This time the Senate voted on the real thing.
In July, the House of Representatives voted 214 to 208 to order U.S. forces out of Trump's war with Iran. The resolution, H.Con.Res. 89, then sat in a Senate committee for two months. On Thursday, September 24, 2026, it finally came to the Senate floor for a straight up-or-down vote.
It failed 49 to 50.
One vote. Had it passed, both chambers of Congress would have been on record telling the president to bring the troops home from a war Congress never approved — a resolution The Washington Sun called largely symbolic, but a direct instruction from both chambers all the same. Instead the Senate said no — and 14 of the senators who said no are on our report cards.
This wasn't a procedural dodge. It was the real thing.
The last Senate vote we covered was a fight over process. On July 30, in what Roll Call counted as the Senate's 13th vote on the war, 50 senators refused to even pull a resolution out of committee for a debate.
This time there was no hiding behind procedure. The House had already passed the resolution. The Senate took it up directly and voted on whether to agree with it. Yes meant "end the war." No meant "keep it going."
Who voted to keep it going
These 14 senators we track voted Nay:
- 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 Carolina — Darline Graham
- South Dakota — Mike Rounds
- Tennessee — Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty
- West Virginia — Shelley Moore Capito
Every one of them is a Republican, and so were 49 of the 50 no votes. The other was Democrat John Fetterman of Pennsylvania.
Four Republicans voted yes: Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Susan Collins of Maine. So it could be done. Any one senator on the list above could have flipped the result.
Husted said the war had to end. Two days later he voted to keep it going.
No one on this list makes the point better than Jon Husted.
On Tuesday, September 22, the Ohio senator told Politico that "the war needs to come to an end as quickly as possible so that we can lower gas prices," according to Politico's report. "I don't know anybody that doesn't want the war to come to an end," he said.
On Thursday he had the chance to vote for exactly that, and he voted no. We had counted his record before this vote: he had voted no all 13 times the Senate took up the war through early August, and his office said in advance he would not back this resolution either. He kept his word to his party, not to the voters he was talking to on Tuesday.
The Senate's own Republicans have noticed
Tillis switched sides. He backed an Iran war powers resolution for the first time after opposing earlier efforts to rein in the president, the Washington Sun reported. In July he warned he would take a "very different posture" if the fighting went past September 10. It did. On Wednesday he said the vote was important to get "some strategic clarity around here so we can measure our success," and on Thursday he voted yes.
Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana said the week before that voters were unhappy with the war. He voted no anyway.
Both men are leaving the Senate after this year. Every senator on our list is on a ballot this November — two of them, Tuberville and Blackburn, running for governor.
What the war is costing
The war began in February. It has now gone on for nearly seven months.
- On September 15, the same day the House voted a third time since June to end the war, the Congressional Budget Office put its direct cost at $38.1 billion and said it would push inflation higher into 2027. We wrote that up here.
- Moody's chief economist puts the cost at roughly $1,200 per household over the first six months, with gas up more than $1 a gallon.
- The fight has choked off a major oil route, and diesel hit a record $6.51 a gallon this month.
Every senator on this list has spent this fall hearing from people back home about prices at the pump. On Thursday they had a vote that would have told the president to stop the war driving those prices. They voted no.
What the vote shows
On September 24, 2026, the Senate voted 49 to 50 against a House-passed resolution ordering U.S. forces out of the war with Iran. Fourteen Republican senators we track — Tuberville, Sullivan, Cotton, Moody, Risch, Marshall, Hyde-Smith, Ricketts, Husted, Graham, Rounds, Blackburn, Hagerty and Capito — voted no, and any one of them could have changed the outcome. Husted did it two days after saying the war "needs to come to an end as quickly as possible."
Sources
- Senate roll call vote 244, H.Con.Res. 89 — U.S. Senate, September 24, 2026
- Senate Votes Down a Resolution to End the War with Iran — The Washington Sun, September 24, 2026
Photo: Bill Clark/AP, via The Washington Sun.
