Before American troops invaded Iraq, George W. Bush asked Congress to pass a resolution authorizing military force against Washington’s old enemy, a request that lawmakers granted.
Twenty-four years later, the United States is at war with another Middle Eastern rival – Iran – under a different Republican president: Donald Trump. But this time, the president did not bother to ask permission from the Senate and House of Representatives before joining Israel in launching the air and naval campaign. And far from opposing it, the Republican majorities in Congress have simply stepped aside.
“My understanding of the law has always been – and this is the tradition and the way it has been used and observed for many decades – that the president was acting within his authority,” Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, said Monday after receiving a classified briefing on the conflict.
When a reporter asked John Thune, the Republican Senate majority leader, whether Congress would need to approve continued U.S. participation in the campaign after two or three months, he responded: “No.”
“I think the president has the authority he needs to carry out the activities, the operations that are currently taking place there,” Thune said.
On Wednesday, Senate Republicans blocked a Democratic-backed war powers resolution that would have forced the U.S. military to end hostilities against Iran unless Congress gave its permission, and House Republicans voted against a similar measure the next day.
Now the stage is set for Trump to continue his military campaign against Iran free of congressional interference, despite the president and his administration’s shifting explanations of their goals, and lawyers’ concerns that the war is illegal and costs unnecessary money and lives.
The conflict has killed six U.S. service members and at least 1,230 people in Iran, according to officials in those countries. An analysis released Thursday by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington-based think tank, puts the cost of the first 100 hours of the war at $3.7 billion, or $891.4 million per day.
Republicans have downplayed the severity of the conflict – “we are not at war right now,” Johnson said at a recent news conference – or argued that it is a necessary resolution to nearly half a century of enmity between the two countries.
“Since 1979, they have been killing Americans. They have been killing their own people. They have been massacring people in the name of religion. It’s time for that to end,” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said of Iran.
Democrats appear to be taking a decisive stand against the biggest foreign war to involve the United States in years, after struggling to navigate the backlash over Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza and, decades earlier, their own culpability in the Iraq war.
In 2002, 81 House Democrats and more than half of Senate Democrats backed Bush’s resolution to start a war that would come to be seen as an unpopular and unjustified waste. Senator Hillary Clinton’s then-vote in favor of the Resolution Authorizing the Use of Military Force Against Iraq would become a liability when she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination six years later, and ended up losing to Barack Obama.
The war against Iran is, comparatively, a partisan issue. Only one Senate Democrat – John Fetterman of Pennsylvania – opposed the war powers resolution in that chamber, while Kentucky Republican Rand Paul supported it. In the House, four Democrats broke with the rest of their party to vote against the resolution, while the two Republican votes in favor came from lawmakers who worried that Trump was overreaching.
One of them, Warren Davidson, is a former Army Ranger and right-wing Republican who rarely finds common cause with Democrats.
“For some, this debate will be about whether we should even fight in Iran,” he said. “To me, the debate is more fundamental: Is the president of the United States, regardless of who is in office, empowered to do whatever he wants? That’s not what our constitution says.”
The partisan divide in Congress may mean that Republicans end up bearing the political burden of a war that polls show a majority of the American public opposes, a potential boon for Democrats ahead of midterm elections in which conditions appear favorable to retake the House, if perhaps not the Senate.
“I feel like Iran is a distraction from our internal problems,” Democrat Yamilka Almeyda said as she voted in Greenville, North Carolina, one of three states that held their first primaries of the year on Tuesday. “I think this war is unnecessary.”
Leading Democrats have already incorporated the war into the affordability message that forms the backbone of their pitch to voters. “We have no concrete justification for why we are putting American troops in harm’s way and spending billions of dollars on a foreign war while the affordability crisis rages here at home, a crisis that Donald Trump said he would fix from day one, but instead Republican policies have made worse,” said House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
But war powers votes alone will not be enough to satisfy the desires of voters who want Democrats to be the anti-war party, said Usamah Andrabi, spokesperson for Justice Democrats, a progressive group that is endorsing candidates in the just-started primary season. There is already talk in Congress of passing laws to cover the costs of the conflict, and Andrabi said it is essential for Democrats to oppose that.
“Anyone who votes to fund this war or votes against a war powers resolution deserves a primary, because voters deserve a peaceful election in their districts,” Andrabi said.
Jimmy Ryals in Greenville, North Carolina, contributed reporting.
