Mike Johnson and the House Republicans are sending Americans to die in Iran and calling it a budget item.
Now, I’m just a simple man, but I was raised to believe you call the thing by its actual name. When the House GOP’s top budget writer, Jodey Arrington, stood before the chamber last week and asked for $95 billion — that is with a B — he did not once use the word “war.” He did not once say “Iran.” He called it “baseline battlefield readiness.” Bullets and bombs to finish the job and come home victoriously. The House panel had already advanced this spending along party lines, and the same evasions came with it.
There is a long history to that formulation. It was the promise of 2003 in Iraq, and of 2011 in Afghanistan, and of 2021 on the runway at Kabul airport. The pattern outlives the presidents who make it.
As the House has already demonstrated — including through a bipartisan war powers resolution that would have required the president to withdraw troops from combat — there is no legislative majority for this conflict. That vote now sits in the Senate gathering dust. Johnson instead ran the war funding through the reconciliation procedure, a procedural back door designed for budget adjustments, not for authorizing armed conflict. You do that when you cannot sell the war on its own merits.
This is the military-industrial complex doing what the military-industrial complex does. Eisenhower warned us about it in his farewell address of January 17, 1961 — the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, of the military-industrial complex.” Sixty-five years later, we have a House speaker who cannot say the word “war” while funding one, and a budget committee chair who calls combat operations “baseline battlefield readiness.” The alert citizenry was supposed to be us.
The pattern is as old as the republic. Smedley Butler, a major general in the Marine Corps with two Medals of Honor, wrote it down in 1935: “I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers.” The names change — Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam — but the mechanism does not. The war is always about to end. The money is always for “readiness.” The men and women who do the fighting are never the ones who vote on it.
You see it in the roll call. Four Republicans crossed the aisle on the war powers resolution — a symbolic vote, but symbolic of a truth: enough members of both parties still remember that Article I of the Constitution gives Congress, not the White House and not the budget committee, the authority to send Americans into combat. The rest voted to keep the money flowing and went home for summer recess to tell the voters they have “a great story to tell.”
The voters Jason Crow was talking about are not buying it. They are losing healthcare, losing homes, losing farms, losing small businesses. And the question Crow put to them is the one question that matters: “Why the hell are you supporting $100 billion for another endless war in Iran that’s not making us safer, and contributing to the woes of the American people?”
There is a moral arithmetic here that never appears on the budget committee’s spreadsheets. That $95 billion could fund roughly 1.5 million new housing vouchers, or 30 million VA appointments, or 10,000 community health centers. Instead, it flows to “baseline battlefield readiness.” The war that cannot be named eats everything.
Meanwhile, yes — the Democrats have their own problems. Their voters are sour after Harris’s defeat, and a Washington Post-Ipsos poll found only a scant advantage over the GOP in the broader electorate. But the difference between the parties on this question is not symmetrical. One party is funding the war. The other is offering the affordability agenda that working people are actually asking for. A Democratic Party that cannot get out of its own way is still better than a Republican Party shipping your kids to die for a war it will not name.
Don Bacon, one of the few House Republicans representing a district that went for Harris in 2024, said the go-it-alone approach “fails us in the end.” He is retiring. He will not be there to face what comes next.
The rest are heading home for five weeks, carrying a budget that funds a war they cannot name, a defense bill that costs $1.15 trillion, and a voting bill designed to make it harder for the people most likely to hold them accountable to reach a ballot box. They are betting that the recession will distract from the war, and the war will distract from the recession, and the five-week recess will drain the memory of what they just did.
I hope the voters in those districts are paying attention. Because the people who will pay for that $95 billion with something other than money do not have a vote on the budget committee. They have a gunner’s seat and a deployment order.
The “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” Eisenhower was counting on in 1961 is the only check that has not already been hollowed out. We have five weeks to prove we are still that citizenry.