Northwest senators vote along party lines as Senate rejects Democrats’ resolution to stop Iran war

WASHINGTON – The Republican-controlled Senate voted largely along party lines on Wednesday to reject a Democratic measure to halt President Donald Trump’s war with Iran, effectively endorsing the U.S. strikes that continued for a fifth day as the conflict expanded across the Middle East.

The legislation invoked the War Powers Act of 1973, a Vietnam War-era law Congress passed to restrain a president’s ability to start wars without consulting legislators. Had it succeeded, it would have forced Trump to seek congressional approval for any further strikes. A similar resolution is expected to face the same fate in the House on Thursday, as Republicans rally behind the administration’s decision to launch the war along with Israel on Saturday.

In a speech on the Senate floor before the vote, Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, accused Democrats in Congress of trying to help the regime in Tehran when no country has come to its defense.

“They’re trying to use the process of the United States Senate to stop our commander-in-chief doing what he has set out to do,” Risch said. “No other entity on the planet is attempting to help you, Iran – nobody, nobody except one, and that one is right here. But we’re going to end that now.”

Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, a sponsor of the resolution, was the only Republican to vote in favor. Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania was the sole Democrat who opposed it, resulting in a 53-47 vote to reject the largely symbolic measure.

In her own speech on the Senate floor before the vote, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said it was “obscene” that “this president is ordering our kids to be shipped off into war from his beach club in Florida,” referring to Trump’s late-night video announcing the strikes from his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, where he spends most weekends.

“You deserve a clear strategy from any president before he puts you in harm’s way,” Murray said. “Not a president who shrugs his shoulders about how long this will go. Not a president who doesn’t know and doesn’t care if he will put American boots on the ground. And not a Congress led by Republicans that refuse to do their job and hold the president accountable to the people before our citizens are put in danger.”

After six U.S. service members were killed Sunday when an Iranian drone strike hit a command center in Kuwait, Trump said in another video message that more Americans will likely die before “Operation Epic Fury” ends. U.S. Central Command said on Monday that 18 Americans had been “seriously wounded” since the fighting began, in addition to those killed.

“We pray for the full recovery of the wounded and send our immense love and eternal gratitude to the families of the fallen,” the president said. “And, sadly, there will likely be more before it ends. That’s the way it is.”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters on Wednesday that the war had “only just begun.”

“America is winning decisively, devastatingly and without mercy,” Hegseth said. “Our rules of engagement are bold, precise and designed to unleash American power, not shackle it. This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”

Since the war began, the president and members of his administration have given conflicting explanations for the decision to strike Iran in coordination with Israel. On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters at the U.S. Capitol that the United States attacked Iran because Israel was going to attack Iran.

“The imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked – and we believe they would be attacked – that they would immediately come after us, and we were not going to sit there and absorb a blow before we responded,” said Rubio, who also serves as Trump’s national security adviser. “Because the Department of War assessed that if we did that, if we waited for them to hit us first after they were attacked – and by someone else, Israel attacked them, they hit us first, and we waited for them to hit us – we would suffer more casualties and more deaths.”

Trump contradicted that account on Tuesday, telling reporters at the White House, “If anything, I might have forced Israel’s hand.”

“You see, we were having negotiations with these lunatics, and it was my opinion that they were going to attack first,” the president said. “They were going to attack if we didn’t do it. They were going to attack first. I felt strongly about that.”

The administration has yet to provide a consistent explanation of the specific, imminent threat it claims that Iran posed to the United States. When asked to do so during the White House press briefing on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt cited the Iranian government’s support for terrorist groups, its ballistic missiles, its navy and its effort to rebuild a nuclear weapons program that Trump has claimed the United States “obliterated” in strikes last July.

“This decision to launch this operation was based on a cumulative effect of various direct threats that Iran posed to the United States of America,” Leavitt said, “and the president’s feeling based on the fact that Iran does pose an imminent anddirect threat to the United States of America.”

In the video announcing the strikes, Trump said Iran was developing ballistic missiles that “could soon reach the American homeland.” But a report released by Trump’s own Defense Intelligence Agency in May said Iran hadn’t decided to pursue such missiles, and if it did, the agency estimated that Iran couldn’t develop them until 2035.

Rubio and other administration officials briefed members of Congress on Tuesday in a classified meeting. Afterward, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said in a post on X that her position on the war remained unchanged.

“While deterring dangerous regimes from developing nuclear weapons is a critical mission, this effort has gone far beyond key strikes on timely, urgent targets,” Cantwell wrote Wednesday on X, adding that the Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war while a president “may only use military force without prior congressional approval to repel sudden attacks and respond to clear imminent threats.”

Sen. Mike Crapo said in a brief interview on Wednesday that he had seen evidence of an imminent threat to Americans in the classified briefing but couldn’t share that information publicly. Like other Republicans, the Idaho senator pointed to a long history of the Iranian regime and the proxy groups it supports killing Americans since Iran’s 1979 revolution, but he didn’t explain what justified the full-scale war now.

“That would require me to talk about what I learned in the briefing,” Crapo said. “I can just tell you that I believe that there was plenty of justification to believe that if we’d delayed, that we would have had greater damage.”

In Wednesday’s briefing at the White House, Leavitt laid out four objectives of the war: destroying Iran’s ballistic missile program, destroying its navy, guaranteeing that it can never obtain a nuclear weapon and ensuring that its proxies can no longer operate in the region. Those Iran-backed proxy groups include Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in the initial wave of strikes on Saturday, and Leavitt said Wednesday that 49 senior Iranian leaders had been “wiped off the face of the earth.”

She declined to answer questions about a strike that hit a girls’ school in southern Iran, killing at least 175 people according to Iran’s health ministry and state media. The Israeli government has denied responsibility for that strike and Hegseth has said the Pentagon is investigating the incident.

In his speech before the vote, Risch said he believes the war will bring a new and better future for the Middle East, describing Iran as the only “bad apple” left in the region.

“Today, I am more optimistic than I have ever been about the Middle East,” Risch said. “I really believe that when we end this, and the Iranian regime is brought down, we are going to have a Middle East that is going to be very peaceful.”

What Hegseth described on Wednesday as a campaign of “death and destruction from the sky all day long” had cost U.S. taxpayers $5 billion in just the first three days, the left-wing Center for American Progress estimated. Congress has given the Pentagon a budget of roughly $1 trillion in the current fiscal year, but the cost of the war has prompted speculation that lawmakers may need to approve an emergency “supplemental” spending bill for the war.

Murray, the top Democrat on the committee responsible for government funding, said Tuesday that the administration hadn’t yet asked for more money.

“It does scare me that the president said today that he’s ready for an endless war,” Murray in a brief interview Tuesday, referring to Trump saying he wouldn’t put a timeline on the war. “They didn’t plan for this. They didn’t think about the consequences or the cost of this, because they have not asked for a supplemental or shared with us what the costs are.”

The House is expected to vote on a war powers resolution Thursday. Even if that legislation passes, Trump would be sure to veto it and Congress would need a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate to overturn that veto.

Editor’s note: This article was updated on March 5, 2026, to correct a quote from Karoline Leavitt.