Congress has voted roughly a dozen times trying to end the war with Iran. None of those votes has stopped a single strike. This edition is about why that keeps happening, and what would actually have to change, for the White House or for Congress, to get a different outcome. Government, unfiltered, means showing you the mechanism, not just the vote count.

The US and Iran have had two ceasefires collapse in five months. Fighting began February 28, 2026, when US and Israeli strikes hit Iran’s nuclear facilities, military infrastructure, and leadership, killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei; Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in response. An April ceasefire broke down within days. A second, signed as a formal memorandum by Trump and Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on June 17, lasted three weeks before Iran allegedly struck commercial shipping in Hormuz on July 8, the US struck Iranian territory, and Iran struck US bases in the Gulf. The US reinstated its naval blockade July 14.

Israel and the US trace the collapse to Hezbollah, which fired rockets and drones at Israeli forces in early June; Israel’s retaliatory Beirut strike is what Iran points to as the actual breach. Neither claim has been tested anywhere neutral. What hasn’t moved is the underlying dispute: Washington wants Iran to give up uranium enrichment entirely and dismantle its three main nuclear sites; Iran has refused both, and the 60-day window the June memorandum set aside to negotiate that never got used.

Congress has tried, and failed, to force a stop. A resolution demanding withdrawal passed the House and Senate for the first time on June 23, but as a concurrent resolution it needed no presidential signature, got none, and carries no legal force. Sen. Adam Schiff has filed a new one, arguing the administration’s own 60-day legal clock to keep fighting ran out months ago; the administration says each new round of hostilities resets it. Actually stopping a president who disagrees takes a two-thirds veto override in both chambers, not a simple majority, which is why Congress’s real leverage shifted to the one bill it must pass every year: the Senate’s July 14 refusal to advance the $1.15 trillion National Defense Authorization Act, on a straight party-line vote, is what a stalled war looks like once it reaches the one lever Congress actually has.

Nothing about the war’s legality has been resolved by any of this, so both the fighting and the funding fight are likely to continue without a real answer. Both parties broadly agree Iran shouldn’t get a nuclear weapon and that Israel should be able to defend itself; what’s actually splitting Congress is how much continued US military involvement either goal requires.

The Deep Reason walks through the full legal fight over the war’s authorization, four decades of precedent for presidents doing exactly this, and what a real off-ramp on the defense bill would look like. Read Deep Reason: Why the Iran Ceasefire Collapsed, and Why Congress Can’t Stop the War.

What’s Loud: The Senate confirmed Matthew Schwartz, a Sullivan & Cromwell partner who has personally represented Trump in his business-records appeal, to the Second Circuit on a 50-45 party-line vote July 14. Litigants before the court that hears most of the country’s major financial-regulation cases now face a bench that leans further toward whoever appointed its newest judge.

What’s Missing: The same week, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s own party gave his CDC pick a harder time than Democrats did. Republican Chairman Bill Cassidy pressed nominee Erica Schwartz on her independence from Kennedy, while Democrat Bernie Sanders got her to affirm the evidence against a vaccine-autism link, though she’d only commit to reviewing, not removing, a CDC webpage he flagged, a fight over the agency’s independence from political pressure in either direction that drew less attention than the judicial vote above.

What Matters: Confirmations move fast when the majority party is unified and slow or contentious when it isn’t. The same week produced one smooth party-line judicial confirmation and one rockier health-nominee hearing where the nominee’s own party wasn’t fully behind her, and that gap, not which party controls the Senate, is the better predictor of how a confirmation goes.

Crypto market rules: A merged Senate draft of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, splitting crypto into securities and investment contracts overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and “digital commodities” newly overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), heads toward a floor vote the week of July 20. The merged draft dropped the ethics provision barring senior officials, including the president, from crypto business ties, the one thing Democrats had named as their price for votes. For anyone holding or trading crypto, this bill decides which regulator handles disputes and how much disclosure a project owes investors.

Chemical manufacturing exemption: Trump signed a proclamation July 16 exempting 25 chemical manufacturing facilities from a 2024 EPA emissions rule for two years, citing chemical supply chains for defense, medical sterilization, and semiconductors. The rule’s 2024 justification was reducing hazardous air pollutants near those same facilities, so residents near the 25 sites live with current emissions levels for two more years than planned.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche spent five hours before the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 15 seeking confirmation to hold the job permanently, and most of it covered two controversies from his time already running the department: redaction failures in the Justice Department’s release of the Jeffrey Epstein files that exposed survivors’ personal information, which drew an apology from Blanche, and a proposed fund that would have shielded Trump and his family from IRS audits of past taxes, which Blanche testified under oath is now “dead” after bipartisan pushback. This matters because it’s one of the few hearings this year where senators from both parties pressed a Trump nominee on the same facts instead of splitting along party lines, and his confirmation still isn’t assured.

360. That’s how many days regulators would get to write registration, custody, and disclosure rules for digital commodities under the CLARITY Act, the first time the CFTC would gain jurisdiction over that spot market at all.

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