Like a fun-house mirror, Trump-hatred distorts reality. Congressional Democrats are so anti-Trump, that even when he continues long-standing policy, many reflexively oppose it. Exhibit A is Democrats’ decidedly negative reaction to Trump’s airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities.
Trump isn’t the first president to strike a foreign adversary, nor to do so without a Congressional vote. However, you’d never know that looking at Congressional Democrats’ reactions.
In a statement, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer insisted, “No president should be allowed to unilaterally march this nation into something as consequential as war with erratic threats and no strategy,” certain “the danger of wider, longer, and more devastating war has now dramatically increased.” Schumer wanted to “enforce the War Powers Act” via a Senate vote (that won’t be happening).
Castigating Trump’s actions as violating protocol and inviting disaster on Americans became a theme. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, for example, criticised Trump for failing to “bring peace,” before charging, “Trump misled the country about his intentions, failed to seek congressional authorisation for the use of military force and risks American entanglement in a potentially disastrous war in the Middle East.”
Trump wasn’t only accused of ignoring Congress, though. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed Trump also “ignored the Constitution” and demanded “answers from the Administration on this operation which endangers American lives and risks further escalation.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Jerry Nadler also referenced the Constitution, tweeting that Trump’s bombing “Iran was grossly unconstitutional, since only Congress has the power to declare war.” Nadler prognosticated that there would be “many American, Israeli and Iranian deaths” and urged that this action “be condemned in the strongest possible terms.”
Squad member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez escalated those “strongest possible terms.” She slammed “the President’s disastrous decision to bomb Iran without authorisation,” calling it “a grave violation of the Constitution and Congressional War Powers.” AOC asserted that Trump had “impulsively risked launching a war that may ensnare us for generations,” before declaring this “grounds for impeachment.”
These reactions are seriously off-base. First, they ignore the Iranian regime’s repeatedly harming Americans since 1979. Second, as Orde Kittrie, the former lead U.S. State Department attorney for nuclear affairs and current senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, tweeted, “Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that ‘death to America is not just a slogan, it’s a policy’” as recently as November 2023. And third, for all the talk about Trump’s norm shattering, he followed bipartisan presidential precedent here.
Richard Haas, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, diplomatically addressed “all those critical of @potus for not getting congressional authorization before attacking Iran,” noting they “are overlooking the historical record that since WW2 99% of the time U.S. presidents have used military force it was without explicit prior approval from Congress.”
Kittrie relatedly tweeted that Trump’s not seeking “advance Congressional approval is consistent with how Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden have interpreted and applied the U.S. Constitution and laws addressing presidential war powers.” Clinton’s situation was “a two-week operation in which the United States flew over 2300 sorties over Bosnia in 1995,” while Obama’s was a “U.S. air campaign in Libya in 2011 that lasted for over a week and involved the use of over 600 missiles and precision-guided munitions.”
Every 21st-century president has promised “to use force if necessary to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, Congress has never acted to prohibit or restrict such military action,” Kittrie explained. In fact, the House overwhelmingly voted in November 2023 “that ‘it is the policy of the United States . . . to use all means necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.’”
President Trump further demonstrated zero interest in launching a full-scale war against the Iranian regime. As John Spencer, executive director of the Urban Warfare Institute, tweeted, “The United States is not at war with Iran. The United States has not declared war on Iran. The United States did use military force to assist Israel in achieving a limited goal to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program.” Trump even optimistically announced a ceasefire between Israel and Iran on Monday – that Iran’s regime promptly broke.
In short, Congressional Democrats bollixed things up. Going forward, they’d be wise to learn from former Massachusetts Democratic Congressional candidate Brianna Wu, who rightly observed, “A nation cannot survive if our partisanship overrides our national security.
