Speaker Mike Johnson convened a conference-wide House Republican meeting Monday morning to settle the fate of the Trump administration’s $89.4 billion war supplemental, even as a Senate war powers resolution targeting the now-concluded Iran campaign cleared its first procedural test in a vote that exposed deeper Republican fractures than the leadership had anticipated.

The Senate motion to proceed, filed Friday by Sens. Tim Kaine of Virginia and Mike Lee of Utah, advanced 56-44 shortly before noon, with five Republicans joining 49 Democrats and two independents to force a debate that the White House had spent the weekend trying to head off. The resolution, framed as a retrospective assertion of congressional authority rather than a binding constraint on a ceasefire that has now held for 12 days, would direct the president to seek formal authorization for any renewed hostilities against Iran.

“This vote is not about second-guessing the outcome. It is about restoring a constitutional muscle that has atrophied across administrations of both parties,” Kaine told reporters outside the Senate chamber. Lee, in a separate statement, called the war “a textbook example of why the founders did not entrust a single person with the decision to commit American forces to combat.”

The five Republicans who joined the motion — Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Lee, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Todd Young of Indiana — represented a wider crack in the GOP caucus than Majority Leader John Thune’s team had projected over the weekend. A senior Senate Republican aide, granted anonymity to discuss whip operations, said leadership had counted on no more than three defections and was now bracing for a substantive vote later in the week with as many as seven or eight Republicans peeling off.

Across the Capitol, Johnson’s task was harder. The speaker entered the basement meeting in HC-5 at 9:15 a.m., flanked by Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Whip Tom Emmer, with the explicit goal of producing a path to floor votes on the war supplemental, a separate intelligence authorization, and what leadership has begun calling the “post-hostilities posture” package. The trio of items has tangled together because the Freedom Caucus has demanded that any supplemental be paired with rescissions, while a separate bloc of more than a dozen members representing suburban swing districts has signaled it will not vote for the supplemental absent a meaningful war powers vehicle attached.

“You cannot ask members in Northern Virginia, in suburban Philly, in Orange County, to walk the plank on a $90 billion war bill without giving them a vote on the principle that Congress declares wars,” said Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, emerging from the meeting around 10:40 a.m. “That is the conversation we are having today, and it is overdue.”

Fitzpatrick and 14 other House Republicans on Friday signed a letter to Johnson asking that the supplemental be brought to the floor under a rule allowing a standalone war powers vote. Aides to several signatories said over the weekend that the group was prepared to vote against the rule itself — a step that would force Johnson to rely on Democratic procedural votes — if leadership refused to accommodate the request.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, in a Sunday letter to members, said Democrats would not provide procedural cover for “a closed process that buries the war powers question.” Jeffries reiterated his Friday demand for a closed-door briefing on the war’s casualty figures, intelligence inputs and the legal basis for strikes inside Iranian territory before Democrats would commit to a substantive position on the supplemental.

The White House response was a study in compartmentalization. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt, at her regular briefing, said the administration “welcomes a debate about the future” but considered “any retrospective constraint on a successfully concluded operation to be both legally moot and politically performative.” She declined to say whether President Donald Trump would veto a war powers resolution that reached his desk, calling the question “premature.”

Behind the scenes, the calculation was less serene. Two administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, said the White House counsel’s office had begun drafting a signing-statement strategy for a scenario in which both chambers passed the resolution and the president let it become law without a signature, on the theory that a veto would invite a constitutional fight the administration would prefer to avoid in the run-up to the midterms.

That calculation tracks closely with new polling. A Marist survey released Monday morning found 61 percent of registered voters favoring a congressional vote on any future strikes against Iran, with majorities of Republicans (54 percent), Democrats (78 percent) and independents (62 percent). The same poll showed Trump’s overall handling of the war underwater at 43-52 even as 56 percent approved of the ceasefire itself — the same split Quinnipiac documented last week, now widening modestly.

“This is the rare issue where the politics and the policy point in the same direction for vulnerable members,” said David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report, in an interview Monday. “A war powers vote is a way for swing-district Republicans to put distance between themselves and a war the public is glad is over but not glad about how it was waged.”

For Johnson, the pressure is acute. The speaker has not yet announced floor time for the supplemental and, according to two members who attended Monday’s conference meeting, told the room he would not bring the bill up “without the votes to pass it on a Republican rule.” Whether that means Johnson agrees to attach a war powers component, splits the package into separate bills, or delays the entire matter past the May recess was, as of midday Monday, still unresolved.

Senate Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker, asked about the House dynamics on his way into a closed briefing on post-ceasefire force posture, said only that the Senate would “do its work on a reasonable timeline” and that he expected the supplemental “to land on the president’s desk before Memorial Day, one way or another.” Pressed on whether that timeline assumed a war powers companion, Wicker said: “I assume nothing.”

Senate floor action on the Kaine-Lee resolution is now expected Wednesday or Thursday, leadership aides said, with a final vote on passage targeted for Friday afternoon. House leadership is expected to brief members on a path forward Tuesday evening.

Aides to Johnson said additional conference meetings would be scheduled later in the week if no consensus emerged.