Democrats vow to shut down Senate over Iran conflict
Source: The Hill
03/09/26 7:50 PM ET
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.
Read more: https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5776021-democrats-iran-conflict-war-powers/
= new reply since forum marked as read
talk about COMPROMISED 
...I think it’s important to understand that the U.S. Senate doesn't have a neon CLOSED sign that they can turn on. Democrats are in the minority (47–53). They cannot simply outvote the GOP to stop all business. Instead, 'shutting it down' means using procedural friction to make it (nearly) impossible for business as usual.
Democrats can "shut down" the Senate by demanding a roll call vote on every minor procedural step or by filing endless amendments. This doesn't stop the Senate instantly... it just makes every 5-minute task take 5 hours.
There's a 2-speech rule... wherein each Senator is allowed two speeches on a single topic per legislative day. A determined minority can use these to grind the clock, but it requires 47 people to literally stay on the floor for days or weeks to maintain that pressure.
In the Senate, the minority party uses levers like the filibuster and War Powers Act to force votes and delay proceedings. With regard to war powers resolutions, those are "privileged" measures, and it allows a single Senator to bypass leadership and force a floor vote, but that doesn't happen "right fucking now" either. The process has built-in waiting periods (10 days) for committee review before a vote can even happen.
But yeah... saying or insinuating that Democrats are "spineless" and "weak" and "cowards" or "compromised" or "disloyal" ... I'm sure that's helping. Keep it up, eh? 