Want To Stop the Iran War? Don’t Pay the Bill

With the power of the purse, Congress can pressure the president to stand down in Iran by doing what it usually does best: nothing. 

The U.S. war with Iran passed the seven-month mark this week, and the people in charge of it aren’t exactly inspiring confidence. Trust the plan, President Donald Trump urged Tuesday: “I don’t know if they are going to give up yet, but they’ll give up.” Meanwhile, U.S. Central Command has taken to cold emailing military experts “looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran.”

Congressional opponents of the war seem equally bereft of ideas on how to stop it. Their preferred tool, the 1973 War Powers Resolution (WPR), isn’t doing the job—yet they invoke it again and again, expecting different results. The Senate took another shot last week, missing 49–50. Overall, the House and the Senate have taken 20 such votes since Trump launched the war in February.

When Congress passed the WPR over President Richard Nixon’s veto in 1973, it meant to provide two independent brakes on presidential warmaking. If either of them actually worked, “Operation Epic Fury” would have been over in May—after the war passed the 60-day mark—or in June, when both houses of Congress passed resolutions ordering Trump to withdraw. 

The WPR’s first brake was supposed to operate automatically: Section 5(b) commands the president to “terminate” military operations after 60 days absent congressional authorization. Trump has alternately ignored the deadline or tried to game the system by claiming that each pause in the fighting constitutes a new war and resets the clock.

The second brake, the basis of last week’s Senate vote, was supposed to give Congress a means of voting an illegal war to a close. WPR section 5(c) stipulates that U.S. forces “shall be removed by the President if the Congress so directs by concurrent resolution.”

Three months into the Iran War, Congress so directed. First the House, on June 3, then the Senate, on June 23, passed the same concurrent resolution directing “the President to remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran.” 

Leave aside the old-fashioned notion that, in a constitutional democracy, the legislature is supposed to get a vote before we go to war; under the original plan, a congressional majority would have been enough.

It’s not enough anymore: The Supreme Court broke that mechanism when it struck down the legislative veto in 1983. Now any attempt to halt an illegal war has to be presented to the president who started it, for his signature or veto. Getting past Trump’s veto takes a supermajority of both houses: a higher bar than it would take to impeach and remove him from office. 

Still, there’s a much easier way Congress can pressure the president to stand down. It doesn’t take a supermajority to defund a war. It just takes inaction.

To date, we’ve spent over $40 billion on the president’s Iran adventure, yet Congress has never passed specific appropriations for any of it. The administration has been paying the bills by tapping into Pentagon funds authorized for other purposes, such as military training and readiness.

In 2011, President Barack Obama found enough loose change in the Pentagon budget to bomb Libya for seven months, despite Congress’s refusal to authorize the war. But that illegal war cost less than $2 billion all included. The tab for Trump’s war of choice is currently running $2 billion to $3 billion a month. The problem with off-budget warmaking is, sooner or later, you run out of other programs’ money. 

Facing “an urgent budget shortfall,” the Trump administration requested Epic Fury funds in June. In July, the House passed a budget resolution incorporating the ask. The supplemental request now sits with the Senate, which seems in no particular hurry to comply—they’ll likely take it up after the midterms.

Historically, using the power of the purse has proved “the most effective way to compel a President to take actions regarding use of U.S. military force overseas that he otherwise might not agree to,” the Congressional Research Service has noted. In the past, Congress has wielded that weapon most effectively by attaching strings to funding the president needs and forcing him to wind down unauthorized wars. But here, doing nothing—simply refusing to pass the supplemental—would be a good start.

It might also be the wise move, politically. Already, Republicans on the campaign trail have been desperately distancing themselves from Trump’s folly, echoing the strong voter sentiment that the war needs to end. If there’s a midterm bloodbath, those who return to Capitol Hill may find themselves wondering just how far they should stretch to help Trump prolong a disastrous war he launched without consultation with Congress, let alone a vote.