The Senate is set to vote Wednesday on a resolution to block President Donald Trump from ordering further strikes on Iran after the two sides reached a fragile ceasefire.
The vote is the latest test of lawmakers’ support for the unpopular conflict since Trump threatened to destroy Iran’s “whole civilization.” Trump imposed a naval blockade on the country on Monday after negotiations to end the conflict collapsed.
The resolution faces tough odds in the Senate. Democrats have forced votes on three similar measures since the war’s start, all of which have failed. Sen. Rand Paul (Kentucky) is the only Republican who has joined Democrats to support them, while Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania) has opposed them.
But some Republicans have expressed increasing concern about Congress’s lack of input on the war as it approaches the two-month mark — an important legal deadline.
The War Powers Resolution of 1973 — the law Democrats are using to force war powers votes — also requires presidents to remove U.S. forces from any conflict that Congress has not authorized within 60 days. Trump can obtain a 30-day extension if he certifies to Congress that it is an “unavoidable military necessity.”
Trump predicted shortly after the war started that it would be over within four or five weeks, but lawmakers now are staring down the 60-day deadline, which arrives May 1.
“The president recognized ahead of time when he first went into Iran that this was going to be a short-term thing, right?” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said. “We’re probably not going to be dealing with 60 days. Well, here we are.”
Murkowski and other Senate Republicans have called for the administration to come to Congress to make the case for why the war should continue before the 60-day mark. Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) has said he will not support more funding for military operations against Iran unless Congress declares war.
“If this conflict exceeds the 60 days specified in the War Powers Act, or if the President deploys troops on the ground, I believe that Congress should have to authorize those actions,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said in a statement.
Murkowski said she had spoken with other Republicans about drafting legislation to authorize the war if the conflict drags on. Congress passed similar authorizations before the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Trump did not ask lawmakers to do so before striking Iran.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) said he did not plan to vote for Democrats’ resolution to block Trump from ordering further strikes this week but expected the administration to respect the 60-day deadline.
“At the end of the day, the law is the law, and we should follow it,” Tillis said.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) praised the administration’s handling of the war so far but said the administration needs to articulate how to end the war as the 60-day threshold approaches.
“They need a plan for how to wind this down and how to get an outcome that actually leads to a safer, more secure Middle East,” Thune told reporters.
Other Republicans have downplayed the looming deadline.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) has said he believes the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) said Trump should not allow it to restrict him from removing the Iranian regime from power.
“Once we made the tough decision to do this, to stir this hornet’s nest, you’d better finish the job,” Johnson told reporters. “I don’t want to leave a regime in place that still wants to create nuclear weapons, to keep producing missiles, to keep producing drones.”
Senate Democrats have also brushed aside the 60-day deadline, arguing that Trump started the war illegally so that the deadline means little.
The War Powers Resolution bars presidents from ordering U.S. forces into hostilities without congressional authorization unless the country or its troops are attacked.
“If we allow this as a Congress, this is the new standard,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) told reporters. “Donald Trump can wage war on Cuba next for 30, 60 days before having to consult Congress.”
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) echoed those concerns.
“We don’t need 60 days to know this war is a mistake,” Schumer said in a statement. “Every day more means more risk, more chaos and billions spent on a failed war.”
Oona Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale who served as a special counsel to the Defense Department during the Obama administration, said the 60-day deadline would still apply even if Trump started the war illegally.
The 60-day threshold, Hathaway wrote in an email, “is meaningful in that it makes exceedingly clear to anyone who is wondering that the President is prepared to ignore the law altogether.”
The Trump administration argued last year that it was not bound by the 60-day threshold during its campaign against alleged drug traffickers in the waters off Latin America, telling Congress in private that it did not believe the strikes rose to the level of hostilities governed under the law, The Washington Post reported.
Rebecca Ingber, a former senior State Department legal adviser during the Biden administration, said the same case was nearly impossible to make with the current operation.
“There is no plausible argument that the U.S. is not engaged in hostilities in Iran,” she said.
The White House has not said whether Trump would seek a 30-day extension.
“The President’s preference is always diplomacy, and Iran is desperate to make a deal – but they first must renounce their desire for a nuclear weapon and agree to redlines articulated by the United States,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement.
Trump said Tuesday in an interview with Maria Bartiromo of Fox Business that he viewed the war as “very close to over.”
Trump would not be the first president to be undeterred by the 60-day deadline.
President Barack Obama did not seek authorization from Congress before ordering strikes on Libya in 2011, which continued beyond the 60-day threshold. (Hathaway warned at the time that Obama’s failure to comply with the War Powers Resolution would condemn it “to a quiet death by a president who had solemnly pledged, on the campaign trail, to put an end to indiscriminate warmaking.”)
Neither did President Bill Clinton when he ordered the bombing of Kosovo in 1999, though his administration argued that Congress implicitly authorized the strikes because it passed legislation to fund them with 60 days of the start of the campaign.
The House is set to vote Thursday on a separate war powers resolution to block Trump from ordering more strikes on Iran. A similar resolution narrowly failed last month, with two House Republicans voting for it and four Democrats opposing it.
Rep. Kevin Kiley (California), a Republican who left the party last month to become an independent, said he planned to vote against the resolution because it would order Trump to remove troops immediately, which Kiley views as dangerous. Trump would veto the resolution even if it passed, he said, rendering it meaningless.
Still, “Congress does need to be much more centrally involved in defining the objectives and scope and resolution of this conflict going forward,” Kiley said.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri) said he hoped that the two-week ceasefire — which is set to expire next week — is still in force once the 60-day deadline arrives.
“We’re not engaged in hostilities now,” Hawley told reporters. “I would hope that we would not be then and that there’d be a resolution to this by then.”
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