Why Don’t Democratic Leaders Want To Vote on the Iran War?

The Trump administration hasn’t tried very hard to sell its planned Iran War to the public. While the U.S. military carries out its largest airpower buildup since the Iraq War in 2003, President Donald Trump and his advisors have been throwing justifications at the wall to see what sticks, with a tone that doesn’t match the urgency of the military buildup.

“They’re not enriching [uranium] right now, but they’re trying to get to the point where they ultimately can,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on Wednesday. Pointing to the fact that Iranian missiles can reach U.S. bases in countries next to Iran, he added that “they possess these conventional weapons that are solely designed to attack America and attack Americans, if they choose to do so.”

Some officials in the administration have so little confidence in public support for war that they want Israel to throw the first punch so that “the Iranians retaliate against us, and give us more reason to take action,” POLITICO reports. Even when Israel started a war with Iran in June 2025, however, a majority of Americans still opposed getting involved.

A coalition of antiwar lawmakers is trying to force the administration into a public debate on its war plans. Sens. Tim Kaine (D–Va.) and Rand Paul (R–Ky.) proposed a war powers resolution last month when the military buildup began, and Reps. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) introduced a companion resolution in the House of Representatives last week.

Khanna and Massie wanted their war powers resolution to go to a vote on Monday, but it has been delayed due to weather and scheduling conflicts. Several members of Congress announced in a joint statement that it will go to a vote “as soon as Congress reconvenes next week.” Kaine said on Wednesday that the Senate resolution, which was introduced when the U.S. military buildup began last month, will go to a vote “very soon.”

While Republican hawks have been open about their opposition to a war powers vote, some Democratic leaders have reportedly tried to avoid going on the record. Referring to the war powers resolution, Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D–Mich.) told Reason Editor Matt Welch on The Fifth Column podcast that “the reason why there’s this debate and under-the-surface attempt to be like let’s not do it, or let’s not do it in a strong way, is that people fear the political consequences.”

Capital & Empire reported on Wednesday that a top Democratic staffer on the House Foreign Affairs Committee was discouraging a vote on the war powers resolution because it could split Democrats. But Drop Site reports that Democratic leadership has a much more insidious reason to avoid the vote: They want the war to happen and Trump to eat the political consequences.

A staffer for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) told a political organizer several months ago that “a substantial number of Senate Democrats believed Iran ultimately needed to be dealt with militarily” but “also understood that going to war again in the Middle East would be a political catastrophe” for the current president, according to Drop Site, which heard from other sources that “many Democrats remain convinced a war with Iran is both the right policy and beneficial politically for them.”

After Drop Site‘s report came out last week, Schumer publicly stated that Congress “must enforce the War Powers Act and compel this administration to consult with Congress and explain to the American people the objectives and exactly why he is risking more American lives.”

Even some Republican hawks seem to want to pass the buck on to the president rather than declaring war themselves. “The President has the power to declare war,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R–N.Y.) told Drop Site in an interview. (The Constitution states clearly that “Congress…shall have the power to declare war.”) Lawler accused Khanna and Massie of trying “to tie the President’s hand to respond to threats from the greatest state sponsor of terror.”

War with Iran is wildly unpopular with the American public. Only 21 percent of the country would support a war under the current circumstances, while 49 percent would oppose it, including a quarter of Republicans, a recent poll by the University of Maryland found. Another poll by the conservative firm J.L. Partners found that a majority of Republicans, who support a regime change campaign in theory, would tolerate zero American casualties from such a war.

But party elites tend to be much more hawkish on the Middle East than the people they represent. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris attacked Trump as weak on Iran. In the run-up to the June 2025 war, Schumer released a video mocking “TACO Trump,” an acronym for “Trump Always Chickens Out,” for letting “the terrorist government of Iran…get away with everything.”

Iranian and American negotiators are currently in Switzerland for talks over Iran’s nuclear program. Rubio called it a “big, big problem” that Iran does not want to discuss giving up its conventional weapons, too.

Administration officials, including Rubio, gave a classified briefing on Tuesday to the Gang of Eight, a group made of the majority and minority leaders in both houses of Congress and their respective intelligence committees. Schumer came out of the room with a statement not quite in opposition to whatever Trump was planning. “Closed-door briefings are fine, but the administration has to make its case to the American people as [sic] something as important as this,” he told reporters.