As the Iran War enters its 11th day, with no apparent end in sight, The Hill highlights a new movement among Senate Democrats to force hearings on that war:
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.”
Meanwhile, despite the failure of the first War Powers vote to try and rein in the Trump administration’s military adventurism, more votes may be in the offing:
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.
At least it’s some sort of a start.
