WASHINGTON – Congress has officially opted not to immediately halt U.S. involvement in the rapidly escalating Iran war after a pair of back-to-back votes went down unsuccessfully in the Senate and House of Representatives.
A House vote on March 5 over a war powers resolution failed mostly on party lines. Republicans nearly uniformly batted it down, with the help of a few Democrats. It came after a similar doomed vote the prior day in the Senate.
The blocked measures would've immediately halted American hostilities against Iran. Most Republicans in both legislative chambers held together in opposition to them, standing by President Donald Trump's decision to attack the country and launch a regional war that has killed more than 1,000 people, primarily Iranians and at least half a dozen Americans, in just days.
Though the resolutions failed, Democrats still claimed victory for pushing Republicans to go on the record with their support of the president's intervention in Iran. Doing so, Democrats have argued, will force the GOP – amid a midterm election year – to fully politically own the unpredictable consequences of the chaos in the Middle East.
"This vote on Iran is not a procedural vote. It is a profoundly moral vote," said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-California, one of the bipartisan sponsors of the war powers resolution, on the House floor. "It is a vote to direct our resources toward healing our own people, toward health care that saves lives, jobs that restore dignity, housing that shelters families, instead of raining destruction on other nations."
