Americans want Congress to stop the imperial presidency
Follow into
Save into
Follow into
Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week.
Sixty-six percent of voters polled by The Argument believe that the president should be required to get Congressional approval before sending armed forces into action. (Illustration by The Argument using ChatGPT, photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
The Verdict, by Kobe Yank-Jacobs
According to both President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, what the U.S. military is doing in Iran is not a war. That said, as of Friday, the U.S. is moving an additional 10,000 troops and a third aircraft carrier to the region, raising concerns that this suspiciously warlike “conflict” could escalate.
By all accounts, Americans are sick of the conflict, which was started unilaterally by the president. According to new data, they are also ready for Congress to rein it in.
Sixty-six percent of registered voters in The Argument’s latest poll, fielded nationally between September 16th and 22nd**,** believe that the president should be required to get Congressional approval before sending armed forces into action — and only 21% oppose. Almost a majority would go even further: 50% of voters believe that Congress should defund a military action when the president moves ahead without Congressional approval. (Only 26% of respondents oppose this.) Historically, the main enabler of unilateral presidential warmaking has been legislators’ skittishness about reigning in conflicts after they’ve started, but our survey suggests that this is a step that voters feel they are entitled to take.
Now, it would be great if this result was motivated by high-minded respect for the Constitution, which is very clear that Congress is the branch with the power “to declare war,”1 but a closer look at the results suggests the results are heavily influenced by current events. For one, the current war in Iran — initiated unilaterally by President Trump — is the most unpopular war since Vietnam, when compared to Afghanistan, Iraq, and World War II. More voters think that George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq was justified than the current conflict.
There is also a strong partisan slant to our poll results: 94% of people who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 said they think that Congress should approve war, while only 40% of Trump voters said the same. That said, 44% of Trump voters ages 30 to 44 preferred requiring Congressional approval, suggesting younger generations may be closer to consensus on the need for Congressional approval.2
But even if our results reflect anxieties specific to this moment in time, the overwhelming support for Congressional signoff is still a rebuke of what’s become business-as-usual in Washington.
The United States has not actually declared war since World War II. Beginning with the Korean War in 1950, presidents have either ordered troops into combat unilaterally, secured a different form of wartime “authorization” (as George W. Bush did to invade Afghanistan), or plainly abused past authorizations to make war elsewhere. (The Afghanistan authorization was used to justify drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia.) The result is that presidents functionally make war wherever and whenever they want.
In 1991, when asked what he would do if Congress declined to authorize the Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush told a reporter, “I still feel that I have the constitutional authority” — a sentiment later echoed by presidents from Barack Obama to Donald Trump.3
Thankfully, we don’t necessarily need high-minded Constitutionalism to change how things are done. Some of the most substantial reforms to presidential authority have come in response to specific presidents violating a norm or law, including term limits (after FDR), anti-nepotism laws (after JFK), and restrictions on withholding congressionally appropriated funds (after Nixon).
Congressional capitulation
The fact that half of registered voters are open to Congress taking action even after a president moves ahead with a war unilaterally could be the key to reigning in the executive here.
Once presidents take the initiative to launch a combat operation, it’s hard for politicians in Congress to take a vote opposing or reversing it. There is a fundamental asymmetry between a single person with the ability to handle threats quickly and a large deliberative body, lumbering along in its approval, each politician fearful of being seen as unpatriotic. That’s how war powers got out of whack in the first place: The history of U.S. warmaking is the president using dramatic incidents — real or provoked or lied about — to cow Congress into going along.
As early as 1846, James Polk ordered troops into disputed territory between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande to provoke the start of the Mexican-American War. To stir up support for the Spanish-American war in 1898, President William McKinley pointed to the explosion of a ship off the coast of Havana, despite inconclusive evidence about the cause of the explosion. (Later evidence has suggested it may have been an internal issue, not an attack).
In the summer of 1964, the Johnson administration claimed that its ships were innocently patrolling international waters when struck by the North Vietnamese, but they were really 12 miles off the Vietnamese coast, likely trying to draw fire. (The second of the alleged strikes also never happened.)
The modern era has made this dynamic — presidents making war a fait accompli and daring Congress to pull them back — much worse. In 1973, in the waning days of the Vietnam War, Congress tried to restrain presidents by passing the War Powers Resolution. The law generally required presidents to get congressional approval within 60 days or end hostilities, with up to 30 additional days if necessary for a safe withdrawal. But presidents have used that deadline to justify acting unilaterally.
Unfortunately, the law has had the opposite of its intended effect. On paper, it cemented the requirement for Congressional signoff. In practice, it gave presidents the green light for monthslong deployments that sitting members of Congress would end up hesitant to rein in.
The real significance of The Argument’s finding, even if it was heavily motivated by the current war on Iran, may be that the public believes Congress can act forcefully after a president has initiated combat, which is where we most need Congress to be muscular. If the issue is that legislators find it politically untenable to go against a war once it’s started, we now know that, in the abstract at least, the public is on their side.
The founders understood that excessive warmaking would not be due to the flawed character of this or that president but endemic to the office. That’s why they gave the power to Congress. It just so happens that this separation of powers is especially important when a president with a flawed character does take the helm.
Midterm update
Lakshya Jain, our director of political data, uses data from The Argument’s polling operation to inform the Split Ticket 2026 House and Senate models. Here’s his update on the state of play this week:
Democrats remain the firmest of favorites to win the House, thanks to an environment that is even more favorable than it was in 2018: Their win probability is 89%. In the Senate, Democrats have a slight edge, with a 60% chance of winning the chamber thanks to leads in Alaska, Texas, Ohio, and North Carolina. Maine and Iowa are both tossup races, but Democrats only need to flip four of these six to take the chamber. Right now, polling and fundamentals are both so good for them that they’ve got a better-than-even chance of doing exactly that.
These models update every day; bookmark this page to see the odds of each party taking the House and the Senate.
Top stories this week, by Milan Singh
Nikole Hannah-Jones nearly broke the internet with a viral New York Times essay about sending her daughter to one of New York City’s worst-performing schools. While many of her conclusions drew criticism from education experts, there is one point on which Kelsey Piper found herself in firm agreement: Schools around the country are making it more and more difficult for parents to actually evaluate their children’s academic performance — and it’s not only because of grade inflation.
The Argument also released its latest national survey, which focused on how American voters think about war. Lakshya Jain, our director of political data, introduced the findings by highlighting just how incredibly unpopular Trump’s Iran war is with our respondents. Our polling shows that it’s nearly as unpopular as the Vietnam War, which killed over 58,000 Americans. And it’s even less popular than George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
As a liberal, it’s tempting to stay out of public debates about the ultimate ends of human life. Liberal societies need to be able to accommodate private religious and spiritual codes that promote competing visions on this front. But in evading these questions, do we end up ceding ground to those who would degrade not just the political processes we value, but also the moral systems we privately hold dear? In his column this week, Matt Yglesias argues that while liberalism should remain neutral, liberals themselves need to take a stand on bigger questions than they may be comfortable with.
🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟
-
Top Senate Democrats and Republicans released the long-awaited text of a massive reform to the federal permitting regime: the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026 (BAJAA). If passed, the package would make it much easier to build energy projects of all types — but likely with particularly pronounced benefits for clean energy — plus the long-distance transmission needed to efficiently move energy across the country.
-
In other good climate news, the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued a construction permit for the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to build America’s first commercial small modular nuclear reactor. It’s the NRC’s second approval of construction for a new reactor this year, and both reviews were completed months ahead of schedule. Small modular reactors promise much simpler and faster paths to carbon-free nuclear energy than traditional reactors. (TVA will still need a separate operating license before it can run the reactor.)
-
New York City just unveiled 12 “Fast Track Districts” where it will streamline the review process for qualifying affordable housing projects. The districts — which include Manhattan’s Upper East and Upper West Sides, as well as large swaths of South Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Queens — were selected because they have produced the smallest share of the city’s affordable housing over the past five years: just 1% combined. The fast track process, which was approved by the city’s voters last year, is projected to reduce review times from seven months to three.
Worth watching…
There is a spectre haunting Europe: The far-right is on the rise. The AfD just placed first in the Saxony-Anhalt state elections in Germany. Reform UK is projected to come second in the next British general election. France will elect a new president next year, and the polling suggests that Marine Le Pen (or her acolyte Jordan Bardella) is the favorite to win.
Why is this happening? Is it the refusal of the center-left to make compromises on immigration? Or is it the refusal of the left to let people have air conditioning? Matt and Jerusalem discuss all this and more in the latest episode of The Argument podcast.
The only independent in the House of Representatives is waging a lonely fight against the gerrymandering arms race, which both political parties have escalated this cycle. Rep. Kevin Kiley, a former Republican who recently left the party after his district was redrawn, spoke with Lakshya Jain, The Argument’s director of political data, and Zachary Donnini about his decision and the polarization that gerrymandering encourages. “If you fight fire with fire, then the whole world burns,” he said. “There’s absolutely no reason that you should deprive your own citizens of fair representation based upon what some other state is doing.”
What’s News with The Argument
The Argument recommends, by Milan Singh
It’s officially October, and I’m ready for it: no more humidity, layering of outfits, assorted pumpkin spice foods and beverages. What can I say? I’m a bit basic.
To celebrate the arrival of autumn, I asked my esteemed colleagues for their fall-themed recommendations.
“I have no justification for how this is fall themed, but a friend found me in a Little Free Library The Floating Admiral, a detective novel collaboratively written by Agatha Christie, GK Chesterton, and twenty of their Golden Age detective novelist friends,” said staff writer Kelsey Piper. “It was great fun, and now I’m suffering immensely from the fact no one else I know has read it so that I can complain about it with them, so if you have read it, hit me up!”
Kelsey also read John LeCarre’s The Constant Gardener, but “while I love John LeCarre for being the most cynical everything-is-bad-because-of-human-nature-and-always-will-be spy novelist of them all, it hits differently when he’s being cynical about post-colonial Kenya instead of declining imperial Britain, so it was mostly just kind of depressing.”
Gender and culture fellow Maibritt Henkel recommended Julia Jacklin’s new album The Gem, which she said was “perfect for October — think Australian Phoebe Bridgers.” Operations manager Angela Tracy overcame some initial difficulty in narrowing the recommendations down (because “fall is the best time of year,” which is clearly true) but eventually settled on an unconventional-yet-simple dessert: a brûléed squash or sweet potato, riffing on the traditional Japanese winter snack.
The rest of the office was feeling a bit laconic, so I provided some additional incentive by telling them that if they didn’t give me a recommendation, I would have AI do it for them. That seemed to do the trick.
“This might make me sound like a narcissist but I randomly came across this book calledJerusalem the Golden by Margaret Drabble and immediately picked it up for obvious reasons,” said editor Jerusalem Demsas. “It’s a coming-of-age novel about a girl trying to break out of a provincial and constrained upbringing — but she finds out that no matter how far you run you can never escape your mother.”
“AI recommended that I recommend The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and I do, in fact, recommend it,” said senior editor John Thomason of Carson McCullers’s 1940 debut novel. “Alongside Ross McElwee’s 1986 film Sherman’s March, it’s probably the best piece of narrative art ever produced at least partially in (and, I would argue, at least partially by) Charlotte, North Carolina, a city with a well-known reputation for philistinism.”4
Video producer Justin Zuckerman also agreed with AI’s suggested recommendation: Ken Burns’ Baseball, which he’s about halfway through. “It’s around 18 hours of baseball history and lore, with folksy music and even folksier characters! It’s a great way to get excited about the postseason and also get your baseball fix during the winter months.”
Staff Writer Jeremiah Johnson said that he and his wife enjoyed watching “spoopy” — as in, “a mix of spooky and cute,” like The Nightmare Before Christmas — in the lead-up to Halloween.
“All horror media is implicitly fall-themed,” copy editor and fact checker Eli Richman noted, “and since he was robbed in The New York Times' top TV show list, I'll go ahead and recommend the works of Mike Flanagan. All of them…. The Haunting of Hill House gets all the love, and it's hard to argue it isn't deserved. But I'd reserve my biggest praise for Midnight Mass and Before I Wake.”
We have merch!
We have quarter-zips, keychains, hats, and stickers. Each one is a great conversation starter in its own way. Buy them here.
More to read:
Article II makes the president commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy and provides that he commands state militias “when called into the actual service of the United States*.*” In The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton elaborates: “The President will have only the occasional command of such part of the militia of the nation as by legislative provision may be called into the actual service of the Union.”
Sixty-three percent of 18-29 year-old Trump voters supported Congressional approval, though the sample size was too small to be considered good evidence.
In 2013, President Obama said he didn’t think he needed approval but he would seek approval for action in Syria and argued that the country would be “stronger if we take this course,” while this year, President Trump rejected the idea that Congress should even vote, complaining that it would threaten what he called, “My War Powers.”
“Readers with any insight into exactly what influence the Queen City may have had on McCullers during her brief residence in an East Boulevard rooming house should contact me directly,” he added.