The US Senate on Thursday rejected a largely symbolic effort to limit Donald Trump’s authority to wage war in Iran, amid rising regional tensions after the US conducted a “heavy wave” of retaliatory airstrikes.
The war powers resolution failed in a ۴۹-۵۰ vote, marking the second time in two weeks the chamber has taken up legislation aimed at forcing Trump to end hostilities.
The US military said it launched a fresh wave of airstrikes in Iran on Wednesday, in retaliation for an Iranian missile attack targeting a US base in Jordan. The exchange marked an escalation in the Iran war, following the collapse of a ceasefire between Washington and Tehran.
The Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman voted with Republicans to sink the measure, the only Democrat to do so. The Republican senators Susan Collins, of Maine, Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska, and Rand Paul, of Kentucky, crossed the aisle to vote in favor of the motion, which would have directed Trump to withdraw US forces from hostilities with Iran absent explicit congressional authorization.
Mitch McConnell was absent for the vote as he continues to recover from a fall in June and has not received medical clearance to return to work.
The vote is the latest sign of eroding patience with a conflict that has now stretched more than five months, far beyond the “four to five weeks” Trump predicted when he co-launched the war with Israel against Iran on ۲۸ February, killing the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. The often twisty aim has been to prevent Tehran from obtaining a nuclear weapon and to curb its support for militant proxies across the Middle East, though under its new leadership the regime seems more inclined to pursue a bomb than ever before.
Iran responded by striking US bases and allied targets across the Gulf region and by disrupting oil traffic through the strait of Hormuz, triggering a global energy shock. A ceasefire brokered in June collapsed within weeks, and fighting resumed with a nearly two-week escalation in July before a renewed pause.
At least ۱۸ US service members have so far been killed in the conflict and more than ۴۵۰ wounded, according to Pentagon figures, which Democratic lawmakers have questioned over a lack of transparency. Four of those deaths came within a ۴۸-hour span in mid-July, when service members were killed in an attack at Muwaffaq Salti air base in Jordan. Thousands of Iranian civilians and combatants are estimated to have died. The Pentagon has told Congress it needs roughly $۸۰bn more to sustain the war effort, on top of the more than $۳۷bn already spent.
The Senate approved a war powers resolution for the first time in late June, in a ۵۰-۴۸ vote that saw Collins, Paul, Murkowski and Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy break with their party. Trump confronted the defecting Republicans at the Capitol the next day, and Paul and Cassidy both reversed their votes within ۲۴ hours, allowing the Senate to kill a nearly identical measure by a similarly narrow margin.
Since then, the chamber has rejected the legislation repeatedly. The Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, noted after one earlier defeat that a growing number of Republicans had nonetheless broken ranks over the course of the war.
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The House, unlike the Senate, has twice passed its own symbolic resolution calling on Trump to end the war, most recently by ۲۱۴-۲۰۸ in late July, with a handful of Republicans joining Democrats. Because the House measure is a concurrent resolution rather than a joint one, it does not carry the force of law and would not go to Trump’s desk even if the Senate followed suit. The Trump administration has separately argued that the ۱۹۷۳ War Powers Resolution, which set out Congress’s authority to check presidential military action, is itself unconstitutional.
The scale of the political problem for Trump was underscored by a new poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, released on Thursday. About two-thirds of US adults said the war has not been worthwhile, versus ۳۳% who said it was worth fighting. That includes the vast majority of Democrats and independents, as well as roughly ۳۷% of Republicans.
Ahead of Thursday’s vote, the senator Kirsten Gillibrand, of New York, urged colleagues to back the resolution, arguing that the war was straining household budgets and that Congress held the constitutional authority to end it immediately.
“This reckless war is driving up monthly bills and making everyday life harder for working families,” she said. “Under the constitution, we have the power to end the war today – let’s use it!”
