A group of Senate Democrats are threatening to use every procedural tool at their disposal to hold up business on the Senate floor unless Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other senior officials testify before key committees under oath on the military conflict with Iran.
“We have collectively agreed that we’re going to use the levers that we have,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said Monday evening. “We should be having hearings on the biggest military engagement since the war in Afghanistan.”
“Each individual senator has a tremendous amount of power to disrupt the normal functioning of the Senate as well as certain privileges that we can exercise, and what we have agreed right now is that we’re not going to let the Senate continue business as usual, which seems to be ignoring the urgent issues the American people are dealing with,” he said.
The Democrats want to grill Rubio and Hegseth in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee over the expected duration of the conflict, its cost, the lack of a clear endgame, and the lack of clear rules of engagement amid growing civilian casualties, including an estimated 170 people killed by a missile strike on a girls’ school in southern Iran.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, have asked the GOP chairs of those panels to hold hearings and ask Trump Cabinet officials to testify.
“We are demanding there be hearings, debate, questions answered — that the Senate do its job,” Booker said. “It is unacceptable that we have not had hearings and we have not had a sufficient debate on the issues in public … in hearings, witnesses under oath. That is what we are demanding.”
The group of Democratic lawmakers threatening to hold up Senate business includes Booker and Sen. Chris Murphy (Conn.), two potential presidential candidates; Sen. Tim Kaine (Va.), an expert on the 1973 War Powers Act; Sen. Tammy Duckworth (Ill.), an Iraq War veteran and Purple Heart recipient; and Sens. Adam Schiff (Calif.) and Tammy Baldwin (Wis.).
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/democrats-vow-shut-down-senate-235006508.html
