A House discharge petition seeking to create an independent commission to investigate the conduct of the U.S. air and missile campaign against Iran cleared the 218-signature threshold shortly after 10 a.m. Thursday, after four House Republicans added their names in a coordinated move that ended Speaker Mike Johnson’s two-week effort to keep the measure off the floor.

The petition, filed April 16 by Rep. Theresa Holloway of Michigan, would force a vote within seven legislative days on a resolution establishing a 10-member bipartisan panel modeled on the 9/11 Commission. The body would be empowered to subpoena administration officials, examine the legal memoranda authorizing strikes inside Iranian territory and review the operational decisions that produced what the Pentagon’s most recent unclassified tally placed at 358 American dead and roughly 1,400 wounded between the war’s onset in early March and the April 15 ceasefire.

The four Republican signatures, added in a 14-minute window between 9:51 a.m. and 10:05 a.m., came from Reps. Don Bacon of Nebraska, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Mike Lawler of New York and Maria Salazar of Florida. All four represent districts that backed Joe Biden in 2020. None had signed the petition in its first two weeks, and three of the four had publicly resisted doing so as recently as last Friday.

“I will not stand here and tell families in my district that 358 of their neighbors died in a war Congress never voted on, and that we are too busy with appropriations to ask how it was fought,” Bacon said in a statement issued from his Capitol Hill office shortly after the threshold was crossed. “If the commission’s scope can be narrowed to operational and oversight questions, as Representative Holloway and I have discussed, then a yes signature here is the right vote.”

Holloway, appearing at a hastily arranged press conference in the Rayburn foyer at 11:15 a.m., said the final negotiations with the four Republicans had concluded the previous evening and that an amendment narrowing the commission’s mandate would be offered when the resolution reached the floor. The amendment, she said, would explicitly exclude review of “the underlying decision to engage” and focus the panel’s work on targeting decisions, casualty reporting, intelligence handling and the post-ceasefire force posture.

“This is not a partisan instrument. It is the same instrument we used after Pearl Harbor, after Sept. 11, after the Iraq weapons-of-mass-destruction failure,” Holloway said. “Three hundred and fifty-eight Americans died. Their families deserve an answer that does not depend on which committee chair is willing to schedule a hearing.”

The collapse of Johnson’s resistance came less than 24 hours after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s contentious appearance Wednesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, his first since the ceasefire took effect. Hegseth declined, citing ongoing classification reviews, to provide a breakdown of casualties by service branch, to specify the legal theory under which strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities near civilian infrastructure had been authorized, or to release the full text of an Office of Legal Counsel memorandum dated March 12 that has been the subject of bipartisan staff inquiries for two weeks.

Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the panel’s ranking Democrat, told Hegseth in an exchange that aired widely overnight that the secretary’s posture was “an argument for the very commission this administration is trying to prevent.” The testimony, multiple Republican aides said Thursday, was the proximate cause of the four House defections. “Members watched four hours of a Pentagon that would not answer questions, and decided they did not want to spend the next six months explaining why they helped bury the only mechanism that could compel answers,” said a senior aide to a swing-district Republican, granted anonymity to describe internal whip dynamics.

The White House response was muted. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt, at the morning briefing, called the commission proposal “duplicative of work the intelligence committees are already conducting” but stopped short of threatening a veto, a notable softening from the administration’s posture last week. Two senior administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, said the president had been briefed Wednesday evening on the likelihood that the petition would clear the threshold and had told aides he would prefer “a narrow commission we can live with than a broad one we have to fight.”

The political backdrop is unforgiving. A Quinnipiac poll released Thursday morning, with field dates straddling the Hegseth testimony, showed 67 percent of registered voters favoring an independent investigation of the war’s conduct, including 55 percent of Republicans. President Donald Trump’s approval on his overall handling of the conflict has slipped to 39 percent, against 56 percent disapproval, even as approval of the ceasefire itself remains at 58 percent.

“This is the issue where the suburban Republican coalition is most exposed,” said David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, in an interview Thursday. “A vote against a narrowed commission, after a Pentagon stonewall on national television, is the kind of vote that runs in attack ads from Memorial Day through November. The four members who signed today were the four members who could read that math.”

Johnson, asked about the petition during a brief Statuary Hall availability shortly before noon, acknowledged the vote would now occur and said leadership would work to “shape the resolution into something this conference can support without surrendering executive prerogative.” He declined to commit to a timetable beyond the seven legislative days the discharge rule requires, saying only that the matter would be resolved “before this body recesses for Memorial Day.”

The petition’s success also reshuffles the calendar around the $89.4 billion war supplemental, which Senate Appropriations is expected to report out Friday. Two members who attended Thursday morning’s leadership meeting said Johnson had begun exploring whether the commission resolution could be paired with the supplemental in a single rule, allowing fiscally conservative Republicans to oppose the spending while moderate Republicans backed the oversight measure. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, in a statement issued at 11:45 a.m., said Democrats would not accept a package designed to “give the speaker cover for a spending bill that still arrives without basic documentation.”

The Senate war powers resolution, separately, is expected to reach final passage Friday afternoon, with leadership aides counting between seven and nine Republican votes. Holloway, asked whether she expected the commission to be operating by Memorial Day, said she expected a House floor vote “before the end of next week” and that the panel’s members “would be named within ten days of passage.”

Aides to several committee chairs said additional procedural announcements were expected Friday morning.