Congress Declines Again To Rein in Trump's Iran War
Republicans can’t decide whether the war is too early to stop, too late to stop, or nonexistent in the first place.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Jim Risch (R–Idaho) has never believed that now is the right time to vote on war with Iran. "There is no clear line of delineation between actual war and the use of kinetic force," he said during a war powers debate in 2020, adding that President Donald Trump has used force "very sparingly" against Iran. "This is not the start of a forever war," Risch said after Trump launched a one-off air raid against Iran in June 2025.
Now that Trump has started an undeniable, no-kidding war with no clear ending, Risch believes that a war powers resolution would unfairly tell the President to "put your tail between your legs and run."
Risch got what he wanted on Wednesday night when the Senate voted 47–52 against a war powers resolution, which would have forced the president to either get congressional approval for the war or end it. It was the fourth attempt to pass a war powers resolution in the Senate since the war began. Every single one went exactly the same way: All Republicans except libertarian-adjacent Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) voted for the war, and all Democrats except the pro-Israel heavyweight Sen. John Fetterman (D–Pa.) voted against the war.
On Thursday morning, the same resolution failed in the House of Representatives in the same way, with every Democrat except Rep. Jared Golden (D–Maine) voting to end the war, and every Republican except for the libertarian-adjacent Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) voting to continue it.
The U.S. and Iran have agreed to a temporary ceasefire to allow for peace talks. After walking out of negotiations last weekend, the Trump administration declared it was enforcing a blockade on Iranian ports. Trump and his advisers insist that they are ready to resume fighting once the ceasefire expires next week. "We are reloading with more power than ever before. We are locked and loaded," Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told reporters on Thursday morning.
Members of Congress are more supportive of the war than the people who elected them. On average, polls at the beginning of the war showed that 43 percent of Americans disapproved of it, compared to only 35 percent who approved. When the U.S. and Iran agreed to a temporary ceasefire on April 8, disapproval stood at 53–38. A poll released by Reuters and Ipsos on Tuesday shows that only 24 percent of Americans think the war has been worth it, and 54 percent think that the war has made their personal financial situation worse.
That may be why the war's supporters in Congress want to avoid voting on it—and why the opposition insists on doing so. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) has promised weekly war powers votes to force senators to go on the record. Democrats have signaled that they are going to make the cost of the war a major issue in the midterm congressional elections. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D–Ill.), sponsor of Tuesday's resolution, said that it would force Republicans to "prove that they're actually putting America first."
One cop-out by the administration and its supporters has been to simply deny that a war ever took place. On March 6, after voting down a war powers resolution, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R–La.) insisted that "we are not at war." Three days later, Trump himself called it a "war." A few days later, Trump insisted that the "military operation" should not be called a "war" because "as a military operation, I don't need any approvals. As a war, you're supposed to get approval from Congress. Something like that."
Another cop-out has been insisting that Congress has 60 days before it can weigh in on war under the War Powers Act. That's not quite true. While the War Powers Act sets a 60 day deadline for the president to "terminate" an undeclared war, it also states that the president can only "introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities" under an authorization from Congress or "a national emergency created by attack upon the United States," and has to "consult regularly with the Congress until United States Armed Forces are no longer engaged in hostilities."
Still, Sens. Susan Collins (R–Maine), James Lankford (R–Okla.), and John Curtis (R–Utah) used the 60-day deadline as an excuse to vote against the war powers resolution on Tuesday while insisting that they support some limits on war powers, at some point in time. "I support the president's actions [in Iran] taken in defense of American lives and interests. However, I will not support ongoing military action beyond a 60-day window without congressional approval," Curtis wrote in an article for Deseret News.
During the debate on Tuesday's resolution, Sen. John Kennedy (R–La.) proverbially rolled his eyes at the idea that his colleagues would actually "jump up and say that's it, it's one second past 60 days, everybody come home." After all, Collins has already backed down on her previous war powers position; she supported war powers resolutions in February 2020 and January 2026 to restrain actions far short of Trump's all-out attack on Iran.
The same day that the Senate voted on the war powers resolution, it also voted on two bills by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) to block weapons shipments to the Israeli military, which attacked Iran alongside U.S. forces. Both of them failed, but gained much more support than Sanders' last attempt. On Wednesday night, 36 senators voted against a shipment of bombs and 40 voted against a shipment of armored bulldozers. All Republicans—along with Schumer, Fetterman, and four other Democrats—voted for both shipments.
Although bombs may seem more controversial than bulldozers, Sen. Mark Warner (D–Va.) explained to the Jewish Insider that the split voters considered the bulldozers to be a referendum on Israel's rule over the Palestinian territories and the bombs to be a referendum on its war with Iran. "The United States should ensure that Israel has the tools it needs to protect its people and deter its adversaries while opposing transfers of equipment that are used to demolish homes, expand settlements, and further entrench a reality that weakens the already fragile prospects for a durable peace" with Palestinians, he said.
The two may not be so easy to separate in reality. In Lebanon, where Israel is fighting the pro-Iran militia Hezbollah, the Israeli army is "behaving just like we did in Gaza. There's a list of homes to be demolished, and we measure success based on the number of buildings destroyed in a day," an army source told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Nonetheless, the Senate vote is an indicator of falling American public support for the Israeli government. A recent Pew Research Center poll shows that 60 percent of American adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, including 80 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of Republicans under the age of 50. Similar numbers do not trust Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to "do the right thing," according to the poll.
Overconfident in the level of pro-Israel public sentiment, the Trump administration first justified the war with Iran in terms of protecting Israel. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on March 2 that the U.S. joined the war because "we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action," and Trump said the next day that he had to fight Iran because "they were getting ready to attack Israel." Faced with unexpected backlash, the administration scrambled to backtrack.
Clock Tower X, a firm run by former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, released a pro-war YouTube ad a few days before the ceasefire. "This decision wasn't about Israel. It was about our safety," the ad states. "This material is distributed by Clock Tower X LLC on behalf of the State of Israel," it concludes.