Vietnam

The House passed its own war-powers measure 215-208 on 3 June, but Senate cloture needs 60 votes and only four Republicans, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul and Bill Cassidy, had crossed the aisle; ten more crossovers were needed, and the Senate's next floor slot went to a judicial nomination rather than Iran . The War Powers Resolution, the 1973 law Vietnam's war produced to limit undeclared wars to 60 days, had by then lapsed three times in the conflict without enforcement.

The vote extended a run stretching back to March, when six Democratic senators first forced a floor vote and Senate Republicans blocked it, and to April, when the House rejected a companion resolution 219-212 . Half a century on, the law Born of Vietnam still gives Congress a recorded position on a war but no mechanism to compel a president to stop fighting it.

The Pentagon was reported on 12 May to be considering renaming any resumed Iran operation "Operation Sledgehammer", on the theory that a fresh mission name would restart the 60-day War Powers Resolution clock that had already expired without a congressional vote on 29 April . Legal scholars at the Lawfare Institute and the Brookings Institution called the argument novel but unlikely to survive scrutiny, since the 1973 law attaches its clock to the fighting itself, not to the name attached to a mission.

The manoeuvre is the clearest sign yet that the instrument Vietnam's war forced onto the statute book in 1973 still shapes how a modern administration manages a war's paperwork, even when trying to work around the law rather than through it. No war has been halted by the War Powers Resolution in more than five decades, a record the sledgehammer gambit was designed to extend rather than break.