Should President Donald Trump have the ability to continue military actions in Iran without congressional approval? That’s the question that consumed Congress this week – and that forced several New Jersey Democrats to seriously weigh whether to break with their party on what may be the most important foreign policy issue of Trump’s second term.
The GOP-controlled Senate and House narrowly voted down Democratic-backed war powers resolutions that would have required Trump to withdraw U.S. forces from Iran, and in both cases, the New Jersey delegation broke down on party lines. But at least two of the state’s Democratic House members, Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-Tenafly) and Donald Norcross (D-Camden), said that they were or remain conflicted on exactly how Congress should approach the conflict.
Gottheimer had not confirmed how he would vote prior to this afternoon, and in fact had publicly opposed the resolution before the strikes occurred, saying that to pass it while negotiations were ongoing risked undermining the U.S.’s position. He ultimately decided to vote in favor today, joining nearly all of his Democratic colleagues in doing so, but not without some trepidation about the prospect of what an immediate withdrawal from hostilities would entail.
Norcross, too, said that he too was not automatically opposed to Trump’s strikes in Iran without learning more. After receiving a number of briefings from Trump officials in recent days, however, he said he came away convinced that the administration has little clear sense of why it entered the conflict or what its objectives are.
“I did my homework, and unfortunately, we found out that the conditions that prompted this attack, I don’t believe. It pains me to say that,” Norcross said. “Our own country not giving us the whole truth is something that we should all be concerned about.”
“How do we get out of [the conflict]?” he added. “Without those answers, I’m not about to say, let’s send kids to war.”
Most of their Democratic colleagues had fewer compunctions about voting to rein in Trump, whom they’ve characterized as a rogue agent and a “warmonger” in the wake of the Saturday morning strikes. “We cannot have this president operating rogue, going into war, creating unsafe situations for Americans,” Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-Newark) said.
And for New Jersey’s Republicans, too, the question of how to vote was a relatively simple one. Across both chambers of Congress, only three Republicans in total (none of them from New Jersey) voted for the resolutions.
“[Passing the resolution] would weaken the president’s stand, it would weaken our position,” Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis) said. “It wouldn’t go through at the end of the day – it wouldn’t get the votes for overriding the veto if it came to that – but the bottom line is, let’s be unified.”
As Van Drew noted, the resolution votes were largely symbolic, since Trump could have vetoed anything that managed to pass both chambers. But if either or both resolutions had passed, it would have been an undeniable blow to Trump as he tries to present a unified front to his party and the world.
Gottheimer and a handful of other moderate Democrats have put forward an alternate war powers resolution requiring Trump to end operations in Iran within 30 days absent congressional authorization, rather than the immediate withdrawal mandated by the resolutions voted on this week. The congressman said that his proposal remains “aggressive,” but gives the administration a short runway to make its case to Congress.
“An open-ended commitment by the administration and the recent implication from the Secretary of Defense that ground troops may be engaged are both unacceptable,” Gottheimer’s office said when the alternate resolution was proposed. “It is equally unwise to act in a precipitous way and endanger America’s security and put our service members in additional harm’s way.”
But Gottheimer’s proposed 30-day window – the congressman said the clock began ticking the day of the strikes, so it’s now down to 25 days – might land with a thud among some members of both parties. Van Drew said there was little point in putting forward any such resolution, saying that it’s “not going to see the light of day” as long as Trump has veto power, while Senator Andy Kim said he “strongly oppose[s]” any effort to delay congressional authority.
“The Constitution is not optional. It’s not advisory,” Kim said. “I’ve been working on this stuff for a long time. I’ve never seen a situation as cut-and-dry as this, where they needed to have congressional approval.”
Kim, like Norcross, said that he came away from the Trump administration’s briefings this week more concerned than before. Having worked in the State Department during the Obama administration, he said he’s worried above all about the prospect of another forever war.
“For someone who worked in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the idea that we have not learned any of those lessons, that we’re back into a war that has no achievable objectives – it’s completely open-ended,” Kim said. “What I heard at the briefing was deeply alarming, and made me feel even more opposed to what’s happening right now.”
