Democrats demand passage of Iran war powers resolution despite House recess
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
Democratic party leaders have vowed to renew the effort to curb Donald Trump’s war in Iran after several days of escalating tactics that culminated in a temporary ceasefire.
Democratic lawmakers plan to seek to pass the war powers resolution introduced by New York representative Greg Meeks via unanimous consent later this morning, when the House of Representatives meets for a pro forma session. There is a press conference scheduled for after.
In a statement on today’s push, Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, said: “House Republican leadership remains completely silent on the president’s unhinged behavior. Instead, they continue to enable and excuse his dangerous conduct. We will continue to unleash maximum pressure on Republicans to put patriotic duty over party loyalty and join Democrats in stopping the madness.”
Representative Glenn Ivey, of Maryland, will lead the effort, and will invite all members who are in Washington today to join. However, the motion is unlikely to succeed, since a single objection would block unanimous consent and require Democrats to pursue a formal vote on the resolution.
In recent months, several war powers resolutions have failed in Congress after a handful of Democrats voted alongside Republicans. But Trump’s aggressive overtures this week – including a Truth Social post that said “a whole civilization” could be wiped out if Iran did not agree to demands, have pushed some to act.
“We need a permanent end to Donald Trump’s reckless war of choice,” said Jeffries on CNN shortly after Trump announced the two-week ceasefire with Iran on Tuesday.
“House Democrats have demanded that Speaker Mike Johnson immediately reconvene the House back into session so we can move a war powers resolution that will end this conflict permanently.”
Read the full story here:
In other developments:
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After a private meeting at the White House with Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, Donald Trump seemed to renew his threats against the defensive military alliance for not helping fight the US-Israeli war on Iran, and hinted he could again try to seize Greenland from Nato member Denmark.
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Before Trump stepped into his meeting with the Nato secretary-general, and as the ceasefire with Iran seemed to be falling apart on its first day, the president found time to continue a social-media feud with his former ally Marjorie Taylor Greene.
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Speaking to reporters in Hungary, the US vice-president, JD Vance, claimed not to recognize the name of the Vatican ambassador to the US when he was asked about reports that a Pentagon official had reprimanded that Catholic diplomat, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, over the American-born pope’s opposition to US militarism.
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At a Pentagon press conference, Pete Hegseth said that Iran “begged for this ceasefire”, and claimed that Operation Epic Fury “decimated” Iran’s military.
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The US justice department announced that the FBI arrested Courtney Williams, a military veteran who later worked in support of Delta Force, a covert commando unit, after she was indicted for “alleged transmission of classified national defense information to individuals not authorized to receive it, including a journalist”.
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Trump, who announced with some fanfare last year a doubling of tariffs on imported steel, plans to use tens of millions of dollars worth of donated foreign steel to build his $400m White House ballroom, the New York Times reported.
Key events
Joseph Gedeon
In a letter to colleagues on Wednesday, Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, expressed significant doubt in the ceasefire.
“A two-week ceasefire is woefully insufficient,” Jeffries said. “Accordingly, we have demanded that the House come back into session immediately in order to vote on our resolution to permanently end the war in the Middle East.”
The House is on a two-week recess and will not return for formal votes until 14 April.
Republican crossover support for a war powers resolution remains elusive. Representative Nancy Mace, who floated supporting Democrats last month, is now considered unlikely by members of both parties to break ranks.
Representative Don Bacon, a Republican and retired one-star general who backed a war powers measure limiting Trump’s Venezuela policy earlier this year, told Politico he would “listen” before adding: “I want us to defeat Iran. They have murdered Americans for 47 years.”
Meanwhile, Democrat Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, said Wednesday that the Senate would vote on an Iran war powers resolution when they return to Washington next week.
Jakub Krupa
Nato secretary general Mark Rutte has briefed some capitals that US president Donald Trump wants concrete commitments within the next few days for help securing the strait of Hormuz, two European diplomats told Reuters.
The report appears to confirm yesterday’s report in the German economic daily Handelsblatt, claiming Nato was considering a naval mission to secure the strait in a move to “appease” Trump.
The move comes after Rutte’s long meeting with Trump in Washington yesterday.
Donald Trump issued a cryptic message on Truth Social this morning. “None of these people, including our own, very disappointing, NATO, understood anything unless they have pressure placed upon them!!!” he wrote. Seeming to, once again, scold the alliance for member states’ reluctance to support the president’s military campaign in Iran.
Mark Rutte, the secretary general of Nato, has said Trump was “clearly disappointed” that the US’s allies had refused to join its war against Iran, following a closed-door meeting in Washington on Wednesday.
Speaking to CNN after his private meeting with the US president, Rutte declined to say directly whether Trump raised his threat to withdraw from the military alliance over the Iran war, but described the exchange as a “very frank, very open” discussion between “two good friends”.
A reminder that on day two of the ceasefire, my colleagues are covering the latest at our dedicated Middle East blog. This includes the news that Iran will allow no more than 15 vessels a day to pass through the strait of Hormuz under the agreement with the US, according to Russia’s state TASS news agency, quoting an unnamed senior Iranian source as saying.
At the White House on Wednesday, Karoline Leavitt offered a muddled explanation about which proposal the administration agreed to with Iran, but said that the regime actually put forward a “more reasonable and entirely different and condensed plan to the president”. The press secretary also warned that any further disruption to the vital waterway is “completely unacceptable”.
Donald Trump is in Washington today. He’ll spend most of the day in back-to-back policy meetings, which are closed to the press.
The president is set to host a Make America Healthy Again (Maha) roundtable at the White House at 4pm ET. As of now, that isn’t open to reporters, but we’ll let you know if that changes.
Jason Wilson
A man who has been charged with plotting to firebomb a pro-Palestine activist’s home is tied to a group whose leaders support violence against Palestinians and have platformed a convicted terrorist who fundraises for a violent settler movement in the occupied West Bank.
Video recordings by the group, called JDL 613 Brotherhood, also reveal its leaders possess an obsessive antipathy to New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani. They feature the organization’s founder, Yisrael Yaacob Ben Avraham, describing Mamdani as a “Muslim terrorist”, a “cancer”, and his election a “harbinger” of “a creeping Islamic takeover of America”.
Alexander Heifler, who law enforcement officials say is a JDL 613 member, was arrested last month after FBI and New York police department agents foiled an alleged plot to attack the home of the activist Nerdeen Kiswani with molotov cocktails.
The Guardian emailed JDL 631 a detailed request for comment including questions for Yisrael Yaacob Ben Avraham and another member known publicly as Eliezer Ben Avraham. (According to the group’s podcasts, videos and archived pages from the their website, both men are Americans who converted to Judaism as adults. They are not related, and the Guardian is using first names throughout this article to distinguish between them.)
Only Yisrael Yaacob replied, saying that Heifler “was a member for a short period of time” but added that “the JDL 613 does not condone any forms of ILLEGAL VIOLENCE. All of our members sign an anti terrorism statement in [their] application.”
An Indian trade delegation will visit Washington later this month, the US envoy to India said on Thursday, as the two sides resume negotiations over a trade deal.
“The United States and India have previously agreed to a trade deal, and we look forward to welcoming an Indian delegation to Washington later this month,” Sergio Gor said in a post on X, after meeting US trade chief Jamieson Greer.
David Smith
Donald Trump’s acceptance of a two-week ceasefire in Iran has exposed fresh divisions in his Make America Great Again (Maga) movement, with some supporters expressing vindication and others accusing the US president of betrayal.
The US and Iran both claimed victory after the two countries agreed to pause hostilities following more than a month of war. But the strait of Hormuz remained closed on Wednesday and fighting was still taking place as Israel launched its biggest attacks yet on Lebanon.
Democrats and other critics said Trump had suffered a humiliating strategic defeat given that, for all his apocalyptic bluster, Iran’s regime remains intact and still holds a stockpile of highly enriched uranium while also now exerting control of the strait.
Maga loyalists raced to defend the president. Dinesh D’Souza, a rightwing commentator and film-maker, posted on social media: “Once again, Trump outsmarts the critics. Once again he exposes their inner derangement. Once again he proves he is the adult in the room. Once again.”
Uwa Ede-Osifo
The FBI has arrested a former military special operations employee accused of providing classified information to the media, the agency’s director Kash Patel announced on Wednesday.
The US Department of Justice said in a press release that the former employee, identified as Courtney Williams, 40, was arrested on Tuesday and indicted on Wednesday for allegedly sharing classified material with a journalist.
While the journalist is not named in the criminal complaint, Williams was interviewed by the investigative reporter Seth Harp for his 2025 nonfiction book about Fort Bragg, the North Carolina headquarters of the US Army’s Delta Force, a clandestine special operations unit.
The book, titled The Fort Bragg Cartel, examined a string of deaths at the base and the alleged involvement of elite soldiers in drug trafficking.
Williams worked at Fort Bragg for six years, according to the FBI’s criminal complaint. She was a custodian of sensitive documents, including fake passports for undercover agents, and would occasionally field calls related to the unit’s front companies, according to an August 2025 excerpt of Harp’s book published in Politico.
A federal judge on Wednesday halted a move by US president Donald Trump’s administration to end legal protections granted to over 5,000 Ethiopians that have allowed them to live and work in the United States.
The ruling by district judge Brian Murphy in Boston marked the latest legal setback for the Department of Homeland Security’s efforts to terminate the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation for 13 countries in furtherance of Trump’s hardline immigration agenda.
TPS under federal law is available to people whose home countries have experienced natural disasters, armed conflicts or other extraordinary events.
It provides eligible migrants with work authorization and temporary protection from deportation.
Democrats demand passage of Iran war powers resolution despite House recess
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
Democratic party leaders have vowed to renew the effort to curb Donald Trump’s war in Iran after several days of escalating tactics that culminated in a temporary ceasefire.
Democratic lawmakers plan to seek to pass the war powers resolution introduced by New York representative Greg Meeks via unanimous consent later this morning, when the House of Representatives meets for a pro forma session. There is a press conference scheduled for after.
In a statement on today’s push, Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, said: “House Republican leadership remains completely silent on the president’s unhinged behavior. Instead, they continue to enable and excuse his dangerous conduct. We will continue to unleash maximum pressure on Republicans to put patriotic duty over party loyalty and join Democrats in stopping the madness.”
Representative Glenn Ivey, of Maryland, will lead the effort, and will invite all members who are in Washington today to join. However, the motion is unlikely to succeed, since a single objection would block unanimous consent and require Democrats to pursue a formal vote on the resolution.
In recent months, several war powers resolutions have failed in Congress after a handful of Democrats voted alongside Republicans. But Trump’s aggressive overtures this week – including a Truth Social post that said “a whole civilization” could be wiped out if Iran did not agree to demands, have pushed some to act.
“We need a permanent end to Donald Trump’s reckless war of choice,” said Jeffries on CNN shortly after Trump announced the two-week ceasefire with Iran on Tuesday.
“House Democrats have demanded that Speaker Mike Johnson immediately reconvene the House back into session so we can move a war powers resolution that will end this conflict permanently.”
Read the full story here:
In other developments:
-
After a private meeting at the White House with Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general, Donald Trump seemed to renew his threats against the defensive military alliance for not helping fight the US-Israeli war on Iran, and hinted he could again try to seize Greenland from Nato member Denmark.
-
Before Trump stepped into his meeting with the Nato secretary-general, and as the ceasefire with Iran seemed to be falling apart on its first day, the president found time to continue a social-media feud with his former ally Marjorie Taylor Greene.
-
Speaking to reporters in Hungary, the US vice-president, JD Vance, claimed not to recognize the name of the Vatican ambassador to the US when he was asked about reports that a Pentagon official had reprimanded that Catholic diplomat, Cardinal Christophe Pierre, over the American-born pope’s opposition to US militarism.
-
At a Pentagon press conference, Pete Hegseth said that Iran “begged for this ceasefire”, and claimed that Operation Epic Fury “decimated” Iran’s military.
-
The US justice department announced that the FBI arrested Courtney Williams, a military veteran who later worked in support of Delta Force, a covert commando unit, after she was indicted for “alleged transmission of classified national defense information to individuals not authorized to receive it, including a journalist”.
-
Trump, who announced with some fanfare last year a doubling of tariffs on imported steel, plans to use tens of millions of dollars worth of donated foreign steel to build his $400m White House ballroom, the New York Times reported.