The United States has assembled its largest military presence in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Two carrier strike groups.
Dozens of fighter jets.
Stealth bombers repositioned across three continents.
An armada sits, poised to attack a powerful nation in the world’s most volatile region, and the silence from many self-described “America First” conservatives is deafening.
Where are the Republican senators who built entire careers warning about executive overreach?
Where are the cable-news constitutionalists who spent the last decade reminding us that the Founders meant what they wrote?
This should be the easiest constitutional call in a generation. And yet… mostly silence.
The power to declare war is not ambiguous. Article I, Section 8 explicitly assigns it to Congress. Not to the President. Not to “the administration.” Not to the Pentagon.
To Congress.
James Madison wrote in 1793 that “the power to declare war, including the power of judging the causes of war, is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature.”
(You’ll note that he didn’t add a footnote about polling numbers or midterm elections.)
Even Alexander Hamilton, who favored a strong executive, acknowledged in Federalist 69 that the President’s authority as commander-in-chief would be “much inferior” to that of the British king, precisely because the power to declare war was reserved to Congress.
They had lived under a monarch who could drag a nation into war on a whim and so they designed a system that made war difficult on purpose.
Wars are easy to start. They are almost impossible to control once begun.
The Framers knew this and made every effort to protect us from war.
So where is the originalist outrage?
Thomas Massie seems to be the only one who gets it. He introduced a War Powers resolution demanding a vote before any strike on Iran. “Congress must vote on war according to our Constitution,” he said. “I will vote to put America First, which means voting against more war in the Middle East.”
Massie’s position isn’t radical (although some try very hard to paint it that way)—it’s textual.
But it’s also lonely.
Because far too many Republicans have decided that constitutional originalism applies only when it’s politically convenient. They’ll quote the Founders when defending the Second Amendment. They’ll invoke federalism when pushing back on domestic mandates. But when a president from their own party begins assembling a massive force abroad without congressional approval, the pocket Constitutions quietly go back in the drawer.
Every president in recent memory has tested this boundary, and every time Congress shrugs, the precedent solidifies.
The justifications keep shifting: it’s about nuclear capability; it’s about regional protests; it’s leverage for a deal; it’s it’s it’s…
It would be smart of us to realize that when the reasoning changes week to week, it’s usually because the reasoning hasn’t actually been done at all.
The last time we assembled this kind of force in the Middle East, Americans were assured it would be swift and decisive. Two decades, trillions of dollars, thousands upon thousands of lives and limbs lost, and families shattered forever later, we know how that story ended.
No thanks. I’ve seen this one before.
Anyone who lived through Iraq and Afghanistan should have a healthy skepticism toward vague objectives backed by massive military buildup.
Several years ago, during another spike in tensions with Iran, we shared a simple image online about the cycle of bombing and retaliation. Some people applauded it, but others called for turning entire cities into craters. One commenter suggested we shouldn’t stop “until there are none of those people left,” while another insisted that nukes would solve the problem.
It’s strange how quickly otherwise decent people can talk about wiping millions of human beings “off the map”.
I remember wondering then whether any of them could even find Tehran on a map. I wondered if they knew it’s a city of universities, ski resorts, families, artists, musicians, sports enthusiasts, and shopkeepers. Just regular people. Just like us. I thought about all parents tucking in their children at night there, just like parents do here.
Are the angry chants we see overseas really that different from the rhetoric some Americans casually type online?
The Founders warned us not just about executive power, but about war fever. They understood something we seem to have to keep relearning: government action abroad creates consequences abroad, and those consequences don’t often stay neatly contained in the places they began.
Ron Paul has long used the term “blowback” to describe this cycle. In his book A Foreign Policy of Freedom, he explains how interventions often generate the very hostility they claim to solve.
It’s the same simple principle we teach kids in The Tuttle Twins and the Golden Rule: aggression tends to invite retaliation. Escalation rarely ends when you want it to. Sometimes, that escalation and retaliation lasts decades. Sometimes even centuries.
Look, we don’t have to be naïve about the Iranian regime to recognize this pattern. We can believe their leaders are dangerous and still insist that the Constitution be followed. We can support a strong national defense and still demand that Congress vote before the nation commits blood and treasure.
In fact, that’s what a constitutional republic requires of us if it's going to last!
We can’t call ourselves constitutionalists only when the Constitution agrees with the people or policies we like. Either the separation of powers matters, or it doesn’t. Either Article I means what it says, or the whole American project is actually just theater.
Patriotism isn’t silence when your own side stretches the rules, and it certainly isn’t cheering for more war. Patriotism is actually the courage to support the founding principles that protect lasting peace and prosperity for ourselves, as well as those who come after us.
Peace is patriotic. I’ll never change my mind on this.
My hope—and my prayer—is that we remember that before the next headline becomes the next war.
— Connor
