WASHINGTON – Republicans in the House of Representatives on Thursday voted down a bipartisan resolution directing President Donald Trump to end his new war in Iran.

The resolution failed by a vote of 219 to 212, with two Republicans in support and four Democrats against.

The resolution’s failure did not come as a surprise, given Republicans’ maximum deference to Trump. Some moderate Republicans who have occasionally gone against the president on other issues, such as trade, support his military adventurism, which, after all, is a Republican tradition.

“Iran’s been at war with us since 1979. We should have done this a long time ago,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) told HuffPost before the vote on Thursday. “We have lost deterrence, because we let these guys kill us and we did nothing.”

There’s no question that Trump’s massive attack on Iran goes against his campaign trail statements against meddling in the Middle East and launching America into new “forever wars” like the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), a far-right Republican who rarely strays from the party line, was one of the few House Republicans willing to highlight the contradiction this week.

“President Trump’s ‘America First’ message was supposed to be a rejection of the globalist war machine, whose endless wars have left America less free, less safe, and more burdened by debt,” Davidson said during floor debate about the resolution on Wednesday.

Davidson and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) were the two Republicans who voted for the resolution against the war, while the Democrats who voted against it were Reps. Jared Golden (Maine), Greg Landsman (Ohio) Juan Vargas (Calif.) and Henry Cuellar (Texas.)

Massie, one of the resolution’s co-sponsors, noted in a speech that the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power to declare war, and also that the Trump administration hasn’t fulfilled its obligations under the 1973 War Powers Resolution — a law Congress passed in order to stop the president from unilaterally embroiling the U.S. in an escalating overseas conflict.

But Massie said there’s an even more important question: “Why are we going to war with Iran? We owe our military service members a clear mission, and American families in my district want to know how this is going to help them pay for groceries.”

Trump has said the war’s aim is to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program, even though an earlier strike last year was supposed to have obliterated it, and he’s said he wants to “free” the Iranian people from a totalitarian regime. This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters the attack was necessary because Israel planned to attack Iran first, and then Iran would attack the United States.

“And we knew that if we didn’t preemptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties,” Rubio said. (Trump later said it was his decision to strike first based on an intuition that Iran was planning an attack.)

On Thursday, Elbridge Colby, Trump’s undersecretary for defense policy, told lawmakers the U.S. wants to degrade Iran’s conventional missile capabilities so it can’t build a nuclear weapon, but there’s “flexibility” in the political objective.

“It’s a fact it’s a historic opportunity for the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow this noxious government,” Colby said, adding that the Department of Defense was focused strictly on the military objective.

The vote was basically symbolic. Even if both the House and Senate approved the antiwar resolution — and the Senate rejected its version on Wednesday — the president would have been able to veto it.

Massie told HuffPost the failed vote was something of a victory since it at least forced the war’s defenders to try to explain their goals. He said depending how long the war continues, there could be another vote.

“I expect if this drags on, we’ll have more debates and votes about this issue,” Massie said.

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