Democrats smell victory on Iran vote
Plus: Schumer and Jeffries to lead Hill Dems in joint event against GOP immigration budget bill, the House passes major housing bill and Warnock calls for sweeping democracy reform.
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First things first: President Donald Trump’s increasingly costly and open-ended war in Iran is colliding head-on with growing bipartisan anxiety on Capitol Hill, where Democrats are escalating a coordinated War Powers offensive they believe is suddenly within striking distance of success in both chambers.
House Republican leadership abruptly postponed a planned vote on House Foreign Affairs Committee Ranking Member Greg Meeks’s (D-N.Y.) resolution to block future military action against Iran without congressional approval after concluding absences inside the GOP conference could allow the measure to pass.
“Because they knew we were going to win,” Meeks told me when I asked why Republicans pulled the vote.
Democratic members and aides privately agreed that the decision marked the clearest sign yet that the politics around the conflict are becoming more volatile for Republicans as gas prices climb, Democrats sharpen their economic attacks and a small but meaningful bloc of GOP lawmakers grows increasingly uneasy with the prospect of a prolonged conflict.
The postponed House vote came less than a week after a separate War Powers Resolution led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer failed by a single vote. Democrats now believe they’ve flipped Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), the lone Democratic holdout last time around. Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.), Tom Barrett (R-Mich.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) previously joined every Democrat except Golden in backing the effort.
The pressure campaign is also intensifying across the Capitol after Senate Democrats finally broke through on Tuesday with Sen. Tim Kaine’s (D-Va.) Iran War Powers Resolution following seven failed attempts. The Senate advanced the measure 50-47 after Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) joined Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) in siding with Democrats. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) was the lone Democrat to oppose the procedural push.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) downplayed the significance of the defections but acknowledged Republicans are increasingly grappling with questions about the administration’s long-term strategy.
“The president has signaled that he is reserving the right to sort of reengage in some sort of kinetic warfare, but hoping that the diplomatic process yields a solution,” Thune told reporters. “I think our members are, and rightly so, asking the right questions and trying to figure out what the strategy is going forward.”
Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is aggressively trying to fuse the Iran conflict to the broader cost-of-living frustrations already dogging Republicans ahead of the midterms, arguing the war is driving up prices on everything from gas to groceries just as Americans head into Memorial Day weekend.
“With gas selling for over four and a half dollars a gallon, many Americans are canceling their Memorial Day plans because they simply can’t afford the drive,” he said in a floor speech on Wednesday morning.
Schumer also previewed an aggressive Democratic messaging strategy during the Senate’s looming reconciliation vote-a-rama, promising amendment votes tying Republicans to “Trump’s ballroom, Trump’s slush fund, and the rising costs of Trump’s war” as Democrats try to force politically painful votes onto the floor one after another.
The emerging dynamic presents a potentially dangerous split-screen for Republicans with a costly foreign conflict abroad, rising economic anxiety at home and visible fractures inside the GOP coalition over how long the administration’s Iran posture should continue.
What paid subscribers are reading: In last evening’s Congress Nerd Sunset, I wrote about how California Gov. Gavin Newsom spent part of the week making the rounds on Capitol Hill, including meetings with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and members of the Congressional Black Caucus, as Democrats increasingly view the escalating redistricting and voting-rights fights as a political litmus test for the party’s next generation of national leaders.
I also reported on Senate Republicans stripping the controversial $1 billion security package tied in part to President Trump’s planned White House ballroom project from their immigration-heavy reconciliation bill after the provision ran into trouble with both the Senate parliamentarian and uneasy GOP senators, adding fresh uncertainty to the already-slow-moving Byrd Bath process and timing for vote-a-rama.
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House sends housing bill back to Senate in resounding fashion: The House overwhelmingly passed a bipartisan housing package yesterday in a 396-13 vote, giving Congress one of its clearest signs yet that lawmakers in both parties feel mounting political pressure to respond to the country’s worsening affordability crisis ahead of the midterms.
But despite the lopsided margin, the legislation’s path forward remains complicated after House Republicans opted to amend the Senate-passed version that cleared the chamber in March on an 89-10 vote rather than simply sending that bipartisan compromise directly to President Trump’s desk, a move Senate leaders had quietly pushed for in recent weeks.
The House bill preserved much of the broader 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act framework aimed at increasing housing supply, curbing some institutional investor activity in the single-family housing market and easing construction barriers, but stripped out a controversial Senate provision requiring certain build-to-rent investors to sell homes within seven years.
Leader Thune and other senators had argued that the fastest route to enactment was for the House to pass the Senate version unchanged, especially with the White House increasingly eager to show progress on housing affordability, as high home prices and mortgage costs continue to squeeze voters nationwide.
The legislation now heads back to the Senate, where lawmakers will have to decide whether to accept the House changes, negotiate a compromise or risk letting one of Congress’s rare bipartisan policy achievements stall amid election-year politics.
Elsewhere on the Hill: Schumer and Jeffries will appear together on the Capitol steps this morning alongside Senate and House Democrats for a bicameral show of force against Republicans’ reconciliation bill, which Democrats are increasingly trying to define as a Trump-first agenda that pairs billions in new federal immigration- and border-enforcement spending with policies they argue would leave working families worse off.
The joint event comes as Senate Republicans continue grinding through the Byrd Bath on the package ahead of an expected vote-a-rama later today and as Democrats sharpen their attacks on the GOP’s push for provisions tied to Trump’s broader second-term agenda. The leaders are expected to use the appearance to project unity across both chambers while arguing Republicans are prioritizing Trump’s political and immigration priorities over lowering costs and protecting social safety-net programs.
ICYMI: Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) used a marquee appearance at the Center for American Progress Ideas Conference on Wednesday to lay out an expansive democracy and voting-rights agenda that he argued Democrats should prioritize the next time they control Congress, including Supreme Court reform, D.C. statehood and carving out the filibuster for voting-rights legislation.
Warnock framed the recent Supreme Court rollback of voting-rights protections as part of a broader crisis facing American democracy, arguing Democrats can no longer afford to treat voting rights as a secondary issue once back in power.
“No arcane Senate procedure should block people’s right to have their voices heard,” Warnock said during a conversation with Symone Sanders-Townsend of the 60-vote threshold for most major legislation in the upper chamber.
The Georgia Democrat also renewed his support for the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and called for creating democratic pathways for U.S. territories to pursue statehood, casting the broader fight over voting access and representation as central to Democrats’ post-2024 identity and governing strategy.
It’s worth noting that many of the ideas Warnock highlighted aren’t new and some previously passed the Democratic-controlled House last Congress. They continue to face steep political and procedural obstacles in the Senate, where Democrats failed during the Biden era to secure enough support to weaken the filibuster for voting-rights legislation despite intense pressure from activists and members of their own caucus.
But many Democrats argue the Supreme Court’s Callais decision and the GOP’s aggressive post-ruling redistricting push across the Deep South require a far more confrontational response on voting rights and democratic reform. Warnock—a Southern Democrat with deep credibility on the issue—is seen as an increasingly prominent voice in that debate.
That’s all I’ve got for now. I’ll see many of you at Sunset. I hope today is everything for you.
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