The Other Election

The Capitol at night. Photo: Nicolas Raymond, Bold Frontiers, CC BY 2.0.

Americans vote on Tuesday, eight months into a war Congress has not authorized. What a Democratic House could do about the Iran war, the fight against Islamist influence at home and the alliances in the region, and what it could not, with the other two outcomes in boxes and the Forum’s asks of the 120th Congress. The opening is free for every reader; the rest is for premium subscribers.

Americans vote on Tuesday with the country at war. The strikes on Iran began on February 28. The Navy blockades Iran’s ports, and Treasury’s economic campaign has run since August 24. Eighteen American service members have died, by President Trump’s own figure, and Congress has not voted to authorize any of it. The House elected on Tuesday will be the first chosen since the war began. The Cook Political Report projected on Friday that Democrats will flip 12 to 25 seats and hold as many as 240. The Senate turns on four or five races inside the polling error, with the forecasters leaning the same way.

The question people in Jerusalem, Riyadh and Doha are asking this weekend is what that House could do. The answer has two halves. A House majority has fewer tools against a war than a victory speech will suggest. It cannot stop a strike, end a blockade or lift a sanction. The one congressional instrument that has ever ended an American war is a cutoff of money, and it needs the Senate and a president willing to sign. Its own tools are the subpoena, the hearing and the privileged floor vote. They work on the calendar rather than on the war, which is why the decisions that matter most for the Middle East in 2027 will be made before the new Congress sits, in the eight weeks between Tuesday and January 3.

A second fight changes hands with the gavel. For a year the campaign against Islamist influence in America has been carried by executives, governors and prosecutors rather than by Congress: the White House order of November 24, 2025 on the Muslim Brotherhood, the State Department’s four chapter designations since January, Texas’s designation of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the twelve people charged in Michigan with intimidating Jewish institutions. A Democratic House cannot undo a designation. What it can do is decide who is questioned under oath and who is not. The organizations that want the questioning to stop have positioned themselves for exactly that outcome.

“No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.”

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