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‘A Congress Without Ambition’: Lawmakers Give Trump Blank Check On War

WASHINGTON – In ducking a vote on authorizing war against Iran this week, Congress ceded its constitutional responsibilities yet again, some lawmakers warned, empowering current and future presidents to launch large wars unilaterally, in a major break with the nation’s founding principles.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle said that allowing President Donald Trump to wage an open-ended war in the Middle East without their explicit approval could set a dangerous precedent, ensuring that important decisions about war and peace are no longer made democratically after open debate, but rather behind closed doors and by a single person.

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“There was a time, not too long ago, we voted to go into the Iraq war. We voted to go into the Afghan war,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told HuffPost, calling the lack of a vote on Iran “a bad precedent.”

“This is a Congress without ambition,” he lamented. “This is a Congress without a belief structure in defending legislative prerogative. They just are a rubber stamp for whatever a president tells them to do.”

Trump’s administration and its allies on Capitol Hill have made the strained argument that the massive U.S. bombardment of Iran was necessary to respond to an imminent threat, even though they’ve yet to present evidence of an imminent attack by Tehran against the U.S. They’ve also given a series of shifting explanations to further justify the war, ranging from regime change to taking out Iran’s nuclear program, its navy, and its ability to launch ballistic missiles.

On Friday, Trump added another objective to the list: unconditional surrender by Iran’s government, seemingly rejecting any diplomatic solution to the military conflict that has so far left six U.S. service members and over 1,000 Iranians dead.

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A plume of smoke rises after a strike in Tehran, Iran, on March 2, 2026.

But while much about the war remains unclear, one thing is solidifying: Trump’s second presidency will shift war-making powers further away from Congress, giving his successors a chance to deploy the military as they choose.

“No doubt about it, there will be a Democrat president someday, and he or she will do something that will make Congress go, how dare you assert [warmaking] power? And we’ll go, Well, you know, you’re laying the predicate right here [with Iran],” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) acknowledged in an interview with HuffPost.

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Still, nearly every Republican lawmaker on Capitol Hill this week, including Tillis, voted against a war powers resolution that would have restricted Trump from using further military force in Iran — at least until he sought and Congress passed an authorization to do so, as it did for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some Republican senators argued that Trump had the authority to act unilaterally and that halting hostilities in the middle of combat would be impossible right now.

“The train has left the station,” Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah) told reporters. “I think one of the most devastating things we could do is stop the train. It would be unfair to our troops, unfair to those who lost their life. And so it’s not really an option at this point.”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said that Congress shouldn’t take any vote on going to war at all right now because of how it might affect the morale of U.S. service members.

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“I think the primary restraint on any president of the United States is public opinion. What you don’t want to do in a terribly divided Congress is hold a vote that shows us divided,” Johnson said in an interview with NPR. “That would not be good in a war effort. It would not be good for our troops. It would not be good for, you know, success in the operations.”

Even Republicans who previously asserted Congress’ power of declaring war, like Sen. Todd Young (R-Indiana), said it was too late to challenge the president.

“We’re at war,” Young, a former U.S. Marine, explained to reporters. “It would be dangerous to the American people and our national security to withdraw all military action involvement right now.”

Trump is far from the only president to bypass Congress when it comes to military action: modern presidents have rarely sought congressional approval before engaging in military action abroad, including Ronald Reagan, who sent troops to Lebanon in 1982, and Bill Clinton, who deployed U.S. troops to Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo as part of United Nations peacekeeping efforts.

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In 2011, Barack Obama ordered military strikes against Libya under a U.N. Security Council resolution. Republican lawmakers — many of them still in Congress now — were livid that he did so without approval from Congress. They also rejected a resolution to authorize them in the House.

But Trump’s war in Iran — like George W. Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – has been carried out on a much larger scale than the more limited military deployments ordered by their predecessors. More than 50,000 U.S. troops are involved in the operation, which has grown as Iran continues to retaliate with missile strikes against U.S. allies in the region. More importantly, the Trump administration has not taken the possibility of committing U.S. ground troops off the table.

Senators, including some who otherwise supported Trump’s engagements, also worried about how little effort was made to inform the U.S. public about the war, which is unpopular. Fifty-nine percent of Americans disapprove of the strikes against Iran, with 60% saying they do not think Trump has a clear plan for handling the situation and 62% saying he should get congressional approval for any further military action, according to a CNN poll.

“We should have been holding hearings and asking probing questions and making the case to get a greater measure of unity around this operation on the front end,” Young said.

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Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nev.) said that briefing Congress in a classified setting on the details of the Iran war, as the Trump administration did earlier this week, actually makes it harder for lawmakers to do their jobs and inform the public about what’s going on — yet another way this administration has made the legislative branch basically irrelevant.

“There’s a place for classified briefings, but when they only do classified briefings with us, it’s essentially giving 535 members a gag order. They can go out and talk about whatever they want, but I can’t say a word about what they said,” Rosen said.

“How are we supposed to look our constituents in the eyes and send our sons and daughters into war if we aren’t willing to take this most solemn responsibility seriously?” asked Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.).