‘The pressure is growing’: Why N.J.’s senators keep forcing votes on the Iran War

For the fourth time, the Senate voted today on a bill that would halt American involvement in Iran without congressional approval. For the fourth time, Senate Republicans voted it down.

That isn’t stopping New Jersey’s two Democratic senators, both of whom are co-sponsors on a variety of war powers resolutions that would rein in President Donald Trump’s administration in Iran. Senators Andy Kim and Cory Booker told the New Jersey Globe today that they believe they have a moral imperative to continue pushing for an end to the war for as long as it takes – and that the more they do, the more the American people will take notice.

“The big thing we’re doing here is forcing discussion and forcing debate,” Booker said. “There’s an urgency to force the Senate not to do business as usual, and to debate these issues: put people on the record, and not let them simply ignore a war of this magnitude.”

Booker was part of the original group of six Democrats senators forcing war powers votes, and a resolution he personally sponsored was taken up – and rejected – in March. Kim, a former State Department official who worked in Afghanistan, joined that same effort alongside five other senators this week, and said Democrats intend to continue putting resolutions on the floor at least once per week. As the war approaches the 60-day mark (a key milestone under the War Powers Act), he believes Republicans may start coming around.

“The end goal here is really to focus the American people, and Congress, on this war,” Kim said. “I think we are making progress on that front. I’m hearing from more and more of my Republican colleagues their unease with how long this is going, how much it seems like there’s no clear offramp to this all.”

As senators in the minority party, Kim and Booker wouldn’t normally have the ability to get the Senate to vote on anything Republicans don’t want to see pass. War powers resolutions, however, obey different rules, and even out-of-power senators are able to put them up for a vote.

Forcing votes, though, has proven very different from winning them, and nearly every Senate Republican has remained united behind the Trump administration and opposed to efforts to halt the war. All but one Republican (Kentucky’s Rand Paul) has voted for the resolutions each time, and all but one Democrat (Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman) has voted against them.

It’s Democrats who seem to be more closely aligned with the American public, which according to polls does not view the war as a success or as being worth its cost. Kim said that in conversations with New Jerseyans, he’s heard nothing but “universal concern” about the war and its effect on things like gas prices and the economy: “Nobody’s universally happy about this.”

(Kim’s own concern skyrocketed after Trump threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight” last week on social media, a threat that he later backed away from after a tenuous ceasefire was reached; the senator said that he tried to get a briefing from the Pentagon in the wake of Trump’s post, but “they just flat out told me no.”)

It’s not just the Senate that’s voted on the war; the House also took up a war powers resolution on March 5, rejecting it on a similarly party-line vote. Some House members, among them Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Tenafly), have pitched alternate resolutions, but they haven’t yet been forced onto the floor.

What else could Democrats do? War powers votes may be their easiest way of getting Republicans on the record on Iran, but Kim said he’s plotting out other ways for Democrats to raise attention and pressure on the war, though he wouldn’t divulge what those tools might be.

“I know that the more we do this, the more that Republicans in the Senate are frustrated that they have to vote,” he said. “They’re feeling the pressure, and the pressure is going. They would like nothing more than for this to go off of the front page news.”