Republican Lawmakers Shirk Their War Responsibility

Three weeks after U.S. forces invaded Iraq, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee convened a hearing with several high-ranking Pentagon officials to assess the state of the military campaign.

“It is appropriate that this committee conduct an oversight hearing on the responsibilities and authorities of the Department of Defense,” then-Sen. John Warner said at the outset of the April 2003 hearing.

That same day, another Senate committee convened a hearing with several officials from the Army and State Department and other national security experts. That session led to what became six different oversight hearings that Senate Republican committee chairs held in the first 2 ½ months of a war launched by a Republican president, George W. Bush.

It’s a stark contrast to the first six weeks since U.S. forces joined the Israeli military in attacking Iran. Not a single hearing has been held on the war in the House or Senate committees of jurisdiction, and none are scheduled for the upcoming week when Congress will return from its two-week spring break. Top Republican leaders have been mostly silent, issuing statements of support at the start of the operation, but limiting their comments to reiterating the administration’s assertions that it would end in a matter of weeks.

In fact, the House has been in session for only 11 days since President Donald Trump ordered the launch of the attacks Feb. 28.

Top Trump administration officials have conducted closed-door briefings, but the first public testimony on Capitol Hill will not come until April 29, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is slated to testify before the House Armed Services Committee.

The war in Iran has morphed into an almost standard partisan issue on Capitol Hill and created the sense that this will be seen almost entirely as a Republican war. That means the political reward or punishment is likely to fall exclusively on Republicans by November’s midterm elections.

Democrats are already lining up in near unanimity against emerging requests for extra military funds, with estimates ranging from $80 billion to more than twice that, while some Republicans are considering using fast-track parliamentary procedures to approve the money solely with GOP votes.

“I can only speak from my own standpoint, but again, the fact that we have not had a single public hearing when we were not getting any information about what’s coming next in terms of these negotiations, anything about the ceasefire,” Sen. Andy Kim, a former Obama administration official, told reporters Thursday.

Kim returned to Washington early while the Senate remains in recess, citing the president’s “unbelievably dangerous and horrific statement” threatening to eliminate Iranian civilization. He has requested a solo briefing by Pentagon officials about the state of play in Iran – a request that, so far, has been denied.

“I have to say, Congress is not doing all that it can right now. This Republican leadership here is abdicating responsibility by not having us here during this incredibly consequential moment for America,” Kim said.

Those comments came a few minutes after the Republican whip, Sen. John Barrasso, oversaw a brief open-and-shut session of the chamber and spoke with reporters for more than three minutes. Barrasso began his remarks with a more than 60-second discussion on GOP plans to unilaterally fund portions of the Department of Homeland Security in the coming weeks to overcome Democratic objections to the deportation tactics used by immigration and border agents.

Asked about the possible plan for funding the Iran war, the No. 2 GOP leader in the Senate suggested it might come up Friday when he meets with Trump and Sen. Lindsey Graham, the Budget Committee chair, but that discussion is intended to focus on funding DHS.

“Specifically what I’m telling you today is, we’re moving ahead in spite of incredible obstruction by the Democrats … and funding immigration, custom enforcement and border control with Republican votes alone,” Barrasso told reporters, signaling the chamber’s focus was on a longstanding domestic policy issue and not the war.

He ducked questions about what role, if any, Congress could play on Iran and whether the war had been dragging on too long. He said that some goals are being met – eliminating Iran’s capacity to build nuclear weapons and produce missiles – and that was fine with him.

“Iran has been at war with the United States for 47 years, and it’s time for Iran to choose peace. They haven’t done it yet,” Barrasso said.

American wars are always tied inevitably to the president who gives the initial orders, sometimes to their political benefit (think Franklin D. Roosevelt and World War II) and sometimes to a defining negative moment in their legacy (Lyndon B. Johnson and Vietnam).

But on Capitol Hill, the political fallout usually lands on both parties because, traditionally, Democrats and Republicans share the political burden of voting to approve a war and later funding ongoing military actions.

The October 2002 votes authorizing the Iraq war drew support from 29 of the 51 members of the Senate Democratic caucus, while almost 40 percent of the 208 House Democrats supported that war. Then Sen.-Hillary Clinton’s vote to support that war became a defining issue in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, particularly since she never fully renounced her vote despite the war’s deep unpopularity by that point.

Yet by the summer of 2009, at the height of Democratic power with massive majorities in Congress and Barack Obama in the White House, only two members of the Senate Democratic Caucus – Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders – voted against approving more than $100 billion in funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Democrats in Congress had been brought into the process from the outset of Bush’s attempt to win support for invading Iraq in March 2003.

A review of Senate transcripts shows at least six committee hearings held in 2002 focused on Iraq. That stretched back to February 2002, more than a year before the invasion, and included a Foreign Relations Committee hearing spread across two days in the late summer. Those were led by Sen. Joe Biden, then the Democratic committee chair, who voted in favor of the Iraq war six years before he became the vice-presidential pick of the anti-war Obama.

When Republicans won the majority in the 2002 midterm elections, the new chair, Sen. Richard Lugar, held three more hearings in the winter of 2003 before the Iraq invasion began.

None of that happened this time around, despite Trump launching strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2025 and the massive military buildup in the region in early 2026.

Next week’s Foreign Relations Committee agenda consists of two gatherings to consider Trump’s nominees and one hearing to discuss American priorities at the United Nations.

Rep. Chris Smith, who came into office on Ronald Reagan’s coattails in 1980 and is tied for longest-serving member of the House, defended the lack of information-sharing with Congress, saying he doesn’t believe lawmakers can be trusted.

“This place leaks like a sieve,” the New Jersey Republican told reporters Thursday. “That’s the fear, and when people leak here, it goes out to our enemies.”

Of course, televised committee hearings, with high-profile witnesses, would not produce leaks and could help focus the administration’s public message on the war aims and timeline. Trump’s only attempt at a nationally televised address on Iran, delivered in prime time last week, was poorly received and financial markets began to sink.

In a Pew Research Center poll conducted in late March, 35 percent of Americans said they were “confident” Trump could make “good decisions” on Iran.

A few days before ordering the Iraq attack in 2003, George W. Bush gave a nationally televised address explaining the stakes – and a couple of days later, an ABC-Washington Post poll found 71 percent of Americans supported the strike.

Support would eventually crater before the 2006 midterm elections as the claims about Iraq harboring weapons of mass destruction proved to be wrong, and the war stretched on for years to come.

But from the outset, it was a bipartisan war on Capitol Hill, a very different posture than the current Middle East war.