didn’t bother citing legal subtleties. Rather, he yelled at them in a private meeting, complaining that by threatening to stop the war, they were wrecking his bargaining power in the ongoing peace talks. He made the same charge in a subsequent social media post on Tuesday:
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So, I have Iran on the “ropes,” ready to go down for the fall, willing to give us practically anything, and for the first time in decades, respecting the hell out of the United States and its President, ME, and the U.S. Senate decides to have a poorly timed and meaningless War Powers Act Vote, telling the Number One Sponser of Terror in the World that the United States doesn’t like what I am doing to them, and I must stop, and by so doing has provided aid and comfort the Enemy. Four Republican Losers voted with the Dumocrats, and Iran asked my people, “what does that all mean?” These Senators have just made my job more difficult, but I will get it done, one way or the other, because I always get it done!
In one sense, this is gibberish. First, in no way does Trump, or his inexperienced emissaries, have Iran on the ropes. To the contrary, the memorandum of understanding that they signed gives Iran immense benefits up front—including the waiving of sanctions on oil exports and the lifting of frozen assets—while extracting no costs from Tehran. Meanwhile, despite the MOU’s provisions, Iran continues to control the Strait of Hormuz, in at least one case firing on a large cargo ship passing through.
Second, the Iranian leaders don’t need a congressional vote to tell them that “the United States doesn’t like” what Trump is doing. They’re perfectly capable of reading the news reports and the polls. Finally, Trump himself wrecked his bargaining leverage by repeatedly threatening to resume the bombing if the Iranians didn’t do X, Y, or Z—then backpedaled when they did X, Y, and Z.
Nonetheless, two of those four Republican senators were so swayed by the argument—or perhaps shaken by his charge of treason (saying they have provided “aid and comfort [to] the enemy”) and the implicit political attacks to follow—that in a subsequent vote to proceed to more binding legislation, they switched their votes.
Then again, Trump was right in calling the vote “meaningless.” The joint resolution that the House and Senate passed the previous week had, by nature, no binding effect. The vote to proceed with debate on a second motion, which was killed under Trump’s pressure, might have resulted in a real law. But the law would merely have required Trump to seek congressional approval to continue the war—which, given the historical pliancy of Congress and the slavish obeisance of this Congress, was well assured. Finally, if Congress had gone ahead with the motion, then voted to approve binding restrictions, Trump could have vetoed it—and, unlike the case in 1973, the anti-war members comprise nowhere near a two-thirds majority to override it.
The whole sequence of events was political drama. The Democrats and not quite a handful of Republicans (some of whom no longer cared about Trump’s pressures after he successfully endorsed more pro-MAGA opponents in recent primaries) showed that they were in alignment with public opinion on a deeply unpopular war. Trump showed that, even so, he can still do pretty much whatever he wants.
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