Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the United States Constitution grants Congress — and Congress alone — the power to declare war. This is not ambiguous. It is not subject to interpretation. The Founders, who had lived under the tyranny of a monarch who waged wars at will, deliberately placed the most consequential power a government can exercise in the hands of the people's elected representatives.

President Donald Trump launched Operation Shield of Judah — a massive, coordinated military assault on a sovereign nation of 88 million people — without a congressional vote. No declaration of war. No new Authorization for Use of Military Force. No formal notification to congressional leadership beyond what the War Powers Resolution nominally requires.

The Constitution has been mugged. Again.

The Executive Power Creep

To be clear: this is not a uniquely Trumpian sin. The erosion of congressional war-making authority is a bipartisan project spanning seven decades. Truman went to Korea without Congress. Johnson escalated Vietnam on a resolution built on fabricated intelligence. Obama bombed Libya with the legal justification that airstrikes didn't constitute "hostilities" under the War Powers Resolution — a claim so absurd it would be funny if people hadn't died for it.

Trump himself is a repeat offender. The 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani was conducted without congressional authorization. The administration's legal theory — that the strike was justified under Article II self-defense authority because Soleimani represented an "imminent threat" — stretched the concept of imminence beyond recognition.

Shield of Judah takes this executive overreach to a new level. This is not a single targeted killing. It is not a retaliatory strike against a specific threat. It is a full-scale military campaign against a nation-state, involving hundreds of aircraft, naval vessels, and precision munitions across multiple countries. If this isn't war, the word has no meaning.

The War Powers Resolution: A Paper Tiger

The War Powers Resolution of 1973 was supposed to prevent exactly this scenario. Passed over Nixon's veto in the aftermath of Vietnam, it requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of committing armed forces and limits military action to 60 days without congressional authorization.

In practice, it has never worked. Every president since Nixon has considered it an unconstitutional infringement on executive authority. Congress has never enforced it. The 60-day clock has been ignored, circumvented, or legally reinterpreted into meaninglessness.

Senator Rand Paul's demand for an immediate war powers vote is constitutionally correct and politically doomed. No Congress has ever voted to withdraw authorization in the middle of an active military campaign. The political cost of appearing to "abandon the troops" while they're under fire is too high for any member of either party to bear.

What's at Stake

This isn't about Iran. This is about whether the American republic maintains even the pretense of constitutional governance over its most consequential decisions. If a president can launch a war against a nation of 88 million people without the consent of the people's representatives, then the constitutional framework of limited government is decorative — a parchment barrier against the raw exercise of executive power.

The Founders knew this. James Madison wrote that the executive is "the branch of power most interested in war and most prone to it" and that the Constitution therefore "has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war to the Legislature."

Madison would not recognize what we've built. And he would not approve.