The Senate voted 58-42 late Tuesday to adopt a war powers resolution rebuking the executive conduct of the six-week Iran war, with five Republicans joining nearly every Democrat in the chamber’s first formal verdict on a conflict that ended two weeks ago in Islamabad.

The resolution, sponsored by Senators Tim Kaine of Virginia and Chris Murphy of Connecticut, does not unwind the April 15 ceasefire or restrict reconstruction spending, but declares that the administration’s strikes inside Iranian territory between March 4 and April 14 exceeded the authority granted under the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force and the 2002 Iraq authorization. It directs the executive branch to withdraw “all forces engaged in offensive operations against the government of Iran” within 30 days absent fresh congressional authorization, a clause administration lawyers argue is moot because the war is already over.

Senators Rand Paul of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Todd Young of Indiana and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky voted with all but two Democrats. Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania were the only Democrats to vote no. Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who had spent the morning whipping for Kaine, called the tally “the largest cross-party rebuke on a war vote since 1973” in a statement issued from the cloakroom shortly after the gavel.

The roll call came at 6:42 p.m., after a procedural motion to table the resolution failed 41-59 and after Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota declined a last-minute request from the White House to delay the vote until Wednesday morning. Thune himself voted no on the resolution but, in an unusual floor speech before the final tally, said he had counseled the administration “for two weeks” that the votes were not there to kill the measure and that “a closed loop on the constitutional question is in this body’s interest, regardless of the policy outcome.”

President Donald Trump, in a statement released from the White House at 7:11 p.m., called the vote “a partisan exercise on a finished war” and said he would veto the resolution when it reached his desk. The resolution now moves to the House, where Speaker Mike Johnson has previously said he would not bring it to the floor. A discharge petition filed late Monday by Representative Theresa Holloway of Michigan had collected 188 signatures as of Tuesday afternoon, 30 short of the 218 needed to force a vote, according to a tally maintained by the House Democratic Caucus.

The five Republican defections each carried distinct rationales offered in floor remarks or post-vote statements. McConnell, in what aides described as his most consequential vote since stepping down from leadership, said the chamber’s authority over war “is not a museum piece” and that the body had “tolerated drift for a generation.” Murkowski said her support reflected the absence of any briefing on civilian casualties before March 18, a date she said marked the first heavy night of strikes on the Iranian power grid. Collins said her vote was “narrow and specific to the strikes after April 1” — the date OPEC+ announced its emergency production hike and, in her account, “the moment the strategic predicate of further escalation became unclear.”

“This is not about the ceasefire and it is not about reconstruction,” Kaine said in a brief news conference outside the chamber. “It is about whether the next president can take a country to war for six weeks without a single vote in this building. Tonight the answer from this body was no.”

Vice President J.D. Vance, who spent much of the afternoon in the Capitol meeting with on-the-fence Republicans, told reporters as he left the building that the administration was “disappointed but not surprised” and would press its case in the House. Vance disputed the resolution’s legal premise, saying the strikes on Iran were “self-defensive in character” following the March 3 attack on the USS Higgins that killed 14 American sailors and triggered the initial U.S. response. “The Constitution doesn’t require a permission slip to repel an attack on your forces,” Vance said.

The White House counsel’s office circulated a four-page legal memorandum to Senate offices shortly after the vote arguing that the 30-day withdrawal clause cannot apply to forces engaged in “post-hostilities stabilization and observer support,” a category that, according to Pentagon figures released last week, currently accounts for roughly 19,000 of the 24,000 U.S. personnel still deployed in the Gulf theater. Democratic aides said the memorandum was “a tell that the administration is preparing to read the resolution narrowly even if it cannot block it.”

The vote complicates an already crowded week on Capitol Hill. The Senate Appropriations Committee is scheduled to mark up the administration’s $89.4 billion war supplemental on Thursday, with Chair Susan Collins signaling she will move a roughly $94 billion vehicle that adds Defense Health Agency mental health funding and an inspector general for reconstruction. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is set to testify Wednesday morning before the Senate Armed Services Committee, his first appearance before the panel since the ceasefire.

On the House side, Holloway’s commission proposal — a 10-member independent panel modeled on the 9/11 Commission — picked up two Republican co-sponsors Tuesday, Representatives Don Bacon of Nebraska and Mike Lawler of New York, who said they would back a narrowed version focused on operational decisions rather than the underlying choice to escalate. Holloway, in an interview Tuesday evening, said the Senate vote “changes the conversation about what is politically survivable” for House Republicans in suburban districts.

Polling released Tuesday by Marist showed 56 percent of registered voters supported a congressional review of the war’s conduct, with approval of the administration’s handling of the war at 43 percent, essentially unchanged from a Quinnipiac survey taken before the resolution moved.

“The political cost of voting no got higher this afternoon,” said John Reilly, a political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, in a telephone interview. “Five Republican senators in safe seats or near-safe seats just gave cover to a lot of House members in unsafe seats. Speaker Johnson now has to decide whether holding the floor closed is worth the discharge math.”

White House officials said the president would meet Wednesday morning with House Republican leadership to discuss strategy ahead of the supplemental markup and the discharge petition. Senate aides said the resolution would be formally engrossed and transmitted to the House by Thursday, after which a 15-day clock for House consideration begins under expedited procedures attached to the underlying War Powers Act.