WATCH: Senate Blocks War Powers Resolution Led by Sens. Schiff, Booker, Kaine, Murphy to End Trump’s Illegal War in Iran

Washington, D.C. - Today, a majority of Senate Republicans voted to block U.S. Senators Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Chris Murphy's (D-Conn.) resolution to end Donald Trump's illegal war in Iran.

Last week, Senators, Schiff, Cory Booker, Tim Kaine, Chris Murphy, Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), and Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) followed up on their demand that Republican Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) ensure the relevant committees of jurisdiction in the Senate hold immediate public hearings on the administration's ongoing unconstitutional war in Iran. The Senators made clear they will use these resolutions to force debate and additional votes if Republican leadership does not move swiftly to arrange public committee hearings with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

"Today, we are in a war that the public has not backed, that Congress has not approved, and for which the president has not made the case. A war of regime change, in which the regime has not changed. A war to stop an imminent threat, which did not exist," said Senator Schiff.

"After weeks of war, and billions spent, and 13 servicemembers killed and 200 injured, it is still not too late to discharge our responsibility. As our Founders intended. As the American people have a right to expect," continued Senator Schiff.

Last June, the Senate voted on a similar War Powers Resolution introduced by Kaine and Schiff to prevent the use of military force against Iran unless explicitly authorized by Congress. The June resolution gained bipartisan support but did not receive enough votes to advance.

Watch his full speech HERE. Download remarks HERE.

Read the full transcript of his remarks as delivered below:

I thank Senator Booker for his extraordinary leadership on this War Powers Resolution. Some of my colleagues may not know this, but I was raised in a divided household. My father was a lifelong Democrat. My mother, a Republican. And there were any number of Republican elected officials who appealed to both of my parents, who embodied the spirit of America, and the promise of this great republic. One of them was Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Yes, some in my family liked him so much they helped campaign for him. Like my grandfather, Harry Glovsky. I have a photograph in my office of my Pa Harry - who was a Republican county chair - walking side by side with Ike at a campaign rally.

It makes me wonder what Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander during World War II and the man who brought peace to Europe, would have to say right now. To see our military might, and our military personnel, used in a war of choice against a country with a terrible regime, but which was not attacking us, and posed no imminent threat to the American people.

To see a president like we have today, unwilling even when asked, to comment on those who made the ultimate sacrifice in the service of this country. A president who ignores or worse, belittles, a reporter who asks about them or whether more troops are going to be deployed to the region.

What would he think of a Congress, empowered by our Framers to have the sole power to make war or refuse to do so, relegated to an afterthought in conflict after conflict after conflict.

Eisenhower was a singular voice in our nation - he was a military leader who advocated strongly against the use of military power when it was not needed, when there were alternatives, someone who acknowledged the enormous cost and the lost opportunity to the country that comes with excessive spending on armaments.

He is famous, in his farewell address, for warning of the encroaching influence of the military industrial complex. And we should turn to that speech now, to remind ourselves of where we are in this moment - as we find ourselves at war once again.

Eisenhower said:

"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.

"This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

"The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

"We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

"This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense.

"Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."

A theft from those who hunger and are not fed. That is what he said.

And I ask my colleagues, 70 years later, has anything changed? We have taken $170 billion in food aid away from people who hunger and are not fed, and we are feeding that money into a military operation that is costing the country billions every week. Are we not seeing the money for a hospital - or 10 hospitals - squandered halfway around the world rather than spent here at home?

President Eisenhower understood the basic tradeoffs that we face when we go to war. And here's the thing: the American people are not afraid of sacrifice. In a just cause, we can marshall the strength of our people to take on any challenge, overcome any threat, defend ourselves against any foe. In a just cause. But has the case been made that this is a just cause? A necessary cause? Have we even had a debate on the subject? Or a public hearing? Or God forbid, a vote?

Have we said, on behalf of the schoolchildren who will go hungry, that we are comfortable taking their meals and spending them instead on missiles? Have we agreed, as we send our sons and daughters on ships to the Strait of Hormuz, that we are willing to risk their lives, that we are ready to pay the cost at the pump, and on the grocery shelf, that this is a sacrifice we are ready to make for the greater good? We have not. No, we have not agreed.

Because we have ducked and dodged and bobbed and weaved our way around this terrible decision. Not wanting to debate the war. Not wanting even to call it war, because when we do, we acknowledge our own failure as an institution, as the Congress to take up the matter. As if bombs falling day after day, for weeks on end, could be labeled as anything else but war.

A war whose risks, like closing of the Strait of Hormuz, or Iran's attacks on its neighbors, or the staying power of the clerical regime, were known and ignored by the president, a president whose hubris has now cost our nation dearly.

What would Ike have thought? What would Ike have done?

I suspect he would conclude this war was not worth its costs in casualties and lost opportunities. But if he concluded otherwise, I suspect he would have leveled with the American people about the purpose, the goals, the risks, and sought to rally us to the cause. He would have asked for the support of Congress even as he rallied the support of the nation. Had it been a just cause. Had it been a necessary fight. Had our nation been under attack or imminent threat of attack.

Today, we are in a war that the public has not backed, that the Congress has not approved, and for which the president has not made the case. A war of regime change, in which the regime has not changed. A war to stop an imminent threat, which did not exist.

A war in which the president tells us we don't need allies, then pleads for the help of those allies to open the strait, and when they do not comply, tells us we don't need them after all. A war in which we mistakenly bombed a girl's school in Iran, in which our president told us Iran bombed its own school, and in which the administration was forced to acknowledge that simply wasn't true. A war in which the president calls for the people of Iran to rise up, that this is the best chance they will ever get, and then tells us they will be mowed down if they do.

The Congress does not exist to merely implement the president's will in war or peace. It does not exist to serve as his echo chamber or to dutifully stand and applaud when he addresses the joint session. The Framers did not draft such an exquisite framework - in which ambition was made to counter ambition, in which the power to declare war and fund war was held in one branch, so as to resist the bellicose interests and instincts of the head of another branch - they did not draft such a perfect Constitution with the idea that it would all be a nullity.

That Congress would simply abdicate, surrender its constitutional responsibility. The Founders had higher hopes for us, they had dreams for us to realize, they wagered their lives and sacred honor that we would rise to the occasion, that we possessed sufficient virtue to be self-governing, that we as a people did not need to be ruled by a despot.

Were they wrong? Were they wrong? At long last, were our Founders wrong?

After weeks of war, and billions spent, and 13 servicemembers killed and 200 injured, is it still not too late to discharge our responsibility as our Founders intended, as the American people have every right to expect.

This resolution gives us a chance to do that. Let us take it.

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