The House of Representatives voted Thursday to order Donald Trump to end the war with Iran, which is exactly what the House already did last month, which Trump also ignored. This is the part where you're supposed to ask what Congress is even for.
The Vote That Won't Stop a War
The resolution, introduced by Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, passed 214 to 208. Four Republicans broke with their party to vote yes: Tom Barrett of Michigan, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Warren Davidson of Ohio, and Thomas Massie of Kentucky. Every Democrat present voted in favor.
The measure would direct Trump to remove U.S. Armed Forces from hostilities against Iran, including, as CBS News notes, any potential ground forces in a combat role or used for occupation. That last clause is doing a lot of work right now, given that no one seems entirely sure what the U.S. military is doing over there on any given Tuesday.
This is the second time the House has passed a resolution like this. The Senate passed a similar one too. Trump has not complied with either. His administration's position, per CBS News, is that the War Powers Resolution of 1973 is unconstitutional, which is a tidy way of saying the law doesn't apply to them because they've decided it doesn't. Cool system we've got.
A Brief Timeline of the Administration Doing Whatever It Wants
Here's how we got here. The U.S.-Iran war started in late February, when Trump joined Israel in striking Iran. The White House notified Congress, as required under the War Powers Resolution, which gives a president 60 days to conduct military operations before needing congressional authorization. Then the two sides signed a ceasefire in early April.
The administration declared hostilities had "terminated" after the ceasefire, CBS News reports, which they argued reset the 60-day clock entirely. Then Trump declared the ceasefire "over" on July 10 and notified Congress that military action had formally restarted. The administration is now arguing both that the clock restarted and that the whole provision is unconstitutional anyway. They're keeping their options open, legally speaking.
Under the 1973 law, if Congress doesn't authorize the use of force within 60 days, the president has 30 more days to safely withdraw. Congress has now told Trump to withdraw twice. He has not withdrawn. Nobody appears to be in any particular hurry to figure out what happens next.
Democrats Are Mad. Republicans Are Writing Checks.
Rep. Greg Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was direct about it on the floor Thursday. "Let me be clear: this body has already spoken," The Guardian quotes him saying. "The war powers resolution passed with bipartisan support in the House and the Senate. The Trump administration was required to end its hostilities against Iran. It has not."
Meeks says he plans to introduce legislation to force House Speaker Mike Johnson to sue Trump to compel compliance. Johnson, who is about as likely to sue Trump as he is to resign and become a folklorist, has given no indication he'll do anything of the sort. The measure is dead on arrival in this Congress and everyone knows it.
While Democrats were holding symbolic votes, House Republicans were doing something rather different. The day before Thursday's war powers vote, according to both The Guardian and CBS News, House Republicans advanced a $95 billion budget blueprint dedicated largely to military costs related to the Iran war, plus a $1.15 trillion defense spending bill. The administration has separately requested $67 billion in supplemental war funding. So the war Congress has twice voted to end is getting tens of billions of dollars from the same Congress. That's one way to run a constitutional republic.
The Fighting Is Getting Worse, Not Better
None of this procedural theater is happening in a vacuum. The Guardian reports that Iran has struck U.S. military bases around the region in recent days, with retaliatory American airstrikes going the other direction. Several U.S. service members have been killed in Iranian attacks, CBS News notes, and there is, as the network puts it, no off-ramp in sight.
The Houthis in Yemen, aligned with Tehran, announced Thursday they had attacked two oil tankers and threatened to halt Saudi oil shipments through the Red Sea. That sent crude prices to their highest levels in weeks, per The Guardian. The economic blast radius of this war is expanding, and the political one isn't far behind. CBS News reports that Trump has dismissed GOP concerns about what the war could do to Republicans in the midterm elections, though most of the party has stayed in line behind him anyway.
The Senate was set to vote Thursday on advancing its own separate war powers measure. Whether that passes or not, the pattern is established: Congress votes, the White House shrugs, and the bombs keep falling.
What Congress Can Actually Do About Any of This
Democrats say they're looking at legal options to force compliance and plan to use leverage over the appropriations process to deny additional war funding, according to CBS News. That's a real card to play, in theory. In practice, Republicans control the chamber and just voted to send nearly $100 billion toward the conflict.
Jayapal and Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado, in a letter to Democratic colleagues ahead of the vote, framed the resolution as a constitutional matter as much as an anti-war one. "It is absolutely crucial that we assert our Article I Constitutional powers," they wrote, per CBS News. Article I gives Congress the power to declare war. Congress has not declared war on Iran. The war is happening anyway. This is the tension that nobody in power seems particularly motivated to resolve.
The Dingo Take
Let's be honest about what is happening here. Congress passed a law in 1973 specifically because presidents kept starting wars without asking permission. That law says if you don't get authorization within 60 days, you have to stop. Congress has now invoked that law twice against the same president for the same war, and the president has looked at both of those votes and continued the war. The administration's response is essentially: we think the law is unconstitutional, so we're not following it. A court hasn't ruled that. They've just decided it, and they're acting accordingly.
The four Republicans who crossed the aisle deserve a sentence. Fitzpatrick and Massie are not exactly surprising. But the fact that only four members of the president's party were willing to vote that Congress should have some say in whether the country is at war tells you everything about where the Republican Party is right now. U.S. service members are dying. Oil prices are spiking. Iran is hitting American bases. And the institutional response from the GOP is to write a $95 billion check and hope the midterms work out.
The War Powers Resolution was always a compromise that depended on presidential good faith to function. Trump has no good faith to offer. Democrats can introduce all the resolutions they want and Meeks can threaten all the lawsuits he can dream up, but the hard truth is that nothing stops this war until someone with actual power decides to stop it. Right now, that person is Donald Trump, and he has given every indication that he has no intention of doing so.
