The Senate on Friday blocked a Democratic resolution that would have forced President Trump to go to Congress for approval of further military action against Iran, dealing a blow to efforts to rein in his war powers.
The 53-to-47 vote against bringing up the resolution came nearly a week after the president unilaterally ordered strikes against three Iranian nuclear facilities without consulting the House and Senate. It also followed a searing debate on the Senate floor over the role of Congress in authorizing the use of military force.
The measure, sponsored by Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, invoked the War Powers Act, a 1973 law aimed at limiting a president’s power to enter an armed conflict without the consent of Congress. It would have required the White House to notify lawmakers and seek the approval of both the House and Senate before U.S. forces could take further military action against Iran.
Earlier this week, Mr. Kaine said that if the Senate voted to take up his resolution, he would modify it to include language that affirmed the president’s authority to act in self-defense. He clarified that it did not limit U.S. support for Israel or any “defensive measures” it might take against Iran or its proxies. That was in part an effort to unite Democrats around the measure, even though the party is deeply divided over supporting Israel.
Still, the resolution had little chance of success in a Republican-led Congress that has split bitterly along partisan lines over the strikes, with most G.O.P. lawmakers — even anti-interventionists on the far right — supporting Mr. Trump’s actions, and many Democrats outraged about them.
“War is too big an issue to leave to the moods and the whims and the daily vibes of any one person,” Mr. Kaine said ahead of the vote.
Supporters of the resolution rejected Mr. Trump’s contention, embraced by many who opposed the measure, that the limited strike did not constitute war or necessitate a declaration as such.
“What would we have said if Iran or any other country had flown bombers over our country and struck our facilities,” Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland, said in a floor speech before the vote. “We would rightly call it what it was: an act of war.”
Even before the American strikes against Iran were carried out, Democrats were alarmed at the possibility that Mr. Trump would take military action in the Middle East without their knowledge or approval, something that presidents of both parties have done to varying degrees in the years since the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
But Republicans balked at the idea of limiting Mr. Trump’s authority, and accused Democrats of playing politics, noting that few of them had been vocal opponents when President Barack Obama launched strikes against Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.
“Democrats, of course, rushed to turn this successful strike into a political fight,” Senator John Barrasso, the No. 2 Republican, said on the Senate floor. “National security moves fast. That’s why our Constitution says: ‘Give the commander in chief real authority.’ ”
In urging members to vote the effort down, Mr. Barrasso said that consultation with Congress was not needed and would “prevent the president from protecting us in the future.”
The vote was the latest setback for proponents of clawing back congressional war powers. For decades, they have lamented how presidents of both parties have gone around the legislative branch when making decisions about the use of military force.
The War Powers Act was enacted in the shadow of the Vietnam War, amid a public backlash to the prolonged conflict that fueled broad support in Congress for limiting a president’s power to wage war. President Richard M. Nixon had deployed American troops across the border of South Vietnam and in Cambodia, resulting in an expansion of the war, which would continue for another five years. Congress acted with near unanimity, and lawmakers were able to override a veto from Mr. Nixon.
But Friday’s vote reflected the sharp partisan divide on the issue that now exists in Congress.
Efforts to limit Mr. Trump’s ability to strike Iran again are also underway in the House, where two different coalitions — one led by Democrats, and another by a bipartisan team — have introduced similar resolutions. But those measures are not on track to come to a vote until mid-July, and Republican leaders in that chamber could seek to thwart any effort to force a vote, as they have done with efforts to force votes challenging Mr. Trump on trade.
In the Senate, only one Democrat joined most Republicans in opposing the war powers resolution. Senator John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Democrat who has frequently broken ranks with his party on issues involving Israel, said he decided to vote against the resolution “simply because I would never want to restrict any future president, Republican or Democrat, to do this kind of military exercise.”
A sole Republican, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, voted in favor of the measure, citing the arguments made by President James Madison in his early writings encouraging the passage of the Constitution.
“Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers that the executive is the branch most prone to war. Therefore, the Constitution, with studied care, vested that power in the legislature,” Mr. Paul said earlier this week.
Though Congress has not formally issued a declaration of war since World War II, lawmakers have voted a number of times in recent decades to authorize the use of military force against designated entities, most notably after the Sept. 11 attacks.
One authorization granted President George W. Bush the ability to direct military force against those responsible for the attacks and any groups that harbored them. Another was passed a year later authorizing the president to oversee the use of force against Iraq, citing concerns about weapons of mass destruction.
In the years since, Democratic and Republican administrations have used those authorizations to justify a wide range of military actions, including Mr. Obama’s campaign against ISIS in 2014; Mr. Trump’s strikes on Iranian proxies and a strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani in 2020; and President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2024 drone strike in Baghdad that killed a senior figure in Harakat al-Nujaba, an Iran-backed militant group.
However, in a letter sent to Congress this week, Mr. Trump cited his authority as commander in chief and the “constitutional authority to conduct United States foreign policy” as the sole legal basis for the attack.
He also said that the operation was undertaken in “collective self-defense of our ally, Israel,” suggesting that even in the exceedingly unlikely event that Mr. Kaine’s resolution had passed, cleared Congress and survived a presidential veto, Mr. Trump could have circumvented it by arguing that he was taking defensive, not offensive, action.
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