The war powers resolution vote was put to John Kiriakou by a viewer during the 2026 war, who asked what the impact would be if Congress took the president’s war powers away.[1]
The forecast on the programme
The expectation set out on the show was that the vote would fail on the usual lines: a handful of conservatives such as Thomas Massie and Rand Paul voting for the war powers resolution, and a number of Democrats crossing the other way, producing “kind of like a normal vote in Congress that Democrats try to get through that fails.”[1]
Kiriakou’s structural objection
Kiriakou’s own answer set the arithmetic aside and addressed the instrument. Whichever way the vote went, he argued, the measure could not do the work being asked of it.[2]
“Yeah, and if it’s written as a resolution, a sense of the Congress resolution, it’s not going to have any any teeth or authority anyway, if it’s done as as a you know, bill being passed into law, the president’s going to veto it.”[2]
The two branches of that sentence exhaust the options. A sense-of-the-Congress resolution expresses an opinion and binds nobody; a bill binds, and therefore attracts a veto that a divided Congress will not override.[2]
The wider pattern
The assessment matches Kiriakou’s long-running view of congressional oversight of national security, which he has elsewhere described as having effectively ceased in the early 1980s, with the intelligence and judiciary committees acting as “cheerleaders” for the agencies they are meant to supervise.[3]
On the 2026 war specifically, it also fits his account of how the conflict was begun — announced on Truth Social at two in the morning, never explained to the country, and run inside the executive by Marco Rubio over the reported objections of most of the national security leadership. A legislature that was not consulted before the fact is, on Kiriakou’s reading, unlikely to constrain the war after it.[2]
The first morning
The procedural objection was Kiriakou’s first substantive point of the war, and he lost the name of the statute halfway through making it. Trump, he said, had not gone to Congress to invoke “the uh what do you call it act the uh — Oh my god, I’m blanking. I’m so mad right now. The to send forces to the Middle East.” Rall supplied it; Kiriakou thanked him and carried on.[4][5]
The conclusion did not depend on the name: “There certainly has been no congressional declaration of war. So, this is a war crime. It’s illegal. It’s an illegal attack. And it’s completely unprovoked.”[5]
What surprised him that morning was the breadth of the objection in the Senate — “to see how many US senators of both parties are condemning this action” — which he read as evidence of a serious split inside the American government, the same split he credits for the advance warning he received.[4]
Asked later whether the administration had offered any legal theory at all, he said it had not, and gave what he took to be the real one: “We’re doing this because the Israelis told us to.”[6]