When President Donald Trump authorized the military strikes against three Iranian sites suspected as the key to that nation’s attempt to build nuclear weapons, it also started a political firestorm back in the United States.

The reaction from Democrats was immediate. Firebrand New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was perhaps the most direct in her response. In a post on her social media account on X, she wrote, “The President’s disastrous decision to bomb Iran without authorization is a grave violation of the Constitution and Congressional War Powers. He has impulsively risked launching a war that may ensnare us for generations. It is absolutely and clearly grounds for impeachment.”

Other prominent Democrats followed in what was no doubt a coordinated message when they too called the attack “unconstitutional,” with many also calling for the impeachment of the president. However, there are a couple of questions that must be raised. Firstly, was this action unconstitutional? And secondly, what does the historical landscape look like regarding the use of the military by past presidents?

SOURCES:

Ely, John Hart. War and Responsibility: Constitutional Lessons of Vietnam and Its Aftermath. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Fisher, Louis. Presidential War Power. 3rd ed. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2013.

Goldsmith, Jack. Power and Constraint: The Accountable Presidency After 9/11. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012.

Grandin, Greg. Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism. New York: Henry Holt, 2006.

Griffin, Stephen M. Long Wars and the Constitution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Kinzer, Stephen. Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. New York: Times Books, 2006.

LaFeber, Walter. Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America. New York: W.W. Norton, 1983.

Langley, Lester D. The Banana Wars: United States Intervention in the Caribbean, 1898–1934. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985.

Sexton, Jay. The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011.

Schlesinger Jr., Arthur M. The Imperial Presidency. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973.

Smith, Gaddis. The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine: 1945–1993. New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.

U.S. Department of State. Monroe Doctrine (1823). Office of the Historian. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1801-1829/monroe.

Weinberg, Albert K. Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1935.