Washington: Robert Jimison and Michael Gold
The confrontation came over lunch. The cleanup began after dinner.
Hours after US President Donald Trump angrily confronted Senate Republicans for joining Democrats to approve a war powers resolution rebuking his handling of the war in Iran, Republican leaders brought another, nearly identical measure to the floor.
In a 50-to-47 vote, with one senator voting “present,” they defeated the measure in a largely symbolic move that did nothing to change the resolution the Senate had narrowly approved a day earlier. Instead, it served as an unmistakable gesture to mollify a furious president who had just berated them.
Of the Republican senators who voted to adopt a resolution on Tuesday that instructed him to end the war with Iran or seek Congress’s approval to continue, two shifted their votes: Senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Rand Paul of Kentucky.
Cassidy, who hours earlier angrily confronted Trump over a lack of transparency on the status of the war, said that he changed his vote after a meeting with Vice President JD Vance and Steve Witkoff, the president’s special envoy, at the White House.
“I was going to vote yes, but I had a briefing this evening, and it was complete,” he said moments after voting against the measure, adding: “I am reassured.”
Paul, who voted “present,” said that Trump’s remarks in his lunch meeting with senators had affected his vote, though not his views on the conflict and Congress’s role in declaring war.
“I did listen to the president today, and the president feels like it reduces his leverage to find a deal, and I do think it is important that we have peace negotiations,” Paul said.
Trump celebrated Wednesday’s late-night vote, thanking Republican leaders in a social media post that falsely claimed that the Senate had “changed its vote on Iran.”
Trump said that the new vote “puts Iran on notice.”
Ultimately, the maneuver did not undo Tuesday’s vote, which was the first war powers measure approved by both chambers since the war began and remains adopted. Wednesday’s vote neither rescinded nor superseded it.
Still, Republicans sought to characterize the procedural move as a chance to “re-vote,” even though the initial action cannot simply be erased through a subsequent vote on different legislation.
“That train has left the station,” said Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, whose resolution was called up by Republican leaders.
He noted that because of the rules surrounding the procedural tool used to call up the vote Wednesday’s vote to defeat the so-called “motion to proceed” does not prevent him from forcing another vote on the same resolution at another point, it simply prevents the chamber from taking up a final vote to consider it.
“My bill is in exactly the same position as it was before they did this vote,” he said.
The remarkable sequence underscored the lengths Republican leaders were willing to go to contain the latest clash between Senate Republicans skeptical of the war and Trump, which unfolded during a closed-door lunch earlier in the day.
The vote was the last one senators took before leaving for a planned recess that is set to last until July 13.
It capped off a turbulent day on Capitol Hill that began after Trump abruptly called off the ceremonial signing of a bipartisan housing bill that Republicans had already started championing as a major accomplishment ahead of the midterm elections.
Dismissing that legislation as “minor,” Trump instead urged Republicans to swiftly pass an elections bill that Republicans have acknowledged does not have the votes to advance.
But at his lunch meeting, Trump made clear that he was equally furious about the Senate adopting a resolution on Tuesday that instructed him to end the war with Iran or seek Congress’s approval to continue it. In that vote, four Republican senators joined Democrats, and it succeeded because two other Republican senators were absent.
According to lawmakers who attended Wednesday’s lunch, the president berated Republicans who had voted with Democrats and singled out several senators by name. The meeting then erupted into a shouting match between Trump and Cassidy, who has become an increasingly outspoken critic of the president after losing his primary race to a challenger backed by Trump.
Among Cassidy’s complaints was that senators had yet to receive a comprehensive briefing on the Iran war. Hours later, the senator went to the White House for a briefing on the Iran war with Vance and Witkoff.
In a social media post, Cassidy said that the meeting addressed “many of my concerns” on the Iran war.
Republican leaders were also helped in their effort to defeat the resolution by the presence of Senator Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania, who missed Tuesday’s vote because he was traveling with Trump at the time.
Tensions with lawmakers over the war were likely to continue, however, as Trump asked Wednesday to approve $87.6 billion in extra spending this year for the war and several unrelated programs — a request that appeared all but dead on arrival in the Senate.
The New York Times
