US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has argued that the clock has paused on a deadline for the Trump administration to seek approval from Congress for the US-Israeli war with Iran. Hegseth was responding to questions from members of the Senate, or upper chamber, on Thursday. Friday is the 60th day since Trump formally notified Congress of the strikes against Iran on 2 March. US law requires a president to “terminate any use of United States Armed Forces” within 60 days of such a notification - unless Congress allows a continuation. A senior administration official said hostilities with Iran had “terminated”, emphasising that a ceasefire had been in effect since early April. Despite the ceasefire, the two sides have not yet reached a longer-term deal via talks, though efforts to end the stalemate appear to be underway.

  • immutable@lemmy.zip
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    12 hours ago

    By this logic as long as the executive branch filed a new report once a week with a new operation name they could commit US forces to a theater of war indefinitely.

    Clearly this is against both the spirit and the letter of the law, but I have no faith that congress will fight to enforce it or if they did that the Supreme Court would do fuck all to stop it.

    We find ourselves in “they thought they were free”

    And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.