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This Is an Unnecessary, Unauthorized, and Unconstitutional War

Congress has a duty to take up War Powers resolutions and assert its primacy over matters of war and peace.

Protesters gather at Federal Plaza on February 28, 2026, in Chicago, Illinois, to demonstrate against the joint US and Israeli military operation in Iran.

On Saturday morning, after President Trump launched an unnecessary, unauthorized, and unconstitutional attack on Iran, US Representative Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie did their jobs as members of Congress.

The California Democrat and the Kentucky Republican had already cosponsored a War Powers Act resolution in hopes of thwarting a rush to war with Iran. Now, the war was on. Bombs were dropping, missiles were flying, and people were dying. So the bipartisan team demanded that Congress step up. Khanna immediately announced, “Trump has launched an illegal regime change war in Iran with American lives at risk. Congress must convene on Monday to vote on US Rep. Thomas Massie and my War Powers Resolution to stop this.”

Seeking to force a congressional debate about the war –as Khanna and Massie are doing in the House, and as Tim Kaine (D-VA) has proposed in the Senate–is a vital first step in pushing back against Trump.

It won’t be easy. Despite a notable level of congressional opposition to Trump’s new war, efforts to establish even the most basic counterbalances to presidential warmaking will face overwhelming odds. House Speaker Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican who serves as Trump’s enforcer in the chamber, will do everything in his power to thwart any meaningful effort to renew the constitutionally mandated role of Congress as the arbiter of matters of war and peace. The same goes for the president.

Yet that does not change the fact that Khanna, Massie, and Kaine are doing their constitutional duty.

Like all members of the House, Khanna and Massie took office only after swearing oaths to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” By reasserting the role of Congress as a check and balance on presidential warmaking, they are honoring that oath.

The question at this point is whether a sufficient number of House members, and their Senate colleagues, will join them and use their authority under the Constitution to object to Trump’s open-ended attack before it metastasizes into a broader war that could engulf the Middle East.

Even as apologists for executive overreach in general—and this president in particular—spin their self-serving arguments regarding war powers, the constitutional........

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