WASHINGTON—By a 220-204 margin, the GOP-run House for the third time defied Trump and approved a resolution to invoke the War Powers Act and bring the troops, munitions, and planes home from the conflict.
With the support of 213 Democrats and seven Republicans—many of them from “swing” districts—the resolution passed Tuesday evening. The other 204 Republicans stuck with Trump and voted against the measure. One Democrat and eight Republicans did not vote.
For many of the Democrats, led by sponsor Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., and aided by Reps. Kendrick Meeks, D-N.Y., and Jason Crow, D-Colo., ordering Trump to stop the war and bring the troops home from the conflict is a matter of Congress’s reasserting its constitutional authority to declare war—or not.
Anticipating either a Senate defeat or a Trump veto, Moulton declared “we will keep the pressure on” until Trump ends the war.
“This Congress has not authorized a war with Iran, and yet this administration has kept our troops in harm’s way, without a declaration of war, without an authorization from Congress, and without any plan for how to win or end the war,” added Meeks. In 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, did not declare war on that country until after he took, in accordance with the Constitution, the matter to Congress.
Meeks brought up the economic impact of the war, too.
“We are seven months into a war of choice President Trump said would only last four to six weeks,” said Meeks. Due to the war, “Families have paid over $100 billion more for gasoline and diesel, roughly $800 more per household, while gas averages more than $4 a gallon and diesel is near $6.”
Actually, Meeks understated the hit to U.S. wallets and purses. Prices increased 3.4% from August 2025 to last month, the government reported, while wages lagged behind. Gasoline prices rose by 27.4% over those same 12 months and fuel oil rose by double that (52%).
The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office reported, just hours before the House’s 7:48 p.m. vote, that the war—which has now cost $38 billion since Trump and Israel began it on Feb. 28—will add at least a further 0.5% to next year’s inflation.
Crow, a former Army Ranger, hit the themes of accountability—and class.
“What is the accountability mechanism?” Crow asked. “The accountability mechanism is Americans are in the driver’s seat because Americans are the ones that have to do the fighting, do the dying, and pay for this. It is not the elites and the pedigreed folks in this administration that are fighting and dying. They are banging the war drums and sending working-class kids like us to go do it.”
The anti-war resolution is expected to hit the Senate later in the week. It’s the third time the House invoked the War Powers Act against Trump, and the number of Republicans increased each time. The GOP-run Senate has held fast with Trump and war, but by small margins.
Trump in turn has made support for his war a litmus test for his party. If so, two-thirds of all U.S. voters fail the test. That’s how unpopular the war is—and it may become even more so.
The war is also affecting workers, and the AFL-CIO recognized that at its convention in Minneapolis in May. Some unions are even tougher on the war than the federation is. One of the bluntest denunciations came from National Nurses United, just four days after Trump began the war.
“We will stand with workers and communities harmed by war, repression, coercion, threats of genocide, and to democratic self-determination,” the AFL-CIO convention resolution said. “We will advocate for an end to wars that threaten workers’ livelihoods, security, and rights. Working people must never be treated as pawns in geopolitical power struggles.”
“The Trump administration has ignored the Constitution and committed yet another imperialist act of war…without approval from Congress,” NNU declared on March 2. “The U.S. attack on Iran is paid for by our patients: Working-class people across the United States who are already struggling here at home to afford basic necessities such as health care, food, and housing.”
While denouncing the brutality of the Iranian government against its own people, NNU called the war “an extension of Trump’s fascist allegiance to the billionaire class and a continuation of decades of U.S. intervention in Iran, beginning with the overthrow of the democratically-elected Iranian government in 1953.
“While prioritizing spending on war abroad, Trump and the Republicans have also openly waged war over the past year on working-class people here at home, gutting Medicaid and Medicare, refusing to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies that keep our patients’ premiums from skyrocketing, and proving that they run the United States to benefit only billionaires and corporations.”
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