By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
The Congress has officially opted not to immediately halt the United States involvement in the rapidly escalating Iran war, a day after a similar move collapsed in the Senate.
House lawmakers, in a tight 212-219 vote, rejected a bipartisan war powers resolution that would require Congress to sign off on Middle East operations.
The back-to-back defeats of war powers legislation come as top officials warn U.S. military operations will soon intensify. If passed, the resolution would have stopped US military action in Iran without congressional approval.
Democrats in both chambers of Congress have argued that president Donald Trump was ignoring congressional input and not being clear about the reasons for war.
Some Republicans in the House and Senate said they blocked the resolution for now but could change course if the war expanded
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has said the US has both the resources and the determination to sustain its military campaign against Iran.
Speaking about the conflict, Hegseth said Iran was miscalculating if it believed the United States could not maintain the operation.
“Iran is hoping that we cannot sustain this – which is a really bad miscalculation,” he said.
“Our munitions are full up and our will is iron-clad, which means our timeline is ours to control,” he said. The dumb politically correct wars of the past are the opposite of what we are doing here,” he added.
More than 1000 people have been killed in the conflict across the Middle East since the US and Israel launched their opening attacks on Iran, killing country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.Iran responded with waves of retaliatory attacks against several countries in the region.
Meanwhile Trump fired Kristi Noem as head of the Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for carrying out his sweeping immigration crackdown.
According to multiple media reports, Trump was upset with Noem’s handling of the recent large-scale operation against undocumented migrants in Minnesota, during which federal immigration agents shot dead two Americans.
Trump was also angered by Noem’s testimony at a Senate hearing this week during which she said the president had personally approved a $220 million DHS advertising campaign in which she featured prominently.
He said Noem, 54, would become his special envoy for a new security initiative in the Western Hemisphere he called “The Shield of the Americas” that will be announced on Saturday.