WASHINGTON \u2014 U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration argued that a ceasefire with Tehran had “terminated” hostilities as a legal deadline arrived \u200bon Friday for coming to Congress about the two-month Iran war.<\/p>\n
Under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, the president can wage military action for only 60 days before ending it, asking Congress for authorization or seeking a 30-day extension \u200cdue to “unavoidable military necessity regarding the safety of United States Armed Forces” while withdrawing forces.<\/p>\n
The war began on February 28, when Israel and the U.S. began airstrikes on \u2060Iran. On Friday, the Iranian state news agency IRNA said Tehran \u200bhad sent its latest proposal for negotiations with the U.S. \u2060to Pakistani mediators.<\/p>\n
Trump formally notified Congress of the conflict 48 hours after the first airstrikes, starting the 60-day clock that ends \u200cMay 1.<\/p>\n
As that date approached, congressional \u200caides and analysts said they expected the Republican president to sidestep the deadline. A senior Trump administration \u2060official said on Thursday the administration’s view was that the war powers law \u2060deadline did not apply.<\/p>\n
“For War Powers Resolution purposes, the hostilities that began on Saturday, February 28, have terminated,” said the official, requesting anonymity while describing the administration’s thinking.<\/p>\n
No way out: Democratic senator<\/p>\n
Congressional Democrats, who have tried repeatedly to pass war powers legislation that would force Trump to end the war or come to Congress for authorization, dismissed that characterization, saying there was nothing in the 1973 law allowing for a ceasefire.<\/p>\n
They also said the continuing deployment of U.S. ships blockading \u200cIranian oil exports was evidence of continuing hostility, not a ceasefire.<\/p>\n
“After sixty days of conflict, \u200bPresident Trump still does not have a strategy or way out for this poorly planned war,” Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement calling the deadline “a clear legal threshold” for Trump to act.<\/p>\n
Party loyalty as elections loom<\/p>\n
Trump’s fellow Republicans, who hold slim majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives and rarely break from Trump, have voted almost unanimously to block every resolution seeking to end the conflict.<\/p>\n
The Iran war has killed thousands, caused billions of dollars in damage and roiled world markets, disrupting energy shipments and boosting a \u200bwide range of consumer prices.<\/p>\n
Polls show the war is unpopular among Americans, six months before the November elections that will determine who controls Congress next year.<\/p>\n
Trump’s approval rating sank to the lowest level of his current term this week, as Americans blamed the war for higher prices.<\/p>\n
The U.S. Constitution says only Congress, not the president, can declare war, but that restriction does not apply to short-term operations or to counter an immediate threat.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, Trump received a briefing on plans for fresh military strikes to compel Iran to negotiate an end to the conflict.<\/p>\n
If fighting resumes, Trump can tell lawmakers he \u200chas started a new 60-day clock. \u200bPresidents from both parties have repeatedly done so when waging intermittent hostilities since \u200cCongress passed the War Powers Act in \u2060response to the Vietnam \u200bWar.<\/p>\n
That conflict, widely unpopular with Americans, was also not authorized by Congress.<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON \u2014 U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration argued that a ceasefire with Tehran had “terminated” hostilities as a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":93407,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[551,550,553,34,552,558,42,555,556,549,554,547,557,548],"class_list":{"0":"post-93406","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-iran","8":"tag-cars","9":"tag-classifieds","10":"tag-homes","11":"tag-iran","12":"tag-jobs","13":"tag-local","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-radio","16":"tag-salt-lake","17":"tag-sports","18":"tag-television","19":"tag-traffic","20":"tag-utah","21":"tag-weather"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116501167651767020","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93406\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/93407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}