You might think that after the unpopular undeclared wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were ended, Congress would have learned its lesson and refused to allow the President (no matter who he is) to make war without the Constitutionally mandated declaration from Congress. It appears that Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA), have no intention to exercise their Constitutional authority over the war in Iran. At the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, John and Nisha Whitehead excoriate the President and Congress for their failures, writing:

The Trump administration has requested $1.5 trillion for its FY 2027 military budget—separate from an additional $200 billion in emergency funding for the war in Iran.

The sitting president of the United States is spending money that is not his to spend in order to fight endless wars unauthorized by Congress that do nothing to protect the American people or our interests, while insisting that the federal government’s only priority should be the military industrial complex.

In addition to increasing the budget for the military, prisons, nuclear weapons, and a weaponized Justice Department, the Trump administration has also proposed budget cuts of $73 billion to non-military programs—slashing funding for medical research, public schools, and low-income heating assistance, as well as cuts to affordable housing, job training, small-business lending, anti-poverty programs, agriculture, NASA, research in social sciences and economics, humanitarian assistance and global health programs, among others.

As Dominik Lett writes for Cato, “Shifting dollars from domestic programs to the Pentagon is shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic given our mounting fiscal crisis.”

This is how empires fall.

The Constitution does not permit a president to wage war on a whim.

Read more here.