‘They’re traitors’: JD Vance publicly calls Congress attempt to restrain Donald Trunp’s foreign invasions ‘unconstitutional’

In the past week, the U.S. Senate advanced, then narrowly rejected a joint resolution to constrain Trump’s authority to conduct military operations without congressional authorization. Now, JD Vance has publicly called the War Powers Act “fundamentally fake and unconstitutional.”

In the White House on Jan. 8, reporters asked Vance about Congress invoking the War Powers Act to rein in President Donald Trump’s foreign military actions. But the vice president waved the entire statute away as “fake” and “unconstitutional.” He framed the War Powers Resolution as little more than a legal nuisance.

According to Vance, senators who voted against Trump weren’t disagreeing on policy, just “legal technicalities.” He then delivered the line that should have stopped the room cold:

Every president, Democrat or Republican, believes the War Powers Act is fundamentally a fake and unconstitutional law. It’s not going to change anything about how we conduct foreign policy over the next couple of weeks, the next couple of months. That will continue to be how we approach things.

Vance insisted that the War Powers Act would not change how the administration conducts foreign policy. In other words, Congress can pass resolutions. It just shouldn’t expect the White House gang to care. In reflection, it means that Trump’s foreign invasions are not stopping anytime soon.

The statement preemptively rejects Congress’s authority to constrain executive war-making. That’s the very authority the Constitution explicitly grants to Congress, not the President. And ironically, Vance is Yale Law–educated. He, better than anyone, should know exactly what the War Powers Act is and why it exists.

Passed in 1973 after Vietnam, the law was Congress’s attempt to reclaim its Article I power to declare war after decades of executive overreach. It requires presidents to notify Congress when U.S. forces are introduced into hostilities and limits military action without authorization. Presidents often complain about it, but openly declaring it “fake” while still in office is something else entirely.

For Vance, the law is real when it’s convenient, and fake when it isn’t. It’s binding on citizens and optional for presidents. As one X user wrote sarcastically, “Amazing that we have a president and VP who declare laws are fake.” Because this is not how constitutional government works. It is how authoritarian regimes announce that it no longer recognizes limits.

If the War Powers Act is fake, then congressional oversight of war is fake. If congressional oversight is fake, then the president alone decides when, where, and how the U.S. uses military force. One user on X summed it up: the Trump administration “can’t make totalitarianism any clearer.”

Calling the War Powers Act “fake” is not rhetorical flair. It is a declaration that the law exists only if the president agrees with it. And if war powers are fake, what’s next? Surveillance law? Due process? Election law? Vance’s statement, in blunt language, is the administration “telling us they’re traitors” in bold words.