Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) on Sunday said it was “unlikely” that he would vote in favor of a war powers vote after the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran.
“I’m going to have to take a close look at it. I want to hear from the White House what their strategy is going forward. I will say at this point, it’s rather unlikely that I would be [a yes],” Kelly said during a Sunday appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“They went into this without any discussion with us ahead of time, and by the way, why on Tuesday during the State of the Union, didn’t the president make a case to the American people on why he’s going to conduct an attack on Iran?” the Arizona senator added.
Kelly’s statements follow Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie’s (R-Ky.) push to check President Trump’s military authority in the House while Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) is backing a resolution in the Senate.
The Arizona senator said he would back Kaine’s resolution.
“The Senate needs to vote immediately on Tim Kaine’s War Powers Resolution. I’m voting yes, because it’s clear that Trump has no plan to avoid escalation into a wider conflict that puts more servicemembers in harm’s way,” Kelly wrote in a Sunday post on the social platform X.
On Saturday, Kaine questioned if the president learned nothing from “forever wars” in the Middle East and asked if he was “too mentally incapacitated to realize that we had a diplomatic agreement with Iran that was keeping its nuclear program in check, until he ripped it up during his first term?”
Similarly, Kelly on Sunday said he has little confidence in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s ability to navigate the country’s military strategy in Iran.
“Well, I didn’t vote for him, and I had previously said, and I maintain, that he’s the least qualified secretary of Defense we’ve ever had in our country’s history. So no, I don’t think he is the person to be leading this, but he is who Donald Trump chose to be secretary of Defense,” Kelly told anchor Kristen Welker.
“So unless he’s fired, he’s going to remain in that job. So yeah, sure that concerns me,” he added.
