WASHINGTON — House Democrats unsuccessfully tried to pass a resolution to halt President Donald Trump’s war with Iran on Thursday — a response to his shocking threat two days earlier to annihilate “a whole civilization.”
House and Senate members are at the tail end of a two-week spring recess, but Rep. Glenn Ivey of Maryland and other Democrats returned to Washington for a routine “pro forma” session to try to pass the resolution by unanimous consent.
However, the Republican lawmaker presiding over the session, Chris Smith of New Jersey, gaveled out of the brief session without calling on Ivey. Democrats howled in protest, with some shouting "Shame!"
Outside the Capitol, the Democrats slammed Trump for vowing to strike civilian infrastructure targets and blast Iran back to the "Stone Ages" unless its leaders agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the critical shipping lane connecting the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman.
Seeing the real Iran
And Democrats beseeched Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to cut the recess short and call the House back into session to take up a war powers vote. Johnson has ignored Democrats' pleas.
"We've been at war for 40 days. We've only been in session for 33, which is another part of this pattern for the speaker, being away and being on vacation instead of being here getting the people's work done," Ivey told reporters.
"The threats of total annihilation were beyond the pale. It's time for Congress to step in and take control of the wheel," he said.
Democrats, and even some prominent conservatives outside Congress, have called on Vice President JD Vance and the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from power over his stunning comments.
Trump and his team have argued they're in complete control. Before his self-imposed 8 p.m. deadline that day, Trump backed down from his threat — as he has done before — and said the U.S. would enter a two-week ceasefire with Iran facilitated by the Pakistani government. With talks planned for this weekend, he posted Wednesday night that if a "REAL AGREEMENT" is not reached, "then the 'Shootin’ Starts,' bigger, and better, and stronger than anyone has ever seen before."
The House Democrats’ push precedes a more serious effort to rein in Trump next week, when Congress is set to return to Washington and, they say, Senate Democrats will force a vote on their own war powers resolution. If it is successful, it would halt Trump’s military operations in Iran and require Congress to vote to approve any future military actions.
“This temporary ceasefire agreement — which is already being violated — starts a very short clock for Congress to finally end this unprecedented chaos,” Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., Cory Booker, D-N.J., Chris Murphy, D-Conn., and other Democrats said in a statement. “Absent immediate steps by Republican leadership to stand up to Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior, we will once again force a vote on a War Powers Resolution to finally end this dangerous war in the Middle East."
“The American people do not want and have not authorized it, but nonetheless keep paying the price,” the Democrats said.
The exact day and time of the war powers vote has not been set. It can be triggered by a member of the minority party at any point. A simple majority vote is required to pass the resolution.
The GOP-controlled Senate has rejected war powers resolutions to limit Trump's actions in recent months, with Rand Paul of Kentucky being the only Republican to consistently vote for them. But Democrats want to turn up the heat on the GOP and pick off other Republicans who are alarmed by Trump's escalating rhetoric toward Iran.
Trump set off a firestorm Tuesday morning when he warned on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” unless a deal was reached with Tehran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the closure of which has curbed shipments of oil and hiked gas prices in the U.S. and around the world.
Trump stood down from a catastrophic strike on Iran, a nation of 90 million people, but Democrats aren’t backing off their talk of the 25th Amendment — or impeachment, should they take back the House in November.
In a letter to his Democratic Caucus, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee and a former constitutional law professor, will “host a virtual briefing on Trump administration accountability and the 25th Amendment” for Democrats on Friday afternoon.
The party is powerless to invoke it, however. The 25th Amendment allows members of the president's Cabinet, including his vice president, to declare him unfit to fulfill his duties and remove him from power.
Still, the 25th Amendment chatter has fired up the left. Even some of Trump's former MAGA allies called for the Cabinet to use it.
“25TH AMENDMENT!!! Not a single bomb has dropped on America. We cannot kill an entire civilization,” former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., once a close ally of Trump, wrote on X in response to Trump. "This is evil and madness."
On the steps of the Capitol on Thursday, Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-Pa., a member of the Judiciary Committee, urged the Republicans around Trump to end his presidency.
"The words and actions of this president have proved that he is unhinged and unwell and has been for some time. Over the weekend, we read and heard the president's Easter morning tweet of profanity, blasphemy, danger, and the following day his threat to eliminate an entire civilization," Dean told reporters.
"Pause there. These are not normal times, America," Dean continued. "When will my Republican colleagues stand up in the House, in the Senate, the vice president, the Cabinet secretaries who surround this madman? When will they grow a spine? When will they say, 'Stop!'?"
