The House rejected Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s second attempt to force a U.S. military withdrawal from Lebanon, voting 235-189 against a war powers resolution that even two dozen members of her own party refused to support. The Michigan Democrat’s measure, H.Con.Res. 108, would have ordered President Donald Trump to pull American armed forces from hostilities in Lebanon within seven days, invoking section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution.
Twenty-two Democrats crossed the aisle to join Republicans in sinking the measure Tuesday. Only two Republicans, Thomas Massie and Lauren Boebert, voted in favor, according to Fox News. The bipartisan rejection left Tlaib isolated, and exposed a widening rift between the progressive wing and the rest of the Democratic caucus on Middle East policy.
The defeat was decisive, but it was also a dramatic improvement over Tlaib’s first try. Her earlier resolution, H.Con.Res. 84, failed on June 4 by a far wider margin, 324 to 92, after Democratic leaders warned that its broad language could force the withdrawal of troops guarding the U.S. embassy in Beirut.
A rewrite that still couldn’t find the votes
The revised resolution tried to fix that problem. It preserved security cooperation with the Lebanese Armed Forces and protected diplomatic facilities, narrowing the scope of the withdrawal order. House Foreign Affairs Committee ranking member Gregory Meeks, a New York Democrat, said the rewrite “corrected the flaws” of the original and would keep the United States “out of another forever war.”
This time, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries backed the measure, a reversal from his opposition to the first version. When H.Con.Res. 84 came to the floor in June, Jeffries had argued against it, telling colleagues that “there are no U.S. servicemembers involved in combat operations or hostilities in Lebanon.”
That framing, that the resolution addressed a problem that did not exist, dogged Tlaib’s effort from the start. Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Florida Democrat, put it bluntly during the first vote: “The United States is not at war with Lebanon, nor is there any indication that we’re going to war with Lebanon, so it’s an unnecessary war powers vote,” the Washington Examiner reported.
Even Meeks, while supporting the revised resolution, acknowledged the awkward premise. He stated that to his knowledge, U.S. forces are not currently engaged in hostilities alongside the Israeli military in Lebanon.
Republicans frame the vote around Hezbollah
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast, a Florida Republican, wasted no time framing the resolution in starker terms. He called the measure “a win for terrorists” and pointed to the diplomatic landscape that Tlaib’s resolution threatened to upend.
As Newsmax reported, Mast told colleagues:
“Hezbollah is the one holdout that is standing in the way of peace between Israel and Lebanon. The Lebanese government wants the fighting to stop. Israel wants the fighting to stop.”
That argument carried particular weight given the timing. An agreement signed between Israel and Lebanon last week ties Israeli troop withdrawal to Hezbollah disarmament, a framework that Tlaib’s resolution would have undercut by removing any U.S. military leverage before the deal could take hold.
Iran and Hezbollah have made a full Israeli pullout a prerequisite for finalizing a broader U.S.-Iran framework. Passing a congressional resolution ordering American forces out of the area would have handed both parties exactly the concession they wanted, for free. Republicans have faced their own internal debates on war powers votes, but on Lebanon the caucus held firm.
Tlaib’s rhetoric and the 22 who walked away
Tlaib told colleagues Monday that the vote was about “immediately ending all U.S. participation in the Israeli government’s violent assault against the people of Lebanon.” She accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing and territory expansion” through its bombing campaign in southern Lebanon.
That language may have helped rally the progressive base, but it clearly repelled the 22 Democrats who voted no. Their defections suggest that even within the minority party, there is limited appetite for resolutions that functionally side with Hezbollah’s negotiating position while accusing a U.S. ally of ethnic cleansing.
The identities of those 22 Democrats were not specified in the vote reporting. But their numbers tell a story. On the first resolution, 117 Democrats voted against Tlaib’s measure, a landslide rejection within her own caucus. The revised version clawed back roughly a hundred of those votes, largely because leadership switched sides. Still, the 22 holdouts were enough, combined with near-total Republican opposition, to bury the measure comfortably.
The internal Democratic divide on Israel policy has been widening for months. Far-left challengers have increasingly pressured the party’s establishment on foreign policy, and votes like this one force Democratic leaders into uncomfortable choices between their progressive flank and the political center.
A nonbinding gesture that still mattered
H.Con.Res. 108 was a concurrent resolution, nonbinding by design. Even if it had passed, it would not have reached President Trump’s desk. The practical effect on military operations would have been zero.
But the political signal would have been significant. A House majority ordering the president to withdraw forces from a theater where active diplomacy is underway would have weakened American credibility at a sensitive moment. It would have told Iran and Hezbollah that Congress was prepared to pull the rug out from under ongoing negotiations.
The Senate already rejected a related war powers resolution earlier in June. Breitbart reported that the upper chamber voted 48-47 against the measure, with Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania crossing party lines to oppose it. That narrow margin in the Senate made the House vote all the more important as a backstop.
Congressional Republicans have been navigating their own legislative challenges this session, from tense negotiations over the SAVE America Act to border-funding fights. But on the question of presidential war powers in the Middle East, the GOP caucus showed the kind of discipline that has eluded it on domestic spending bills.
What remains unanswered
Several questions hang over this vote. The current number, mission, and precise location of U.S. forces in Lebanon remain unclear from public reporting. Meeks’s acknowledgment that American troops are not engaged in hostilities alongside Israel raises the obvious question: what exactly was the resolution withdrawing them from?
The specific terms of the Israel-Lebanon agreement, beyond the headline condition tying Israeli withdrawal to Hezbollah disarmament, have not been fully detailed. And the status of the broader U.S.-Iran framework remains in flux, with Hezbollah’s refusal to disarm serving as the primary obstacle.
Meanwhile, the House continues to move through a packed legislative calendar, and Republican leaders will likely view this vote as proof that their majority can hold on national security even when Democrats try to peel off libertarian-leaning members.
Tlaib has now brought two Lebanon war powers resolutions to the floor and lost both. The first was a rout. The second was merely a defeat. Whether she tries a third remains to be seen, but the trajectory is clear: even with leadership support, the votes are not there.
When your own party supplies 22 votes to defeat your resolution, on a measure that wouldn’t have changed a single thing on the ground, the problem isn’t the drafting. It’s the premise.
