By SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor and Charlie Hunt
Despite the scale of its military assault on Iran, the Trump administration’s reasons for entering into war have been inconsistent and vague, from regime change to the destruction of nuclear weapons, preempting military action by Israel, or the more chilling decree of following “God’s divine plan.”
Politicians, pundits and even social media users have been quick to point out the contradictions of these justifications – regime change is impossible from the air, especially when you kill the alternatives, and weren’t those nuclear weapons already destroyed?
But the “why” for entering into war matters beyond scoring political points.
Why, and how, a president engages in military action has serious implications for the constitutional authority of any wartime action and, specifically, whether Congress has any hope of checking the warmaking of a president.
War powers and ‘imminent threats’
Under Article 1, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution, only Congress has the authority to declare war.
One way around this, as the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have half-heartedly attempted, is to avoid calling this conflict a “war.” The messaging didn’t stick. In fact, President Donald Trump has already used the term repeatedly.
The more viable option for sidestepping the need to have Congress declare a war is for the president to claim authority under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which grants a president the power to involve the armed forced in “hostilities” or “potential hostilities” without congressional approval only under extraordinary conditions of “imminent threat.”
At least one member of the administration appears to understand this nuance: Secretary of State Marco Rubio – notably, a former member of Congress himself. Rubio used the specific terminology “imminent threat” when discussing why the Trump administration began the bombing.
Absent a truly imminent threat, the president is required by the resolution to “consult regularly” with Congress before and after engaging in military action. Importantly, the military action is limited to 60 days, during which the president must “report to the Congress periodically” with updates to keep the legislative branch informed.
After 60 days, the president must, the resolution says, “terminate any use of United States Armed Forces.” If a president wants to wage a war longer than that, that requires an additional declaration by Congress. Such a declaration would require votes similar to a bill being passed.
In 2002, for example, after initiating a “war on terror,” President George W. Bush eventually turned to Congress to pass the Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Iraq. This permitted Bush to send troops into Iraq and further pursue a war that would last a decade.
In today’s case, by claiming that the Iranian regime was posing an imminent threat to the United States, the president can more easily circumvent congressional approval for military action and then turn to Congress after the fact if further action is needed.
As we recently discussed on our podcast about Congress, “Highway to Hill,” Congress has been continually ceding its power to the executive branch for decades. Deflection on military authority goes back even further: Congress hasn’t formally declared war since World War II – yes, despite involvement in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and many other places. But the Constitution doesn’t mince words on who’s responsible for entering the U.S. into war: Congress.
And how this war is ultimately framed by the White House has implications for the types of oversight Congress can perform to limit or curtail military action.
The limited powers of the war powers resolution
Congress, seemingly caught off guard by the Trump administration’s actions in Iran, has responded in a few ways. Perhaps unsurprisingly, responses have fallen largely along party lines.
Following the initial bombings, U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, a Democrat from Virginia, introduced a war powers resolution to prevent further military action in Iran. In the House, U.S. Reps. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, and Thomas Massie, a Republican from Kentucky, introduced a similar bipartisan resolution. The votes failed in both chambers despite overwhelming support from Democrats.
On the Republican side, Rubio’s explanation for the military action seemed to appease many key members of Congress. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, claimed the president had the authority to move forward with military action in Iran.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said that any congressional attempt to limit the president’s warmaking power would be “frightening” and “dangerous.”
Public accountability in congressional hearings
Henry Griffin, AP file photo
But Congress has two more traditional and frequently used oversight tools at its disposal: oversight hearings and the power of the purse.
Oversight hearings provide members of Congress an opportunity to not only question and investigate the executive branch’s activity, but also to provide their constituents with this fact-finding work and draw attention to policy issues. As some recent oversight hearings indicate, these can also be opportunities for partisan jabs and “made for TV” moments.
But there is evidence that they produce results.
Following tense oversight hearings on excessive spending in the Department of Homeland Security, Secretary Kristi Noem was fired from her position in early March 2026.
In the 1970s, the Church Committee – named for its formidable chair, U.S. Sen. Frank Church of Idaho – held extensive hearings that included eye-opening testimony about clandestine U.S. intelligence activities abroad and domestically. The Church Committee recommended, and Congress subsequently enacted, dozens of sweeping reforms to foreign intelligence collection activities, as well as restraints on future efforts by the U.S. government to assassinate people.
Although the Trump administration has provided closed-door briefings to members of Congress, Democratic senators are asking for more. They are calling for Department of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Rubio to come before congressional committees to explain their reasoning and plans for the Iran war.
Not only do oversight hearings provide members of Congress with an opportunity to investigate and question an administration’s actions, but they bring that discussion to the public. This transparency provides constituents with information about how their tax dollars are being spent, what their members of Congress think, and may even sway public opinion.
Power of the purse
But perhaps the most powerful tool that Congress has is its power of the purse, outlined in Article 1 of the Constitution.
Military actions in Iran are already costing an estimated US$1 billion a day, or as U.S. Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, the Republican House Appropriations Committee chair, put it: “a lot.”
As the war drags on, the Trump administration will need more money – money that only Congress can dole out. Unlike war powers resolutions, which in this case would limit military action after the fact, new spending cannot occur until Congress writes and passes legislation appropriating additional funds.
But this would constitute a blank check for a foreign war. And that might be too much to ask of members of Congress in both parties, particularly as the U.S. faces a historic deficit and cuts to safety net programs.
And as public opinion on both military action in Iran and the state of the economy continues to sour, a vote for more military spending might well overtax any remaining goodwill of voters and members of Congress alike.
In fact, the political pressure on Congress to put its foot down could become so immense that lawmakers may have to do something – like their job.
SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor is Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Politics at the University of Virginia. Charlie Hunt is Associate Professor of Political Science at Boise State University.
PaulT says
Congress is still there but come on now, follow the money.
The members and senators are very busy counting the Shekels they’ve received from AIPAC and other pro-Israel donors.
And they won’t act, our of worries that the payments will dry up if they lift a finger to interfere with Trump and Netanyahu’s war.
Sherry says
Complete “corruption” in both houses and both parties in Congress!
The “Citizens United” decision needs to be overturned! Unless/Until we get the vast sums of money out of politics, we the people will never truly be represented by those in office!
Sherry says
Adam Kinzinger spells out the details of just some of the reasons why Congress is ineffective and corrupt :
Why Retiring Members of Congress Still Won’t Stand Up
Even members who know the direction of their party is wrong rarely use the power they have on their way out. The reasons are uncomfortable—and one day many of them will regret it.
Adam Kinzinger
Mar 16
One of the questions I get most often from people watching the chaos in Washington is actually a very simple one. If members of Congress know something is wrong, and if they’re retiring anyway, why don’t they just do something about it?
People aren’t usually asking about the loud voices. They’re not asking about the members who built their entire careers around outrage. They’re asking about the quieter ones. The members who privately admit that much of what is happening isn’t right. The ones who shake their heads in the hallway, or pull you aside to say, “This isn’t what the party used to be.” Or the ole “concerned” tweets.
The public assumption is that a retiring member of Congress should be the freest person in the building. They don’t have to worry about reelection. They don’t have to worry about campaign donors or primary challengers. Their political future, at least in that role, is already decided. So why wouldn’t they be the people willing to stand up and use the power they still have?
The reality is that even the “good ones” rarely do.
The first reason is pressure. Turning against your own party in a meaningful way is one of the hardest things a member of Congress can do. That pressure is not abstract. It is immediate and personal. Colleagues stop talking to you. Leadership threatens to strip committee assignments. Activists mobilize against you. Donors start making phone calls. Your staff gets dragged into the fight. The anger comes from all directions.
Congress is an intensely tribal place. Breaking with the tribe in a symbolic way—casting a single vote or making a speech—already carries consequences. Breaking with the tribe in a way that actually disrupts the system is something far bigger. It means actively standing in the way of your own team. It means becoming the person who forces uncomfortable decisions.
But the second reason is the one people rarely talk about openly.
Money.
Members of Congress understand that when they leave office there is a very lucrative ecosystem waiting for them. Lobbying firms, consulting contracts, corporate boards, speaking engagements, think tank fellowships. Washington has built an entire post-congressional economy around former members.
The value of a former member of Congress in that world isn’t just their knowledge. It’s their relationships. It’s their access. It’s the ability to pick up the phone and call a former colleague and get a meeting. It’s the ability to walk a client into an office on Capitol Hill and say, “I used to serve with these people.”
That access is worth a lot of money.
But access depends on one thing above all else: not burning down the relationships that give you that access in the first place. If you spend your final months in Congress openly rebelling against leadership, embarrassing your colleagues, or shutting down the legislative process, those relationships disappear very quickly. The phone calls stop getting returned. The doors quietly close.
And so many members, even the ones who know better, simply ride out the clock. They keep their heads down. They make a few speeches. Maybe they cast a protest vote here or there. But they never actually use the leverage that they still have.
The frustrating part is that the leverage can be very real.
The House of Representatives currently runs on extremely thin margins. Sometimes the difference between control and paralysis is just a handful of votes. In certain moments, the entire functioning of the chamber can hinge on just one or two members.
Imagine, for example, that two Republican members who are retiring walk into Speaker Mike Johnson’s office and tell him something very simple. They say they will vote with Democrats against every single procedural motion on the floor. They will vote against every rule that brings legislation up for debate. They will vote with the minority on every motion to recommit.
In the House, those procedural votes are everything. Without the rule vote, legislation doesn’t even come up for debate. Without procedural control, the entire legislative machine stops moving. Two members could effectively paralyze the chamber.
Not forever, but long enough to force something that leadership desperately wants to avoid: negotiation. Those two members could say the House will remain frozen until Ukraine aid is brought to the floor. They could demand a vote on a war powers resolution. They could force consideration of issues that leadership would rather avoid.
It would not require a revolution. It would simply require two members deciding that their conscience matters more than their future consulting contract.
But moments like that almost never happen. Even members who know something is wrong often continue calculating the personal cost. They wonder whether this will destroy their relationships with colleagues. They worry about what doors might close after Congress. They worry about whether the people they served with will view them as traitors.
And so the system rolls forward.
When I left Congress, I thought a lot about something that most members try not to think about while they are there. Your time in Congress will define you publicly for the rest of your life. Unless you go on to become president, governor, or something similarly high-profile, your years in Congress are the chapter people remember when your name comes up.
I spent twelve years in Congress. Whether I like it or not, those years will shape how people see me for the rest of my life. My son will eventually read about that time. One day my grandchildren will read about it too. I will have to live with the choices I made and the things I chose not to do.
Every member of Congress understands this at some level, but the pressure of the moment makes it easy to forget. The meetings, the votes, the constant political noise, and the fear of angering colleagues all combine to create a powerful incentive to simply survive the moment. Many members convince themselves that the safest path is to keep their heads down until retirement.
Eventually the moment passes.
Every political movement fades. Every era becomes history. When that happens, the calculations that seemed so important in the moment suddenly feel much smaller. The consulting contracts and board seats fade into the background, but the historical record remains.
One day MAGA will sit where may stupid political movements eventually sits: in the museum of bad ideas. Future generations will look back on this era the same way we look back on McCarthyism or the politics of segregation. They will study how it happened and who stood up to it.
Many of the people who quietly went along with it will eventually realize something uncomfortable. They had more power than they admitted to themselves at the time. They had opportunities to push back, to slow things down, to force debate or accountability.
They did not have the power to fix everything, but they had the power to do something.
Years from now, when the pressure of the present moment is gone, many of them will look back on that time with a quiet kind of shame. They will remember the private conversations in hallways where everyone admitted that something was wrong. They will remember the meetings where colleagues whispered their concerns. They will remember the moments when just a few members could have changed the trajectory of the House.
And when they think back on those moments, they will have to confront a very simple question.
Why was I such a coward?
BillC says
The war in Iran is being justified by the catch- all slogan “short term pain for long term gain”. Really? Short term fixes are temporary and often lead to greater problems down the road, like fixing a leaky roof with a smear of tar. After watching Trump’s news conference today (3/16) and his fractured, unhinged responses to questions and obvious fabrications, one has to wonder who is the greater threat to the long term future of the United States- Iran or Trump.
Sherry says
TRUMP . . by far! Iran may be able to a few terrorist acts our way. . . which “is” scary and terrible! But, trump and Maga are hell bent on destroying us from within!
PaulT says
BillC. Fully agree, but the answer to the question in your last sentence is pretty clear. Trump is far more of a threat to the security of both the US and the world at large.Trump is dangerous because he is so ignorant and to arrogant to listen to advice..
The rest of the world knew that an all out attack on Iran would result in an Iranian blockade of the Straits of Hormuz which would choke off Persian Gulf oil, 20% of the world’s supply.
Trump didn’t listen.
The rest of the world knew that Iran would attack US bases in the Gulf region and perhaps the states that host them.
Trump neither listened or cared.
Trump was so confident in his game of soldiers because his Defense Secretary told him the US military is invincible. Trump, Vance and Rubio repeated Hegseth’s assertion and told the Europeans they are weak, decayed and on their own.
Now Trump is demanding that Europe pull him out of the fire and help him clear up the mess he’s made.
The European nations have quite sensibly replies ‘No thanks, we’ll defend ourselves but you started this, you fix it’.
Independant voter says
I’m an Independent Voter but evaluating the Republican Administration and Republican House/Senate voting for any of them in the future is null and void. Have no respect for anyone that can’t accept the truth.