Congress Can’t Meet Its Own Iran-War Deadline
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Most wars take a long time to achieve quagmire status, but Donald Trump’s Iran war is precocious. Just 60 days have passed since the president formally notified Congress about the military action there, on March 2. (The first air strikes had begun two days earlier.) That makes today the deadline, under the War Powers Resolution (WPR), for the president to end the war, Congress to authorize it, or Trump to invoke a 30-day extension for withdrawal. Even though the deadline is written into law, it seems likely that none of these things will happen. Given a chance to rein in a wildly unpopular, unsuccessful, and likely illegal war, Congress might just do nothing—the latest sign of how ineffectual the body has become. The administration and Republican leaders have decided to pretend the war is simply over, freeing themselves of …
