| | | | BY PHILIP ELLIOTT
Senior Correspondent, TIME | There's always a tinge of performative outrage on Capitol Hill, a tendency to indulge hyperbole and summon more than a little manufactured disbelief. But the mood right now among Democrats is a class apart, so much that it could bring Congress to a standstill. | As the joint U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran slogs into its second week, Democrats have exited closed-door, classified briefings uniformly aghast at what they were told. That sincere fury has prompted a group of Senators to threaten to shut down the chamber's floor unless Senate Majority Leader John Thune allows hearings on an expensive and unpopular operation that has roiled the Middle East, sent oil prices rocketing, and left hundreds dead. | "I don't know how we put this genie back in the bottle," Sen. Chris Murphy said. "I don't know how we don't become a nation in which one person, one man, one woman, decides whether the entire country goes to war." | Murphy was among the lawmakers to receive a highly sensitive two-hour briefing on Tuesday. Taking pains not to disclose classified information, the Connecticut Democrat suggested the war plans were "incoherent and incomplete." Neither regime change nor the eradication of Iran's nuclear capacity are explicit goals of the war, according to those doing the briefing, contradicting statements made by President Donald Trump. There is also, according to Murphy, no long-term plan for moving commercial traffic again through the Strait of Hormuz, the shipping route that carries about one-fifth of the world's oil. | "It is so much worse than you thought," Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said. "The Trump administration has no plan in Iran. This illegal war is based on lies and it was launched without any imminent threat to our nation. Trump has not given a single clear reason for the war and has no plan to end it." | Added Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland: "What you hear behind closed doors is essentially what we're hearing in the public domain, which is complete incoherence." | Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said after his briefing—which he described as leaving him "as dissatisfied and angry, frankly, as I have from any past briefing in my 15 years in the Senate"—that he senses boots on the ground will be the next step without an intervention from Congress. | | | All the while, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey is doing a nose count to see who is with him on plans to jam up all Senate business. | "We are not going to let business as usual go on in the Senate," he said. "It is time for the Senate to do its job, and we are demanding that the Republican leadership of the Senate hold the adequate hearings and oversight, as well as to allow a debate that brings transparency to this onto the Senate floor." | Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin said too much is at stake to leave Trump on auto-pilot: "We intend to use every lever that we can in order to get those hearings." | Not dissimilar to their ongoing shutdown fight over immigration enforcement, Democrats see the public on their side on this. Trump has bounced between any number of reasons to justify his strikes on Iran, while providing odd, at times contradictory, assessments on how close the United States is in achieving its goals in the military conflict. Trump has said in recent days that the mission in Iran is almost complete, but also that he won't stop until he has Iran's complete surrender, and that sending U.S. troops remains a possibility. He has said Iran must get a new leader whom Trump has blessed as acceptable, even as the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was replaced by his son, another hardliner. Trump has crowed about disarming Iran's proxies in the region, grounding its Air Force, and sinking its Navy. "We're up to boat number 60. I didn't realize they had that big a Navy," Trump told reporters on Wednesday. | If that sounds confusing, it's because it is. This is not like Japan attacking Pearl Harbor or Afghanistan providing safe haven for the 9/11 plotters. This feels a lot more like the pre-emptive rhetoric that led the invasion of Iraq based on a belief it would make Americans safer. Most Democrats in Congress at that time ultimately backed that effort. Those there now seem more ready to stand against this military action. | Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, speaking on the Senate floor Tuesday, said "the story from the administration changes by the hour." | "When it comes to sending our service members into harm's way, the American people need to understand why. But right now, they don't even have a 'why,'" Schumer said. | | | Meanwhile, even some corners of Trump's base are going wobbly. Podcasting captain of the Manosphere Joe Rogan said on his show Tuesday that the new conflict was a "betrayal" of Trump's campaign pledges. "He ran on no more wars: End these stupid, senseless wars. And then we have one that we can't even really clearly define why we did it," Rogan said. | Despite private grumblings among Republicans about Trump's scattershot justifications, party strategists take comfort in the fact that the base is with Trump on this military campaign so far. Among Republicans, 84% support U.S. military involvement in the region and 79% support Trump's approach to Iran, according to NPR polling. (Democrats point out that NPR's polling on Trump in Iran from 2020 found 88% of Republicans supported Trump's approach, suggesting a weakening appetite for war now.) | Yet this still remains a wildly unpopular war. Democrats are not only reading their base accurately—86% of Democrats oppose the military strikes and his approach to Iran—but a majority of independents as well. The way the party's pushback may play out at the Capitol for now is through Senators gumming up the Senate floor. Trump has repeatedly called on the Senate to abolish rules that allow a minority to block action but Republicans in the Senate seem to have temporary hearing loss on those calls. Thune understands well that Republicans will want to use that same minority power down the line, perhaps sooner than he expected if the war against Iran drags down its early endorsers. | READ THE STORY » | | | | |
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