Pentagon to brief media this morning on Trump’s Iran strikes
US defense secretary Pete Hegseth and general Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are planning to hold a press conference on Monday morning about the military operation against Iran.
The Pentagon announced the 8am EST media briefing on social media Sunday night.
On Tuesday, Hegseth and Caine will join US secretary of state Marco Rubio and CIA director John Ratcliffe in briefing the full membership of Congress on the strikes, the White House said.
Rubio also was slated to brief Hill leadership on Monday.
Key events
Congress is about to launch a war powers debate over president Donald Trump’s authority to bomb Iran under largely unusual circumstances – he has already done it, and the country is essentially already at war, reports AP.
The moment is a defining one for Congress, which alone has the authority under the US Constitution to declare war, and for the Republican president , who has consistently seized power during his second term with an apparent limitless view of his own executive reach.
“The Constitution is intended to prevent the accumulation of power in any one branch of government – and in any one person in government,” said David Janovsky, acting director of the Constitution Project at the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog organization.
“Congress is the people’s representatives in a way that the president isn’t, even though we tend to focus on the president,” he said.
“We need the people’s representatives to weigh in on whether we, the people, are going to war right now.”
David Smith
As Republicans celebrated the death of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with praise for Donald Trump’s decisive action, Democrats faced their own divisions and a reckoning over how to present a united front.
Most were quick to condemn the US president for sidelining Congress to launch an illegal and unconstitutional war and demanded a swift vote on a war powers resolution that would restrain his military onslaught.
But some in the party also felt obliged to acknowledge the authoritarian Khamenei’s death as a positive development and demonstrate their support for US troops. A small band of centrist Democrats have even threatened to scupper a war powers resolution if it comes to the floor.
“President Trump has been willing to do what’s right and necessary to produce real peace in the region,” tweeted John Fetterman, a Democratic senator for Pennsylvania and staunch supporter of Israel, declaring himself a “hard no” on a war powers vote and posting an image of the ayatollah with the provocative statement: “Let’s see who grieves for that garbage.”
Democratic leaders were outspoken during the massive US military buildup in the Middle East, decrying his unwillingness to engage with Congress and lack of long-term strategy for Iran. They noted that it was Trump, during his first term, who shredded Barack Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran.
Democrats demand immediate vote in Congress to limit Trump’s war on Iran
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
Top Democrats demanded over the weekend for an immediate vote in Congress on whether to restrain president Donald Trump’s military action against Iran.
The House and Senate were already expected to hold votes this week but Trump’s decision to launch attacks on Iran has increased the urgency of lawmakers to try to reassert their powers.
It comes as Israel and the US launched fresh waves of intensive attacks across Iran as part of their joint campaign to overthrow the country’s government, which has plunged the Middle East into a new regional conflict with no certain timeline or outcome.
The heated rhetoric from both Washington and Tehran suggests a further escalation in the coming hours and days.
New York representative Gregory W Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he would “get on the next plane flying” to vote against the war.
Meanwhile, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer and House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries both called for urgent action to restrain Trump’s attacks on Iran.
The Democrats’ strategy of forcing votes on war power resolutions have been portrayed as a way for Congress to reclaim its constitutional powers to declare war but have, so far, all failed.
In other developments:
-
Donald Trump appeared to link the massive attack he ordered against Iran to his persistent claims about his 2020 election loss in a social media post about allegations that Tehran’s government interfered in the US elections. This is the second military operation of the Trump administration where the president alluded to allegations concerning the 2020 result.
-
Donald Trump said on Sunday he was prepared to talk to what was left of the Iranian leadership after the killing of the country’s supreme leader by US-Israeli airstrikes aimed at overthrowing the regime. Trump was speaking as a second day of intense bombing of Iranian cities and Tehran’s missile counterattacks sent tremors across the region and through the global economy.
-
Three US service members have been killed in action as part of US military operations against Iran, the US Central Command said in a statement on Sunday. These are the first confirmed deaths since the US began launching strikes against Iran on Saturday.
-
The Iranian community in Los Angeles has spoken out about the attack by Israel and the US, with some saying ‘it’s not an invasion, it’s a liberation’.
-
The US military reportedly used Claude, Anthropic’s AI model, to inform its attack on Iran despite Trump’s decision, announced hours earlier, to sever all ties with the company and its artificial intelligence tools.
-
National Democrats are watching the Texas Senate primary closely to see which style and message resonates – anti-Maga rage or a populist crusade against a “corrupt” political system.
-
All unaccompanied immigrant children who are pregnant, many by rape, are being moved to a single facility in Texas in order to avoid providing abortion services in a significant human rights violation, critics say.
