On a Tuesday afternoon in May, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska walked onto the Senate floor and did something she had not done in six previous chances to do it. She voted to invoke the War Powers Resolution.
She stood with Susan Collins of Maine and Rand Paul of Kentucky, the same two Republicans who had voted for similar measures before, and when it was over and the tally was 50 to 49, Murkowski spoke to reporters in the hallway without much theater. “You’ve got a timeline that has taken us beyond the 60 days,” she told them. “I thought that perhaps we would get more clarity from the administration in terms of where we are, and I haven’t received it.”
Not a floor speech. A statement of fact about waiting and not being answered.
The vote failed. It was the seventh time the Senate has tried to invoke the War Powers Resolution since the United States began joint military strikes with Israel against Iranian facilities in late February. Trump formally notified Congress of the action on March 2, which is when the clock starts under the law. Seven attempts. Seven losses. The latest by a single vote.
That number, one vote, is worth the attention it deserves before the week moves on.
The War Powers Resolution was passed on November 7, 1973, overriding Richard Nixon’s veto by a vote of 284 to 135 in the House and 75 to 18 in the Senate. The context was Vietnam, which had swallowed fifty-eight thousand American lives without a formal declaration of war, funded year after year by a Congress that kept writing the check without ever fully owning the decision. The resolution was supposed to fix that: within sixty days of deploying forces into combat, the president gets congressional authorization or brings the troops home. Written law. Not a suggestion.
What happened next is the kind of story that takes fifty years to tell properly. Reagan went into Grenada. Clinton conducted 78 days of air operations over Kosovo without authorization. Obama in Libya. Trump, in his first term, launched strikes on Syria twice. Each time, the resolution existed. Each time, something else happened. The pattern isn’t complicated: presidents act, Congress objects, the courts mostly stay out, the moment passes. The WPR remains on the books. It just doesn’t, quite, do what it says it does.
This is what I’ve spent forty years watching, not this war specifically but this mechanism, this gap between what the Constitution says about who decides to commit the country to a war and what the country has actually practiced since Korea. Congress ceded that authority slowly, one appropriation and one authorization at a time, through the accumulated urgency of crises that always seemed to demand speed over deliberation. Getting it back turns out to be harder than passing a law. A law is not the same thing as a principle that sticks.
Here is what makes the count harder to read than it first appears.
John Fetterman of Pennsylvania voted with the Republican majority to block the resolution. Fetterman is a Democrat and, by most measures, a progressive. He won his Senate seat in part on the strength of his reputation for saying what he means. He has also been a consistent hawk on Israel, and his position on the broader conflict has put him crosswise with most of his caucus for months. His single vote against the resolution was the margin. Fifty to 49 instead of 51 to 48. One Democrat crossing in one direction swallowed one Republican coming the other way.
The crossings run both ways. Murkowski moves toward the resolution. Fetterman moves away. Both have reasons that make sense to them, and probably reasons beyond those. This is what makes the Senate, at its unromantic best, at least minimally honest about the fact that no position in a hard situation is entirely clean.
The Trump administration’s argument, that the 60-day clock stopped when a ceasefire halted active hostilities before the deadline elapsed, isn’t invented from nothing. The WPR was drafted in the context of sustained ground combat, soldiers in the field, continuous engagement. A strike-and-negotiate campaign that pauses and resumes raises genuine questions about how the 60-day mechanism applies. There are serious lawyers who find the administration’s reading defensible, even if they also find it convenient. Dismissing an argument because the conclusion suits the people making it is its own kind of lazy.
Still. The clock began March 2. The Senate voted May 13. Do the arithmetic.
What this leaves you with, at the end of a week in which an Alaska senator finally voted yes and the resolution still failed, is something that is neither comfort nor despair. The principle is alive. Three Republicans crossed the line. The margin was one vote. The seventh vote against won 50 to 49, which is different from 60 to 40, and very different from 90 to 10.
Congress has been trying, with varying degrees of conviction, to reclaim the war-making authority the Constitution explicitly gave it since the last years of Vietnam. That reclamation hasn’t happened. But the attempts haven’t stopped, and the margins are tightening, and senators who haven’t voted this way before are starting to.
Murkowski said she’d been waiting for clarity. She waited through six votes. On the seventh, she stopped waiting.
These things take the number of tries they take. The War Powers Resolution itself took years of failed legislative attempts before Congress finally passed it in 1973. The principle that generated it, that there’s a constitutional question worth asking about who actually decides to send the country to war, survived Korea and Vietnam and two decades of post-9/11 permanent emergency and came out the other side still generating votes.
Seven tries. Still losing. Still asking.
That’s not nothing. In a week of noise, a handful of senators kept insisting on a question that deserves an answer. They lost again. The question is still on the floor.
