Foreign Affairs
Trump Shows Why Congress Should Decide When America Goes to War
An erratic executive without checks is a danger to the country and to the world.
President Donald Trump took the world to the brink by threatening war crimes and full-scale genocide if Iran did not surrender to his demands. On Tuesday, he “TACO’d” an hour before his self-imposed deadline, but left some observers urging the Cabinet to use the 25th Amendment to remove him in response to his unhinged rantings.
He apparently is preparing to request $200 billion or perhaps even more from Congress to fund his war against Iran. In little more than five weeks, his lawless attack has achieved an unusual trifecta: destabilizing the Middle East, shocking the international energy market, and threatening the global economy—all for the benefit of a foreign nation rather than America.
So far congressional Republicans have refused to assert their constitutional responsibilities over the Iran war. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) claimed that a declaration of war is “not required because it’s defensive in nature,” dressing Trumpian logic in Orwellian rhetoric. Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), since confirmed as secretary of homeland security, justified his dereliction of duty: “We don’t need 535 commanders-in-chief.” No, but the Constitution empowers Congress to decide whether the one commander-in-chief has a war to fight.
Another oft-repeated argument is that the Islamic Republic has been at war with America, so the president is entitled to bomb, invade, and occupy it without congressional authority. It would be more accurate to admit that America has been at war with Iran for 73 years, beginning with the overthrow of its democracy in 1953. Washington supported the dictatorial shah, even urging Tehran to use lethal force against demonstrators in 1978; aided Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980, while ignoring its use of chemical weapons; participated in the infamous “tanker war,” defending oil shipments used to subsidize Baghdad; shot down an Iranian airliner in 1988, for which President George H.W. Bush refused to apologize; killed a top Iranian official in 2018, while he visited Iraq; and for decades imposed economic sanctions on Tehran, surrounded Iran with military bases, and issued military threats against the Islamist regime.
The president’s performance has been bizarre as well as hypocritical. He insists, as nations around the world stumble toward recession, that he acted for them, so it is up to them to get the oil they need. He removed sanctions on oil sold by Iran while threatening to wipe out Iranian civilization. He declared his support for the Iranian people while warning that he would bomb them back into “the Stone Ages.”
America’s founders would not have been surprised by such a performance. They revolted against not just Great Britain, but an entire monarchical system in which kings, emperors, queens, czars, and other royals ruled arbitrarily. Among monarchs’ chief crimes was callously taking their peoples into senseless wars for economic plunder, territorial aggrandizement, and personal glory—rather like Trump’s Iranian misadventure.
Those who drafted the Constitution wanted to ensure that America didn’t suffer similar travails. Although the president is the commander-in-chief of the military (not the country!), he is subject to Congress’s control. Indeed, its authority is transcendent. Article I, Section 8 provides that Congress is empowered “To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water; To raise and support armies … To provide and maintain a navy; To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces; To provide for calling forth the militia … To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia.”
George Washington, for whom the presidency was essentially designed, observed, “The Constitution vests the power of declaring war with Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject, and authorized such a measure.” Another strong president, Abraham Lincoln, agreed with the Constitution’s authors that war was “the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.”
More than a century later, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia insisted, “Except for the actual command of military forces, all authorization for their maintenance and all explicit authorization for their use is placed in the control of Congress under Article I, rather than the president under Article II.” Other conservatives today denigrate Congress’s warpower, even claiming that wars are not wars. But, had the issue been a mere matter of semantics, the founders would have paid little attention to it.
Instead, they took the power to declare war quite seriously. Thomas Jefferson lauded the Constitution for providing an “effectual check to the dog of war by transferring the power of letting him loose.” At the Constitutional convention, Elbridge Gerry rejected proposals for expansive presidential warmaking power, stating that he “never expected to hear in a republic a motion to empower the Executive alone to declare war.” Several drafters explained that they sought to make it more difficult for the chief executive to act, in the words of George Mason “clogging rather than facilitating war.”
James Madison argued that the “fundamental doctrine of the Constitution [is] that the power to declare war is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature.” This system, said James Wilson, “will not hurry us into war,” but rather, “is calculated to guard against it. It will not be in the power of a single man, or a single body of men, to involve us in such distress; for the important power of declaring war is in the legislature at large.” Oliver Ellsworth looked at it from the other end, arguing that “it should be more easy to get out of war than into it.” Even Alexander Hamilton, the premier advocate of expansive executive power and quasi-monarchy, wrote in Federalist 69 that “the President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect his authority would be nominally the same with that of the king of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it.”
These sentiments are even more relevant today than in 1787 when the Constitution was drafted. The extraordinary impact and reach of America’s military makes it imperative to circumscribe executive warmaking. As Lord Acton famously observed, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The resulting danger afflicts even the best-intentioned actors, believers in American exceptionalism who imagine that they stand taller and see further, and thus are entitled to “rain down” hell upon an unclean world.
The revolutionary generation that vigorously debated and only narrowly ratified the Constitution would be horrified if confronted by the result of their labor. The Columbia law professor John Bassett Moore observed, “There can hardly be room for doubt that the framers of the Constitution when they vested in Congress the power to declare war, never imagined that they were leaving it to the executive to use the military and naval forces of the United States all over the world for the purpose of actually coercing other nations, occupying their territory, and killing their soldiers and citizens, all according to his own notions of the fitness of things, as long as he refrained from calling his action war or persisted in calling it peace.” In this century alone Washington has squandered trillions of dollars and thousands of lives in dubious wars. Hundreds of thousands of foreigners have died as a result. Many more have been injured, even maimed. The social and economic consequences have been incalculable. As we are seeing in the Persian Gulf today.
Nor is this the first time that foreign interests have manipulated American officials. After the French Revolution Paris sought to enlist the new American nation against Great Britain, creating sharp dissension within the Washington administration. A couple hundred years later an ambitious Iraqi exile played U.S. officials for fools and helped push the US into a disastrous war. Today Israel’s prime minister has gloried in dominating US policy and using Washington to achieve his 40-year ambition of waging war against Iran.
It is time for Congress to reassert its constitutional powers. War, absent instances of exigent self-defense, should never be left to one person, especially one who, like Trump, declared the only limits on his power to be “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” His willingness to wage an illegal war and threaten another nation’s destruction demonstrates Congress’s obligation to reassert its constitutional responsibilities. Legislators should start by rejecting the Trump administration’s request to fund its illegal Iran campaign. Money should be granted only to end rather than extend the combat.
War remains a terrible necessity, but only very rarely. Despite the chaos and instability of today’s world, America remains the most secure great power ever. Military action should always be a last resort, justified only by the most serious, even vital interests. Presidents have consistently proved that they cannot be trusted. Legislators should reassert their constitutional responsibilities.
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