Pushback of the Week, March 15, 2026

Senator Rand Paul on War Powers

As a 12-term Congressman and three-time presidential candidate, Ron Paul stood out in many ways, not least because of his opposition to foreign intervention. Though having served himself as a U.S. Air Force flight surgeon, Congressman Paul’s principled anti-war stance led him to propose eliminating overseas bases, reducing the military “to the strictly defensive force envisioned in the Constitution,” and, significantly, only waging wars declared by Congress—a power conferred to Congress by the U.S. Constitution’s Article I, Section 8.

In this respect, Paul’s son, Senator Rand Paul, has shown himself equally willing to push back against unconstitutional bellicosity. Sen. Paul was the lone Republican senator to join with Democrats on a failed March 4 war powers resolution vote (47-53) that would have required congressional authorization for continued U.S. military action in Iran. In contrast, President Trump illustrated his disregard for the constitutional balance of powers by imperiously declaring a week later, “Any time I want it to end, it will end,” adding, “We’re not finished yet.”

After the failed war powers vote, Sen. Paul, who has served in the Senate since 2011, was not shy about calling out his colleagues’ cowardly rubber-stamping behavior and shirking of their constitutional duty:

“The congressional leadership—resigned to their own irrelevance—will gladly hand the president the power to initiate war in exchange for plausible deniability. Congressional leaders want to make the case to voters that they are not to be held accountable at the ballot box because they played no role in the decision to go to war. That is not statemanship. That is shameful.”

Over the course of his political career, Sen. Paul has also stood up for the Constitution on other occasions, for example, in his opposition to renewal of some provisions of the PATRIOT Act and in his description of the Fourth Amendment as “equally as important as the Second Amendment.” It is a sad commentary on the state of the Republican party that it has left Paul to be the sole voice on that side of the Senate aisle to condemn “unilateral actions taken without congressional authorization, as the Constitution commands.”