THE IRAN WAR IS A MONEY SUCK AND DEMOCRATS SHOULD NEVER STOP TALKING ABOUT THAT

Greg Sargent has a strong opinion about what Democrats should be doing right now:

While some Democrats have gotten this right, more of them need to say forthrightly that this war is patently illegal and that Trump’s chief stated rationale for it—that Iran posed “imminent threats” to the United States—is utter nonsense.

“Democrats need to strongly make the point that there was no imminent threat and that this war is a violation of the Constitution—and illegal,” Representative Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, told me. “Absent congressional approval, this is an illegal war.”

I think it's worth saying that the war is illegal, but I don't think it changes very many minds. It's a message that reinforces the anger of educated liberals who understand how our government works and what a president can or can't lawfully do, but the vast majority of Americans don't understand the legal constraints on a president and don't care. When asked, they'll tell pollsters that, yes, Congress should be consulted on war, but a refusal to consult Congress won't become a top issue for most of them.

I think this is a stronger Democratic argument:

That's from iran-cost-ticker.com. I don't know who's behind it. I don't know if it's accurate. But it's an effort to provide a running total of the cost of the war, in the manner of the National Debt Clock. The dollar cost escalates rapidly.

Paul Krugman has more data:

On Sunday, according to the U.S. military, Kuwaiti forces shot down three U.S. F-15s in a “friendly fire” incident.

... A new F-15 costs U.S. taxpayers $97 million. So that’s almost $300 million lost in seconds. And we should think about what could have been done with that money other than launch a war without a clear plan or an exit strategy....

One of the reasons to be disturbed by this war is the extraordinary amount of money the U.S. government is either laying out now or will have to lay out in the future to replace the spent munitions....

Linda Bilmes of Harvard’s Kennedy School estimates that Trump’s largely unsuccessful bombing campaign last year against the Iran-backed Islamist Houthis in Yemen — a far softer target than Iran itself — cost between $2.76 billion and $4.95 billion. Operation Midnight Hammer, Trump’s one-day strike against suspected Iranian nuclear facilities, cost between $2.04 billion and $2.26 billion....

The current war is being waged not only with massive bombing but also with the use of large numbers of expensive interceptors to defend U.S. bases and U.S. allies against Iranian drones and missiles. So in just a few days we have surely incurred billions of dollars in cost. And if this war continues for an extended period, the costs could easily rise to the twenty to thirty billion dollar range.

... if we compare the cost of this war to what we spend to help needy Americans, then it’s clear that this war is extremely expensive compared with other ways we could have spent the funds. Put it this way: SNAP — the Supplemental Nutritional Food Assistance Program, formerly food stamps — spends an average of about $2,400 a year per recipient. CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program administered under Medicaid, provides comprehensive health care for about $3,000 per child.

So just replacing those three jets shot down over Kuwait — each of them, remember, with a price tag of $97 million — will cost about as much as providing 125,000 Americans with crucial food aid or providing healthcare to 100,000 American children. And the war might very well end up costing 100 times as much as the price of those jets.

I'm not sure Democrats should get into the weeds the way Krugman does. Reciting a string of numbers and per-capita costs isn't compelling rhetoric. If I were a Democratic officeholder or candidate, I'd just start with the topline number -- trhe cost of the war so far -- and say, "What are we getting for this? How does this help you in your day-to-day lives? What else could be done with this tax money taken from your pocket?"

Democrats have a rare opportunity. Ordinarily, it's easy to score political points by complaining about the high cost of whatever the government does, except in matters of defense and policing. As a rule, normies don't even bother comparing those huge costs to the often much lower costs of programs that serve other human needs, because they accept the premise that we need to spend whatever it takes to keep ourselves safe.

But this is an exception to the rule. It's a war that, unlike most U.S. wars, is unpopular at the outset. Apart from Republicans, no one wants this war. No one knows why it's being fought. Most Americans think it will make America less safe.

So Democrats should bring up the cost of this pointless war at every possible opportunity. Bring up the total cost. Bring up the daily cost. Ask how all that expense is making America safer. Ask how much we're all going to shell out before it's all over, if that day ever comes.

WHY LOOK AT REALITY WHEN YOU HAVE VIBES? (updated)

The New York Times has posted an unusually bad story under the headline "6 Voters React to Attacks on Iran Ahead of the Texas Primaries." Here's the subhead:

President Trump has said the attacks were necessary for the security of the United States and to free the Iranian people from oppression. Do voters agree?

But we don't learn whether voters agree with Trump, we learn whether six Texas voters agree with him -- and not one of them reports ever having voted for a Democrat.

I can understand focusing on Texas -- tomorrow is the state's primary election day, with early voting underway, and it's not clear who'll win Senate primaries in both major parties. But this is not a representative sample of Texas voters:

* "Nate McHale, 24, has voted for President Trump twice, a product of his conservative leanings. He supports the decision to strike Iran."

* "Craig Wallace is not a fan of President Trump’s style, but he supports his policies on the economy and immigration and has voted consistently for him since 2016. He supports the strikes in Iran as well...."

* "Tex Peterson has voted for President Trump in every presidential election. He supports the president’s policies generally, he said, and that goes for the strikes on Iran, too."

* "Matt Lutz is a libertarian and skeptical about foreign conflict. He voted for Gary Johnson, not President Trump, in 2016. But he said he supported the president’s approach to Iran, on balance...."

* "Angela Gschwend, a stalwart Trump supporter, ... said her Persian friends cried tears of joy upon learning of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran over the weekend....

"'I’m a Christian. I believe in peace and love,' Ms. Gschwend said. 'But sometimes you have to fight when you’re attacked. They want to kill because they hate, and that’s the opposite of my worldview.'"

There's one Iran-attack skeptic, and even he was a Trump voter:

* "Gael Ramirez, a student who describes himself as an independent, voted for President Trump for the first time in the 2024 election....

"He is skeptical that the nation will be helped by the strikes on Iran."

Six people, no Clinton, Biden, or Harris voters, five people on board with Trump's attacks.

You'll say that the Times loves Republicans and therefore we shouldn't be surprised at this. But the paper's editorial board called the attack on Iran "reckless," and the paper has published deeply skeptical columns by Nicholas Kristof, David French, Ben Rhodes, and others.

Previous roundups of ordinary voters' opinions haven't been quite so biased. A piece titled "11 Voters on Trump’s First Year," published on December 29, included four people identified as Harris voters and five identified as Trump voters. An October story called "7 Voters Weigh In on Trump’s New Ballroom" had a similar mix.

I think the Texas panel is skewed Republican because the Times has fallen for Texas vibes. It's true that Republicans win every statewide race there, and have throughout this century. But it's not a blood-red state like West Virginia or Idaho, where Democrats struggle to reach 30% of the vote.

Donald Trump won Texas comfortably in 2024, by a 56%-42% margin. But Trump's Texas victory margin in 2020 was 52%-46%. Biden won 5,259,126 votes in Texas in 2020; Harris won 4,835,250 in 2024. The Times couldn't find any of these people, or any of the 3,877,868 Texans who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016?

Just as the myth of Trump's near-universal appeal in the heartland survives his abysmal polling, the myth of Texas as a state made up exclusively of pickup-driving Republican cowboys survives its actual recent voting history. So the Times prints the vibes.

*****

UPDATE: The headline has been changed to "6 Conservative Voters React to Attacks on Iran Ahead of the Texas Primaries." But you can see the original headline here.

TRUMP SHOULD HAVE GONE TO CONGRESS, FOR ALL THE GOOD THAT EVER DOES

We're at war with Iran, and all the right-thinking people in our political culture are saying the same thing: The president should have gone to Congress. Here's Hakeem Jeffries:

Overnight, Donald Trump announced the start of massive and ongoing military operations against Iran. The framers of the United States Constitution gave Congress the sole power to declare war as the branch of government closest to the American people.

Iran is a bad actor and must be aggressively confronted for its human rights violations, nuclear ambitions, support of terrorism and the threat it poses to our allies like Israel and Jordan in the region. However, absent exigent circumstances, the Trump administration must seek authorization for the preemptive use of military force that constitutes an act of war.

That constitutional requirement has been degraded for decades. The Constitution says flatly, "The Congress shall have Power ... To declare War," but we haven't had a formal congressional declaration of war since World War II. What we've had are congressional authorizations of military force, or military actions authorized by the UN Security Council and funded by Congress.

I think presidents should go to Congress before taking America to war, though the process doesn't accomplish much. David French writes:

... the constitutional structure, when followed, ... helps provide accountability. To make the case to Congress, a president doesn’t just outline the reasons for war; he also outlines the objectives of the conflict. This provides an opportunity to investigate the weaknesses of the case for the conflict, along with the possibility of success and the risks of failure.

But that always leads to the same outcome: the president gets to do what he wants. It's valuable because at least there's a public discussion of what we all know the president is going to do anyway. It's also valuable because we retain the notion that we have multiple branches of government and we aren't a dictatorship.

In effect, our Republican Congress actually has authorized this and other Trump acts of military adventurism, just as it has authorized the rest of his dictatorial moves -- it has authorized them by using silence as assent. The unstated but obvious message this Congress has sent since January of last year has been: Unless we say otherwise, you can do whatever the hell you want, Mr. President. You're our Daddy. Daddy can do as he pleases.

Without announcing it, campaigning on it, or consulting with the rest of us, congressional Republicans have replaced our system of government with Christian-right male "headship." Republicans already believed that Democrats have no legitimate place in government, and they've since decided that Republicanism is embodied in one man, so he gets to decide more or less everything, as they believe the man should in the family. It's a system that works out nicely for Republicans because the base loves Trump and agrees that he should be allowed to do whatever he pleases, and most Republican candidates don't need anything but a strong turnout from the base to win elections.

The public, when asked by pollsters, says Congress should be involved in decisions to go to war, but Americans have such a vague understanding of how our government is supposed to work that there isn't across-the-board outrage at Trump's unilateralism. So I imagine all future Republican presidents will operate this way if they have Republican congressional majorities.