The roll call, 220-204, was similar to earlier efforts this summer, with a few more Republicans joining all Democrats voting to bring an end to the conflict. None of the resolutions have made it to the president’s desk, where Trump would almost certainly veto the measure.
“Remember when Donald Trump said that this war would last just a few weeks?” said Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., who served as a Marine during the Iraq War and pushed the resolution forward.
He said it’s time for Congress to “actually ask tough questions, as the Constitution directs us to do, rather than be subservient to another warmongering administration.”
Republican Rep. Brian Mast of Florida, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, questioned which military resources Democrats would want to remove from the region where he said Iran remains a threat.
Mast said Trump is against “forever wars, and that is what he is ending” — the decades of hostilities from Iran.
“They are a continuous ongoing threat to the United States,” Mast said. “Enough is enough.”
The action is likely the last House vote on the Iran war ahead of the midterm elections, where the conflict overseas is playing a substantial role in the political campaigns. The war that Trump launched February 28 has dragged, with on-again, off-again deadly missile strikes being exchanged and causing havoc in the region for nearly seven months.
Lawmakers are heading home at the end of the week to campaign nearly full-time, with less than 50 days to go before the elections that will determine control of Congress as Democrats try to wrest power from Republicans.
Voters are confronting high prices, particularly for gas at the pumps, as the conflict disrupts the flow of oil resources through the vital Strait of Hormuz.
The Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday that the war has cost more than $38 billion, as of August 1, and is projected to be costing between $2 billion and $3 billion monthly, depending on the intensity of the fighting. The budget office projected inflation will be 0.5 percentage points higher than expected heading into 2027 due to the war.
Trump himself had promised not to involve the US in foreign wars when he won a second term in the White House, and his actions against Iran are weighing on the Republican Party that controls the House and Senate. Most Americans say the war in Iran has not been worth fighting, according to an AP-NORC poll in July.
In the previous House actions, four Republicans voted to halt the war in Iran, but that number rose to seven in Tuesday’s war powers vote, including GOP lawmakers from battleground Iowa, Rep. Zachary Nunn and Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, and retiring Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina.
They joined GOP Reps. Tom Barrett of Michigan, Warren Davidson of Ohio, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky voting in favour of the war powers resolution, with all Democrats.
