On Tuesday, Congress did its job for the first time in a generation — and voted, in both chambers, to end an undeclared war. On Wednesday night, after a closed-door tantrum from the president, two Republicans folded. Meanwhile, wounded soldiers tell CBS News the Pentagon downplayed their injuries to mask the cost. This is what a leadership failure looks like.
For one extraordinary afternoon, the constitutional order worked. On Tuesday, June 23, the United States Senate voted 50–48 to direct President Donald Trump to remove American forces from hostilities against Iran — the first time in history a war powers resolution has cleared both chambers of Congress, after the House passed an identical measure 215–208 earlier in June. Four Republicans — Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and outgoing Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy — joined nearly every Democrat to deliver the rebuke. The president had launched the war on his own. The Constitution says Congress decides. For a moment, Congress remembered that.
Twenty-eight hours later, in a vote held just before midnight, the Senate took it all back. Reported by the Associated Press and confirmed by CNN, two of those four Republicans — Cassidy and Paul — flipped on a nearly identical companion resolution after Trump appeared at a Senate Republican luncheon and, in Cassidy’s own description, called him a “lunatic” and demanded to know why GOP senators had voted against him. The new tally was 47–50–1. The motion died. The Senate then left town for a two-week recess.
This is not, on its face, a story about an arcane procedural maneuver. It is a story about a president whose foreign policy has killed at least thirteen American service members, wounded roughly four hundred more, sent gasoline prices over $4.50 a gallon, and added an estimated $1,000 in costs to every American household — and whose response to a constitutional check from his own party was to scream at them in private and demand they undo it. It is also a story, as CBS News reported this week, about an administration that, even now, is telling the families of wounded soldiers their husbands are “not seriously injured” when the medical records say otherwise.
1. The Vote That Mattered
For nearly four months, Senate Democrats — led by Sens. Tim Kaine of Virginia and Adam Schiff of California — forced the chamber to vote on war powers resolutions against the Iran war launched on Feb. 28 as “Operation Epic Fury.” They lost nine times. On Tuesday, they won. NPR reported that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer celebrated the moment in a floor speech and a written statement that named what the country had just gone through.
“For years, Trump promised to put maximum pressure on Iran, but he ended up delivering maximum confusion, maximum chaos, maximum cost to the American people with his disastrous war. It’ll go down in the history books as one of the worst foreign policy forays America has ever made.”
— Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Senate floor, June 23, 2026
Rep. Adam Schiff, who sponsored an earlier version of the resolution in the House before joining the Senate, posted on X that “we’ve seen the region in chaos, shifting goalposts and rationales for the war, skyrocketing gas and grocery costs, and tragically, the lives of 13 servicemembers lost with thousands more put in harm’s way.” The reality he described is documented. The administration’s response — that the resolution “has no significance,” per a White House official quoted by CNN — was a tell. If it had no significance, the president would not have spent the next day trying to undo it.
2. The Reversal
What happened next is one of the most naked acts of executive intimidation Congress has tolerated in living memory. According to NBC News, Trump arrived at the Senate Republican luncheon Wednesday and, instead of pitching the housing bill he had been scheduled to sign that morning — and which he had suddenly refused to sign in order to punish his own party — turned the room on the four senators who had crossed him.
Cassidy, the outgoing Louisiana senator whose primary loss in May had freed him to speak more openly, stood up. By his own account to reporters afterward, he told the president: “You have not told the American people what’s going on.” The war, Cassidy said, “was supposed to last four weeks. It’s lasted four months. Our original objectives have not been achieved, and I want to know what’s going on.” Trump, according to multiple senators in the room, called him a “lunatic.” He called the Republican holdouts “losers.”
“You have not told the American people what’s going on. The war was supposed to last four weeks. It’s lasted four months. Our original objectives have not been achieved.”
— Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), to President Trump, June 24, 2026
Hours later, Cassidy was invited to a private “briefing” at the White House with Vice President JD Vance and special envoy Steve Witkoff. By his own description, the briefing “addressed many of my concerns.” That night, he returned to the Capitol and voted against the second war powers resolution. Sen. Rand Paul, who had also voted yes on Tuesday, voted “present” on Wednesday, posting on X that he wanted to “give the President more space and leverage to negotiate.” The vote, as CBS News documented, was a victory for the White House. Sen. Kaine, in a statement carried by NBC, called the new vote “of no consequence” and reminded the country that the Tuesday resolution still stood as the formal expression of Congress: “Further war against Iran is illegal unless Congress votes for it.”
What is left of the principle that the president cannot wage war alone? It is sitting where Tuesday’s resolution left it — adopted by both chambers, dismissed by the administration as meaningless, and now bracketed by a midnight vote staged to placate a furious commander in chief. The constitutional question was answered. Then it was unanswered. Because the president threw a fit.
3. The Soldiers Left Behind
The same week the Senate flinched, CBS News published an investigation — reported by correspondent Jonah Kaplan and the network’s investigative unit — that should have ended any debate about whether this war has been honestly accounted for. It hasn’t.
On March 1, an Iranian drone slammed into a multi-trailer workstation at Port of Shuaiba in Kuwait, killing six American soldiers and wounding more than twenty. It was the deadliest strike on U.S. troops since 2021. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters in March that “almost 90%” of the roughly 400 American service members wounded across the conflict had sustained only minor injuries and returned to duty. CBS News, working from medical records, has now established that this characterization was, in case after case, false.
Chief Warrant Officer Rodney Bearman, 57, was riddled with shrapnel in the strike. His medical records, reviewed by CBS, document a concussion, hearing and vision loss, and damage to his lungs. The Army classified him “not seriously injured.” His wife, Amy Bearman — a military spouse of nearly 25 years — was told over the phone that her husband had a minor injury and would return to duty. “That assessment is unacceptable,” she told CBS. Sergeant First Class Cory Hicks, also wounded in the same attack, was airlifted to Walter Reed for a traumatic brain injury after his wife was told he had “a minor jaw injury.” Asked whether the Pentagon had deliberately softened the picture, Hicks answered with one word: “Absolutely.”
The most damning testimony came from Major Stephen Ramsbottom, who told CBS that requests for additional medical personnel and supplies at the outpost had been made before the strike and went unanswered. “This was a failure,” he said, telling the network he believes Master Sergeant Nicole Amor — one of the six killed — could have survived had a doctor, a fixed aid station, or more than one ambulance been on site. Wounded soldiers triaged themselves with makeshift bandages and tourniquets and commandeered civilian vehicles to drive the dying to two Kuwaiti hospitals. An April CBS investigation had already established that intelligence warning of the Iranian drone targeting was in hand before the attack, and that soldiers were left unprotected — a finding that triggered an ongoing Senate Democratic investigation.
The Army, in a statement to CBS, “strongly denied” downplaying anything. The denial does not survive the medical records.
4. A Timeline of the Failure
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5. What It Costs the Country
The Pentagon’s own comptroller has put the operational cost of this war at $29 billion, and conceded the figure does not include repairs to bases in Kuwait and Bahrain that were hit by Iranian drones and missiles, per NPR’s reporting. The administration is asking Congress for another $80 billion in emergency funding, largely to backfill munitions and stockpiles, per the Associated Press. The U.S. strategic petroleum reserve is at its lowest level since 1983.
A typical American household has paid roughly $1,000 more for gasoline, groceries, shipping, and heating since the war began, per an economist’s calculation in The Philadelphia Inquirer. The price of fertilizer rose 47% in a single month, per the American Farm Bureau Federation. According to Time magazine, Farm Bureau president Zippy Duvall warned the White House directly that the U.S. “risks a shortfall in crops.” Tomato prices are up 40% year over year. Mortgage rates rose with wartime uncertainty just as a long-awaited housing recovery was beginning.
For these costs — for thirteen dead soldiers, four hundred wounded, a strategic reserve drained to a forty-three-year low, a $29 billion bill and rising, $4.56 gas, and a region in continuing crisis — the president has demanded that Republicans applaud him. Two of them did so at midnight on Wednesday. Most of the rest stayed quiet.
The 25th Amendment and the Failure of Self-Restraint
The Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1967, was designed for moments like this. Section 4 provides that the Vice President and a majority of the principal officers of the executive departments may declare in writing that the President is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” at which point the Vice President assumes them. If the President contests it, Congress decides — by a two-thirds vote of both chambers.
In April, after Trump posted that “a whole civilization will die tonight” hours before a deadline he had set for Iran, more than seventy members of Congress publicly called for the amendment or impeachment, per NBC News. They included Sens. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Ron Wyden of Oregon, and Chris Murphy of Connecticut, and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, Rashida Tlaib, Mark Pocan, Maxwell Frost, Robert Garcia, Sarah McBride, and Yassamin Ansari — the Iranian-American president of the House Democrats’ freshman class.
The constitutional argument is straightforward. A president who threatens, in writing on a public platform, to extinguish an entire civilization; who launches a sustained war without congressional authorization; whose Defense Secretary is documented misrepresenting casualty figures to the public; and whose response to a constitutional vote by his own party is to scream at them until they reverse it — that president is not exercising the deliberative judgment the office requires. As Sen. Murphy put it: “No President in control of his senses would publicly promise to eradicate an entire civilization.”
Notably, the calls were not confined to the left. CNN documented that former Trump allies — including Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones — used the same constitutional language. GOP Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin told the Wall Street Journal that Trump would “lose me if he attacks civilian targets,” signaling he viewed such strikes as illegal.
Honesty requires acknowledging the wall. The 25th Amendment has never been used to remove a president against his will. Section 4 requires the assent of the Vice President — JD Vance — and a majority of a Cabinet selected for loyalty. A subsequent vote in Congress requires two-thirds of both chambers. With Republicans holding majorities and most of them, as Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) bluntly put it to Axios, behaving “zombie-like,” that threshold is, today, unreachable.
But the argument is not erased by its political difficulty. The midnight reversal of Wednesday night is the same problem in miniature: a Congress that knows what its constitutional duty is, briefly does it, and then unmakes it under pressure from the executive it was supposed to check. If the 25th Amendment is unavailable because the Cabinet will not invoke it, and impeachment is unavailable because the Senate will not convict, and even a non-binding war powers resolution can be reversed within twenty-four hours by a presidential outburst, then the question is no longer whether the system can remove this president. It is whether the system can constrain him at all. That question is what voters will answer in November.
6. What This Says About Leadership
There is a defensible version of presidential power that says a commander in chief, faced with imminent threat, must sometimes act before Congress can deliberate. That is not what happened here. The president launched a war of choice in February; refused to come to Congress for authorization; allowed his Defense Secretary to misrepresent its casualties; spent four months on a campaign whose own architect, Cassidy, now says has not achieved its original objectives; threatened on social media to extinguish a civilization; held a strategic reserve at a forty-three-year low; and, when Congress finally exercised the one constitutional check available to it, summoned the offending senators to a private lunch and demanded they undo it.
That is not leadership. It is, by the plainest definition, the use of office to insulate the officeholder from accountability for that office. The wounded soldiers whose injuries have been downplayed by the Pentagon are not collateral damage of a noble cause. They are evidence the administration would rather the public did not see. The midnight Senate vote is evidence the administration would rather the public did not see. The $29 billion request, the gas prices, the grocery bills — all of it is being kept out of the news cycle by the simple expedient of presidential rage at any official who tries to put it there.
A leader confident in his decisions does not call his own party “losers” for asking what the war was for. A leader honest about what his policy has cost does not let a defense secretary tell the country 90% of the wounded were lightly injured when soldiers with shrapnel still in their bodies and traumatic brain injuries are telling reporters otherwise. A leader who respects the Constitution does not stage a midnight vote to overturn a constitutional rebuke from his own party. He answers it.
Editorial Conclusion
The Constitution was honored for one afternoon and abandoned by midnight. A president who cannot survive a non-binding vote of disapproval without screaming his own party into reversing it has confessed, in front of the country, that he cannot govern within the limits of his office. A Defense Department caught misclassifying the wounds of its own soldiers has confessed it does not trust the public with the truth. The choice now belongs to the rest of us — to voters in November, to the four senators who briefly remembered their oaths, and to every American watching $4 gasoline and $5 groceries pay for a war nobody authorized. The question is not whether this presidency has failed the Constitution. The question is whether the country still has the will to enforce it.
Sources & References
- PBS / AP: Senate for 1st time approves war powers resolution to halt Iran conflict (June 23, 2026)
- PBS / AP: Senate Republicans reject war powers resolution after Trump berates them (June 25, 2026)
- CBS News: Wounded soldiers, families accuse Army of downplaying war injuries (June 24, 2026)
- CBS News: Senate rejects measure to restrict Trump’s Iran war powers as key Republicans shift votes (June 24, 2026)
- CNN: Senate votes to limit Trump’s Iran war powers in rare rebuke (June 23, 2026)
- CNN: Trump-Cassidy clash and Senate reversal: live coverage (June 24, 2026)
- NBC News: Senate Republicans reject war powers resolution after Trump clash (June 24, 2026)
- NPR: In symbolic vote, Congress directs Trump to remove forces from Iran war (June 23, 2026)
- NPR: Here’s how much the Iran war cost — and how its effects will linger (June 17, 2026)
- The Hill: Senate approves Iran war powers resolution after four Republicans break ranks (June 23, 2026)
- Al Jazeera: US Senate votes to pass Iran war powers resolution in blow to Trump (June 23, 2026)
- ABC News: Congress passes war powers resolution, offering rare rebuke of Trump (June 23, 2026)
- Congress.gov: S.J.Res.59 — Joint resolution to direct removal of U.S. Armed Forces from hostilities against Iran
- NBC News: Dozens of Democrats call for Trump’s removal after Iran threats (April 8, 2026)
- Axios: 25th Amendment chatter erupts among Dems over Trump Iran post (April 7, 2026)
- CNN: 25th Amendment: Democrats and right-wing voices call for removing Trump (April 7, 2026)
- Mediaite: American Soldiers Claim Hegseth Downplayed Severity of Iran War Wounds (June 24, 2026)
- Philadelphia Inquirer: Iran war has cost your household $1,000 — and counting (June 24, 2026)
- Time: How Much the War in Iran is Costing Americans (March 13, 2026)
- PBS: Higher prices for gas, groceries, and flights will outlast Iran war (June 2026)
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