Eight Months, $47 Billion, No Declaration

In January, a month before the first American bombs fell on Iran, Rep. Mark Messmer offered Fox News a sober judgment. "Boots on the ground, you know, foreign intervention and costly overseas wars have been borne out to be pretty ineffective in the long run," the Jasper Republican said. On July 23, the House voted on whether American forces should be removed from hostilities with Iran unless Congress authorized the fight. Messmer voted Nay.

That vote was no lapse. Messmer has voted Nay on all six Iran war-powers resolutions the House has taken up this year, from March 5 to Sept. 15. The July measure passed 214-208, then failed in the Senate on Sept. 24 by a single vote, 49-50. The war has cost 21 American lives and left 865 service members wounded. Central Command puts the bill at $47.1 billion as of Oct. 16. More than 50,000 troops are deployed to the Middle East. In June the White House asked Congress for $87.6 billion; Congress has not provided it, and the Pentagon is stretching its regular accounts to cover the gap. Hoosiers felt it at the pump, where Indiana's average gas price jumped from $2.82 to $3.98 in the single month before March 31.

Article I gives Congress the power "To declare War." The War Powers Resolution of 1973 allows a president 60 days of unauthorized hostilities. When that clock ran out on May 1, the president informed Congress that the hostilities "have terminated," even as a naval blockade of Iranian ports continued. Of the law itself, he told reporters, "It's never been adhered to." The framers saw this temptation coming.

"The constitution supposes, what the History of all Govts demonstrates, that the Ex. is the branch of power most interested in war, & most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the Legisl." — James Madison, letter to Thomas Jefferson, April 2, 1798

Madison's warning leaves the Eighth District with a plain question: if the people's House will not decide whether the nation is at war, who will?

Richard Haass, a senior State Department official under George W. Bush, drew the line between wars of necessity and wars of choice. A war of choice, he wrote, involves "stakes or interests that are less clearly 'vital,' along with the existence of viable alternative policies." Iran in February fit that description. Washington and Tehran had held indirect talks that very month. Haass applied the label to Iraq in 2003, a war that "at its core" was "a war of choice." The White House budget office once estimated its cost at $50 billion to $60 billion; Brown University's Costs of War project later put the price at $2.2 trillion and counted 4,488 American service members killed. Even so, Congress authorized Iraq, 296-133 in the House and 77-23 in the Senate. Congress has enacted no such authorization for Iran.

Messmer's reasons deserve a fair hearing. In June 2025 he wrote that Iranian leadership "must never be trusted to have the capability to produce a nuclear bomb." That is a serious position. Holding it settles nothing about who decides on war; the Constitution settled that long ago. His own January standard on costly overseas wars argues for a vote in Congress, and he has offered constituents no public explanation of his votes. His press releases and his official account on X are silent on the Iran war, and WNIN reported in September that he did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.

His Democratic challenger, Evansville City Council member Mary Allen, has put her view in writing. "We should end the war in Iran," she told the Indiana Capital Chronicle's voter guide, where she called for policies that put working families ahead of "misguided foreign wars." Whatever voters make of her wider platform, she has answered the question. The incumbent who cast the votes has not.

Restraint abroad and strength at home are an old American pairing. In 1823 James Monroe told Congress the United States had never taken part in Europe's wars, while events in this hemisphere concerned it directly. His secretary of state and the doctrine's chief author, John Quincy Adams, had already given the principle its finest expression.

"But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own." — John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State, July 4, 1821

The Trump administration revived that doctrine in its 2025 National Security Strategy, putting the Western Hemisphere first. It is a worthy aim, and the Iran war has worked against it. In February the carrier Gerald R. Ford left the Caribbean for the Iran buildup, and the Navy's presence there fell from a dozen warships to five. The White House's own June request sought $2.03 billion so the Coast Guard could "fill in the gaps where DOW assets are not available to support Western Hemisphere operations," including at the Southern Border. A hemisphere-first policy cannot be carried out with the hemisphere's ships half a world away.

Pat Buchanan once urged a president to "Isolate America, not from the world, but from the world's wars." The work at home shows what focus achieves. Border Patrol recorded 98,708 apprehensions at the southwest border in fiscal 2026, the lowest in agency history. Congress committed $170.7 billion to immigration and border enforcement in 2025. Yet deportations are running near 660,000 a year, by the Migration Policy Institute's count, well short of the administration's goal of one million. Every agency has limits. After the June 2025 strikes on Iran, the FBI pulled agents off immigration work and sent them back to counterterrorism. One FBI employee summed up the trade-off for NBC News: "it's math."

Defenders of the war insist a president must be free to protect the country. H.Con.Res. 89 agreed, preserving the power to defend the United States, its forces, its diplomats and its allies from imminent attack. It asked only that a war of choice be chosen by the branch the Constitution trusts with that choice.

The president has said new strikes on Iran would wait until after the midterm elections. The next decision on war, then, is timed to follow the one day when voters hold the question Madison placed in their care. A nation that governs its own spirit, keeps its own house in order and sends its sons and daughters into battle only after the whole people have weighed the cost has nothing to fear from honest debate. On Tuesday, Nov. 3, the Eighth District can insist on one. War belongs to the people's House, and the House belongs to you.