Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American
March 10, 2026
Today, administration officials gave a classified briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee about the war in Iran. Democrats who spoke to the press afterward appeared to be furious.
Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) told reporters he was coming out of the briefing “as dissatisfied and angry, frankly, as I have from any past briefing in my 15 years in the Senate. I am left with more questions than answers, especially about the cost of the war. My questions have been unanswered. And I will demand answers because the American people deserve to know.”
“I am most concerned about the threat to American lives, of potentially deploying our sons and daughters on the ground in Iran. We seem to be on a path toward deploying American troops on the ground in Iran…and there is also, as disturbingly as anything else, the specter of active Russian aid to Iran, putting in danger American lives. Literally, Russia seems to be aiding our enemy, actively and intensively, with intelligence and perhaps with other means, and China, also, may be assisting Iran.”
“So, the American people deserve to know much more than this administration has told them about the cost of the war, the danger to our sons and daughters in uniform, and the potential for further escalation and widening of this war, a war of choice made by this president, not chosen by the American people, with potentially huge consequences to American lives.”
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) noted on social media that the administration appears to have no goals for the war except continued bombing, and no plan for reopening the Strait of Hormuz.
Senator Jacky Rosen (D-NV) was obviously frustrated that the administration is giving out information only under the cloak of classified briefings, making it hard for elected officials to communicate with their constituents about the war. “[W]e’ve been calling over and over again for them to come out of the classified briefings, to allow us to have these conversations, as much as we can, in an open setting, not just with the press, but with the American people, and with our constituents. With our men and women who serve in the military with their families, who are waiting home for them.”
While it is “solely the responsibility of the United States Congress to declare war,” she said, she called attention to Trump’s frequent use of the word “war” to suggest Republicans are hiding his seizing of that power by claiming Trump’s attacks on Iran do not fall under that constitutional provision. “Make no mistake,” she said, “this is Trump’s war. He says it every day…. And If he wants to go any further, he needs to come out and have this discussion with Congress and the American people.
“[W]hat I heard is not just concerning,” Rosen said, “it is disturbing, and I’m not sure what the endgame is or what their plans are.” She said Trump “has not shown, to this Congress, to me, or, I believe, to us in our classified briefing…any plans for what he wants to do for the day after.” She warned that Trump could not simply stop the war and have everything go back to the way it was on February 27. The Middle East has sustained too much damage. “You see the bombs, you see the destruction. It’s not going to stop just because he wishes it to be so.”
A key reason the Framers of the Constitution put the power to declare war in the hands of Congress, rather than the executive, was that they were all too familiar with the history of European kings who had launched wars of choice that had reduced their subjects to poverty under crushing war taxes. They feared that the same thing could happen in their new country: that supporting an army would cost tax dollars, impoverishing the citizens of the new nation.
If the debate over war went to Congress, voters could hear the reasoning for the war hashed out and decide for themselves if the cost in lives and treasure was worth it to them. And, after they voted for a war, members of Congress would have to answer to their constituents for the money they spent and the lives lost.
That argument is potent again almost 250 years later. Democrats are calling out that Trump is spending $1 billion a day in his attacks on Iran but that he slashed through government programs that help Americans, claiming the need to address the country’s ballooning national debt. Just yesterday, Berkeley Lovelace Jr. of NBC News reported that Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administration official overseeing the Affordable Care Act, says that many of those enrolled in healthcare under the law should not be there. About 23 million people signed up for ACA coverage this year, down by more than 1.2 million from last year. Oz anticipates cutting another 4 million off the rolls as he targets “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
And yet, as Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling of The New Republic noted last night, according to a report from government watchdog Open the Books, the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blew through $93.4 billion in September 2025 alone, with more than $50 billion going out in the last five days of the month alone.
To spend the entirety of the defense budget, rather than lose it, Pentagon officials bought “a $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, $5.3 million for Apple devices such as the new iPad, and an astronomical amount of shellfish, including $2 million for Alaskan king crab and $6.9 million worth of lobster tail. (Lobster tail is apparently a favorite of Hegseth’s Pentagon—the department spent more than $7.4 million total on the luxury item in March, May, June, and October.) In other pricey food purchases, the government decided to drop $15.1 million for ribeye steak (again, just in September), $124,000 for ice cream machines, and $139,224 on 272 orders of doughnuts.”
In October, Houghtaling noted, the administration said it could not fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, because the government had shut down. Millions of Americans lost food benefits.
Representative Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) reposted Houghtaling’s article and commented: “You better believe we’ll be investigating.”
Democratic Texas state representative James Talarico, who is running for the U.S. Senate, expressed his concerns about the Iran war on CBS Mornings yesterday. “As a millennial, I saw how military disasters like the Iraq War robbed this nation of young lives, of billions of dollars of our moral standing in the world, and I worry that our current leaders are repeating those same mistakes,” he said.
“I was in Sand Branch, Texas, which is a community south of Dallas that doesn’t have running water. It doesn’t have basic sewer infrastructure,” he continued. “So every dollar we spend bombing people in the Middle East is a dollar we’re not spending in Sand Branch, Texas, or in our communities here at home.”
“We’re always told that we don’t have enough money for schools, or for health care, or for our veterans. But there’s always enough money to bomb people on the other side of the world. And so we can support the democracy movement in Iran. We can prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, all without bombing innocent schoolchildren, or sending our American troops off to die on the other side of the world.”
Talarico was channeling a Texas-born Republican from the post–World War II years: President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In early March 1953, soon after he took office, Soviet leader Josef Stalin died, and Eisenhower jumped at the chance to reset the militarization of the Cold War.
All people hunger for “peace and fellowship and justice,” he said in a speech to newspaper editors, and he deplored the growing arms race with the USSR. Even if the two superpowers managed to avoid an atomic war, pouring wealth and energy into armaments would limit their ability to raise up the rest of the world.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” The sweat of workers, the genius of scientists, and the hopes of children would be better spent on schools, hospitals, roads, and homes than on armaments. World peace could be achieved, Eisenhower said, “not by weapons of war but by wheat and by cotton, by milk and by wool, by meat and by timber and by rice.”
Extremist Republicans sneered at what they called Eisenhower’s “stomach theory” of diplomacy, but Eisenhower’s approach to the world was forged by his horror at what he saw at Ohrdruf, the Nazi concentration camp that funneled prisoners to Buchenwald, when he commanded the Allies in World War II. “I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world!” he wrote. He was determined to do all he could to guarantee that such atrocities never happened again.
Eisenhower recognized that economically dispossessed people were natural targets for political and religious extremists. They could easily be manipulated by a strong leader to back a cause—any cause—that promised to resurrect a world in which they had enjoyed prosperity and cultural significance.
Such extremism had been dangerous enough in the hands of the Nazis, but 1945 gave quite specific shape to Eisenhower’s fears. The atomic bomb, unleashed by the United States over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in summer 1945, changed the meaning of human conflict. If a charismatic political or religious extremist roused a dispossessed population behind another war, and if that leader got his hands on a nuclear weapon, he could destroy the world.
Promoting economic prosperity and better standards of living at home and around the world was not just about peace or justice, Eisenhower thought; it was about saving humankind.
Source: Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American
