Small Band of Senate Democrats Plan To Throw Up Roadblocks Until Rubio, Hegseth Testify About Iran War

A small band of Senate Democrats are threatening to set up roadblocks in the chamber as Republicans look to consider President Trump’s nominations and pass legislation. Democrats are demanding that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth come before two Senate committees to answer questions about the Iran war under oath. The Democratic lawmakers, led by Senator Tim Kaine, have introduced a number of war powers resolutions in the chamber. Those could take up a significant amount of time in the coming weeks if Messrs. Rubio and Hegseth do not appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee, respectively. During an hour-long question-and-answer session with reporters at the Capitol on Monday night, six senators said they would not relent until the secretaries come in for questioning. Mr. Kaine was joined during that meeting by Senators Adam Schiff, Tammy Baldwin, Chris Murphy, Tammy Duckworth, and Cory Booker. “The president has jumped into a war of choice without in any way getting permission from the Article I branch,” Mr. Booker told reporters in the Senate press offices on Monday. “We’ve had no hearings in the House, no hearings in the Senate. We’ve had no oversight whatsoever over what the executive is doing.”“We’re spending a billion dollars a day and we have failed to have any real substantive debate or discussion,” he said. Mr. Kaine has led Democrats in their effort to restrict Mr. Trump’s actions abroad, including by introducing a war powers resolution to force a debate in Congress around the operation in Venezuela which saw President Maduro extradited to New York for his trial. As one of Virginia’s two senators, Mr. Kaine represents the sailors who serve in Carrier Strike Group 12, more commonly known as the USS Gerald Ford Carrier Strike Group. Members of that unit, who are based at Norfolk, Virginia’s naval station, have been on deployment since last summer after being positioned in the Middle East, re-deployed to the Caribbean, and then being sent back to the Middle East amid the war with Iran. “All these sailors who thought they were gonna be home likely before Christmas to see their families — now it’s March,” Mr. Kaine said, noting that they are now expected to not return home until early summer. “It will break the record for the longest deployment ever.”Mr. Kaine says that even in classified settings, lawmakers are not getting answers that are satisfactory. He and his Democratic colleagues agree that they did not hear any credible evidence that the Iranian government was an imminent threat to the United States at the time Mr. Trump and the Israelis launched strikes on Iran last weekend. “We are planning to use our powers as individual senators and as an allied group to force this debate and to force, to the best of our ability, the hearings to take place,” Mr. Booker told reporters. Just last week, two war powers resolutions — one in the House and one in the Senate — both failed in bipartisan votes. In the House, four Democrats sided with Mr. Trump, while Senator John Fetterman was the lone Democrat in the Senate to vote against Mr. Kaine’s first war powers resolution. The House and Senate “yes” votes were also bipartisan, with two House Republicans and one Senate Republican siding with those in favor of limiting Mr. Trump’s military operations in Iran. “We should be having hearings on the biggest military engagement since the War in Afghanistan,” Mr. Booker said.

Small Band of Senate Democrats Plan To Throw Up Roadblocks Until Rubio, Hegseth Testify About Iran War

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