A mad king’s illegal war on Iran is a cry for regime change...in Washington

It turns out that democracy really does die in darkness — at 1:30 a.m. Eastern time, to be exact.

The pilastered chambers of the U.S. Capitol — where 535 lawmakers who, under the Constitution, wield the sole authority to send the nation to war — were empty when the first cruise missiles slammed into Tehran, 6,300 miles and eight-and-a-half time zones away.

Like Congress, many Americans — only 27% of whom, according to a poll last week, have great confidence in Donald Trump’s ability to make the right decisions about using military force — were likely sound asleep when the war started, perhaps dreaming of the normality of brunch or the dog park on an unseasonably warm Saturday.

Trump was not even in the White House Situation Room — the multi-million-dollar mancave that exists for a commander-in-chief to run our too-frequent military ops — but was instead ensconced at his gilded Florida palace at Mar-a-Lago, addressing the nation in an 8-minute video after a Friday night of partying. His wild uncoiffed midnight hair was crammed under a hat hailing the country whose founding principles he’d just demolished, “USA.”

It’s normal for invaders to attack under the cover of darkness, yet Saturday’s massive attack on Iran — launched jointly with our sister 2020s global pariah, Israel — occurred in bright morning sunshine in downtown Tehran, its streets packed with commuters and school buses at the start of the Arab world’s workweek.

It seems that this time, the dead-of-night deception was aimed at the American people, in an assault on everything the United States was intended to stand for.

While many words will be written or uttered in the coming days about who is winning this U.S.-and-Israel war of choice, the next military targets, the inevitable spike in the price of oil, and the fate of Iran’s tottering democracy, there is one fact that matters more than any other.

This war — and, yes, it is a “war,” with an expected loss of American blood, as Trump himself acknowledged from Mar-a-Lago — is illegal.

Full stop.

Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution hashed out here in Philadelphia could not be more explicit on that point, stating in plain 18th-century English that only Congress has the power “To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water.”

America’s founders knew exactly what they were doing — seeking to prevent one unchecked or unhinged president from arbitrarily launching a lethal conflict that might be in his own best interest, but not the nation’s. “The constitution supposes,” James Madison wrote in 1798, “what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it.”

David Janovsky, acting director of the Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight, told Time Magazine last week that any attack on Iran ordered by White House fiat would be flat-out unconstitutional.

“There’s no indication that there’s any sort of circumstance that would give the president the unilateral authority to order military action.” Janovsky said. “It’s true that presidents have some inherent authority to deploy the military as commander in chief, but that’s really limited to true emergency circumstances where there is an attack underway that needs to be repelled, or maybe an extremely clear imminent attack. But there’s no suggestion that that’s the case today — that would make the strikes illegal."

And it’s not only unconstitutional. An aggressive and unprovoked war — which this unambiguously is — is also a blatant violation of international law and the post-World War global order that we once encouraged with the United Nations, in the hope of preventing the emergence of some future tyrant. Who knew that the greatest threat to world security in the 21st century would come from the current holder of the coveted FIFA Peace Prize™ and the chairman of his own much ballyhooed Board of Peace?

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When the rise of our Cold War national security state after 1945 led to prolonged, unpopular, and undeclared wars in Korea and Vietnam, Congress passed the 1973 War Powers Act that meant to require consultation and its mandated involvement, a seeming solution that is now increasingly honored in the breach.

It’s worth noting that when the George W. Bush regime decided to launch a war of choice against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the early 2000s, its case was larded with lies, including a 16-word whopper that the president uncorked during his 2003 State of the Union address. But a generation ago, Bush, Dick Cheney and their merry band of war criminals at least felt it was necessary to get a congressional authorization and to spend months wooing the public and the pundits.

Trump had a similar chance to lobby the American people and the world in his State of the Union address last week, and he largely whiffed. He included only a brief and perfunctory recitation of the long-standing and, in fairness, justifiable grievances against Iran’s brutal repression of its own people, its nuclear ambition, and its backing of violent proxy groups.

To be sure, we should be alarmed about the destructive threat of nuclear bombs in the hands of unconstrained strongmen backed by religious fanatics — whether that’s in Tehran, Jerusalem, or Washington. And most of the world wants freedom for Iran’s long-repressed masses, but U.S. and Israeli bombs might be the worst possible way to make that happen.

Already, as I write this in the very early hours of the war, there are reports that the bombing of a girl’s school in southern Iran has killed as many as 85 people, most of them innocent children. We are spilling the blood of the very people we are promising to liberate. Are we really expecting to be someday greeted with rose petals?

Again?

Indeed, there are many painful echoes of Bush 43’s disastrous conflict with Iraq, including shameless lying by the commander in chief. Trump’s 3 a.m. claims that Iran poses an “imminent” threat to the United States and is close to developing ballistic missiles that can reach our shores are almost as ludicrous as his Big Lie about the 2020 election.

Just like early 2003, when Iraq opened up to outside weapons inspectors but we invaded them anyway, Trump’s all-attack attack came in spite of reports that Iran was making “significant” concessions at the bargaining table in Geneva, regarding both the nuclear program and the kind of big-money stuff like oil and minerals that warm the heart of our corrupt kleptocracy. All this after Barack Obama had a successful deal, negotiated with years of hard work, to halt Iran’s nuclear enrichment that Trump 45 came in and scuttled because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Trump seems to be bored of peace. For who? For what?

It seems way too spot on that the Pentagon is calling this massive attack “Operation Epic Fury” — a fitting tribute to a president who reportedly launched into an epic Downfall-level rage when even a right-wing Supreme Court struck down his also-unconstitutional tariffs, whose Justice Department is covering up the Jeffrey Epstein files, and who is considering a “national emergency” around the 2026 midterms that smells like a Reichstag fire.

Sure, the Iran War is a massive distraction from Trump’s cratering poll numbers at home, but aggressive war is also just a thing that strutting strongmen do, to consolidate their illegitimate powers. Bush’s Iraq War was the last throes of a decaying democracy, while Trump’s actions are those of an unrestrained dictator — exactly the mad king that Madison sought to warn us about 228 years ago.

So now what?

“Trump has launched an illegal regime change war in Iran with American lives at risk,” Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California, a Bucks County native and a top critic of unchecked militarism, posted on X after the attack. He said he and his GOP renegade ally, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, plan to go ahead Monday with a vote to invoke the War Powers Act — even as the prospect of that vote may be why Trump pushed the button now.

Not only do the odds of success for Khanna and Massie seem dim, but the War Powers Act seems too late yet also too little. In a nation that has pressed impeachment or resignation on four presidents, including Trump 45, Trump 47’s unlawful and murderous war on Iran already seems the worse abuse of presidential power in American history.

A cruise-missile assault aiming to change the government in Iran is, in reality, a desperate plea for regime change in Washington, D.C. Democrats, who could gain power in the House as early as this year thanks to GOP scandals and illness, must make clear that Trump’s impeachment and an end to American autocracy is their main priority.

For now, we have unnecessarily injected ourselves into a long-troubled corner of the world where there are almost no good guys, where theocratic dictators are unceasingly slaughtering the citizens of other theocratic dictators. Maybe that’s because, over the course of 250 increasingly tragic years, the United States has finally become exactly like them.

The only epic fury should be our own.

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