Democrats Outraged as Trump Tries to Reset the Clock on Iran War

Democrats in Congress aren’t happy that President Trump has restarted the Iran war.

Trump formally notified lawmakers last week that the war in Iran has resumed, attempting to legally claim that a new 60-day period has started that gives him the power to use military action in Iran without congressional approval. Democrats called out the Trump administration for going back on its promises that the war was over.

“We were promised the war would be over for months. And now in a matter of days, we’ve gone from a bad U.S.-Iran deal to more strikes, another blockade, and added turmoil that will only drive prices higher,” Senator Adam Schiff said on X Monday.

The California senator filed a new war powers resolution on Monday, co-sponsored by colleagues Tim Kaine, Andy Kim, Jeff Merkley, and Chris Van Hollen, in an attempt to rein in the president.

“Any assertion by the Trump Administration that he gets 60 more days to act without Congress has no foundation in law,” Schiff said in a statement, asking for a “new vote to end this war.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor Monday that “Trump’s rinse and repeat approach to the Iran war isn’t a strategy, it’s a recipe for utter disaster.

“We keep moving backward. Gas prices stay high, casualties increase, costs increase. It’s incredible what a fiasco this war is,” Schumer added.

Senator Chris Murphy pointed out that the war’s resumption hurts the economy, saying, “Gas prices are spiking again.”

“The bottom line? Trump has no moves to make. His spiraling incompetence has boxed America in. It’s only going to get worse,” Murphy said in an X post.

Last month, Iran and the U.S. signed a memorandum of understanding, seemingly ending the conflict while long-term negotiations continued. Those negotiations have collapsed, and Iran has resumed attacking American and oil industry targets in the Persian Gulf, while the U.S. military is once again bombing targets within Iran. Iran has resumed its tolls in the Strait of Hormuz, while Trump claims that the U.S. naval blockade of Iran is back on. By trying to reset the clock, Trump is acknowledging, consciously or not, that he’s also resetting a quagmire.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is notorious for professing ignorance when asked potentially difficult questions about the news of the day. He fell back on this strategy in a Tuesday morning press conference, this time in response to the fatal ICE shooting in Biddeford, Maine, the day prior.

On Monday, Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old father, was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, marking the eleventh fatal ICE shooting of Donald Trump’s current term. Sebastian Guerrero was reportedly authorized to work in the U.S. and had not been the target of an immigration operation.

The agents involved in the high-profile incident were reportedly not wearing body cameras, which, as Benjamin Weiss of Courthouse News pointed out to Johnson, cuts against assurances that Department of Homeland Security officials have made to Congress about expanding agents’ use of body cameras.

“Does there need to be accountability on DHS from Congress here?” Weiss asked.

“Uh,” Johnson replied, “I don’t know anything about this event, OK? I was a little busy yesterday, so I’m going to reserve judgment. I know that there was a tragic shooting, and I’m not going to comment because I don’t know.” (Notably, Weiss had prefaced his question with relevant facts, but anyway … )

Preemptively defending himself against accusations of, yet again, turning a blind eye to an inconvenient news item, Johnson told reporters, “You guys can mock me for not knowing that. I worked about 22 hours the last few days, and I did not get the briefing on that. I will this morning.”

Last year, the Trump administration publicly lied about the content and status of a multimillion-dollar stockpile of contraceptives that was allocated for foreign aid but slated to be destroyed amid Elon Musk’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Newly disclosed records show that the government’s internal discussions about the stockpile were as chaotic as its external statements were dishonest.

Last summer, the administration announced plans to destroy about $10 million worth of contraceptives stored in a Belgian warehouse. The products, already paid for by U.S. taxpayers, were allocated toward women and girls in Africa. By the fall, the administration falsely told the press that the contraceptives were abortifacients, or substances used to induce an abortion—and that they had been destroyed. In reality, they were largely ruined due to being stored improperly (despite their storage costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to the USAID Office of Inspector General).

New reporting published Tuesday by The Washington Post shows that falsehoods surrounding the stockpile were pervading internally as well as externally—adding to a mountain of evidence of the incompetence, willful or not, of Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency.”

In one email, an official at the U.S. Embassy to Belgium informed someone at the State Department that “there is no one here that knows definitively what is in the warehouse.”

In an August 8 email, a State Department official emailed a colleague a list of purported “Current Viable Abortifacients” at the warehouse, but nothing he listed is considered an abortifacient by the Food and Drug Administration. “Everything else has practically been destroyed,” the official wrote—and by “has practically been destroyed,” he apparently meant “had spoiled due to improper storage.”

After The New York Times reported that none of the products in the stockpile were abortifacients—in fact, USAID could not legally purchase such substances—State Department official Brendan Hanrahan sent out an email asking if anything in the stockpile could be used to “induce an abortion if taken by a woman once she is already pregnant.” This prompted a “series of emails among diplomats” seeking more information, including one in which the aforementioned embassy official revealed the staff’s complete ignorance of the stockpile’s contents.

These revelations had to be wrenched from the government by the Center for Reproductive Rights, which sued the government over its failure to respond to a Freedom of Information Act Request about the wasted contraceptives.

The Trump administration wants to dismantle the International Criminal Court.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted a video message to X Monday saying that the ICC has turned into something “radical and extreme” and that the U.S. will now target the court.

“As we speak, the ICC and its friends are waging a war against our ​country, not with bullets and missiles but ​with statutes, compacts, and the force of ⁠so-called international law,” Rubio said in the video.

In addition to the post, Rubio wrote an op-ed column for The Wall Street Journal accusing the court and its allies of seeking “a standing world tribunal with near-unlimited reach, empowered to override the courts and constitutions of the U.S. and other sovereign states—and to prosecute and arrest our citizens.

“The ICC is backed and run by a powerful network of leftist nongovernment organizations, smug globalists, and hostile Third World governments united by their enmity toward the U.S.,” Rubio’s column added.

Reuters spoke to an anonymous State Department official who said that the Trump administration is considering a variety of tactics, including travel bans, visa revocations, increased sanctions against the ICC and its affiliates, and diplomatic pressure on countries to withdraw from the ICC.

“No diplomatic option will be off-limits in the campaign ​to dismantle the threat posed by the ICC to Americans,” the State Department said in a statement.

The U.S. has never been a member of the ICC, and President Trump attacked the court after it issued arrest warrants against Israeli government leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in 2024 for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Since then, the U.S. has sanctioned court officials and prosecutors, as well as other international leaders who document and speak out about Israel’s crimes, including United Nations Special Rapporteur for Palestine Francesca Albanese.

The Trump administration’s new push is not only based on support for Israel (whose Gaza massacre was largely conducted with American weapons) but also on the possibility of ICC charges being issued against the U.S. During Trump’s second term, the U.S. has launched strikes against boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, which it claims are bringing drugs to the U.S.

In effect, the administration sees the ICC as a threat to its ability to launch military activities around the world whenever it wants, and as a threat to Israel. Trump and Rubio think that the U.S. is above any international criticism and checks on its military power, war crimes be damned.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has announced that he will vote against Representative Thomas Massie’s measure to cut off all aid to Israel—even though it’s a policy that the vast majority of Democratic voters agree with.

“I will be voting no on Republican Amendment #8.… It is overly broad in that it prohibits or would limit the use of funds for longstanding initiatives related to humanitarian aid, refugee resettlement, peace-building and U.S. Embassy operations,” Jeffries wrote in a letter to his Democratic colleagues Tuesday. “In addition, the so-called Massie amendment would restrict our country’s ability to confront Hamas, Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations in the region who are sworn enemies of both the United States and Israel. In my view, there are more decisive ways to achieve the urgent change necessary when it comes to the far-right Netanyahu government.”

In his letter, Jeffries noted that the liberal organization J Street also opposed the measure. In response, the Jewish group hedged its opposition, saying it supports Jeffries’s position while also respecting that he won’t whip against the measure. The group suggested that Democrats could vote “no, present or yes” to reflect their concerns about “the way American military assistance and American-supplied weapons have been used by the Israeli government in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and elsewhere.”

Jeffries opposed the amendment while mentioning that the U.S. and Israel need a “new security arrangement” that would “undergird the maintenance of Israel’s qualitative military edge against Iran and other malign actors in the region.”

Dozens of Democrats are expected to vote for the amendment, which would be attached to the spending bill.

Jeffries’s letter reveals the ideological gap between party leadership and the party’s base. The second-most-powerful Democrat in the country thinks that cutting off aid to Israel—which has been committing a genocide against Palestinians for nearly three years—is too extreme, and that the problem lies solely with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and not the decades of apartheid that preceded his nonconsecutive 20 years in leadership.

This isn’t just coming from congressional Democrats. California Governor and 2028 presidential hopeful Gavin Newsom refused to call Israel an apartheid state and doubled down on his support for Israel in an interview with Axios on Monday. And even Democratic Representative Ro Khanna—who was just held at gunpoint by Israeli settlers on his trip to the West Bank—stopped short of calling for a full embargo against the Israeli government.

“Inexcusable moral failure by the ‘opposition’ party leadership,” Middle East analyst Omar Baddar wrote on X. “If a genocide (sniper bullets in the heads of toddlers, systematically murdered medics & journalists, rape of prisoners … etc.) isn’t a red line, then what the hell is?!”