Sixty-one House Democrats and four Republicans filed a resolution Friday establishing a bipartisan, independent commission to review intelligence assessments, strike-authorization decisions and casualty management during the six-week Iran war, opening a post-ceasefire accountability fight the White House had hoped to defer past the midterm elections.

The measure, introduced by Representative Marisol Vega of California and co-led by Representative Joaquín Reyes of Texas, would seat a 12-member panel modeled in structure on the 9/11 Commission, with five members each from House and Senate leadership and two appointed by the president. It would have 14 months to deliver findings and would carry subpoena power for testimony from current and former executive-branch officials, with classified annexes permitted but a publicly releasable executive summary required.

Vega and Reyes filed the resolution shortly after 10 a.m. and brought it to the floor for an opening colloquy under a procedural request that the Rules Committee has not yet scheduled. Republican leadership signaled the bill would not move under the current calendar. But Vega, speaking in the Capitol’s House triangle, said the goal was less to win an immediate vote than to lock the Iran war into the legislative agenda before the focus shifts to the AI moratorium fight in House Ways and Means and the Doha prisoner exchange now scheduled for Saturday.

“Three hundred and fifty-one Americans came home in flag-draped boxes,” Vega told reporters, repeating the casualty count read into the Congressional Record on Thursday. “The country that sent them is owed a full and unsparing accounting, and it is owed that accounting before the people who made those decisions ask voters for another term.”

The resolution’s mandate runs in four parts. It would direct the commission to examine the intelligence picture before the early-March escalation, including a series of analytic assessments delivered to the National Security Council in late February; the legal framework relied upon to conduct strikes inside Iran and against Houthi launch sites in Yemen; the conduct of operations themselves, including the loss of a Marine Corps detachment at a forward refueling site on March 18; and the medical-evacuation and family-notification systems that drew sustained criticism from veterans’ groups in the war’s third week.

A senior administration official, granted anonymity to describe internal deliberations, said the White House would oppose the measure but had not yet decided whether to expend political capital fighting it openly while the ceasefire is in its third day. The official said President Donald Trump considered the proposal “an effort to relitigate a war he just ended” but acknowledged that a flat refusal to cooperate could complicate negotiations with Senate Democrats over the remaining elements of the $67.4 billion Iran war supplemental.

White House counsel Eliza Pham told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a closed session Thursday afternoon that the administration would assert executive privilege over a narrow set of pre-war strike-option memos but would consider sharing other materials with congressional committees on a confidential basis, according to two people familiar with the briefing. Pham declined to comment.

The four Republican co-leads — Representatives Henry Beaumont of Ohio, Karen Whitlow of Pennsylvania, James “Jim” Carbajal of Florida and Andrea Petros of Michigan — represent a mix of district profiles, including three with significant veteran populations and one in a hotly contested suburb. Beaumont, an Air Force veteran whose son was deployed aboard the USS Ronald Reagan during the war, said in a brief floor speech that the commission’s design specifically addressed conservative concerns by allowing two presidential appointees and by capping the panel at a size small enough “to prevent it from turning into a television show.”

“This is not impeachment by another name,” Beaumont said. “This is the question we should be able to answer for any war: what did we know, what did we do, and what did it cost. If we cannot answer those questions about Iran, then we will not be able to answer them about the next one.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson said Friday afternoon that he would refer the resolution to the House Armed Services and Intelligence committees and would not commit to a floor vote. “I am not opposed to oversight, but I am opposed to political theater,” Johnson said. He said the existing committee structure was “more than capable” of conducting a review and pointed to a series of classified briefings the Pentagon has agreed to provide next week.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called Johnson’s response “predictable and inadequate” and said Democrats would seek to attach commission-creation language to the war supplemental or to the fiscal year defense authorization bill if the standalone resolution stalled. “Procedural burial does not end this conversation,” Jeffries said. “It only delays it.”

The push from House Democrats arrived alongside parallel motion in the Senate, where Sens. Tim Kaine of Virginia and Chris Murphy of Connecticut have demanded an up-or-down vote on a war powers resolution covering the conflict. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has indicated a floor vote could come the week of April 27. Aides to Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who said Thursday he would back the war powers measure “without apology,” said the senator had not yet reviewed the House commission resolution but viewed it favorably.

The political backdrop is unforgiving. A national survey released Friday morning by the Quinnipiac University Poll found that 58 percent of registered voters supported “a full, independent investigation” into how the Iran war was waged, including 42 percent of self-identified Republicans. The same poll showed President Trump’s approval rating on handling of the war at 47 percent, up from 39 percent before the Islamabad ceasefire was announced, but his approval on “honesty about the war’s costs” at 36 percent.

“The president gets to claim the ceasefire,” said Geoffrey Sandoval, a political scientist at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “What he does not yet control is the war’s memory. A commission like this is the venue in which that memory gets written, and the White House understands that as clearly as anyone.”

Vega said the resolution’s sponsors would begin canvassing additional Republican members next week and would seek a procedural vote on a discharge petition if the Rules Committee declined to schedule the bill by May 1. Aides to Speaker Johnson said the speaker would consult with committee chairs over the weekend and would have further comment on Monday, when President Trump is scheduled to deliver remarks at Arlington National Cemetery honoring service members lost during the war.