The House Voted a Third Time to End the Iran War, the CBO Priced It at 38 Billion, and Massie Moved to Impeach Hegseth

House Concurrent Resolution 93, sponsored by Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, passed on Tuesday by 220 votes to 204. It directs the president to remove American forces from hostilities against Iran unless Congress authorises them. It is the third such resolution the House has passed this year and, like the first two, it carries no force of law; the Senate will not take it up and the White House would ignore it if it did. What was different was the count. Seven Republicans voted yes: Nancy Mace, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Zach Nunn, Thomas Massie, Brian Fitzpatrick, Warren Davidson and Tom Barrett, the largest defection so far. Nunn's explanation, as GlobalSecurity's daily report records it, was that "with the negotiating window closed, sustained combat operations now require congressional authorization". The New York Times' account is in Just Security's morning digest.

The bill

The vote came the day after the Congressional Budget Office put a figure on the war: 38 billion dollars through the beginning of August, which Democracy Now works out at 246 million dollars a day, with continuing costs of two to three billion a month depending on intensity. The CBO also said the United States "has probably used between one-half and two-thirds" of its missile-defence interceptor inventory since June of last year and that rebuilding it will take "at least five years". The Pentagon's inspector general, in a report released on Monday covering the period to 30 June, counted 33.4 billion dollars spent, 22.3 billion of it on munitions expended and 3.7 billion on equipment lost, and named the bottlenecks: "solid rocket motors, explosives and propellants". The same report gave the first cumulative account of aircraft: four F-15Es destroyed or badly damaged, one F-35A, an A-10, twelve KC-135 tankers, nine other aircraft and more than thirty MQ-9 Reapers, and the first departmental admission that an F-35 was hit by Iranian fire. Damage to eight American bases in the region came to 184 million dollars. The IG counted seven killed in action and seven non-hostile deaths to 30 June and 417 wounded; the standing figure is eighteen dead since February and, by Reuters' count, more than 800 wounded.

Massie's marker

Thomas Massie of Kentucky then filed eight articles of impeachment against the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, as a privileged resolution, which obliges the House to deal with it within two legislative days. The articles accuse Hegseth of defying Congress and continuing the war illegally. Massie told reporters "there needs to be a marker in history". It will be tabled; the point was to make members vote on tabling it. The same day the Wall Street Journal reported that the Pentagon has asked commanders to nominate troops who meet waist-to-height requirements and "impeccable" grooming standards to sit behind Hegseth at his coming "State of the Force" address, which follows his earlier remarks about "beardos" and "fat generals". Axios' Kate Santaliz carried the impeachment story; the Journal's Lara Seligman the audience one.

The vice president's two phases

JD Vance gave the New York Post the administration's framing. "There are really two phases to this thing, and the first phase is done," he said: the first was destroying Iran's nuclear programme and its conventional military, the second is ensuring neither is rebuilt. "The United States is not engaged in aggressive operations. We'll enter a much different phase in a couple of months." The record supports him on the first sentence and not the second: no announced strike on Iranian territory for nine operational periods, but an American drone killed most of the crew of two IRGC boats off Hormozgan on Monday, the first Iranian military deaths since 1 September, and the strait remains all but shut. At the IAEA general conference in Vienna, Israel's Moshe Edri told delegates Iran holds "over nine tons of nuclear material" outside safeguards, including 440 kilograms of enriched uranium, and said "we acted to ensure our survival, and we will do it again if needed"; Iran's Behrouz Kamalvandi, standing in for a nuclear chief refused an Austrian visa, replied that the country's nuclear industry "cannot be eliminated through military action and assassination". The Security Council votes on Wednesday on restoring the 1737 sanctions committee. Russia and China oppose it.

What the vote means

Nothing, legally, and something, politically. Seven Republicans is not a majority of the conference but it is a trend, and it arrived in the same week as a 38 billion dollar bill, a record diesel price and a Fed rate rise blamed in part on the war. The administration's answer is the calendar: a different phase "in a couple of months", which is to say after the midterms on 3 November. Congress has made clear it would like to be asked. It has not yet found a way to make itself heard.