The return to active hostilities with Iran has Republican lawmakers on edge about the midterm elections, as the nearly five-month-long conflict continues with no end in sight and gas prices again on the rise.
The Trump administration this week restarted a blockade on Iranian ports and launched dozens of strikes on Iran, warning that it would escalate attacks against key infrastructure targets like bridges and power plants if Iran doesn’t agree to a deal. The previous ceasefire agreement, which many lawmakers welcomed with a sigh of relief, lasted just a few weeks before collapsing over disputes involving Lebanon and control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Republicans believe Iran is purposefully dragging out negotiations to squeeze the Trump administration, using voter pain at the pump as a cudgel for more favorable terms.
“It’ll weave back into the affordability issue. It makes it very difficult,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) said of the rising gas prices. “Just when we’re getting to a point where we’re kind of leaning more towards easing the [inflation] rate, [now] it’s probably not.”
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“I wouldn’t put it past the Iranians — I think they’re playing good cop, bad cop with some of their negotiators, and a piece of this, I believe, is because they want to drive it into our election cycle,” he added.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), who got into a heated shouting match with President Donald Trump over Iran last month, told NOTUS the war “needs to end.” He urged the administration to brief members of Congress on the state of the conflict, which began in February and is estimated to have cost as much as $100 billion so far.
“My wife just said, ‘Oh my gosh, I just put 40 bucks into the car, and I didn’t have to put that much gas in,’” Cassidy said. “So it impacts people’s budget, and right now people’s budgets are being impacted all over the place.”
South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds added: “I like the idea that he’s going after [Iran] and he’s taking out their ability to cause problems in the Strait of Hormuz, but it’s not going to be easy to get it done. So yeah, gas prices are going to be up, and we should be very concerned about it.”
Still, for all their grumbling, most Republicans haven’t shown any inclination to go as far cutting off funding for the war, which Congress controls with its power of the purse. The Trump administration is seeking an additional $67 billion in defense funding this year for the war, on top of a massive proposed $1.5 trillion total military budget for the 2027 fiscal year.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), a U.S. Army veteran, said the Pentagon “needs to do a better job communicating maybe what the goals are, what the intentions are, how quickly we can see this wrapped up, and then on the dollar front, why we would need that supplemental.”
“They need to come to Congress and explain exactly what is going on and what they’re going to achieve with those dollars, and really how we wrap up this conflict,” she added.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who voted with Democrats last month for a war powers resolution forcing the administration to end the war, said her concerns remained.
“We don’t know what to expect,” she said. “This is my problem prior to this: that we didn’t have a lot of communication from the administration, so it would be good to be getting more.”
Not all Republicans see a political cost. “I can tell you in my state, people are very supportive of making sure Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon,” said Florida Sen. Rick Scott. “They realize the only way that doesn’t happen is you have to continue to prevent it, and that takes military action.”
Regardless of the political concerns, House Armed Services Chairman Mike Rogers warned that the Pentagon would have to begin diverting money away from training, repairs and more on Aug. 1 if Congress doesn’t approve the administration’s emergency Iran war spending request. In Rogers’ estimation, the Iran war created a $50 billion “hole” in the defense budget.
“Anything they got discretion over is basically going to be frozen so they can defer that money to fill the hole that’s being created,” he told NOTUS.
Lawmakers will get an opportunity to ask questions about the budget request next week, when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine are scheduled to appear before the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Ernst noted that Trump’s nominee for Pentagon comptroller, Jay Hurst, testified at a hearing earlier this week that the Pentagon may shift money around that Congress already approved to help pay for the war, giving lawmakers more time to act.
But Democrats accused Trump of breaking promises that helped him win in 2024, including avoiding more foreign entanglements and lowering inflation. They voted in unison to block the annual defense policy bill from advancing earlier this week in protest over the war.
“We have a president who promised to keep us out of war, who said he was going to focus on bringing prices down. He’s done the exact opposite, right?” said Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen.
“Just when the president said he wanted to cool things down, he’s heating them up, and so prices will go up as he heats up the war. Prices will go up, and the American people are going to take a hit,” he added.
Trump and his top aides recognize that getting ship traffic flowing through the Strait of Hormuz is critical to keeping the price of energy and consumer goods under control. Earlier this week, the president announced a plan to impose a toll on the Strait of Hormuz, something his administration previously characterized as illegal. He reversed course 24 hours later, however, after pushback on Capitol Hill and from U.S. allies in the Middle East.
“We’ll have Iran defeated soon. They’ll be defeated very soon!” Trump vowed on Thursday, without offering specifics. “They want to settle so badly.”
Vice President JD Vance, a skeptic of U.S. interventions abroad, urged patience.
“I don’t know exactly where this is going to go, but I think fundamentally we are on the right trajectory,” Vance told Joe Rogan on his podcast. “It’s just going to be really messy and there’s going to be a lot of stops and starts.”
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