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 any need to act. In a letter to Congress, obtained by Politico, the White House claims that the war has “terminated” because of the current cease-fire. House Speaker Mike Johnson has adopted a similar line. “We are not at war,” he told NBC News yesterday. “I don’t think we have an active, kinetic military bombing, firing, or anything like that. Right now, we are trying to broker a peace.”This is absurd. Trump’s interpretation would allow a president to engineer cease-fires every two weeks to escape congressional involvement. The war is not over in any sense: Thousands of service members are deployed, thousands of ships are trapped in the Persian Gulf, and negotiations with Iran haven’t just stalled—they barely seem to exist. The president has resorted to threatening Iran with a meme depicting himself wielding an assault rifle in front of explosions and the caption No More Mr. Nice Guy!The war’s existence is itself a sign of Congress’s weakness. The Constit