The House passed its third resolution this year on ending the Iran war, 220-204, with seven Republicans crossing over — but as a non-binding concurrent resolution, it never reaches President Trump’s desk.
The vote: what actually passed
The House of Representatives voted Tuesday, Sept. 15, to direct President Trump to end U.S. military involvement in the conflict with Iran, passing H.Con.Res.93 by a vote of 220 to 204. The House Clerk’s roll call, recorded at 10:32 p.m. ET, shows 220 members in favor, 204 opposed, no members voting present and nine not voting. ABC News, Al Jazeera and lawcommentary.com each independently reported the same tally.
What the resolution does not do matters as much as what it does. H.Con.Res.93 is a concurrent resolution, not a joint resolution. Under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, that distinction means the measure does not go to the president for a signature and cannot be vetoed. ABC News described it as a measure that “does not carry the weight of law and is not subject to veto or presented to the president,” and lawcommentary.com reported it “would not be presented to the president for a signature or veto.” None of the three war-powers resolutions the House has passed this year has reached Trump’s desk, according to Al Jazeera.
The bill directs the president, “pursuant to section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution,” to “remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran,” with an exception allowing defensive operations against an imminent attack, according to the bill’s text on govinfo.gov. Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., sponsored the measure; Reps. Crow, Ryan, Houlahan, Panetta, Auchincloss, Goodlander, Vindman and Scott of Virginia signed on as cosponsors. It was introduced April 28. The day before the vote, Sept. 14, Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, requested the unanimous-consent order that set up one hour of floor debate; the recorded vote itself was pushed to the next legislative day.
The crossover Republicans
Seven House Republicans voted with 213 Democrats to pass the measure: Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Warren Davidson of Ohio, Tom Barrett of Michigan, Nancy Mace of South Carolina, Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa and Zach Nunn of Iowa. That is up from four Republicans who crossed over on each of the two prior successful votes, in June and July. Massie, Fitzpatrick, Davidson and Barrett had voted this way both times before; Mace, Miller-Meeks and Nunn broke with their party for the first time on this resolution.
Nunn explained his vote in a statement posted to his official House website: “Congress owes them, their families, and every American in uniform clear objectives and constitutional oversight.” He told Al Jazeera that “with the negotiating window closed, sustained combat operations now require congressional authorization,” adding, “I will not support another open-ended war.”
Mast took the opposite position on the floor, even as he handled the procedural steps that brought the bill to a vote. “They are a continuous ongoing threat to the United States,” he told Al Jazeera. “Enough is enough.” The House Clerk’s roll call shows he voted no.
Overall, Republicans opposed the resolution by a wide margin — 203 to 7 — while nearly every voting Democrat backed it: 213 in favor, none opposed, one not voting. The chamber’s single independent member voted no.
The Democratic case
Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, made the floor case for the resolution in a statement released by House Foreign Affairs Democrats. He framed the war in terms of both cost and casualties: “Seven months into a war of choice that President Trump said would only last 4-6 weeks, American families have paid over 100 billion dollars more for gasoline and diesel, roughly 800 dollars more per household.” He said 19 service members have died and more than 750 have been wounded.
Meeks argued the vote was about a constitutional line, not the war’s merits alone. “Congress, not the president, has the power to decide when the United States goes to war,” he said, closing by urging colleagues to “make clear, once again, that this president cannot wage war without our consent.” He described diplomacy as unfinished business: “We need real diplomats at the table, not real estate developers in over their heads.” His statement counted three war-powers resolutions considered by Congress this year: H.Con.Res.93; his own earlier resolution, H.Con.Res.86, which he said “passed both the House and the Senate” in June; and one the House passed in July.
Separately, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated the war’s cost at $38 billion over its first six months, with monthly costs projected to keep rising by roughly $3 billion, Al Jazeera reported.
Why it doesn’t bind Trump
The mechanics explain what Tuesday’s vote can and cannot do. A concurrent resolution under section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution skips the presidential-signature step entirely — it is a statement of congressional direction, not a law, though Lawfare’s analysis notes such resolutions can still carry political weight as evidence of congressional opposition. Lawfare’s analysis of the earlier, similarly structured June measure noted that a concurrent resolution “won’t be subject to a presidential veto but will also lack the force of law” even when the Senate concurs.
Lawfare also flagged a deeper legal question: in the outlet’s words, “the conventional wisdom is that section 5(c) is likely unconstitutional under Chadha as well” — a reference to the Supreme Court’s decision in INS v. Chadha, which limited Congress’s ability to act through resolutions that bypass presentment to the president. Congress had never actually used this specific procedure to adopt such a resolution before this year; earlier attempts tied to Somalia in 1993, Iraq in 2014 and Iran in 2020 were never even discharged from Senate committee.
History offers a preview of what tends to happen next. No president has ever complied with a war-powers measure he opposed, and no legal challenge under the 1973 law has ever succeeded, according to Wikipedia’s account of the statute and, separately, PBS NewsHour. PBS and PolitiFact note that no war-powers resolution has ever survived a presidential veto; in Trump’s first term, two such measures passed Congress but fell short of the votes needed to override his veto, including a 2019 measure on the Yemen war that Trump vetoed outright. Expert Mark Cancian told PBS that if a binding version of such a measure ever did pass Congress, “the Trump administration would develop a legal rationale for not complying, and the issue would end up in front of the Supreme Court” — and that courts so far have “repeatedly declined to rule on its constitutionality.”
How we got here
The current conflict began Feb. 28, when the United States joined Israel in strikes on Iran. A ceasefire that followed broke down in early July, and the U.S. and Iran traded 12 consecutive days of attacks; around July 22, an Iranian strike on a U.S. base in Jordan killed three American service members.
The House first passed a war-powers resolution on the conflict June 3, by a vote of 215-208, with the same four Republicans crossing over who would do so again in July. Three weeks later, the Senate took up that same measure and approved it 50-48 on June 23, with Republicans Bill Cassidy, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Rand Paul voting with Democrats — completing its passage through both chambers as a non-binding concurrent resolution, since it required no presidential signature. Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, argued on the floor that the vote would backfire: “It’s going to have no effect. The president isn’t going to pay any attention to it,” he said.
The next day, the Senate separately took up a joint resolution on the war — a measure that, unlike the concurrent resolution, would have required Trump’s signature to take effect — and rejected a motion to proceed, 47-50-1, after Trump called the senators who had voted for the concurrent resolution “losers” and, according to PBS, personally confronted them at a closed-door Capitol lunch. Cassidy voted no on the joint resolution after a briefing from Vice President Vance and envoy Steve Witkoff; Paul voted present. The House passed its second resolution, H.Con.Res.89, on July 23, by 214-208 — what Al Jazeera described as the chamber’s first such vote since the ceasefire had collapsed.
What’s next, and what’s not known
No specific date for Senate action on H.Con.Res.93 had been confirmed by Wednesday, Sept. 16, though the War Powers Resolution sets an expedited procedure once a chamber receives a concurrent resolution passed by the other — 15 days for committee action, then three more for a floor vote, according to Lawfare. No reaction from the White House or from Trump to Tuesday’s vote had surfaced by Wednesday. A poll conducted by the AP-NORC Center in July, cited by Al Jazeera, found that most Americans believe the Iran war “has not been worth fighting” — a sentiment that has not, so far, translated into a resolution that reaches the president’s desk. Whether Sept. 15’s vote produces a different outcome in the Senate than June’s reversal did remains an open question.