Murkowski Flips on the Seventh Iran War-Powers Vote — the Senate Falls 49 to 50 With Fetterman the Final No, the Hegseth Restart Threat on Tuesday Is the Trigger, the Eighth Vote Already Sits on the Whip’s Calendar for the Last Week of May
Lisa Murkowski crossed the aisle on the seventh Senate vote on the Kaine Iran war-powers resolution at twenty past three on Thursday afternoon, joining Susan Collins and Rand Paul on the discharge motion the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has held in committee since the third week of April. The motion failed by a single vote, forty-nine to fifty, after John Fetterman of Pennsylvania crossed the other way and held the Republican majority intact. The trigger for the Murkowski flip, on the line the Alaskan’s office gave the Capitol pool at four, was the War Secretary’s Tuesday testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the United States “reserves the right to restart air operations on Iranian targets without further consultation with Congress.”
The Seventh Vote at Twenty Past Three
The discharge motion on the Kaine joint resolution, which would have removed the resolution from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and placed it on the Senate calendar for a privileged debate within thirty session hours, was called at twenty past three on Thursday afternoon on the motion of the Minority Leader. The roll, on the open call sheet released through the Senate clerk’s office at half past three, ran forty-nine to fifty. The forty-nine consisted of forty-six Senate Democrats, the two independents who caucus with the Democrats, and three Republicans — Collins of Maine, Paul of Kentucky and, for the first time, Murkowski of Alaska. The fifty consisted of forty-nine Senate Republicans and Mr Fetterman of Pennsylvania. The Vice-President was not in the chair; the presiding officer was the senior senator from Wyoming.
The Hegseth Tuesday Testimony as Trigger
The Murkowski office’s line at four o’clock named the Tuesday Hegseth testimony as the proximate trigger. On the Tuesday-morning hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the War Secretary, in answer to a Reed question on the Office of Legal Counsel memorandum of the second of May, said the Department of Defense “reserves the right to restart air operations against Iranian targets in the event of a material breach of the Tehran framework, without further consultation with Congress beyond the standing notification provisions of the War Powers Act.” Senator Murkowski, in the floor statement she made before the discharge vote on Thursday afternoon, named the testimony as “a position the Senate cannot decline to test on the floor of the chamber whose constitutional authority the Department asserts the right to bypass.” The senator did not declare a position on the underlying merits of the Tehran framework.
Fetterman as the Final No
Mr Fetterman, who has voted with the Republican majority on each of the previous six discharge motions on the Kaine resolution and the parallel Sanders amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, returned the same vote on the seventh attempt on Thursday afternoon, on a floor statement that ran to two minutes. The senator said the Tehran-conditional framework returned through the Pakistan channel on Sunday morning was “at the most fragile point of any negotiation,” said the seventh discharge motion would “take the most consequential foreign-policy negotiation of this Administration out of the room in which it is being conducted,” and confirmed he would “hold the position until the framework either lands or fails.” The Pennsylvania senator declined to answer three follow-up shouts on the Murkowski flip on his way out of the chamber.
The Eighth Vote on the Whip’s Calendar
The Minority Leader, on a one-page release issued through his floor office at half past four on Thursday afternoon, has already calendared the eighth Senate vote on the Kaine resolution for the last week of May, sequenced after the Memorial Day recess and the second Banking Committee hearing on the consolidated sanctions schedule. The Schumer working count, on the brief the deputy whip gave Capitol political editors at five, runs to forty-nine confirmed yes votes; the position of Senator Fetterman, on the same brief, “will be tested by the conduct of the framework negotiations in the intervening fortnight.” The Schumer release adds two further Republican names — Senator Tillis of North Carolina and Senator Young of Indiana — to the soft column the whip team will work through the recess.
The H.Res.939 Wednesday Vote in the House
On the parallel House calendar, the Wednesday morning vote on House Resolution 939 — the Pelosi-cosponsored war-powers resolution discharged out of the House Rules Committee on the second Sunday of May — remains scheduled for ten o’clock Wednesday morning, on the brief the Speaker’s office released at five. The House Republican whip count, on the Saturday closing call read out by the Speaker on CBS Face the Nation last weekend, holds twenty-three Republicans in the soft column. The Democratic whip count, on the line the House Democratic Leader gave CNN State of the Union, holds the full two hundred and fourteen votes of the Democratic caucus. The Wednesday roll will be the first floor test in the lower chamber of a war-powers position the Senate has now declined to advance for the seventh time by a single vote.