Republican leaders of the United States House of Representatives unexpectedly cancelled a vote Thursday on a resolution that would have required President Donald Trump to obtain Congressional authorisation to continue the Iran war, citing Reuters.
The vote had been scheduled for late Thursday afternoon, just before the chamber broke for the Memorial Day recess. Leadership delayed it until early June, after the recess.
“We had the votes without question, and they knew it,” Representative Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told reporters after the cancellation.
The House had blocked three previous war powers resolutions earlier this year, with near-unanimous Republican support. But the margins had narrowed sharply since the United States and Israel began striking Iran on February 28, with the last such resolution failing on a tie vote. A handful of Republicans were expected to defect on Thursday, and the absence of others looked likely to flip the result.
Democrats — and a small but growing group of Republicans — have argued that the Constitution gives Congress, not the President, the power to declare war and that Trump may have committed the country to a long conflict without a clear strategy. Most Republicans and the White House counter that Trump’s actions fall within his commander-in-chief authority to order limited operations against imminent threats.
The cancellation comes two days after the US Senate advanced a similar war powers resolution 50–47, in a rare procedural rebuke of Trump in which four Republicans crossed over to join all but one Senate Democrat. Republicans control narrow majorities in both chambers.
The continued absence of a Congressional deadline keeps the Iran war open-ended, sustaining the Hormuz risk premium that has driven up Sri Lanka’s fuel-import costs and hardened the rupee’s depreciation pressure through May. Pentagon spending on the war has now passed US$29 billion, and the IMF has warned that a prolonged conflict could trigger a multi-month global energy shock.
Source: Ada Derana (Reuters).
