The Republican-led US House voted 215-208 on Wednesday to approve a war-powers resolution requiring President Donald Trump to withdraw US forces from hostilities with Iran unless Congress authorises the conflict or declares war, a rare bipartisan rebuke as four Republicans joined Democrats against a campaign entering its fourth month.
The measure still faces the Senate and a likely presidential veto, yet media sources are framing it as evidence of Republican unease. Representative Gregory Meeks said, “The passage of this WPR today signals a significant turning point: more and more Republicans are listening to their constituents who do not want another open-ended war in the Middle East.” Democrats invoked the 1973 War Powers Act, which limits hostilities without congressional approval, as critics argue the administration has already crossed the relevant deadline. The White House, which has questioned the law’s application, is expected to contest any attempt to bind the president’s hands.
The administration’s answer, for now, is that the offensive phase has ended. At a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing earlier this week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “We’re no longer conducting sustained strikes inside of Iran to degrade their military, because Epic Fury is over.”
Rubio said the campaign had destroyed Iran’s defence industrial base, launchers, drones, air force and conventional navy.
Those assurances were echoed by Representative Brian Mast, who said, “We are not in hostilities … we are out there with almost the exact same number of forces that we continually keep in the region.”
However, Representative Sara Jacobs challenged Rubio directly, saying, “You can change the name of the operation, it doesn’t change the fact that the Strait’s still closed, and my service members and all of our service members are still in harm’s way.”
The Republican split remains limited. Brian Fitzpatrick, Thomas Massie, Tom Barrett and Warren Davidson were the Republicans who broke ranks, despite a strong plea from Speaker Mike Johnson ahead of the House vote.
Trump blasted the resolution as “meaningless,” calling the quartet “grandstanders” and asking: “Who would do such an unpatriotic thing?” Johnson even argued that curbing the president’s war powers would “take away … the ability to negotiate” and warned that it would “weaken us”. Trump’s supporters see this not as defiance of congressional prerogatives but as an assault on a commander in chief who, they argue, is close to forcing Iran back to the table.
“This has been the most successful military operation considering the breadth, the depth, the scope of the enemy that’s involved,” Majority Whip Tom Emmer had previously noted, adding that “we will be rewarded for the president’s efforts”.
The harder question is what “over” means.
Rubio told senators that opening the Strait of Hormuz is the “predicate that opens the door to phase two” of negotiations on Iran’s nuclear programme. He added that dropping sanctions would not be an option unless Tehran abandons enrichment. For Republicans, the war has already paid dividends: Iran’s missile production facilities, drones and naval assets have been destroyed. Trump says he is in “final negotiations” and that the conflict is “very close to over”. Supporters cite the example of the current ceasefire holding, albeit tenuously, as evidence that pressure works.
Still, scepticism runs deep across the aisle. Meeks warned that the vote shows Americans have grown tired of wars without clear end states. Many Democrats and a few Republicans argue that the War Powers Act must be enforced, especially because the conflict has cost about $29 billion already and could exceed a trillion dollars if it drags on. Massie, one of the defectors, said: “The People’s House is sending a message: end this war”.
For Pakistan, this turmoil is not an abstract drama on C SPAN. Islamabad has bet heavily on being the only actor trusted enough to carry messages between Washington and Tehran.
The New Yorker described Pakistan’s transformation from a near pariah to a mediator as a “remarkable turnaround,” quoting Michael Kugelman as saying that it had evolved from “something close to a pariah to a peacemaker.” Ryan Crocker, a former US ambassador, said Islamabad had “played it extremely well” in terms of timing and substance. The payoff has been a ceasefire track and at least one round of face-to-face talks in Islamabad.
Yet that role carries risk. Pakistan now faces a delicate balancing act between the US, Iran, Gulf states and domestic pressures. Kugelman warned that Pakistan’s biggest danger is becoming “the fall guy when things go wrong,” or even when talks merely go downhill. Senator Lindsey Graham has already called Pakistan’s role as mediator “more than problematic,” citing what he described as Islamabad’s longstanding animosity toward Israel.
The House vote intersects with Pakistan’s diplomacy because it raises questions about Washington’s commitment. If US lawmakers cannot agree whether the war is over, legally authorised, symbolic, ongoing or merely renamed, Iranian negotiators may doubt America’s ability to deliver on any deal. Rubio himself acknowledged that congressional votes could signal weakness to Tehran, warning that Iranian negotiators might conclude the president “no longer has any leverage.”
The House resolution will not, by itself, end the war. Trump is still pressing for an Iranian climb down, and Republican leaders argue that curbing him would embolden Tehran. Yet the vote reveals a political landscape in which war fatigue and constitutional anxieties are rising. According to diplomatic sources in Islamabad, the four Republican defections, though numerically small, mark the first time Congress has voted to curtail the Iran war since its start. They also took notice of the alarming public polling. If the conflict drags on into the fall, US politics could begin demanding an exit before diplomacy has produced a durable settlement. If it ends too abruptly, Tehran may read Washington’s domestic fatigue as strategic weakness.