Speaker Mike Johnson scheduled a House floor vote for Thursday on the Senate-passed Iran war powers resolution, his office announced Tuesday morning, abruptly resolving days of procedural ambiguity and setting up a constitutional showdown with President Donald Trump less than 18 hours after the Islamabad ceasefire is scheduled to take effect.

The decision, communicated in a one-paragraph statement from Johnson’s office at 8:47 a.m., reversed a posture the Louisiana Republican had maintained since the Senate cleared the measure 56-43 on April 10. Johnson had spent the weekend telling members that he saw “no urgency” to schedule a floor vote while the diplomatic track in Islamabad was still being finalized. The statement Tuesday cited the imminent halt in hostilities — the ceasefire is due at 00:00 GMT Wednesday, or 8 p.m. Tuesday in Washington — as the reason for moving now.

“With combat operations expected to wind down within hours, the House should not delay its constitutional responsibility to weigh in on the conflict’s authorization and its terms,” Johnson said in the statement. “Members deserve a recorded vote. They will have one Thursday.”

The pivot reshuffled whip operations on both sides of the aisle. Within an hour of the announcement, Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana convened a closed-door meeting of senior Republican members in H-208 to assess support; House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York held a parallel meeting on the Democratic side and told reporters afterward that he expected “every Democrat who is in town and walking” to vote yes. House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark told members in a leadership memo distributed before noon that the caucus would treat the measure as a “leadership priority” but not as a formally whipped vote.

The Senate resolution, sponsored by Sens. Tim Kaine, D-Va., Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Chris Murphy, D-Conn., directs the president to terminate the use of U.S. armed forces in hostilities against Iran within 30 days unless Congress affirmatively authorizes their continuation. The text carries narrow exceptions for the defense of already-deployed forces and the protection of U.S. citizens and diplomatic facilities. The Senate passed it with eight Republican crossover votes.

House supporters of the measure, led by Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., had been preparing a discharge petition to force a floor vote in the absence of leadership action. Khanna told reporters Tuesday that he welcomed the scheduling decision but that the substance of the resolution mattered more than the timing. “A ceasefire is not an authorization,” Khanna said outside the House chamber. “If the war restarts, this resolution is what stops it from restarting without Congress. That’s why Thursday matters.”

The ceasefire timing has scrambled the political calculus for a bloc of roughly 20 House Republicans whose private positions had remained fluid through the weekend, according to two GOP aides familiar with the count. Those members, several of whom represent districts with significant veteran populations or active-duty bases, had been reluctant to vote against the administration during ongoing combat operations but had also expressed unease at the casualty toll, which the Pentagon updated to 367 service members killed on Monday evening.

“The argument that you can’t tie the commander in chief’s hands during a shooting war evaporates the moment the shooting stops,” said a senior Republican strategist who has worked with several of the undecided offices, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations. “Members who were quietly looking for a way to vote yes just got one.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, briefing reporters at 10:30 a.m., reiterated the administration’s veto threat and called the timing of the vote “an extraordinary lapse of judgment by the speaker.” Leavitt said the resolution, as written, “would constrain the president’s ability to enforce the very ceasefire it claims to support” and warned that any violation by Iran in the early days of the truce would have to be answered “with American steel, not American statutes.”

“The president has been clear, and he will be clear again,” Leavitt said. “If this resolution reaches his desk in its current form, he will veto it. The House should not waste its first post-ceasefire week passing a bill destined to be returned.”

Trump, asked about the vote during a brief exchange with reporters on the South Lawn before departing for an event in Pennsylvania, was more dismissive. “Mike’s going to do what Mike’s going to do,” the president said. “We won this war. The ceasefire is going to hold, and the Constitution is just fine.”

The veto math in the House has tightened in recent days but remains short of the two-thirds threshold required for an override. A whip estimate circulated Tuesday afternoon by the office of Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., a co-sponsor of a parallel House version of the measure, projected 218 to 232 yes votes, including 24 to 38 Republicans. The estimate, which Bacon’s office said was based on direct conversations with member offices, would fall well short of the 290 votes needed to override a veto in a fully attended chamber.

Vice President JD Vance, who has played a central role in the administration’s outreach to wavering Republicans, returned to Capitol Hill Tuesday for the second time in a week. Vance met for roughly 45 minutes with members of the House Armed Services Committee in the Capitol Visitor Center, then walked to the office of Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, the committee’s chair. Turner declined to discuss the meeting in detail but told reporters afterward that “the vice president understands the constitutional argument better than his critics give him credit for.”

Senator Kaine, asked at a Senate hallway gaggle whether he expected the House to match the Senate’s bipartisan margin, said the question was the wrong one. “I don’t need 56 votes in the House. I need 218 plus one, and then a country that watches what its representatives do when the bombs stop falling,” Kaine said. “If we get an override, we get an override. If we don’t, we still get a record.”

Reema Khoury, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, said the Thursday vote was likely to be more consequential as a precedent than as an immediate constraint on the executive. “A House majority on a war powers resolution, even one that’s vetoed, hardens the political ceiling on the next war,” Khoury said. “That’s the legacy here, whether Thursday’s margin is 218 or 240.”

A senior House Democratic aide, granted anonymity to describe leadership planning, said the caucus expected debate to begin Thursday morning and the vote itself shortly after the afternoon series. The aide said leadership had not ruled out attempting to attach the war powers language to the pending war supplemental as a backstop if a stand-alone vote fell short. Johnson’s office said additional floor scheduling details would be released Wednesday.