How to Make a War Disappear
The Speaker of the House makes it sound like an infrastructure project.
On Fox News today, the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said about the Iran war:
“This not time for a war powers act. Operation Epic Fury has been declared concluded, and it is, and now we’re into a new project, and that is to get the Strait of Hormuz open. This is about diplomacy And negotiation, you don’t have kinetic warfare right now. You don’t have missiles flying around. So, We’ve got to allow the administration time to finish this and sort it out.”
There is a lot going on in this answer. Let’s break it down:
“This is not time for a war powers act”
Frames a constitutional obligation (the power to declare war) as a matter of timing — something you get around to when conditions are right, rather than a legal requirement triggered by specific facts on the ground.
“Operation Epic Fury has been declared concluded, and it is”
Accepts the executive branch’s unilateral determination that hostilities have ended and ratifies it as fact. “Has been declared” is passive — declared by whom? The administration. “And it is” converts that declaration into reality. In those three words, the Speaker is deferring to the very branch the War Powers Resolution was designed to check.
“Now we’re into a new project”
Reclassifies a naval blockade enforced by 50,000 troops into a “project” — a word that domesticates an act of war into something that sounds like an infrastructure initiative. The “project,” is a result of the war which the president promises to resolve by shooting more missiles.
“This is about diplomacy and negotiation”
Describes the situation as diplomatic while the diplomacy is made possible by military coercion. Forty-five commercial vessels have been turned back by warships. That’s not the absence of hostilities — it’s the textbook definition of gunboat diplomacy. It’s a cousin of when the Secretary of Defense says: “We negotiate with bombs.”
“You don’t have kinetic warfare right now. You don’t have missiles flying around.”
Defines war as the visible, explosive part — if nothing is detonating on camera, it isn’t war. But the War Powers Resolution was written to cover exactly this situation. The legislative history1 specifically defines hostilities to include confrontations where no shots have been fired but a clear and present danger of armed conflict exists.
“We’ve got to allow the administration time to finish this and sort it out”
Recasts Congress’s constitutional role as an interruption — an impatience that should yield to executive competence. The premise is that the administration is handling things and Congress should stay out of the way until it’s done, which is precisely the Vietnam-era dynamic the Resolution was written to prevent.
Imagine your apartment is flooding because of a building-wide pipe problem from the water tank on the roof. You want to call the insurance company — or a lawyer, or the city inspector — but the super says: “The flooding phase is over. We’re in a water removal project now. This is a moisture situation. You don’t need to make that call.” Meanwhile, the water is still pouring in and the super has told the building owner he can turn the pressure back up at any time.
The Congressional Research Service's own explainer, hosted on Congress.gov. quotes House Report 93-287 directly: the term "hostilities" includes not only a situation in which fighting has actually begun, but also "a state of confrontation in which no shots have been fired but where there is a clear and present danger of armed conflict." The word "hostilities" was deliberately substituted for "armed conflict" because it was broader. Just Security published a piece two weeks ago that walks through the legislative history, quotes the same House report language, and argues explicitly that Congress understood hostilities to be broader than "armed conflict" and thus to encompass a state of confrontation in which no shots have been fired, and that although Congress would have been on much stronger footing had that language made it into a definitions section of the bill, it has long been inappropriate for the executive branch to essentially ignore the very clear legislative history and substitute its own preferred interpretation.
Correct on all points! It has always been clear that Mike Johnson is a puppet of the administration, seemingly incapable of independent thought. His playing with terminologies and definitions reminds me of the “Leave It To Beaver”character Eddie Haskell, always sweet talking his way out of trouble.
There you go again, John .... doing your Truth-seeking Missile bit. The pronouncements of the Squeaker of the House rarely survive the light of facts and logic. Thank you for shedding the light yet again.