Democrats vow to shut down Senate over Iran conflict

A group of Senate Democrats are threatening to use every procedural tool at their disposal to hold up business on the Senate floor unless Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other senior officials testify before key committees under oath on the military conflict with Iran.

“We have collectively agreed that we’re going to use the levers that we have,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said Monday evening. “We should be having hearings on the biggest military engagement since the war in Afghanistan.”

“Each individual senator has a tremendous amount of power to disrupt the normal functioning of the Senate as well as certain privileges that we can exercise, and what we have agreed right now is that we’re not going to let the Senate continue business as usual, which seems to be ignoring the urgent issues the American people are dealing with,” he said.

The Democrats want to grill Rubio and Hegseth in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee over the expected duration of the conflict, its cost, the lack of a clear endgame, and the lack of clear rules of engagement amid growing civilian casualties, including an estimated 170 people killed by a missile strike on a girls’ school in southern Iran.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, have asked the GOP chairs of those panels to hold hearings and ask Trump Cabinet officials to testify.

“We are demanding there be hearings, debate, questions answered — that the Senate do its job,” Booker said. “It is unacceptable that we have not had hearings and we have not had a sufficient debate on the issues in public … in hearings, witnesses under oath. That is what we are demanding.”

The group of Democratic lawmakers threatening to hold up Senate business includes Booker and Sen. Chris Murphy (Conn.), two potential presidential candidates; Sen. Tim Kaine (Va.), an expert on the 1973 War Powers Act; Sen. Tammy Duckworth (Ill.), an Iraq War veteran and Purple Heart recipient; and Sens. Adam Schiff (Calif.) and Tammy Baldwin (Wis.).

The Democrats have already filed five different resolutions directing the administration to remove U.S. troops from military hostilities against Iran, and they plan to force Republicans to repeatedly debate and vote on the conflict on the Senate floor.

“As senators we have the right to force a vote and debate every single day in the Senate. That’s not a right under the rules, by the way, granted to us by the majority. That’s a right given to us by the statute,” Murphy said, referring to the 1973 War Powers Act, which Kaine used to force a vote last week on halting military action against Iran.

“What we’re saying is we’re not going to let the Senate be silent. We want there to be a hearing so that the American public can hear from their leaders why they think this war is in the national interest. I think they’ll fail in that exercise,” he added.

Democrats have the ability to force votes on the Iran conflict under the War Powers Act, which creates a privileged pathway for resolutions ordering the halt of military action not authorized by Congress.

The law requires the Foreign Relations Committee to either report such a resolution within 10 days of being introduced or face a Senate vote to discharge the measure to the floor.

A resolution sponsored by Kaine to halt military action in Iran failed last week in a vote that fell largely along party lines.

Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) was the only Republican to vote for it while Sen. John Fetterman (Pa.) was the only Democrat to against for it.

But Democrats are planning to force Republicans to take repeated votes, betting that opposing the measure will become tougher to do as the costs of the conflict escalate.

“I think it will become harder and harder as this war gets uglier and uglier, deadlier and deadlier, more costly and more costly, for Republicans to continue to vote in favor of this war,” Murphy said.

Duckworth, who was shot down in a Black Hawk helicopter in Iraq in 2004, predicted the conflict is going to spread, despite President Trump’s assertion Monday that the war will end “very soon.”

“It’s going to spread, it’s already spreading,” she said, referring to Iranian drone and missile strikes throughout the region, which have hit targets in Israel, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait.

By introducing somewhat different resolutions on the war sponsored by several different senators, Democrats say they will be able to force the debate to the Senate floor on a near-daily basis.

Murphy said Democrats could introduce additional resolutions.

“There are five now,” he said. “They’re not all the same. Again, this is not a right by rule, it’s a right by statute.”