When it comes to whether the United States is at war with Iran, Republicans are borrowing from Bill Clinton: “It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.”
On Wednesday, the Senate voted down a War Powers Act resolution to rein in President Donald Trump’s actions in Iran. And Republicans are conjuring a new argument: The United States’ operations in Iran are not at war.
At least according to their tortured definitions.
“We’re not at war right now, we’re four days into a very specific, clear mission and operation,” House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters Wednesday during his weekly press conference. This comes despite the fact that Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have separately called the operation a war on different occasions.
There’s a good reason for this: Trump ran as a uniquely non-interventionist president. He regularly criticized the hawks in his party like Jeb Bush and John McCain and defeated them. His campaign said that Kamala Harris would send young men to war as a way to convince them to break for him.
So now they scramble to find new definitions of war. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the most bellicose Republican and Trump ally, told The Independent that the United States has been in an “undeclared state of war with Iran since 1979.”
“You kill an American, you’re at war with the people you’re killing,” Graham said. It’s a way for Graham to keep his hawkish credentials without saying Trump is now at war. This likely is due to the fact that Trump is already unpopular and voters would not appreciate a new war on top of a cost of living crisis.
But by Graham’s very definition, the United States is at war with Iran, given it killed Iran’s Supreme Ayatollah Leader Ali Khamenei.
Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, a critic of Trump, repeated the claim. He told The Independent that there will be a time to talk about war.
“I think a lot of it will come around when we when we're talking about timing, deployment, sustainment, are we building any sort of alliances in the region?” he said. “Are we tapping on any of our relationships or partners across the globe?”
Other Republicans simply said they opposed the War Powers Act because Iran posed a threat.
“Because Iran cannot be allowed to develop or possess a nuclear weapon,” Sen. Susan Collins of Maine told The Independent. “It has thousands and thousands of ballistic missiles that can be used to shield that activity, and it's the leading sponsor of terrorism in the world, and has been responsible for the murder Americans.”
But as Appropriations Committee Chairwoman, Collins will be in charge of setting the budget for the Pentagon and discretionary spending. This means she will be appropriating money for a war that is not a war.
Others are not buying it.
"I don't know how tuned in Mike Johnson is with the president of the United States, but the president of the United States himself has said that we are at war and that would make his actions patently illegal," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told The Independent.
Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona didn’t buy it either.
“I've heard Republicans say we're at war, and in the next sentence, the same person say we're not at war,” he told The Independent.
There’s another reason for this: Allowing Trump to take military action unfettered prevents Republicans from taking a hard vote.
Voting for a War Powers Act resolution tees up a vote on the authorization of the use of military force or a formal declaration of war.
In a year where Republicans consistently lose in the generic ballot, taking a vote to send U.S. service members to go to war when most Americans oppose it or do not even know why the country is fighting is nothing short of a death sentence.
Johnson essentially said that much.
“I trust that American people will understand that this administration did the right thing, I think they’ll reward it politically,” he said.
As a result, expect Congress to make Trump do their homework lest they have to shoulder the failing grade.
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