Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) already knows what disloyalty costs. President Donald Trump backed his primary opponent in May and ended his Senate career over it. On Tuesday, with nothing left to lose, Cassidy cast a vote that proves exactly why he was targeted in the first place. He tried to rein in Trump’s war powers in Iran.
It did not matter. The resolution failed 47 to 48. It was the eighth time Congress had voted on whether to check the president’s authority to wage war in Iran. It has failed eight times.
Eight votes. Eight failures. The arguments were not weak. The political cost of voting your conscience on a war you did not declare has simply become higher than the cost of rubber-stamping one you did not authorize.
The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to declare war. The framers tucked the war power into Article I, Section 8, right after the power to coin money. They meant for both to belong to Congress, not one person. The framers were explicit about why. A single person deciding when the nation goes to war is how monarchies work. A nation of laws decides collectively, through the body closest to the people who actually fight and pay for it.
Iran has tested that design, and the design lost. The conflict began without explicit congressional authorization, expanding rapidly after killing Iran’s supreme leader and several senior figures in Tehran, while American troops died in retaliatory strikes. Congress has voted eight times, across the House and the Senate, on resolutions that would have forced a real debate about whether this war should continue. Every single one has failed.
This pattern started long before Iran. Congress authorized the Gulf War in 1991. It authorized Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2002, respectively. Those authorizations have since been stretched to justify military action in numerous countries that Congress never specifically voted to approve. Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, Libya, Syria, and now Iran were all entered into through some combination of presidential assertion and congressional silence. Silence has become the default position of the legislative branch on the most consequential decision a government can make.
This carries a real cost. When Congress cedes the war power, it also cedes oversight, funding accountability, and the basic check that prevents a single administration from committing the country to open-ended conflict on its own judgment.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) said his office had to request the text of the agreement and a briefing from the Trump administration. “Since I’ve been in this job, we haven’t had this issue,” he said, acknowledging it is unusual for a president to withhold details of a major international agreement from his own party’s leadership. Lawmakers are negotiating a deal whose terms remain secret, for a war they never authorized, and now they are being asked to ratify whatever comes of it after the fact.
CASSIDY CALLS TRUMP’S DEAL WITH IRAN ‘WORST FOREIGN POLICY BLUNDER IN DECADES’
This is the same instinct driving the purges happening inside the Republican Party right now. Loyalty has replaced judgment as the currency that keeps a member in office. Cassidy found that out the hard way in May. He voted his conscience anyway on his way out, which only proves the point. But the system did not reward him for it. In fact, it fired him for less.
Congress does not need a new law to fix this. It needs the will to use the power it already has. That will has been missing for decades, and nothing about Tuesday’s vote suggests it is coming back soon.
Tony Vanderhoef is a law student at Florida State University specializing in legislative and administrative law and a Young Voices senior contributor whose work on policy and congressional affairs has appeared in the Washington Examiner and the Hill.