Speaker Mike Johnson convened a closed-door House Republican conference meeting Tuesday morning that ran nearly three hours, attempting to corral votes for the administration’s $89.4 billion war supplemental and decide whether to schedule a floor vote on the Senate-passed war powers resolution before the Memorial Day recess, as the House Appropriations defense subcommittee began its long-delayed markup of the package downstairs.

Lawmakers emerging from the Capitol’s HC-5 meeting room described a session that veered, in the words of one Republican who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private discussion, “from a fiscal lecture to a midterm intervention and back.” Johnson, exiting through the basement, told reporters only that the conference was “united on supporting the troops” and that further announcements would follow committee action later in the week.

The supplemental markup, which began at 1 p.m. in the Rayburn House Office Building under defense subcommittee Chair Ken Calvert of California, opened with an opening statement in which Calvert called the package “the minimum the magazine requires” and warned that further amendments to offset war spending elsewhere in the discretionary budget “would be a vote against the troops who are still standing watch in the Gulf.” Calvert’s posture put him at immediate odds with at least 21 House Republicans who have publicly demanded rescissions, and with Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris of Maryland, who told reporters outside the markup that an unoffset bill “will not have the votes on the floor and the speaker knows it.”

The two-track pressure on Johnson sharpened over the weekend after the Senate passed the Kaine-Lee war powers resolution 58-42 on Friday with seven Republicans crossing, and after House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries filed a discharge petition Monday morning that collected 197 signatures within six hours, according to a tally maintained by the House Democratic Whip’s office. The petition needs 218 signatures to force a floor vote, and at least nine House Republicans — including Pennsylvania’s Brian Fitzpatrick, New York’s Mike Lawler and Nebraska’s Don Bacon — have publicly indicated they would sign if Johnson does not bring the resolution to the floor by May 15.

“The math is the math,” Fitzpatrick said in a brief interview outside the Longworth cafeteria Tuesday morning. “Seven Republican senators voted yes. The Senate vote happened. The American people watched it happen. We cannot pretend, four days later, that the House gets to make it disappear.”

Johnson’s whip team, led by Majority Whip Tom Emmer of Minnesota, has been working two separate vote counts since Friday afternoon — one for the supplemental, one for a possible motion to table the war powers resolution if it reaches the floor through discharge. Two members of the whip operation, granted anonymity to discuss internal counts, said the supplemental was currently 14 to 17 Republican votes short of a majority absent significant Democratic support, while the table motion on war powers was “underwater on the Republican side alone” — a phrase one whip-team aide attributed to Emmer in a Sunday call with committee chairs.

The mathematical problem is compounded by the administration’s continued refusal to brief the full House Foreign Affairs Committee on targeting decisions during the war’s first ten days, a sticking point that House Democrats have linked explicitly to any Democratic votes for the supplemental. Foreign Affairs ranking member Gregory Meeks of New York said Tuesday that “the price of Democratic help on the supplemental is documentation we have asked for since March 8,” referring to the casualty intake data, intelligence inputs and legal memoranda surrounding the campaign that left 358 U.S. service members dead.

“We are not voting to backfill munitions without seeing the paperwork on how they were spent,” Meeks said.

The White House response Tuesday was carefully scaled. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, at the daily briefing, said President Donald Trump had spoken Monday evening with Johnson and Emmer and “remains confident the House will deliver a clean supplemental for our service members and their families.” Leavitt declined to address the war powers question directly, repeating the formulation that the resolution “has not yet been presented to the president.” Two senior administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe internal posture, said the White House counsel’s office had finalized contingency language for a signing statement that would allow the war powers measure to become law without the president’s signature, but that “the preference remains for the resolution to die quietly in the House.”

Vice President J.D. Vance spent much of Tuesday afternoon on Capitol Hill in a series of one-on-one meetings with on-the-fence House Republicans, including Reps. Mariana Olvera of Arizona, Caleb Hartley of Pennsylvania and Anthony D’Esposito of New York, all of whom face competitive reelections in November. Vance, leaving Hartley’s office shortly before 4 p.m., told reporters that the administration was “in listening mode” and had no announcements to make.

Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, the Senate war powers resolution’s lead Republican co-sponsor, weighed in on the House debate in a midday floor speech, urging his House colleagues to “do what we did on Friday — vote the Constitution, not the whip.” Lee’s remarks, which were reposted by at least six House Republican accounts within the hour, became a talking point in the afternoon’s conservative talk-radio coverage and were cited by Reps. Lawler and Bacon in subsequent television hits.

The political backdrop continued to ease in the administration’s direction on some metrics, complicating both sides of the calculus. Brent crude settled near $92 on Tuesday afternoon, the national average pump price slipped to roughly $3.16 a gallon, and the S&P 500 closed within 0.4 percent of its pre-war high. A Quinnipiac survey released Tuesday morning showed approval of the administration’s handling of the war’s aftermath at 47 percent, three points higher than the same question two weeks earlier, while approval of Congress’s handling of the supplemental fight stood at 28 percent.

“The economic surface is good for the White House,” said Layla Choi, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution, in a telephone interview. “But the political surface is exactly where Johnson does not want it to be. He has a supplemental he probably cannot pass with Republicans alone and a war powers resolution he probably cannot keep off the floor. Those two problems eat his entire calendar between now and Memorial Day.”

The defense subcommittee markup is scheduled to recess Tuesday evening and resume Wednesday morning, with a full Appropriations Committee markup tentatively set for Thursday. Johnson aides said a conference-wide whip check on both the supplemental and a possible war powers floor schedule would be conducted Wednesday afternoon, with a leadership decision on next steps expected before close of business Friday.