President Donald Trump has until May 1 to win approval from the United States Congress to continue military action, or the War Powers Resolution will force the issue into a legal and political showdown. The clock is already running, and Congress has not passed the authorization needed to keep the deployments going.
The deadline matters because the law gives Trump only 60 days to keep forces in an ongoing conflict unless both the House of Representatives and the Senate approve a joint resolution by simple majority. It also requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of starting military action, and it allows just one 30-day extension if the president certifies in writing that continuing armed force is necessary because of unavoidable military necessity.
Maryam Jamshidi said that beyond the 90-day window, the president must terminate the deployment if Congress has not declared war or otherwise authorized continued military action. That makes May 1 the point at which the administration either secures a legislative green light or runs headlong into a statute written to restrain presidential war-making.
On Wednesday, Trump announced an extension of the ceasefire with Iran and did not give a deadline for when talks might resume. A day earlier, on April 15, a fourth bipartisan effort in the Senate to curb his authority under the War Powers Resolution failed 52-47, a sign that congressional Republicans have largely declined to interfere during the period the law gives them.
That reluctance has drawn sharp criticism from Democrats and a few Republicans who say the White House should not be allowed to continue without a vote. Senator Chris Murphy said it was extraordinary that Senate Republican leadership had declined to do any oversight of a war costing billions of dollars every week. Senator John Curtis said he supports the president’s actions in defense of American lives and interests, but would not back ongoing military action beyond 60 days without congressional approval. Representative Don Bacon was blunter: “By law, we’ve got to either approve continued operations or stop.”
Passed in 1973, the War Powers Resolution was designed to limit a president’s authority to involve the country in armed conflict overseas, yet past presidents have often bypassed it by relying on other claims of authority. The clash now playing out over Iran exposes the same fault line that has long defined the law: Congress can restrain a war only if it can first agree to act. With May 1 approaching, that agreement is still missing.
