This war raises three questions worth separating. Should the US be fighting Iran at all? Does the President have the legal authority to do it without Congress? And if Congress disagrees, can it make him stop?

The first is a genuinely open debate: how much weight to put on keeping Iran from ever building a nuclear weapon, Israel’s ability to defend itself, and the economic stakes of a shipping chokepoint carrying roughly a fifth of the world’s oil. The second has a clear practical answer, if not a settled constitutional one: yes, presidents of both parties have exercised this authority for decades regardless of who controls Congress. The third is close to no: short of a veto-proof two-thirds majority in both chambers, Congress’s tools amount to objection, not enforcement.

Iran has had two ceasefires collapse in five months, not one continuous war. It began February 28, 2026, when US and Israeli forces struck Iran’s nuclear facilities, military infrastructure, and leadership in roughly 900 strikes over twelve hours, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Iran retaliated against US and Israeli targets, including tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, and closed the strait. A ceasefire held from April 8 but broke down after Israel struck Lebanon and Iran refused to reopen the strait; Islamabad talks collapsed April 12-13, and the US imposed a naval blockade.

After more fighting in early June, the two sides reached a framework June 15. Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian signed a formal memorandum of understanding June 17, Trump at Versailles, Pezeshkian in Tehran. Its 14 points declared a permanent end to hostilities on every front, including Lebanon; set a 60-day window to negotiate enrichment levels and sanctions relief; and required Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile to be down-blended, diluted with lower-enriched material until unusable for a weapon, under International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) supervision. The blockade lifted immediately.

That ceasefire lasted three weeks. It fully collapsed July 8: Iran allegedly struck commercial ships in Hormuz, the US struck Iranian territory, and Iran struck US bases in the Gulf. Trump notified Congress of the resumed strikes July 10; the blockade returned July 14. Schiff’s office says Trump has also floated a new fee on cargo transiting the strait.

Neither ceasefire touched the real sticking point: Iran’s nuclear program. The US wants zero enrichment and the dismantling of Iran’s three main sites, Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan; Iran has refused both. The 60-day window the June memorandum set aside to negotiate that never got used.

Congress’s failed attempts to end conflict are likely read in Tehran as limited American appetite for a prolonged fight, and Iran’s decision to keep striking and re-close the strait suggests it may be testing that read. That’s inference, not fact, but a plausible one: Congress has taken roughly a dozen votes trying to end this war with nothing to show for it.

That same leverage gap is why the fight moved to the defense bill. A war-powers resolution never had power to bind the President; blocking a $1.15 trillion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) does, since it’s the one thing the administration needs from Congress on a deadline. Whether that leverage works is separate from whether it exists, and blocking troop pay and military construction over a war dispute is a real political risk for the Democrats holding it up in a midterm year. Republicans are already framing it that way; the administration may be counting on that pressure more than on winning the argument.

On the resumed fighting. Israel and the US trace this round to Hezbollah, not to any Israeli or American breach: Hezbollah fired rockets and drones at Israel in early June, and Israel’s June 7 Beirut strike, which Netanyahu’s and Defense Minister Israel Katz’s joint statement called a hit on a Hezbollah command center, was framed as the response. The US said it supports Israel’s right to self-defense on that basis. Iran and Hezbollah count that same strike as the actual breach, citing it when Iran re-closed Hormuz. Each side calls its own move the response, not the provocation, and no neutral party has adjudicated either claim. July 8 followed the same pattern: Iran allegedly struck shipping first, and Washington framed what followed as retaliation.

On the President’s authority. Presidents of both parties have claimed this power under Article II without new authorization, and gotten away with it. Reagan invaded Grenada in 1983 without consulting Congress. Clinton kept bombing Kosovo for two months in 1999 after the House tied 213-213 on authorizing it, and Congress funded the campaign anyway once it ended; members who sued lost for lack of standing. Obama ran an eight-month NATO campaign in Libya in 2011 on the theory it wasn’t “hostilities” under the War Powers Resolution. Trump ordered the 2020 strike on Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and struck Syria in 2017 and 2018, both on Office of Legal Counsel advice that Article II covered it. Schiff, Kaine, and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer say this case differs: the 60-day clock triggered by Trump’s March 2 notification ran out before the June ceasefire began, and the administration’s May 1 letter claiming hostilities had “terminated” is contradicted by strikes continuing through it. Thirty-eight Senate Democrats have asked for the Office of Legal Counsel opinion behind that claim; it hasn’t been released.

On the NDAA. Senate Democrats, led by Armed Services ranking member Jack Reed, call funding a $1.15 trillion defense bill mid-war retroactive approval of it, and separately object to its topline. Republican Armed Services Chairman Roger Wicker called the cloture failure “unprecedented”: the bill cleared committee 18-9 in June, and NDAA has passed every year for six decades.

What’s actually at stake in these three fights: whether the war continues at all, whether US troops get paid on time this year, and whether either chamber gets a real answer on the war’s cost and legal basis before voters do in November.

Congress has no current, complete cost figure for this war. Pentagon comptroller nominee Jules Hurst told the Senate Armed Services Committee July 14 that the last estimate, $29 billion as of May, excluded damage to US installations from Iranian retaliation; he wouldn’t update it, saying his comptroller duties lapsed once he was nominated to the post permanently in May. Sen. Angus King pressed him and other nominees and got nothing further. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and colleagues have separately asked the Congressional Budget Office for an independent figure rather than rely on the Pentagon’s own accounting; that hasn’t happened either.

A war-powers resolution can pass the Senate and change nothing, by design. The concurrent resolution that passed both chambers June 23, H.Con.Res. 86, was never going to bind anyone: it doesn’t go to the President for signature and carries no legal force, only a statement of position. Real enforcement needs either a joint resolution the President signs himself, meaning he’d personally certify he should stop acting as Commander in Chief mid-conflict, which no president is going to do, or a veto override by two-thirds of both chambers. That’s the real bar: not a Senate majority, a veto-proof supermajority.

Schiff’s new resolution, filed with Kaine, Sen. Andy Kim, Sen. Jeff Merkley, and Sen. Chris Van Hollen, is privileged, letting him force a floor vote as soon as the week of July 20 without leadership’s help. Thune’s motion to reconsider the NDAA cloture vote has no set date. Neither changes the mechanics above: a war-powers resolution still can’t bind the President even if it passes again, and the NDAA likely needs some resolution of the Iran dispute, not a change of heart on defense spending, before it moves.

The bigger question, closer to where the real public debate sits, is what peace with Iran and a good outcome for the US and Israel actually looks like. Congress has real cross-party agreement on the stated goals: Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney and Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman co-led a resolution backing Israel’s right to defend itself and dismantle Iran’s enrichment capability, and a separate House resolution this year did the same on Iran never getting a nuclear weapon. A nuclear-armed Iran being unacceptable, and Israel’s right to defend itself, aren’t seriously disputed between the parties.

The disagreement is over how much continued US military involvement either goal requires, and for how long. Polling and members’ own statements point to real unease, concentrated among most Democrats and some Republicans, about the scale of continuing support even as the underlying goals hold. That’s the genuine open debate, and it sits above the funding fight, not beside it.

Whether Congress could decouple a war-authorization vote from the NDAA is downstream of that debate, not a substitute for it. Nothing requires Democrats’ objection to the war and the defense bill to stay linked; a standalone vote on Iran authorization, separate from the $1.15 trillion NDAA, would let both sides get an up-or-down answer without holding troop pay and military construction hostage to it. That only becomes live once Congress is closer to answering the bigger question. Republicans haven’t offered that split, and Democrats haven’t asked for it as an alternative to blocking cloture.