Week 29: The Clock Nobody's Watching

Max: Quick question before we even say hello. When's the last time Congress actually voted to send Americans into a shooting war? Blake: Take your time. Max: Because right now Fortune's got a naval historian calling what's happening in the Strait of Hormuz an undeclared naval war. No vote, no declaration, just missiles and oil prices jumping every time one lands. Blake: That's interesting. Max: Yeah, there it is. All right. Hello, I'm Max. Blake: And I'm Blake. Max: This is the Common Thread. Blake: Today we're looking at one pattern across three fronts—Iran, Congress and Taiwan. Max: First, how a June ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran fell apart in six days. And what that's doing Blake: Wow! Max: to shipping traffic through Hormuz. Blake: Then we walk the actual War Powers Resolution time line-the notification, the deadline, the letter the administration says "restarts the clock. Max: Wait, restarts it? Blake: We'll get into that. Max: Fair enough. We'll also do the math on what all this means at the gas pump. Blake: Assuming the refinery cushion holds. Max: And later, while everyone's watching the Gulf, there's a Chinese naval build up near Taiwan nobody's talking about. Thinking about?" Blake: We'll ask what happens when the checks on executive power just don't check. Max: Heavy episode. Blake: Good one, though. Max: So, six days in the Gulf, zero votes in Congress: here's how it happened. Six days, six straight days of the U.S. and Iran trading strikes and nobody in Washington's calling this what it actually is, Blake: What is it? Max: a naval war, undeclared but real. Bloomberg's tracking day six of these counterattacks as of July 17, and CENTCOM says it's hit over 300 targets inside Iran since the weekend. Blake: Three hundred targets, zero declarations of war. Max: One single night reportedly hit a hundred and forty targets. Blake: Wow! And you feel that at the pump. Max: You do." Brent crude jumped more than four percent, pushing towards seventy eight dollars a barrel right after Iran struck a Cyprus-flagged container ship transiting the Strait of Hormuz? Blake: Walk me through the sequence, though. Back in June there was a signed memorandum of understanding-a ceasefire. Max: Right, the April ceasefire; then Trump told reporters at the NATO summit it was was over called Iranian officials scum. That's ABC News' timeline of it. Blake: A blow-up at a summit ends a negotiated deal that fast? Max: That's the timeline. Iran hit commercial vessels, the U.S. hit back twice more, and Fortune's reporting straight-up Hormuz traffic has collapsed to a handful of ships a day now. A handful. Ships going dark, turning off their transponders so they don't become targets. Yes. That's from Fortune's own reporting out of the street. Blake: There's a naval historian quoted in that piece. Max: Sal Mercogliano, he called this an undeclared naval war and said that kind of war can escalate! Blake: That's the line that should worry people. Max: So here's my question: none of this got a congressional vote; how is any of it legal? Blake: So, rewind six weeks before any of this, February 28th: Trump notifies Congress an operation against Iran has started, day one of the War Powers Clock. Max: 60 days, ticking towards May 1st. Blake: May 1st exactly, and when that date hit, the administration didn't ask Congress for anything, they said the clock had already stopped. Max: Wait, stopped? Speaker 3: Mm-hmm. Max: How do you stop a countdown that's already running? Blake: Their argument, the April seventh cease fire terminated hostilities. No hostilities, no clock. Defense Secretary Hegseth said exactly that to Senator Tim Kaine in committee: the sixty day clock pauses or stops during a pause in fighting. Max: And Kaine just accepted that? Blake: No." Kaine told him, on the record, he didn't believe the statute supports it. Max: So the guy running the Pentagon and the guy enforcing the law don't even agree. And agree what the words mean? Blake: And it gets messier. Iran allegedly violates the Islamabad Memorandum in early July, the ceasefire deal signed back in June. Max: Wait, we're already past ceasefire number two? Blake: We are. July 10th, Trump sends Congress a brand new letter. New hostilities, new 60-day clock, starting from zero. Max: Without a vote. Blake: Without a vote. Max: Okay, here's my actual question. Congress wrote this law in '73, so presidents- If humans couldn't do exactly this, why does it keep working? Blake: Because the statute has no enforcement mechanism beyond Congress cutting funding, and courts wave it off as a political question, not a legal one. Max: So it's a deadline with zero teeth. Speaker 4: Bruce Fein, constitutional lawyer, former associate deputy attorney general, told Al Jazeera this reading turns the resolution into simply a paper tiger. Max: Paper tiger, yeah, that tracks. Speaker 4: Fein brought up Vietnam, too; no formal declaration then, either, because Nixon knew he'd lose the vote. His read is Trump knows the same thing. Max: Because they don't think it would pass. Speaker 4: That's the read. Max: Which loops right into what Congress actually did with all this. this, or more accurately, didn't. Speaker 4: There was a vote; it just didn't do what you'd hope. Max: So Congress actually DID something this week. Anybody catch it? Blake: The Senate resolution, barely. Max: Right. NBC covered it, but mostly as a horse race count. Who flipped? Who's up for reelection? Blake: What the vote actually do, though? Max: The question nobody asked. It's a concurrent resolution directing troop withdrawal. Bipartisan, which is rare. Blake: But concurrent means it never lands on Trump's desk. Max: ZERO teeth. No signature required. No veto to override. Nothing binding. Blake: So the cameras were on a vote that changes nothing legally. Max: Cable loves a scoreboard. Nobody wants to explain a statute. Where'd the GOP break stand? Blake: Susan Collins and Thom Tillis both said publicly they're uneasy with this running past sixty days. And then it. Max: And then . . . nothing. No follow up bill, no leadership push, discomfort with no consequence. Blake: That's the part I keep circling. Speaker 4: You can vote your conscience and still change nothing if leadership won't Max: Right. Speaker 4: move it. Max: Which is kind of the whole design flaw here, isn't it? Speaker 4: Walk me through the legal read, because I don't think the vote is even the real story. Max: Go on. Speaker 4: Jurist ran a commentary this week, arguing something specific: no Administration, either party, has ever claimed a cease fire pauses the War Powers Resolution clock before. Max: Not Bush, not Obama, not Biden. Wait, that's a brand new legal theory? Speaker 4: That's the argument; it's untested, nobody's litigated it, nobody's codified it. Max: So the Admin Speaker 5: - Max: Administration invented a reading of the statute, and the press spent its air time on a nonbinding vote count instead of asking whether that reading holds up. Blake: Which means the actual fight is this legal never got covered at all. Max: And that's how you sidestep a deadline without anyone outside DC noticing. Blake: The vote happened, the theory's still standing, nothing's changed. Max: Except the price of the pump, apparently. Blake: Yeah, let's go there next. So let's talk what this actually cost you at the pump. Please-my truck already hates me. Max: Brent crude was near seventy one dollars a barrel a week ago; Al Jazeera has it climbing to nearly seventy nine dollars. Blake: That's not a small jump. Max: Some energy analysts are floating a run toward ninety dollars if the Strait stays this disrupted. Blake: Ninety! That's real money at the pump for regular people. Max: Could be, depending on where you live. Blake: So why hasn't it hit us harder already? Feels calmer than it should. Max: Refiners locked in supply weeks ago-that's the cushion; it's contractual, not permanent. Blake: So the bill's coming just delayed. Max: Right-the longer the standoff drags on, the thinner that cushion gets. Blake: Give me the number that actually stopped me. Max: The ships-since early May U.S. forces have escorted more than eight hundred commercial vessels through Hormuz-Wikipedia's tracking of the crisis puts the oil move to close to four hundred million barrels. Blake: Wow! Four hundred million barrels! Max: Through one strip of water, one choke point, the whole global energy system leaning on one hallway. Blake: And every ship going dark out there, no transponder, that's a guy at a gas station in six weeks. Max: Which is exactly why the White House is watching the calendar. Midterms. November. Nobody wants gas prices spiking in October. Blake: So there's a political clock running parallel to the military one. Max: Both racing the same deadline, different stakes. Blake: And while everybody's staring at the Gulf, something's moving on the other side of the world nobody's Speaker 5: watching. Max: Nobody's watching. Blake: Let's go there. Max: Well, shifting gears, while the Gulf eats every headline, look what's stacking up near Taiwan. Blake: What's stacking up? Max: Taiwan's National Security Council flagged a record this month: over 110 PLA and Coast Guard vessels sitting along the first island chain right now. Blake: 110? That is basically a standing wall. Max: Council Chief Joseph Wu calls it the "new normal": ships parked seventy to a hundred twenty miles off Taiwan's coast, week after week. Blake: Okay, but give me the number that separates real opportunism from Beijing's usual summer drills. July is always their busy season. Max: Fair test: try July sixth, a Chinese submarine fired a ballistic missile into the South Pacific. CNN covered it. The range puts the U.S. mainland in reach from that. from that platform for the first time. Blake: Interesting timing—a second strike demonstration while every American ship and headline sits stuck in Hormuz. Max: Well, there's more. Reports this month say Chinese vessels have been paying Iran discounted fees for safe passage through the strait. Blake: So Beijing gets cheaper oil and a front row seat to a war it never fights. Max: That's the shape of it, though the picture's still developing, and here's a twist. East Asia Forum's analysis this week argues Xi's own military purge is pushing his Taiwan timetable back slower than anyone expected: Blake: So the purge buys Washington time. Max: Right, which is why their read says the real near term danger, way before any invasion talk, is coercion under cover of distraction. Blake: Testing the seams while nobody's looking up. Max: Coast Guard boats radioing container ships for crew manifests? No shots, no headline, but the sovereignty claim gets a little more real every week. Blake: We're doing gas station math. Beijing's playing a much longer game. Max: And there's no Senate hearing scheduled for that one either. Blake: Which might be the very thread tying this whole night together. Max: But zooming out from Taiwan for a second, there's one thread running under all three stories. Executive power grows exactly when checks meant to stop it don't fire in time. Blake: Congress didn't vote on anything binding; the press buried the legal question; and deterrence in the Pacific just didn't hold anyone back. Max: Right; three different failure modes, same result. Now, where we agree, protecting tankers through Hormuz, correct call; nobody's arguing commercial shipping should get shelled. Blake: Agreed; but protecting shipping and skipping Congress are two separate decisions. Decisions-and this White House, like the ones before it since Vietnam, never sent up an actual authorization request, just notifications, letters, no vote that could fail. Max: Which is the whole game, isn't it? Ask permission and you might get told no. Blake: Mm-hmm. That's not a Trump problem specifically. Every Administration back to the Seventies has dodged this same vote. Max: So here's something you can actually do this week: call your Senator's office, not a form email, and ask Speaker 5: your Senator to vote for your bill. Max: An actual call and ask one direct question: Will you force a binding war powers resolution vote? Blake: And before you trust any one's summary of what that law says, including ours, read the nineteen seventy three statute yourself. It's short, sixty day clock, fifteen sections. Max: It's public; it's on Congress dot gov; twenty minutes, tops. Blake: Twenty minutes to know more than most of the people voting on it. Max: Low bar, but let's clear it. So that's the week: Iran, Congress, the Pacific. Blake: The line that stuck with me, Hegseth telling the committee the 60-day clock paused. Max: And Kaine just wasn't having it. Blake: Look, here's what matters: when Congress stays quiet, the executive branch fills that silence every single time. Max: That's not partisan. That's just what happens when a check goes unused. Blake: Right, so here's the ask this week: Max: Call your senator's office; ask where they stand on the War Powers Resolution vote. Blake: And then go read the actual statute yourself; it's from nineteen seventy three, short, maybe fifteen minutes. Max: Don't take our word, or Hegseths or Kaines; read the text. Blake: If this helped you see the wheat clear, share it with someone who needs it. Max: And subscribe; we're back Saturday. Blake: Thanks for spending an hour with us. Max: Go make that call.