Eleven votes. Two hundred and eight days. Congress still has not authorized the war Donald Trump started on February 28.
On Thursday, Senate Republicans blocked the latest chance to confront that fact. The House passed a war powers resolution last week with bipartisan support. The Senate killed it by a vote of 49 to 50. Four Republicans voted yes. Democrat John Fetterman joined the Republican no votes.
Congress has turned its war power into a weekly ritual: call the vote, protect Trump, and go home while the bombing continues. A check that never checks anything is a rubber stamp.
Congress wrote a clock and chose not to enforce it
Article I says exactly who gets the power to declare war: Congress. The decision to take the country into sustained war belongs to the people’s representatives.
Congress tried to put teeth behind that division with the War Powers Resolution. The law says a president must end an unauthorized deployment within 60 days after reporting it to Congress, with no more than 30 additional days when military necessity requires time for a safe withdrawal. It also says Congress may direct the removal of forces engaged in unauthorized hostilities.
Trump launched the attack on Iran on February 28 and notified Congress on March 2. No declaration of war followed. No specific authorization followed. More than 200 days later, the bombing continues while the administration reaches for labels such as “military operation” and “excursion.”
The labels do not matter to the families under the bombs or to the Americans ordered into danger. They should not matter to Congress either. If a president can evade the law by refusing to say the word “war,” then the law is only decoration.
The ledger is $38 billion and 19 dead Americans
The senators who voted no should have to read the ledger aloud.
The Congressional Budget Office found that the war had already cost at least $38 billion and would add about $3 billion for every month it continued. The same report said replacing the Patriot, THAAD, and Navy interceptors consumed in the conflict would probably take at least five years, even with increased production. The Pentagon inspector general separately put munitions spending at $22.3 billion through June and found strategic inventory shortfalls.
Nineteen American service members are dead. The Intercept reported that the official count of dead and wounded had passed 850 by September 22, while its investigation documented omissions from the Pentagon’s public accounting. Those numbers still leave out the Iranian civilians killed, wounded, or driven from their homes.
This is what congressional surrender buys: more deaths, a larger bill, depleted defenses, and another month added to a war with no authorization and no credible exit.
Trump already showed how these votes are controlled
Bill Cassidy of Louisiana showed how Trump gets these votes in June. Cassidy supported one war powers measure. The next day Trump berated Republican senators at a private lunch and got into a heated argument with him. Cassidy was then invited to the White House for a briefing with JD Vance and envoy Steve Witkoff. He returned to the Capitol and voted against a nearly identical resolution.
That episode stripped away the solemn talk about strategy. A senator exercised Congress’s war power, the president yelled, and the senator reversed himself within hours. Senate leader John Thune called Trump after the second vote and reported that the president was “pleased with the outcome.”
Cassidy voted no again Thursday. Thom Tillis joined Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul, and Susan Collins in voting yes, but most Republican senators stayed where Trump wanted them. Fetterman’s no vote deserves its own condemnation. An unauthorized war does not become lawful because a Democrat helps Republicans preserve it.
The Constitution was designed to resist one man’s temper. The Senate has reorganized itself around avoiding it.
Troops in contact cannot erase Congress
Alaska Republican Dan Sullivan argued that voting to remove forces during active combat puts them at greater risk. “When there are troops in contact, I don’t believe in doing it,” he said. Congress should never order a chaotic overnight retreat to make a point.
But Sullivan’s rule would make every presidential war permanent. A president could place troops in danger, keep them there, and then cite that danger as the reason Congress must remain silent. The longer the fighting continued, the weaker Congress would become. The War Powers Resolution was created in the aftermath of Vietnam because the country had already seen presidents turn escalation into its own excuse.
Congress can direct an orderly withdrawal and fund the force protection required to carry it out. It can debate the mission and authorize it if members believe the war is necessary. What it cannot honestly do is pretend that continuing an unauthorized war is the cautious option.
Republicans running for office know the public is not buying that story. Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee for Michigan’s open Senate seat, now says the war must end quickly. Ashley Hinson and John James made similar statements after both had voted against the House resolution. Nancy Mace, who switched her vote and supported the resolution, predicted a “fucking bloodbath” for Republicans in November.
In Washington, Republicans vote to continue the war. On the campaign trail, they promise to end it. Their position changes with the audience because the votes are about fear of Trump and the promises are about fear of voters.
A lawsuit should not be the last check
On the same day the Senate failed, National Iranian American Council Action filed a federal lawsuit asking a court to declare the war illegal under the Declare War Clause. The plaintiffs include Iranian Americans whose relatives have been killed, wounded, or terrorized by the airstrikes.
The lawsuit now asks a judge to enforce the constitutional limit that Congress refused to defend. The families living with the consequences of this war should not have to carry the burden of making Congress exercise its own power.
The founders divided war powers because one person’s appetite for war was the danger. Trump seized that power. Most Senate Republicans, with Fetterman beside them, chose party obedience over their constitutional duty.
Congress now convenes each week to document its surrender. The eleventh vote failed by one. The twelfth will mean nothing until enough senators fear the people who elected them more than they fear the man who started the war.