A top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee says he learned about the U.S. military strikes against Iran on social media.
"This administration has been uniquely bad about responding to the constitutionally mandated jobs of oversight that we do," Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., told Morning Edition. "My Republican counterpart, Rick Crawford, the chairman of the committee, was informed prior to the raid but I, the Democrat, was not."
"We're seeing sort of almost disdain from this administration with respect to that oversight," he added.
Despite years of promises by President Trump to keep the country from entangling itself in another Middle East conflict, the U.S. entered the Israel-Iran conflict on Saturday and bombed Iranian nuclear facilities. Then Trump announced on Monday that Israel and Iran had reached a ceasefire deal, which came hours after Iran fired missiles at a U.S. base in Qatar.
Moments after Trump's social media announcement, Vice President JD Vance said Trump wants to work on a "long-term settlement" between Iran and Israel.
"I think the Iranians are at a place where they don't want to keep on fighting," Vance said in an interview with Fox News' Bret Baier.
"What the Iranians have showed through their support of terror networks, through their now-failed effort to build a nuclear weapon, is that they're just not very good at war. And I think the president really hit the reset button and said, 'Look, let's actually produce long-term peace for the region,'" Vance continued.
On Tuesday, Trump lashed out at Israel and Iran and accused them of violating the ceasefire.
"You know what we have? We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the f*** they're doing," Trump told reporters at the White House.
NPR's Michel Martin and Himes discussed the U.S. attack on Iran and how Democrats intend to push for oversight of the executive branch.
The following excerpt has been edited for length and clarity.
Interview highlights
Michel Martin: So the ceasefire seems to have fallen apart at the moment. The president said this morning that both Israel and Iran violated it. Do you have any sense of what's next?
Rep. Jim Himes: Well, I'm not sure anybody has a sense of what's next. It does seem like in these first couple of days of conflict, we have avoided the 20 or 30 worst case scenarios that usually accompany a war in the Middle East. We're not seeing gas prices spike. We're not seeing fatalities or casualties of American troops. But of course, this is a day-to-day thing. At some point, we've got to ask the question of, given the immense gamble that was taken here both by Israel and by the president of the United States, I would point out without consultation of the United States Congress, as required by law, what was actually achieved. I have seen absolutely no evidence to back up the vice president's statement that the Iranian nuclear program was obliterated. In fact, I would be very, very surprised if that was, in fact, true. So the question obviously remains, if the Iranian nuclear program was set back in a very small way, all of this risk and this massive gamble will have been undertaken for a tiny marginal improvement at best.
Martin: So who in the U.S. government is trying to get to the bottom of what was actually accomplished in those strikes? And do you have any confidence that whoever is sort of tasked with this will report to you and other members of Congress?
Himes: Well, the answer to your question is that the, you know, extensive apparatus of the intelligence community, and as you might imagine, that involves everything from satellites to the ability to conduct espionage against the nation of Iran, traditional espionage, I do think that we will have a pretty good sense in the coming days and weeks of what was actually achieved in Iran.
Martin: You've said that you learned about the U.S. strikes on Iran through social media. Is there a path toward getting more oversight moving forward?
Himes: Well, in my many years of experience serving on the Intelligence Committee, I will tell you that this administration has been uniquely bad about responding to the constitutionally mandated jobs of oversight that we do. As you point out, my Republican counterpart, Rick Crawford, the chairman of the committee, was informed prior to the raid but I, the Democrat, was not. And so we're seeing sort of almost disdain from this administration with respect to that oversight.
Martin: What recourse do you and other Democrats have? You make the argument that this isn't just a custom, that this is required. So then the question becomes, how do you enforce that going forward?
Himes: There's not a good answer to that question because the Democratic Party, the party in which I am a member, is in the minority. And to date, the Republican majority, which has subpoena power, which has the ability to move bills to the floor, which has the ability to hold administration officials in contempt, has shown precisely zero interest in doing that. Now, the dissatisfying but honest answer to your question is that if the Democrats are able to take the majority and therefore, in 18 months, have subpoena power, have all of those tools at our disposal at that point, I think we'll have options other than simply making the case to the American people that shutting down the oversight and ignoring the rules is not okay.
Martin: You co-introduced a War Powers Resolution that would remove U.S. armed forces from hostilities against Iran without approval from Congress. We had heard that there were some Republicans who were not pleased with the level of consultation with Congress. Do you have any sense that this might have enough support to go forward?
Himes: We're certainly going to take a crack at it. And we're hoping against hope that maybe there are a handful of Republicans who will remember that their duty is to the Constitution, to which they raised their right hand and took an oath, as opposed to the man that occupies the Oval Office. That wouldn't be a terribly good bet if you were a betting person. But we are going to try to make that case because, again, it's always worth standing up for the prerogatives of the Congress and, frankly, for the Constitution and the law.
Destinee Adams produced the digital piece for web and Treye Green edited it.
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