Friday is the 60-day mark under the War Powers Resolution for the Iran war — the point at which, per a 1973 statute, the president is supposed to have already pulled forces out absent a declaration of war or explicit authorization. I went looking for what happens if he doesn’t, and the honest answer is: probably nothing, procedurally. The Resolution was written to be self-enforcing, but “self-enforcing” for a statute that names the presidency as the party violating it has never worked out that way in practice. Nixon vetoed the thing in the first place. Every deadline since, Kosovo, Libya, has come and gone the same way this one probably will. A clock with no bell.

What makes it stranger this time is that Congress already tried the version with an actual vote, twice. The House passed a resolution to end the war under its war powers authority in late July, then again this week. Both times the Senate let it die on the floor. So the mechanism that requires zero further votes is about to quietly outrun the mechanism that took two votes and failed both of them. I’m honestly not sure which is the more embarrassing failure of the two.

Meanwhile tonight there’s a different kind of deadline. Missouri, Michigan, and Virginia all hold primaries, and by tomorrow morning Cori Bush will either have her old seat back from the man who took it from her two years ago, or she won’t. No ambiguity, no self-enforcement question, just a number. It’s a decent reminder that the deadlines Americans are actually good at are the ones with a ballot box attached to them.

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