BURSTAmericans are opposed to a war with Iran.
With voters on their side, some rank-and-file Democrats in Congress teamed up with a Republican to try to block President Donald Trump from launching just such a war. With limited support from Democratic Party leadership, however, those efforts faltered.
Now that Trump has launched a military assault against Iran, Democratic leaders are still deciding how to react.
Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, for his part, has yet to announce whether he backs a bipartisan resolution to halt military action.
Instead of backing the existing resolution from Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Ro Khanna, D-Calif., high-ranking Democrats in the House are reportedly working on an alternative measure. Advocates for the bipartisan bill fear the alternative could dilute support for the initial measure.
In the Senate, meanwhile, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer belatedly threw his support behind a companion War Powers Resolution. With broad Republican support for Trump, that bill faces long odds of success.
Advocates said they are pushing hard for Democrats to line up behind the bipartisan measure, but they wish that Democratic leaders such as Schumer had acted sooner.
“Perhaps if Trump had seen aggressive pushback and a united front from the Democratic Party,” said Yasmine Taeb, the legislative and political director for the Muslim advocacy group MPower Change, “then he wouldn’t have felt so emboldened to move forward with the unauthorized strikes on Iran.”
The push to stop Trump’s war started last week, before the strikes even began, with companion resolutions from Massie and Khanna in the House and Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., in the upper chamber.
Both resolutions are made under the War Powers Act, the 1973 law passed in response to the Vietnam War that limits when the president can launch military action and how Congress can move to end a conflict that has already begun.
The Massie-Khanna resolution was filed last Tuesday as Trump publicly weighed whether to join Israel’s attacks on Iran.
The resolution “directs the President to terminate the use of United States Armed Forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran or any part of its government or military, unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific authorization for use of military force against Iran.”
The bill was introduced before Iran launched strikes Monday against a U.S. military base in Qatar. A separate provision in the resolution states that it does nothing “to prevent the United States from defending itself from imminent attack.”
In addition to Massie and Khanna, the resolution so far has 42 co-sponsors. All are Democrats, and most are aligned with the progressive wing of the party.
Kaine, meanwhile, has deliberately avoided adding co-sponsors to his legislation as he attempts to attract GOP support. He told Punchbowl News over the weekend that he expected some Republicans to join.
On Saturday, Schumer called for a quick vote on Kaine’s resolution, for which he has announced his support since Trump’s attack. As the strikes loomed last week, however, he decided against supporting a bill from Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., that would have blocked funding for the strikes.
Even with Schumer’s support, advocates concede that Kaine’s resolution faces long odds. Many Republicans have already issued statements in support of a strike, and even a successful resolution could be vetoed by Trump.
On the other side of the Capitol, Jeffries criticized the way the strikes were conducted but stopped short of calling for a vote on the Khanna-Massie resolution. Instead, he has called on the White House to brief Congress.
Jeffries’s office did not respond to a request for comment Monday on whether he supports the Massie-Khanna resolution.
“Haven’t taken a look at it,” he said Monday, according to Semafor reporter Dave Weigel.
On a Monday call, advocates on a press call urged more members of Congress to back the resolution.
On the call, Sara Haghdoosti, the executive director of the anti-war group Win Without War, said, “Poll after poll shows how deeply the American public does not support strikes on Iran and war with Iran.”
Trump’s attack on Iran remains so fresh that many people are still making up their minds, but polls conducted before and after show plurality opposition.
Americans were opposed to the strikes by a 45 to 25 percent margin before they happened, according to a Washington Post survey conducted by text message last Wednesday. The poll also found a relatively high number of Americans, 30 percent, were unsure of how they felt about the looming conflict.
Snap polls conducted by YouGov after the strike likewise found that a plurality of adults were against bombing Iran.
Democrats looking for a political reason to oppose the strikes could find one in the crosstabs. Fully two-thirds of Democrats were opposed versus 9 percent in support in the Washington Post poll.
One of the few Democrats to offer unqualified support for the strikes, Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, called them the “correct” move in a post on X, adding, “I’m grateful for and salute the finest military in the world. 
”
Progressives have issued strong statements opposed to the strike. Other members of Congress have issued more carefully worded statements that attack Trump for launching the strikes without congressional authorization, while reiterating their support for Israel and opposition to Iran getting nuclear weapons.
That kind of triangulation worries advocates who are waiting for the text of a pending War Powers Resolution from three members of Democratic leadership: Reps. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y.; Adam Smith, D-Wash.; and Jim Himes, D-Conn.
So does the history of the resolution’s sponsors. In 2021, Meeks and Smith backed a measure purportedly meant to restrict U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen that activists said would detract from a firmer provision offered by Khanna.
The resolution’s authors did not respond to a request for the text of the resolution, or comment on why its authors felt compelled to offer an alternative to the Massie-Khanna effort.
All three Democrats behind the competing resolution are committee leaders endorsed by American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the influential pro-Israel group that is lobbying in support of Trump’s strikes.
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