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Today is the deadline for President Donald J. Trump to ask Congress for approval for his war on Iran. Under the 1973 War Powers Act, a president has the authority to respond to an “imminent threat” without congressional approval, so long as he notifies Congress in writing within 48 hours. Then the president has 60 days either to withdraw U.S. forces from their engagement or to get Congress to authorize the military action.
Trump launched U.S. attacks on Iran alongside Israeli attacks on February 28. He notified Congress on March 2. Sixty days from March 2 is today.
And today, Trump sent letters to House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate president pro tempore (officially the leader of the Senate if the vice president is not present) Chuck Grassley (R-IA) to inform them that so far as the White House is concerned, “the hostilities that began on February 28…terminated” on April 7, when Trump ordered a two-week ceasefire. Ignoring the fact the U.S. fired on an Iranian tanker on April 19, the letter says “there has been no exchange of fire between United States Forces and Iran since April 7, 2026.”
The next paragraph notes that the administration is nonetheless continuing to build up its military presence in the region “to address Iranian and Iranian proxy forces’ threats and to protect the United States and its allies and partners.”
In other words, the administration is trying to get around the War Powers Act with the dodge Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth tried in front of the Senate yesterday: a ceasefire stops the War Powers clock. This is not what the law says.
Trump’s letter also ignores the fact the U.S. continues to blockade Iranian ports. A blockade is an act of war.
It’s worth reiterating that Trump’s war of aggression violated the Constitution from the start. He sidestepped Congress—which has the sole authority to declare war—by insisting the threat from Iran was “imminent” even though his own advisors testified that Iran did not, in fact, have the capacity to build a nuclear weapon in less than ten years. As Tess Bridgeman and Oona A. Hathaway of Just Security note, that attack also violated the United Nations charter, which prohibits the use of force except as defense against an attack or a legitimate threat of an imminent one.
Now the administration has just told Congress it intends to retain the power to do whatever Trump wants with the United States military.
This is another example of the administration trying to find a fuzzy way to get around acting within the boundaries of the law. It is clearly just a posture to permit Trump to act as he pleases. This afternoon, Trump told an audience: “You know we’re in a war, because I think you would agree we cannot let lunatics have a nuclear weapon.”
This afternoon, Trump told reporters that there was no need for him to ask Congress for authorization to extend the war because “it’s never been sought before.” “[N]obody’s ever sought it before,” he said. “Nobody’s ever asked for it before. It’s never been used before. Why should we be different?”
In fact, presidents before Trump have indeed honored the 60-day requirement for congressional approval of military operations.
Trump told reporters, “Every other president considered it totally unconstitutional, and we agree with that.”
In fact, the Framers of the Constitution placed the power to declare war in the hands of Congress and not in the president because they did not trust that much power in the hands of one man. They also wanted to make sure the American people would have robust debates about the value of the money and lives lost in combat. So determined were they for the American people to have those debates that they put into the Constitution that Congress had the power “[t]o declare War” and “[t]o raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years.”
In Federalist No. 26, one of the newspaper essays Alexander Hamilton wrote to encourage the ratification of the Constitution, Hamilton explained that people shouldn’t fear the strength of the new government outlined in the Constitution, because the necessity of debating war, alongside the two-year limit on government funding for the military, would force Congress to debate military actions. He expected members of the opposition to attack those in power over military appropriations, so that if those in power were “disposed to exceed the proper limits, the community will be warned of the danger, and will have an opportunity of taking measures to guard against it.”
Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) said yesterday he would not challenge Trump’s novel interpretation of the War Powers Act, in part, he said, because Senate Republicans have given him no reason to. Republicans have no interest in voting to support Trump’s unpopular war, and yet don’t want to buck Trump. So they are choosing to abdicate their constitutional responsibilities.
In contrast, Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) posted: “There’s no pause button in the Constitution, or the War Powers Act. We’re at war. We’ve been at war for 60 days. The blockade alone is a continuing act of war.”
Representative Adam Smith (D-WA), the top-ranked Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, told Mary Clare Jalonick, Stephen Groves, and Seung Min Kim of the Associated Press: “Is the expectation that the Trump administration is going to follow the law? I do not have that expectation.”
Ironically, today is Law Day, a holiday established by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1958 to remind us to “vigilantly guard the great heritage of liberty, justice, and equality under law.”
As former chief justice of the Kansas Supreme Court Lawton Nuss wrote in the Kansas Reflector today, Eisenhower had seen lawlessness and the horrors it produced in World War II. In his first observance of Law Day, he reminded Americans that the U.S. rested not on, as Nuss writes, “the unchecked exercise of raw power,” but on law, individual rights, and the constitutional order.
With the enormously destructive capabilities of modern warfare and the power of leaders to hold loyalists in their sway in the modern era, Eisenhower said, “In a very real sense, the world no longer has a choice between force and law. If civilization is to survive, it must choose the rule of law.”
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Notes:
https://cdn.sanity.io/files/ifn0l6bs/production/dfbe2453a796ee928681ca4ae9bbd079818797d3.pdf
https://www.justsecurity.org/137669/60-day-mark-iran-war-triply-illegal/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/us/politics/trump-congress-authorization-iran-war.html
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-the-president-the-observance-law-day
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/proclamation-3221-law-day-1958
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed26.asp
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript#1-8
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