The year is 2006. Democrats have swept the midterm congressional elections after a Republican administration launched an unpopular war in a Middle Eastern country. But the opposition pulls its punches and is unable to assert Congress’ check on the president. The year is 2026. Democrats have swept the midterm congressional elections after a Republican administration launched an unpopular war in a Middle Eastern country. What will happen next?
Despite President Donald Trump’s insistence that his “excursion” to Iran would be nothing like the invasion of Iraq, the domestic politics are looking quite similar. Both the failures of the war itself and the economic damage caused by setting an oil-rich region on fire became major political liabilities for the president’s party. Exit polling shows that 62 percent of voters consider the war a mistake and 74 percent considered it a major factor in their votes. Some of the newly elected Democrats were upstarts who had ridden the wave of antiwar sentiment in the primaries to beat establishment favorites seen as complicit with the war.
“If it is still around next term, on day one, Democrats will pass a bill to end the Iran war,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D–Calif.) told The New Republic in July 2026.
Translating that popular mandate into policy is easier said than done. Trump has shown multiple times that the president can simply veto or ignore war powers resolutions from Congress demanding an end to the war. Congress’ only direct leverage is over the military budget—and threatening to withhold it is itself a politically risky maneuver, as newly elected lawmakers discovered after the 2006 elections. Party leadership that is willing to attack Republicans’ execution of the war may not share a principled antiwar commitment.
“I had serious misgivings about the decision of this administration to go forward and still do. But it comes down to this. We have to decide whether or not we will provide the funds necessary to support the men and women in uniform…I don’t support a precipitous withdrawal,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D–Ill.) told NPR in May 2006, a few months before the midterms. He is still the Senate Democratic whip today.
Of course, there are important differences between now and then. The Iraq War was popular from the beginning and took some time to become unpopular, while the Iran war is the first U.S. war to start without majority support since mass opinion polling began. Rather than building legal support with an authorization from Congress, as President George W. Bush did for the Iraq War, the Trump administration simply attacked Iran by surprise and dared Congress to stop it.
The administration also stated from the beginning that it entered the war “at the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli ally,” tying the decision to a foreign nation that is becoming controversial in American politics. And unlike in Iraq, where U.S. troops quickly occupied the country and then became bogged down fighting guerrillas, the U.S. military is engaged in an on-again, off-again naval and aerial standoff with an intact Iranian government.
Still, the same tools that were available to Congress then are available to Congress now. “I would stop the funding. The House and the Senate should stop the funding for any further actions in the Iran war. That’s what we did to stop the Vietnam War,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) told Fox News the week before the midterm. (After a 1973 ceasefire in Vietnam, lawmakers forbade the Nixon administration from using any military funds to reenter the war.)
On paper, Khanna’s faction can win this fight. Even some Republicans were shocked at the Trump administration’s initial $200 billion funding request for the Iran war in March 2026. The administration folded the cost of the war into the general military budget a few months later, and all but six Democrats voted against that bill in the House of Representatives. Democrats now have at least a seven-seat House majority, which is expected to grow, according to AP News as of early Wednesday morning.
But they don’t have the two-thirds majority necessary to override a presidential veto—and past experience shows that can be fatal for any attempt to defund the war. In 2007, the Bush administration asked the newly elected Congress for $93.4 billion to sustain U.S. forces in Iraq. Democrats initially passed a $123 billion bill that gave the military until September 2008 to withdraw from the country. Bush vetoed it, claiming that the “terrorists” would simply “mark their calendars and gather their strength.” Faced with a dilemma between giving Bush a blank check or leaving the military without funding, Democrats backed down, passing a war budget without a deadline. U.S. troops would stay for the entirety of the Bush administration.
The sporadic nature of the fighting with Iran does make the politics different from an ongoing ground war. Aside from U.S. naval escorts for oil tankers, which cost $2 billion to $3 billion per month, U.S. forces exclusively see action when there’s a flare-up, which has only happened when Trump decided to escalate. “The only sure way to protect our troops is to end this war as soon as possible,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) contended.
The role of Israel is a double-edged sword for antiwar forces. On one hand, opponents of the Iran war can more easily deflect from accusations of unpatriotism and even present themselves as defending Americans’ interests against foreigners. Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed argued that both Iran and Israel “have proven dangerous in their own way” during the Michigan debate. “Let’s be honest about what happened here. Israel has pushed us to go to war in Iran,” he said. “Ask yourself, are we safer because of that war?” El Sayed won the election and is now headed to the Senate.
On the other hand, the Trump administration can also claim that any decision to escalate the war again was out of its hands. Politico reported before the war began that some members of the Trump administration were hoping Israel would throw the first punch and invite Iranian retaliation. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed a few days after the war began.
Weaker than restricting the budget but stronger than passing more war powers resolutions, Congress can use its investigative powers to squeeze the administration. So far, Democrats have demanded answers about U.S. troop casualties, U.S. attacks on civilians, the financial cost of the war, and even the role of “extreme religious beliefs” in military briefings. With a congressional majority, they can turn strongly worded letters into subpoenas for documents and witnesses with real legal weight.
And those investigations can turn into impeachments. “One of the first things we’re going to do in the majority, we’re going to run [Secretary of War] Pete Hegseth out of town,” House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries (D–N.Y.) said last month, and The Telegraph reports that Democrats have already contacted whistleblowers willing to testify against him. Even before the new Congress takes office, the outgoing libertarian-leaning Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) has vowed to force a vote on Hegseth’s impeachment.
Ultimately, the next Congress’ role in the war comes down to Democrats’ willingness to fight. The week before the war began, Democratic leadership delayed a vote on a war powers resolution. Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D–Mich.) told Reason Editor Matt Welch on The Fifth Column that there was an “under-the-surface attempt to be like let’s not do it, or let’s not do it in a strong way” because lawmakers “fear the political consequences.” Drop Site, meanwhile, reported that “many Democrats remain convinced a war with Iran is both the right policy and beneficial politically for them,” because it would force Trump to own the cost of the conflict.
In June 2025, just before Israel launched the earlier Twelve Day War on Iran, Schumer mocked “TACO Trump,” an acronym for “Trump Always Chickens Out,” for “already folding” against “the terrorist government of Iran” in peace negotiations. On February 28, 2026, the day that Trump launched his current war, House leader Jeffries issued a waffling statement, agreeing that “Iran is a bad actor and must be aggressively confronted” but warning Trump not to make the war “costly” or “prolonged.”
In fact, at one point, Democratic leadership threatened to become a bigger obstacle to ending the war than they were to starting it. When Trump signed a peace memorandum with Iran in June 2026, some Democrats attacked him as a weak appeaser. “This is not the art of the deal. This is the art of surrender,” Schumer said on the Capitol steps, falsely claiming that the memorandum involved giving American taxpayer money to Iran and threatening to withhold any funding for it. The deal fell apart in July 2026.
The midterms have been a decisive rebuke to those politics. El Sayed, for example, won both the primary and the general election by calling his opponents complicit in the war—and dishonest in their opposition. “Now [Republican candidate] Mike Rogers wants you to believe that somehow he was not 100 percent aligned with Donald Trump on the war in the first place,” El Sayed said at a September rally. “Here’s the thing about war, you can’t unring that bell.”
Yet the post-2006 experience shows that talk is cheap, even talk about how the other guy isn’t as serious. “The president may be content with keeping our troops mired in the middle of an open-ended civil war, but we’re not, and neither are most Americans,” the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–Nev.) said in May 2007, two months before voting to let Bush keep U.S. troops mired in the middle of an open-ended civil war.
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