WASHINGTON — Republicans in Congress inched forward to fund the ongoing U.S. battle with Iran despite the lack of a war declaration.
Under White House pressure, most congressional Republicans — including the three who represent New Jersey, Reps. Jeff Van Drew (R-2nd), Chris Smith (R-4th) and Tom Kean Jr. (R-7th) — have repeatedly voted against resolutions to check President Trump’s war powers.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-5th), a hawkish Democrat on Iran with a seat on the House intelligence committee, in May forced a floor vote on his resolution for Trump to detail his war plans to Congress. That measure deadlocked.
In a vote last week, the House agreed 216-214 to adopt a $95 billion budget plan with $73 billion in military funding, $12 billion for farmers and $10 billion to pay for voting restrictions that Trump is pushing to become law before midterm elections in November.
Though the measure was written to sidestep the Senate’s filibuster — a hurdle that requires most bills to receive 60 votes to advance in that chamber — it has dim prospects in the Senate.
All 47 Democrats and Independents, including Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Andy Kim (D-NJ), oppose the proposal, which has drawn criticism from independent-minded Republicans such as Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, the South Dakotan who controls the floor schedule, said last week he would “hold” the budget resolution that cleared the House until a clear path emerged for Congress to pass funding legislation before federal appropriations run out Sept. 30.
Missile interceptors
At a Senate appropriations hearing last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon’s latest cost estimate of the war, which began Feb. 28 with joint U.S.-Israel strikes, was $37.5 billion.
Under questioning from lawmakers, Hegseth made his case for $46 billion in weapons and equipment, including counter-drone systems and missiles.
New Jersey Democrat Donald Norcross (D-1st), a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, which oversees the military, has been skeptical of cost estimates since the war started.
“I want to see the real figures,” Norcross said in a recent interview with NJ Spotlight News. “Any war is expensive, through the pocketbooks of the people paying for the equipment, certainly serious to those who put their lives in jeopardy.”
U.S. forces in the Middle East have burned through and repositioned missile interceptors — projectiles used to take down incoming weapons — since the war started.
Military contractor Lockheed Martin, which has a significant presence in Moorestown in Burlington County, during the war secured a $4.5 billion weapons package for missile defense.
Afghanistan ’embarrassment’
“This is not, I don’t believe, the time to cut the legs out from underneath the president,” Van Drew said of the war in an interview with NJ Spotlight News on Thursday. “We’ve got to get through this thing.” It is a”worthy debate” on whether the U.S. should have attacked, he said, “but now is not the time, because we’re there.”
“We don’t want it to be another Afghanistan, which was a terrible embarrassment,” he said.
Smith said the president has the legal basis to direct the war against Iran, and that briefing Congress before the attacks would have been imprudent because it would have tipped off Iran.
“The element of surprise means fewer casualties on our part,” Smith told NJ Spotlight News when asked whether Trump should have briefed lawmakers on war plans.
The House-passed budget measure marks the third time that Republicans in this Congress have used budget reconciliation — a maneuver for legislation to clear both chambers on party-line votes, as long as the underlying bill has fiscal elements.
The Senate parliamentarian, an official who serves at the approval of the Senate majority leader, is empowered under chamber rules to strike language from the bill that does not follow reconciliation procedure.
Budget reconciliation experts largely do not expect the voting language in the broader proposal to survive that process.
‘Endless war’
At its core, the elections bill that Trump wants passed would severely narrow the voter registration process and shift elections oversight to the U.S. government from the states.
“Instead of lowering costs or helping the American people, Republicans are using their third reconciliation bill to hand this Administration tens of billions of dollars to fund the most unpopular war in American history,” members of the House Budget Committee, including Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-12th), wrote in a letter.
Watson Coleman and her peers criticized Republicans for voting a year ago for more than $1 trillion in cuts to federal health insurance and roughly $285 billion for food assistance.
“The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Just a few months ago, these same Republicans told us America could not afford to help people see a doctor. They told us we could not afford to help parents pay for childcare. They told us we could not afford to help struggling families put food on the table,” the committee Democrats wrote. “But now, suddenly, there is no limit to how much they are willing to spend on an endless war abroad.”
