Congress Prepares for a Consequential Iran Vote
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The U.S. Congress is verging closer to voting to end President Donald Trump’s war against Iran.
If that largely symbolic action happens, then it will send an important signal to the White House, Tehran, and the rest of the world about flagging U.S. belief in Trump’s ability to prosecute the war successfully.
The U.S. Congress is verging closer to voting to end President Donald Trump’s war against Iran.
If that largely symbolic action happens, then it will send an important signal to the White House, Tehran, and the rest of the world about flagging U.S. belief in Trump’s ability to prosecute the war successfully.
But experts said that it could also lead Iranian officials to conclude that they can wait out the Trump administration and avoid making meaningful concessions in peace talks.
The House of Representatives is expected to vote as soon as today on a concurrent resolution ordering the president to withdraw U.S. troops from the Iran war. A concurrent resolution, unlike a joint resolution, does not go before the president for signature or veto. The Supreme Court has previously ruled that such measures do not have the force of law, as they amount to a “legislative veto.”
In the Senate, a legally binding joint resolution ordering an end to the Iran war is also moving forward. However, the president can veto that measure, and, in the super-polarized climate of Capitol Hill, anti-war lawmakers lack the supermajorities necessary in both chambers for overturning a veto.
But having both the Republican-dominated House and Senate vote to end the Iran war would still send a consequential international and domestic signal, analysts said.
“A vote like that may be an indicator that public support is waning and some of [the Iranian government’s] strategic calculations will have worked well,” said Reza H. Akbari, the Middle East and North Africa program manager at the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. “Ultimately, we know that the president holds a lot of power, but it does communicate the limits of the United States’ current appetite for escalation.”
Signs of softening Republican support for the war emerged last month in both congressional chambers. In the Senate, enough Republican lawmakers broke ranks to vote with Democrats, 50-47, on a key procedural vote to allow floor consideration of a joint resolution to withdraw the U.S. military from hostilities against Iran.
Republicans in the House then canceled a scheduled vote on a similar concurrent resolution after it became clear that it would likely pass. Three earlier war powers votes in the House were unsuccessful, with the most recent one failing in a tie, but Democrats now believe that the votes are there for passage.
“This is a sign that the Congress is catching up with where American public opinion has been all along,” said Damian Murphy, a former Democratic staff director on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “I think that sends an important signal to the international community.”
A vote on passage of the Senate joint resolution may come as soon as next week. Whether it will pass is unclear, as the absence of three Republican senators during last month’s successful vote may not be duplicated the second time around. In the possible event of a tied vote, Vice President J.D. Vance, who is widely seen as less supportive of continuing the Iran war than other, more hawkish members of the Trump administration, could be called on to break the tie.
That could place Vance in the “challenging” position of having to defend voting to prolong the Iran war if, as is anticipated, he runs for president in 2028 to succeed Trump, Murphy said.
Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, the sponsor of the joint resolution, told reporters on Tuesday that Trump can’t ignore the political signal that Congress is preparing to send to “find an off ramp” in the war against Iran.
And even if the Senate isn’t quite ready to vote to end the Iran war next week, there is reason to believe that more Republicans will defect in the days and weeks ahead, especially if the herky-jerky U.S.-Iran negotiations continue without a resolution in sight.
The war’s energy and other economic costs for American consumers and foreign allies continue to build, and public opposition to the war and to Trump’s broader handling of the presidency has been sinking among key voting blocs. Just five months out from the November midterm elections, that’s becoming a big problem for Republicans—one that Democrats are eager to exploit.
“The entire country is seized by the question of when there will be an agreement, because apparently until there is an agreement, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed,” Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy told Secretary of State Marco Rubio during a Senate hearing on Tuesday. “It has been indecipherable, the information coming from the administration, especially in the past several weeks, as we get signals that a deal is imminent. The president said yesterday he’s bored by the negotiations. He doesn’t care whether we get a deal.”
Trump also recently said that he believes Iran is stalling peace talks in the hopes that the U.S. midterms might force the White House to cave on key demands.
Akbari said that a congressional vote ordering an end to the war is likely to be viewed in Tehran as a “litmus test” that would probably strengthen the pro-negotiations faction of the Iranian regime, as opposed to the ultra-hard-liners who want to continue regional strikes against the U.S. military, Israel, and Gulf partners.
“This could strengthen the political faction internally that has long been arguing for diplomacy and negotiations,” Akbari said. “There are intense debates happening within the Iranian political landscape, as well, that we perhaps need an off-ramp … There is a faction that is very diligently trying to offer off-ramps.”
But don’t count on any Iranian offer of an off-ramp to include major irreversible concessions on what Iran views as the core pillars of its foreign policy. Those historically have included its nuclear and missile programs, backing for regional proxy groups, and, more recently, an explicit ability to shut down the Strait of Hormuz.
“There are folks in Tehran, a majority of them, who think that time is on their side, that the Americans are not going to invade, they are not going to occupy,” said Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow specializing on Iran at the Middle East Institute think tank. “The most they are going to do is another set of attacks on Iran, and that’s not going to bring the regime down. So why give America what America wants?”
This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage. Read more here.
Rachel Oswald is a staff writer at Foreign Policy. X: @OswaldRachel
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