Donald Trump’s Iran war is either “won” and “complete” or just “beginning,” depending on which fragment of one of Trump’s incoherent run-on rants you focus on. If it is the latter, the Trump regime apparently will ask Congress for more money to support his unconstitutional, unpopular, and unending war.
You can hear the panic rising in the voices of Republicans too cowardly to openly confront Trump. It is one thing to mumble about deference to the commander in chief in voting down a War Powers Act (WPA) resolution; it is quite another to go all in by rubber-stamping funds to continue a war that even many MAGA voters question.
“Republicans on Capitol Hill are growing worried about President Trump’s bet that Americans are willing to swallow higher gas prices due to the conflict with Iran, especially ahead of the November elections,” The Hill reported. Although they could not bring themselves to do something about it (i.e., vote for the WPA resolution), Republicans hinted and pleaded with varying degrees of intensity for Trump to end his forever war. Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) rambled:
Hopefully the operations in Iran will be such that there … won’t be an extended situation in which things start moving again, and shipping lanes get opened up again. ... Hopefully things will settle down. … I hope that the operations there are successful, and that once those objectives have been achieved — that things can resume some sense of normalcy in that region in terms of shipping lanes, et cetera, and access to energy reserves that a number of countries in the region possess.
“Hopefully” he will recognize he is the leader of a body that could do something about it.
Trump must have been thinking about his own party when he claimed only “fools” think the war is not worth higher oil prices. The Washington Post reported, “One GOP operative in a swing state, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly, said they worry price hikes will lead to ‘bloodbath’ for Republicans in the midterms.”
If Trump does not heed their pleas to “[g]et the war in Iran over,” as the nonagenarian Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) grumbled, Democrats should prepare to respond to Trump’s demand for more money — on top of the trillion dollars Congress already appropriated for the Pentagon.
“The best way to keep American servicemembers and civilians in the region safe is to stand united to end Trump’s unnecessary war,” wrote Bobby Kogan and Daimian Murphy from the Center for American Progress. “Rather than authorize more funding and risk emboldening Trump to continue using precious military assets for further adventurism, rather than critical defense needs, Congress should insist that Trump seek an immediate end to hostilities.”
As CAP pointed out, the Pentagon has more than enough money to pay for the war for the foreseeable future thanks to the big, ugly bill that “provided an additional $153 billion for defense just eight months ago, on top of the annual defense budget of around $900 billion.” The National Defense Authorization Act also let the Pentagon move money around (or “transfer authority”) to replenish munitions, for example.
Despite lip service to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, Trump’s consistent demands for more defense spending suggest that enough is never enough for the voracious military-industrial complex. Kogan and Murphy explained that “the Pentagon failed its eighth financial audit in a row” and that the defense budget is 26 percent higher than when Obama left office, while the Afghanistan War was still going on.
It is not as if the Pentagon under Trump’s regime has been guarding the taxpayers’ money. According to a watchdog group Open the Books, the Defense Department spent $93 billion last September alone on items such as “a $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, $5.3 million for Apple devices such as the new iPad, and an astronomical amount of shellfish, including $2 million for Alaskan king crab and $6.9 million worth of lobster tail” and $225 million in furniture. Now the Pentagon claims the cupboards (and freezers, I suppose) are bare.
While House Minority Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has refused to rule out more funding, other Democrats have rejected the bogus arguments for more money to wage Trump’s illegal war. This exchange on CNN’s State of the Union was illuminating:
JAKE TAPPER: So, the administration is reportedly weighing Congress to approve an additional $50 billion in funding for these operations. You have said you’re a hell no, not just a no, on funding the war.
We have seen this movie before. We know that vote will be cast as, especially if you run for higher office, you voting against the troops.
SEN. CHRIS MURPHY: Oh, come on. I mean, the American people don’t want this war. They don’t want this war. They have seen what happens when American troops go into places like Iraq, places like Afghanistan.
Ultimately, we get a lot of people killed. We waste a lot of dollars. The one thing the American people are clear about is that they do not want the United States dragged into another long-term war in the Middle East. If you support the troops, then you should be voting against funding this war, so that we get our troops out of harm’s way.
“Oh, come on,” indeed. An end to war funding would not entail extracting troops from the ground (as the end of the Afghanistan War required). It would bring to a close the high-intensity, fruitless offensive action directed toward the unattainable goal of “regime change.”
Fortunately, a group of five Senate Democrats — Murphy, Cory Booker (NJ), Tim Kaine (VA), Adam Schiff (CA), Tammy Baldwin (WI), and Tammy Duckworth (IL) — announced they will use every procedural tool available to grind the Senate to a halt unless and until Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio come to the Hill. The senators want open hearings to grill them on “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,” The Hill reported. Though the WPA resolution failed last week, Democrats have lined up five other versions for which they can force votes on the floor on a daily basis.
Daily votes to end the war may make it that much harder for any Democrats to turn around and vote for more funds. And it should. It is logically and morally inconsistent (as well as politically self-destructive) to simultaneously wage a fight against the war and then vote for funds to wage that war.
Democrats should make no mistake: Voters understand that funding the war means supporting the war. Democratic lawmakers who do so will incur the same wrath as Republicans who have enabled this unconstitutional and unnecessary war.
I published a piece about this yesterday from the perspective of a daughter of a dad who fought in Vietnam and the mom of four disabled veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. “You can oppose this war and still love this country. You can oppose this war and still support the troops. In fact, opposing it may be the most patriotic thing you can do right now.
Not despite what history has taught us. Because of it.
We have done this before. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. We went in without a plan, without a defined objective, without an honest answer to how we'd know when it was over. Every single time, real soldiers paid the price for that failure. Real families were changed forever.
We have the receipts. We know what "we'll figure it out as we go" costs.
Seven service members are already dead. Congress was notified after the bombs dropped — not consulted, notified. No vote. No debate. And if you raise any of that out loud, you're told you don't support the troops.
I want to push back on that. Hard.
Supporting the troops isn't a bumper sticker. It isn't silence. It's demanding honest answers before more of them board the plane. It's insisting that Congress do its constitutional job before we commit American lives and American dollars to a war with no defined goal and no plan for the day after.
That's what patriotism looks like. That's what supporting the troops looks like.”
https://danismart.substack.com/p/opposing-this-war-is-the-most-patriotic
Want to end the war? Say the magic word. EPSTEIN!