By Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday, February 23, 2026
‘President Trump,” reports NPR, “says he hasn’t decided
whether he’ll launch a military strike on Iran.”
This is a remarkable sentence for a citizen of a free
republic to read. All that elegant constitutional infrastructure, all that
cluttered democratic input, and we’re sitting around waiting to see if he
has decided whether he’ll launch a war with Iran. There are 435 members
of the House of Representatives, there are 100 members of the Senate, and yet
the most sacred decision that a nation’s political leadership can take will
come down to one man’s mood. We might wake up tomorrow and discover that the
United States is engaged in Persia, and we might not. Who knows? Better hope
the president sleeps well tonight.
I am of the view that, absent congressional
authorization, it is unconstitutional for the president to make a substantive,
non-defensive change to America’s foreign policy. By design, the war-making
power lies with the legislature, and what is currently being mooted by the
Trump administration is closer to a declaration of war than to any of the
semantic alternatives.
At a push, one could characterize last year’s strikes on
Iran’s enrichment facilities as a responsive act, on the grounds that the
United States had limited time to prevent its acquisition of a nuclear weapon,
and that legislative debate was therefore impossible. Likewise, when the
protests of late last year began in earnest, and reports surfaced that tens of
thousands of Iranians were being killed for their defiance, one could have
plausibly defended an intervention with the understanding that to wait would
have been to accept an indefensible number of deaths. But this time? This time,
there is no such “hook.” It is true, no doubt, that Iran is an adversary of the
United States, that Iran is seeking to obtain weapons that the United States
does not wish it to have, and that, in various places around the world, Iran is
directly or indirectly involved in attacks on American personnel. But this was
also true 40 years ago. If the United States has finally decided that Iran’s
government must be changed, that is understandable. But, by definition, that
would represent a profound alteration in American policy — one of the sort that
Congress, not the executive branch, has been empowered to design.
Perhaps you dissent from my legal view. That’s fine. Many
do — including
some I admire. But the Constitution aside, would it not, as a matter of
elementary political hygiene, be better for a decision of this magnitude to be
made out in the open, rather than behind closed doors? If President Trump
decides to go into Iran, that decision will be permanent. In an instant, we
will all be committed to the course, with the only opportunity to push back
coming after the fact. Instinctively, I am open to the argument that Iran is a
big enough problem to warrant extraordinary measures. But I would like to hear
the matter debated by people of different opinions, from different places, and
with different agendas to advance. This administration has not, at any point,
made an extended case for broader intervention in Iran. Indeed, one of the
views for which its leader, Donald Trump, is most famous is that the United
States should not get involved in any more conflicts of choice in the Middle
East. If that has changed, the change ought to be accounted for — and not
implicitly, by means of an order that is reported ex nihilo on CNN, but
explicitly, over the course of a number of days, with the eyes of the voters
trained on its advocates. One of the key advantages of a legislature is that it
contains multiple people who wield equal power. The president is the undisputed
master of the executive branch, with all others subordinate to his authority.
But the lawmaker? He has one vote, the same as everyone else, and is thus
required to account for his position with his wits rather than his sovereignty.
I would like to see my representatives do this — not only so that I might hear
their explications, but so that I can hold them to their word at the ballot box
the next time I get a chance. To rob me of that opportunity is a sin.
Since the presidency of Harry Truman, the habit of our
politics has been for the president to make most of the decisions related to
war and peace, and for the Congress to timorously acquiesce until it could no
longer stomach its own impotence. In making this plea, I am thus aware that I
am fighting against the tide. Still, I might ask those who have grown
accustomed to this practice whether they believe that its results have been
happy. By and large, have our president-led wars worked out well? All in all, has
Congress’s abdication of its role made our system of government more
functional, our politics more harmonious, and our ability to assign blame
easier? Or has it been a slow-motion disaster that ought to be rethought from
the ground up, lest one again read casually in the newspapers that the
temporary custodian of the executive branch is flirting casually with taking
the country unto the breach?
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