Opinion: Congress keeps condemning the Iran war. It won't defund it.

When the House reconvened on November 9 after a five-week recess built around the midterm elections, it returned to a piece of unfinished business that had been sitting on the floor since mid-September. Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, had filed eight articles of impeachment against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the conduct of the undeclared war with Iran, plus related military actions in Yemen and Venezuela. Because Massie filed the articles as a privileged resolution, House rules required a vote within two legislative days of their return. Speaker Mike Johnson has already signaled how that vote will go, telling reporters in September that the House leadership would move against it as soon as members returned. Whatever the floor does with Massie's resolution this week, it will not be the moment Congress reasserts control over a war it has spent eight months denouncing in public and funding in private.

"It will immediately be tabled, of course... we probably won't do that today. We will do it when we come back."

That was Johnson's assessment of Massie's resolution back in September, and nothing since has given reason to expect a different outcome now that the House is back.

Eight months, two resolutions, no binding vote

The war itself began on February 28, when American and Israeli aircraft launched a coordinated campaign, code-named Operation Epic Fury on the U.S. side, against Iranian military and nuclear sites. The strikes killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei along with senior commanders, and Iran retaliated with missile and drone attacks on Israel, American bases and shipping in the Gulf. Eight months later, the fighting has cooled into something closer to a siege: Washington's blockade of Iranian ports, lifted briefly in June after an interim deal, was reimposed in July once Iranian forces resumed attacks on tankers. By early November, the International Maritime Organization was counting 121 attacks on shipping in and around the Strait of Hormuz since the war began, with two dozen confirmed seafarer deaths. The Pentagon's own casualty tracker put American losses, as of its October update, at 21 service members killed and 865 wounded — figures that watchdog reporting from The Intercept has argued undercount the true toll because of repeated, unexplained recategorizations of the dead and wounded.

Congress has not been silent about any of this. In April and May, both chambers voted on resolutions invoking the 1973 War Powers Resolution to order American forces out of hostilities with Iran; several failed by razor-thin margins. On June 3, the House finally passed one, 215 to 208, with the official tally recorded by the Clerk showing only four Republicans breaking ranks. The Senate followed on June 23, agreeing 50-48 to its own version after four Republicans — Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul, Bill Cassidy and Susan Collins — joined every Democrat but one. The resolution's text is unambiguous: it directs the president, under Section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution, to remove U.S. forces from hostilities with Iran absent a declaration of war or specific authorization. The administration's answer was to point out, correctly, that a concurrent resolution carries no legal force. It never reaches the president's desk and cannot be vetoed, which is precisely why the White House and, as NPR reported at the time, even some supporters conceded it was more a statement of position than a binding order. The war continued.

Theater instead of the purse

This is the part of the story that deserves more scrutiny than it has gotten. Congress does possess a tool that is unambiguously binding and requires no presidential cooperation at all: the power of the purse. Appropriations bills need the president's signature too, but a chamber that controls its own floor can refuse to fund what it opposes, as the House did to Contra aid in the 1980s and as both chambers did, repeatedly, to narrow the American combat role in Vietnam after 1970. That lever was available this year. During markup of the fiscal 2027 defense authorization bill, Representative Pat Ryan offered an amendment barring funds for continued operations in or against Iran without congressional authorization; the House Armed Services Committee voted it down. In the Senate, Illinois Democrat Tammy Duckworth pushed a similar restriction and, by her own account, had it blocked in committee by Republicans — a fight she described in a public statement vowing to vote against the entire defense bill unless her language ending "Trump's illegal war" was included. It wasn't, and enough Senate Democrats followed through on blocking the bill in July that it failed a procedural vote, 50-46.

Set beside that record, the sequence of this year's war powers votes and now an impeachment push against the defense secretary looks less like escalating oversight and more like a release valve. Lawmakers in both parties can cast a vote that puts them on record as opposing an unpopular war, secure in the knowledge that the vote changes nothing operationally, and then return to funding the Pentagon at near-record levels. Massie's resolution, whatever its merits on the facts — and its allegations, including that Hegseth ordered strikes in Yemen that killed more than 200 civilians without an imminent threat, remain unproven and unadjudicated — fits the same pattern. An impeachment of the war secretary that Republican leadership plans to kill before debate even begins is a vote lawmakers can point to without ever bearing responsibility for using the power that would actually stop the fighting.

The case for caution

There is a serious objection to this argument, and it should not be waved away. Cutting off funding for a war in progress is blunt in a way that a resolution is not: it risks leaving deployed personnel without the resources that keep them alive, and past funding fights, including the Vietnam-era cutoffs, were criticized at the time for exactly that reason. Lawmakers who voted for the concurrent resolutions but against the funding restrictions are not necessarily being hypocritical; they may genuinely believe that ending hostilities is better accomplished by directing the president to negotiate than by starving forces already committed. The administration's broader legal argument also has real pedigree: the Supreme Court's 1983 decision in INS v. Chadha cast doubt on the validity of legislative vetoes that bypass the president's signature, and officials have cited it in dismissing the war powers resolutions as constitutionally void gestures rather than defying a lawful order. And the underlying judgment that Iran posed a genuine proliferation risk is not fabricated: the International Atomic Energy Agency had warned, before the strikes, that Iran was enriching uranium to 60 percent purity, within reach of weapons grade, even as the agency said it had no direct evidence of an active weapons program. Reasonable people can conclude the strikes were a defensible, if costly, response to a narrowing window rather than an unauthorized adventure.

What would actually settle it

None of that, though, explains why the same Congress that insists the war lacks authorization keeps declining the one vote that would make its objection stick. If lawmakers believe operations against Iran are unauthorized, the FY2028 defense appropriations process beginning next year is where that belief should be tested, through a floor vote on withholding funds rather than a committee vote quietly buried, as Ryan's and Duckworth's amendments were this year. Democrats will control both chambers in January, which removes the excuse that Republican leadership alone blocked a defunding vote from reaching the floor. A new majority that wants to end an eight-month war it already voted twice to end has the votes to put money behind the words. Anything short of that — another concurrent resolution, another privileged impeachment motion tabled before lunch — will keep functioning as a form of absolution rather than oversight: a way for Congress to register its conscience about a war it has, in practice, no intention of stopping.