President Trump’s unilateral decision to launch a major attack on Iran has opened a new chapter in a recurring debate over who rightfully wields war powers in American democracy.
The move early Saturday to strike Iran has raised accusations that he is violating the Constitution by starting a war without congressional authorization. It appears likely to prompt a belated debate next week in Congress under the War Powers Resolution.
Many Democrats and at least two Republicans in Congress reacted to what Mr. Trump himself described as “major combat operations” — and said could result in American casualties as “often happens in war” — by insisting that Congress must vote on whether the country enters such a conflict.
The accusations underscore a clear split that has emerged between how the founders intended American-style democracy to function and how it has frequently been governed, especially during and since the Cold War. Presidents of both parties have used the large standing armies maintained after World War II to commit forces to combat without congressional authorization.
In 1973, at the tail end of the Vietnam War, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution in an attempt to regain its role. It described a limited set of situations in which a president can unilaterally deploy forces into hostilities: essentially, when the country is under attack. Every president since has exceeded that purported limit.
The War Powers Resolution also provided that unauthorized deployments into hostile situations must end after 60 days unless Congress votes to approve them in the interim. Both President Barack Obama, in the 2011 Libya intervention, and Mr. Trump, in his campaign of striking vessels suspected of smuggling cocaine from South America, took the position that this rule did not apply to air campaigns in which there is no risk to American forces.
The 1973 law also created a mechanism for Congress to force presidents to immediately withdraw American forces from unauthorized deployments into hostile situations.
Originally, it allowed lawmakers to act via a resolution that the president could not veto, but a 1983 Supreme Court ruling led to a change. Lawmakers must now send such measures to the White House — meaning they would need two-thirds majorities in both chambers to override a presidential veto.
Presidents have since obtained congressional authorization for major land wars — the Persian Gulf war, Afghanistan and Iraq — and they have stretched the Afghanistan war law, which targeted the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks, into standing congressional authorization to strike militants affiliated with Al Qaeda elsewhere.
But they have also increasingly claimed a right to carry out more limited interventions — those deemed in the national interest and whose anticipated nature, scope and duration fall short of a “war” in the constitutional sense — without going to Congress.
Because lawmakers have not impeached presidents for those operations, the moves have accumulated as precedents for their successors to build upon.
Mr. Trump has pushed further with his assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, a top Iranian military commander, in his first term, his bombing of Iranian nuclear sites last year, his ongoing boat strikes operation and his invasion of Venezuela last month to arrest its leader, Nicolás Maduro.
No Americans were killed in any of those operations. But Mr. Trump’s attack on Iran appears likely to be his most significant unilateral military operation yet.
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
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