When the chief Republican budget writer took to the floor of the House of Representatives this week to tout a plan to spend tens of billions of dollars on the war with Iran, he avoided using the words “war”, “conflict” or even “Iran”.
“Just baseline battlefield readiness” is what Jodey Arrington said the money in the $95bn budget blueprint would be used for. “Bullets and bombs to finish the job and come home safely and victoriously, strengthen our food supply, and ultimately safeguard the integrity of our elections.”
It was a rosy depiction of a risky proposition for House Republicans three months before they face voters in November’s midterm elections amid sticky inflation, signs of a Democratic resurgence , and poor approval ratings both for the war with Iran and Donald Trump’s presidency in general.
Under the leadership of the speaker, Mike Johnson, House Republicans in their final week of work before a long summer recess opted not to alter course. In addition to passing the war spending plan along party lines, they approved a super-sized military budget and made multiple attempts to forge new restrictions on voting nationwide.
“Many of you like to say that major legislating can’t happen in an election year. We just proved you wrong,” Johnson told reporters on Wednesday, after the votes.
Not 24 hours later came a reminder of how Democrats can leverage divisions within the House GOP’s historically small majority, when four dissident Republicans joined with the minority to pass a symbolic war powers resolution that would mandate Trump withdraw troops from combat against Iran.
“You’re about to have hundreds of members of Congress go home to their constituents, and a lot of folks are about to get crushed, rightfully so, by their constituents,” the Democratic congressman Jason Crow told reporters following that vote in an articulation of the affordability agenda his party is counting on to return it to power.
“They’re going to hear that people are losing healthcare, they’re losing their homes, they’re losing their farms, they’re losing their small businesses. And why the hell are you supporting $100bn for another endless war in Iran that’s not making us safer, and contributing to the woes of the American people?”
The Thursday vote amounted to an embarrassing defeat for Johnson, but the bigger issue for the speaker was that his legislative barrage landed with a thud among his own party in the Senate.
As they have done twice prior since Trump returned to office, the House had written the budget blueprint to comply with the reconciliation procedure, which can circumvent Democrats’ use of the filibuster in the Senate and pass with a simple majority.
But senior Republicans have shown little enthusiasm for a third such bill, and before the House even approved the budget blueprint, the Republican Senate majority leader, John Thune, said he would put it on “hold” in case he needed the measure as leverage over the Democrats in negotiations to continue government funding beyond its 30 September expiration. That raised the likelihood that the question of how much to spend on the Iran conflict will remain undecided in September.
And while the House’s passage of the annual Pentagon budget, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), is typically a major accomplishment, Johnson complicated its chances in the Senate by bowing to pressure from rightwing lawmakers and merging it with the Save America Act. A fixation of Trump, the legislation would ban mail-in ballots and impose new identification requirements on voters when they register and cast ballots.
But that’s not the only headwind the defense budget faces: Democrats have objected to its $1.15tn cost, and earlier this month they halted the advancement of the Senate’s version of the bill, in protest of the renewed hostilities with Iran.
As they departed the Capitol for the five-week recess, House Republicans nonetheless believed they had a credible case to make for why the opposition should stay in the minority for the final two years of Trump’s presidency.
“Joe Biden and the Democrats are the ones that ran this country into the ditch, and we’re on a rescue mission to save it. And we passed some really good policies that are actually working, and so we got a great story to tell to the voters,” said Richard Hudson, who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, the party’s House campaign arm.
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Nodding to the party’s victories in the redistricting battle, Hudson said: “If you look at the seats that are up for grabs, it’s a majority of Democrats in Trump seats. For the Democrats to pick up the majority, they would have to win a lot of Trump seats, and that’s just not going to happen.”
Glossing over the collapse of peace talks and the return of fighting with Tehran, Ralph Norman, a rightwing stalwart from South Carolina who is vying to replace the late Lindsey Graham in the Senate, predicted that Trump “is at the cusp of ending this thing with Iran, and he’s doing the right thing”.
“The American people’s opinion is to end it quick. I think he will do that,” he added.
Nebraska’s Don Bacon, one of the few Republicans representing a district Kamala Harris won two years ago, offered muted criticism of Trump’s approach to the war, saying the president would benefit from trying to work more with the Democrats.
“The go-it-alone approach fails us in the end,” said Bacon, who is not seeking re-election. “But we need their help,” he said of Democrats, “and so I think he should lean in to working across the aisle more.”
However large the problems of House Republicans may be, they appear to be no solution for the Democrats’ own woes. The party’s own supporters remain sour in the wake of Harris’s defeat, and earlier this week a Washington Post-Ipsos poll found that while the most highly motivated voters are eager to back the Democrats in the midterms, they have a scant advantage over the GOP in the wider electorate.
“I think a lot of people aren’t sure, depending on where you’re from, what it means to be a Democrat,” the progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said when asked about the party’s quandary.
She saw hope in the party’s primary process, which this year has been defined by further showdowns between centrist and leftwing candidates and passionate debates over how to manage the US relationship with Israel.
“I think that’s part of why this primary process has been so active this year, because we’re having much deeper substantive conversations than just … what is the color next to the box on your name,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
