House passes third Iran war powers resolution, 220-204
US Attorney Ryan Raybould of the Northern District of Texas announced Tuesday that his office had charged six lawful permanent residents and one undocumented immigrant with voting in federal elections over the past eight years, the Guardian reported. The charges followed a tease from Attorney General Todd Blanche, who had alerted White House reporters earlier in the day to stand by for what he called “a big development” in the federal crackdown on voting by non-citizens. The Guardian reported that the announcement “hardly lived up to the billing.”
The same day, the US House voted 220-204 late Tuesday to pass a war powers resolution directing President Donald Trump to halt military operations against Iran, marking the third time this year the chamber has moved to end the conflict, the Guardian reported. None of the three House resolutions has reached Trump’s desk, where the AP reported he would “almost certainly veto” the measure. The vote is expected to be the last House action on the Iran war before the midterm elections, where the overseas conflict is playing a substantial role in political campaigns.
Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, who served as a Marine during the Iraq War and pushed the latest resolution forward, framed the vote as a constitutional obligation. “Remember when Donald Trump said that this war would last just a few weeks?” Moulton said. He said it is time for Congress to “actually ask tough questions, as the Constitution directs us to do, rather than be subservient to another warmongering administration.”
Republican Rep. Brian Mast of Florida, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, offered the administration’s defense, questioning which military resources Democrats would want to remove from the region where he said Iran remains a threat. Mast said Trump is against “forever wars, and that is what he is ending” — the decades of hostilities from Iran. “They are a continuous ongoing threat to the United States,” Mast said. “Enough is enough.”
In other Tuesday developments reported by the Guardian, President Donald Trump “threw a tantrum” when he learned that Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty, a Kennedy Center trustee whose lawsuit forced the removal of Trump’s name from the memorial’s facade, had again prevailed in court. A televised Michigan Senate debate in Detroit on Tuesday was “distinctly one-sided” because the Democratic nominee, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, appeared while his Republican rival, Mike Rogers, chose not to attend.
The Guardian also reported Tuesday that the Trump administration plans to send Israel one-ton bombs as part of a $2.8 billion package of military aid — weapons the Biden administration had withheld over concerns they were being used to kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza.