The Senate voted 50 to 47 on Tuesday to discharge a resolution withdrawing congressional authorization for the war in Iran, a rare procedural loss for the White House that required four Republicans to break ranks. The resolution does not have the force of law and would almost certainly be vetoed, but its passage was enough to confirm that a handful of senators had discovered something resembling a principle.
The move was a direct rebuke of Tangerine Cock-Womble’s unauthorized military campaign, which the Senate effectively described as illegal without ever quite using the word. Senators Collins, Murkowski, Paul, and Cassidy joined all Democrats to advance the measure. All four had been described by the former president in recent weeks as insufficiently loyal—a designation that in this Congress has begun to function as a sort of honor.
Senator Cassidy’s vote was the most notable. He lost his primary in Louisiana last month after the former president endorsed his opponent and spent $1.776 billion in taxpayer money settling a lawsuit against his own Treasury Department to finance the attack. That slush fund, which was to be distributed to January 6 defendants, had been the centerpiece of Cassidy’s objection to a separate supplemental spending request that morning. He told colleagues he was suddenly unable to locate the constitutional basis for the allocation.
“I reviewed the proposal and found it lacked a clear nexus to my continued employment,” Cassidy said in a statement. “Under the circumstances, I felt my vote could finally reflect my actual beliefs.”
The other defectors offered similarly pragmatic justifications. Senator Paul explained that the president had called him a “gutless little weasel” in a Truth Social post that morning, which he took as an indication that his concerns about executive overreach were now valid. Senator Murkowski noted only that she had “reviewed the legal arguments and found that my career was already over.”
The war powers resolution now heads to the House, where leadership has indicated it will be buried in a committee chaired by a congressman the president has not yet attacked. The Golden Ballroom funding bloc—a separate $340 million appropriation for presidential event spaces that Cassidy had pledged to oppose—was quietly withdrawn before the vote, sparing the body further displays of constitutional awareness.
