The “No Kings” rallies held over the weekend featured prominent messaging characterizing the American military campaign against Iran as an illegal war conducted without congressional authorization, a claim that legal affairs writer Chris Mondics, whose piece “Why Every President Ignores Congress on War” recently appeared in The Spectator, told Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer has no grounding in law, history, or judicial precedent.
Proft laid out the relevant framework before the conversation began. The War Powers Act of 1973 requires the president to notify Congress within forty-eight hours of deploying forces into hostilities or situations where hostilities are imminent, which the administration satisfied through consultation with the Gang of Eight before strikes commenced and through Trump’s address to the nation the morning after. The act further provides that forces may not remain engaged for more than sixty days without congressional authorization, followed by a mandatory thirty-day withdrawal period, creating an effective ninety-day window. With Trump’s stated goal of a four to six week campaign potentially extending to six to eight weeks based on statements Secretary of State Marco Rubio allegedly made to allies, the operation remains well within that window.
Mondics said the deeper issue is that the Constitution itself contains deliberate ambiguity about which branch of government holds the authority to initiate hostilities, and that federal courts have consistently declined to resolve that ambiguity, treating disputes between Congress and the president over war powers as political rather than legal questions. When Democrats put forward War Powers Resolutions aimed at stopping military operations, they are engaging in politics, not law, and the courts have said so repeatedly across administrations of both parties. The practical consequence is that the phrase illegal war, whatever rhetorical utility it carries for protesters and opposition politicians, simply does not describe a cognizable legal claim that any court is prepared to adjudicate.
He noted that Congress retains a meaningful role through the power of the purse, and that the Pentagon’s recent request for an additional two hundred billion dollars to fund ongoing operations represents exactly the point at which legislative authorization becomes practically relevant. Courts have observed that when Congress funds a military conflict it has not formally declared, that funding itself constitutes a form of endorsement, a practical recognition that the hostilities are legitimate even without a formal declaration of war. The pattern, Mondics said, is entirely typical of how the politics of wartime has played out throughout American history.
On the question of whether an imminent threat existed to justify the strikes, Mondics said the concept is inherently subjective and that no court has established a standard of evidence against which presidential judgment on imminence could be measured or adjudicated. He also pointed to an argument that largely bypasses the imminence debate altogether: the armed conflict between the United States and Iran has been ongoing in various forms for forty-five years, dating to the seizure of American hostages at the Tehran embassy in 1979 and extending through Iran’s supply of the improvised explosive devices that killed and maimed thousands of American troops during the Second Iraq War. When a conflict has that kind of continuous history, the requirement to demonstrate a specific imminent trigger becomes considerably less legally significant.
Mondics drew a distinction between the legal question and the policy question, noting that the more legitimate line of criticism available to opponents of the campaign involves strategic and tactical judgments rather than constitutional ones. Whether the operation is well-planned, whether its objectives are achievable, whether the administration has a clear theory of what success looks like and how to consolidate it, these are all fair subjects of debate. He pointed to the Second Iraq War as a historical example of what happens when a president exercises war powers and the subsequent occupation goes badly, noting that George W. Bush paid a severe political price as voters rendered their own judgment on the outcome. The ultimate accountability mechanism for decisions of this kind, Mondics said, is democratic rather than judicial, and that is precisely where the Constitution intended it to be.