The war with Iran began in February. Congress has never voted to authorize it. Nearly six months later, it is still going — and getting worse.

On Thursday, July 30, 2026, the Senate voted 49 to 50 on a motion to pull Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's war powers resolution out of the Foreign Relations Committee so the full chamber could actually vote on it. The motion failed by a single vote.

That was the 13th time the Senate has voted on a resolution to end this war, according to Roll Call. Thirteen votes. Democrats have forced these to the floor nearly every week since the fighting started. In all that time, exactly one nonbinding resolution has made it through Congress.

They couldn't even agree to talk about it

This is worth being precise about, because it's the part that gets lost.

The July 30 vote was not a vote on whether to end the war. It was a vote on whether the Senate would be allowed to consider whether to end the war. The resolution was sitting in committee. The motion would have freed it for a floor debate and an up-or-down vote.

Fifty senators said no. Not "we disagree" — just "we're not going to discuss it."

And they said it one week after the other chamber of Congress had already spoken. On July 23, the House voted 214 to 208 to order U.S. forces out of the fighting. So the House of Representatives went on record telling the president to stop, and the Senate's response was to refuse to put the question on its own calendar.

Meanwhile, the war is escalating

The timing here is grim. In the days right before this vote, a ceasefire collapsed and the fighting intensified sharply. Iranian forces fired multiple ballistic missiles at U.S. troops in the Middle East on Tuesday — all were intercepted. Trump responded by vowing the U.S. would, in his words, "beat the f—-ing s— out of" Iran. By Wednesday, American forces had launched a heavy wave of strikes on dozens of Iranian military sites.

So on the very day the Senate declined to debate whether this war should continue, American service members were being shot at in a conflict their own Congress has never approved.

Gillibrand put it plainly on the floor: "Under the Constitution, we have the power to end this war today. Let's use it."

Fifty senators decided not to.

Who voted to keep it going

These 13 senators we track all voted Nay — the vote that kept the resolution bottled up in committee:

• Alabama — Tommy Tuberville
• Alaska — Dan Sullivan
• Arkansas — Tom Cotton
• Florida — Ashley Moody
• Idaho — Jim Risch
• Kansas — Roger Marshall
• Mississippi — Cindy Hyde-Smith
• Nebraska — Pete Ricketts
• Ohio — Jon Husted
• South Dakota — Mike Rounds
• Tennessee — Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty
• West Virginia — Shelley Moore Capito

It didn't have to go that way, and three of their Republican colleagues proved it. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska all voted to advance the resolution. (One Democrat, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, voted against it. Mitch McConnell, who is in a rehabilitation facility, did not vote.)

Three Republicans found a way to vote yes. The margin was one vote. Any single senator on the list above could have changed the outcome.

Why this keeps happening

There's a reason a war nobody in Congress authorized has survived 13 attempts to end it.

Voting to keep a war going costs a senator nothing in Washington. Voting to end one means crossing a president who went after Republicans by name the last time they tried it in June — and it means crossing the pro-war money that flows through Senate campaigns. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee and allied donors are among the largest spenders in American politics, and several of the senators listed above count them among their biggest backers.

The founders gave the power to declare war to Congress specifically so that one person couldn't march the country into a fight alone. Thirteen times now, the Senate has had the chance to reclaim that power. Thirteen times, these senators have handed it back.

The cost isn't abstract. It's paid by the troops in the missile's path, and it's paid out of the same budget these senators say is too tight to cover health care or child care back home.

How they voted

The record is public and permanent: the official Senate roll call for vote 216 on S.J.Res. 181, July 30, 2026.