Trump v. United States was built on Youngstown’s logic. It should be bound by Youngstown’s limits.
The United States has been at war with Iran for eight weeks. Operation Epic Fury, the joint U.S.–Israeli campaign launched on February 28, 2026, has killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, struck targets across twenty-four provinces, and left at least 1,443 Iranian civilians dead—including 217 children. Among the documented strikes: a Tomahawk missile that hit Shajareh Tayyebeh Primary School in Minab, killing at least 175 people, 108 of them children. The Pentagon has requested more than $200 billion in supplemental funding. Congress has not authorized any of it.
The illegality of this war is by now well documented. The War Powers Resolution required withdrawal from unauthorized hostilities after sixty days; the clock expires around April 29, and no authorization has been forthcoming. The Senate rejected a war powers resolution 47–53 on March 4. The House rejected another on April 12 by a vote of 219–212. Under international law, the strikes were launched without Security Council authorization and without credible evidence of an imminent threat. Lawmakers briefed on the intelligence have said as much, and the former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center stated in his resignation letter that “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation.” Over one hundred international law scholars have warned that the strikes violate the U.N. Charter and may constitute war crimes.
But establishing that the war is illegal does not answer the question that follows: can anyone be held accountable? In this commentary, I’ll talk about the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Trump v. United States and Youngstown framework in answering this question.
The Immunity Framework
In Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024), the Court created a three-tier framework for presidential criminal immunity. Actions within the President’s “conclusive and preclusive” constitutional authority, core executive powers like the pardon, receive absolute immunity. Other official acts receive presumptive immunity, which can be overcome only if the government shows that prosecution would “pose no dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.” Unofficial acts receive no immunity at all.
Applied to the Iran conflict, this framework undermines the accountability question. Almost any use-of-force decision can be characterized as official conduct taken in the name of national security. If that characterization alone drives the immunity analysis, then the war context will predictably drift toward maximum protection, even when the war itself is unlawful. But luckily, the Court in Trump qualified this framework. The Court expressly stated that the reasons justifying absolute immunity for acts within the President’s exclusive authority “do not extend” in the same way to areas where authority is shared with Congress.
That qualifier can be extended to the war powers context, because war powers are paradigmatically shared. The U.S. Constitution Article II Section 2 Commander-in-Chief Clause sits alongside Congress’s power to declare war, raise and support armies, and appropriate funds for military operations. If any domain of presidential action falls outside the “conclusive and preclusive” sphere, it should be this one. Under the Trump court’s logic, decisions to launch, escalate, or prolong hostilities cannot receive absolute immunity. At most, they receive presumptive immunity, and that presumption is contestable.
Youngstown and the Strength of the Presumption
The question then becomes: how strong is the presumption? The Court in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer provides us with another framework. Justice Jackson’s concurrence divided presidential action into three categories: maximum authority when the President acts with congressional authorization (Category One), uncertain authority when Congress is silent (Category Two), and minimum authority—the “lowest ebb”—when the President acts against the express or implied will of Congress (Category Three). 343 U.S. 579, 637–38 (1952).
The Iran War sits in or near Category Three. Congress has not authorized the conflict. The administration’s briefings to Congress have been so inadequate that even House Armed Services Committee Chair Mike Rogers, a Republican, publicly complained that basic questions about the war’s scope and objectives went unanswered. Both chambers have voted on war powers resolutions; both resolutions failed, but neither chamber has voted to authorize the conflict. And Congress holds the purse: the Appropriations Clause of Article I, Section 9 provides that “no Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” If Congress narrows, delays, or refuses the Pentagon’s $200 billion request, that denial should be taken as an expression of implied Congressional disapproval, which pushes the President further into Category Three.
This was the central insight of David Barron and Martin Lederman’s landmark study of war powers at the lowest ebb: Congress has historically operated through legislatively imposed limitations on the Commander in Chief, and the executive branch has generally accepted those constraints as legitimate. There is, they wrote, “surprisingly little historical evidence supporting the notion that the conduct of military campaigns is beyond legislative control.” The Iran War is testing that proposition in real time.
Connecting the Two Frameworks
The Trump immunity framework and the Youngstown power framework are not separate doctrinal universes. The Court in Trump invoked Jackson’s Youngstown concurrence a dozen times to justify its immunity scheme. In a recent article, Professor Katherine Shaw of the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School argued that the Court “inverted” Jackson’s core premises. I make a complementary argument: if Trump’s framework is built on Youngstown’s logic, it should be bound by Youngstown’s limits.
A President who wages war with congressional authorization, operating in Youngstown Category One, has the strongest claim to presumptive immunity. Prosecuting such a President’s wartime decisions genuinely risks intruding on the combined authority of both political branches. That is what the Trump Court was worried about. But a President who wages war at Youngstown’s “lowest ebb,” against the express or implied will of Congress, has the weakest claim. His actions lack legislative support. The Trump Court’s separation of powers concerns, that prosecution would chill legitimate executive action, carry far less weight when the action in question is one that Congress has specifically resisted.
In the Iran case, the President acts without authorization, against bipartisan calls for transparency, and in the face of congressional refusal to fund the war as requested. The War Crimes Act makes it a federal offense to commit a war crime, punishable by life imprisonment or, where death results, the death penalty. Whether 18 U.S.C. Section 2441 reaches the President’s targeting decisions remains unresolved by the legislative branch.
The Constitutional Inversion
Domestic prosecution remains unlikely in practice. International accountability is theoretically broader, Iran has filed a declaration accepting ICC jurisdiction over crimes committed on its territory since February 28, but practically constrained by political realities and the limits of jurisdictional reach. The dominant accountability mechanisms remain largely political: authorization, appropriations, oversight, and at the extreme, impeachment.
If prosecution is foreclosed as a back-end constraint on presidential uses of force, then the constitutional system must rely on front-end checks. That makes Congress’s war powers both politically important and doctrinally essential. The Youngstown immunity connection matters even if no prosecution ever materializes, because it shapes the legal architecture within which Congress acts. A President whose immunity weakens as he moves toward Category Three faces different incentives than one who enjoys blanket protection regardless of what Congress does.
The War Powers Resolution’s Section 5(c) resolution requiring withdrawal was designed to ensure that the same simple majority sufficient to authorize force would also suffice to terminate it. INS v. Chadha, 462 U.S. 919 (1983), cast that mechanism into constitutional doubt by invalidating legislative vetoes. The result is an inversion of the Constitution’s design: it is now harder to end a war than to start one. Getting in requires unilateral executive action. Getting out requires a congressional supermajority capable of overriding a veto. No principle of constitutional structure justifies that outcome. And no principle of presidential immunity should compound it.
Katherine Wu is a J.D. candidate at Stanford Law School.
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