On February 28, 2026, President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked Iran. Congress did not vote on it. Four days before the bombs fell, Trump had stood in front of Congress and delivered a State of the Union address without mentioning the coming war at all.

There is one committee in the United States Senate whose job is to make a president answer for something like that. It is the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Jim Risch is its chairman.

Two weeks into the war, CNN asked him whether the public might benefit from an open hearing — the kind where senators question the officials running a war and the country gets to watch.

Here is what Idaho's senior senator said:

"I want classified information and there's a huge difference between classified information and open information."

That was it. A closed-door session for committee members. Nothing the people paying for the war, and sending their kids to fight it, would ever see.

The chairman is the gatekeeper. That's the whole point.

This is not a case of one senator among a hundred being outvoted.

A committee chairman decides what his committee does. He sets the calendar. He decides which hearings happen, when they happen, who testifies, and whether the doors are open or shut. On foreign policy, Risch holds that gavel. If the Senate was going to publicly question the Trump administration about attacking another country without a vote of Congress, he was the one who had to call it.

He didn't.

And when Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said publicly that Congress needed hearings — "Absolutely we should have hearings," she told CNN, warning that a war funding package worth tens of billions of dollars would struggle to pass without a public justification — Risch's answer was to send her somewhere else.

"Well, she should hold a hearing if that's the case."

Murkowski doesn't sit on Foreign Relations. She has no committee to hold that hearing in. Risch does.

Everyone else was asking. He was the one who could act.

By the time CNN published that story on March 12, the Republican-led Congress had held no open oversight hearings on the war — only closed sessions for members.

The pressure was not coming from nowhere:

• The Senate Armed Services chairman was moving the other way. Roger Wicker told CNN he was planning what would have been the first public oversight hearing of the war, with top Defense Department officials testifying. "This would be oversight, yes," he said. "We will conduct oversight."
• Senate Democrats had written to Trump two days earlier, asking that "your key cabinet secretaries — including Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth — immediately appear under oath in public hearings."
• Back home in Idaho, two guest columnists in the Idaho Capital Sun spent a whole piece in April on one request: hold the hearings. They pointed out that Idaho used to produce the senators who did exactly this — William Borah, who chaired Foreign Relations for a decade between the world wars, and Frank Church, who chaired it after turning against the Vietnam War his own party's president was running.

Risch's position was that classified briefings were enough and that public hearings risk exposing sensitive information.

Notice what that argument would prove if it were true. Every war involves classified information. Congress held public hearings during Vietnam, during Iraq, during Afghanistan. Senators who wanted the secret details got them in closed session, the same as always — and then went in front of cameras and asked the questions the country could hear the answers to. If "some of it is classified" were reason enough to close the doors, no war would ever be examined in public. Which, for more than three months, is exactly what happened.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio did not testify publicly anywhere on Capitol Hill until June 2 — his first public testimony since the war began at the end of February. And that appearance was the State Department's annual budget hearing, a date already on the calendar every single year, not an oversight hearing anyone called about the war.

He has an F on this. Literally.

The Lugar Center — named for Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, who chaired Foreign Relations himself — grades congressional committees on how much real oversight they actually do. In its report card on the 116th Congress, released in January 2021, seven Senate committees got an F for their oversight of the Trump administration's final two years.

Foreign Relations, under Risch, was one of them. The Lugar Center singled him out:

"For the second Congress in a row, Sen. Jim Risch (R, Ida.) received an F grade, though he chaired two different committees."

Two Congresses. Two committees. Two F's.

There's a well-documented example of how he earned them. In June 2020, Risch's own staff director told Republican committee aides that the chairman was dropping his months-long push to get Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to testify at the routine annual budget hearing — a request the committee had been making for months, and one that had taken on weight after Trump fired the State Department's inspector general at Pompeo's request.

The pattern is the same in 2020 and in 2026: the administration would rather not answer, and the chairman decides not to make it.

What he did do about the war

Risch has not been absent on Iran. He just hasn't used his gavel.

On July 30, the Senate took its 13th vote on ending this war. It was not a vote to end it — it was a vote on whether the Senate would be allowed to debate ending it. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's war powers resolution was stuck in committee, and the motion would have freed it for a floor vote. It failed 49 to 50, one vote short. Risch was one of 13 Republican senators we track who voted no.

The committee that resolution was bottled up in is the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Risch's committee.

So on the two things the Constitution actually gives the Senate here — a say in whether the country goes to war, and the power to make the executive branch explain itself — Risch used one to say yes to the president and simply declined to use the other.

Idahoans can't ask him either

There's a reason this matters more than it would for most senators.

Risch has not hosted a public town hall since 2020, by the Idaho Democratic Party's count. In March 2025, about three dozen Boise residents gathered outside his downtown office to ask for one; his office had room for ten of them, and only to meet briefly with staff. And in April 2026 — while the war he wouldn't hold hearings on was underway — Idaho State University students and the League of Women Voters put on a town hall in Pocatello and invited him. He declined, so they held it with an empty chair.

Add it up. The senator wouldn't hold a public hearing where reporters could ask the administration questions. He wouldn't hold a public meeting where Idahoans could ask him questions. The information about a war Idaho families are paying for and serving in stayed in a locked room, and the only people in it were the ones who already agreed.

Risch is on the ballot again this November. He has been in the Senate since 2009 — 17 years.

We deserve better.

Source

Key Senate chairman hopes to soon have first public oversight hearings on war with Iran — Ted Barrett, CNN, March 12, 2026.