GOP senators respond to Iran bombing. How many stand with Trump? The answer is nuanced. | Opinion

What a difference a few days can make.

Just last week, Sen. Roger Marshall sounded a little bit skeptical about America getting involved in Israel’s war against Iran.

Iran, he said in a radio interview, “cannot have nuclear weapons.”

And yes, Marshall added, he would love to see “regime change” in Tehran.

But also: “I think that most senators hope and believe that Israel can finish the job on their own.” America, Marshall said, would “continue our defensive posture. Do everything we can to stay out of the war.”

Israel did not finish the job on its own, of course. America did not stay out of the war.

Instead, President Trump on Saturday sent B-2 bombers from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri halfway around the world to drop “bunker buster” bombs on three nuclear facilities in Iran.

If Marshall still felt any skepticism about the mission at that point, though, he wasn’t going to share it publicly.

“We stand tall with President Trump,” he said in a statement, “who is protecting the world from a nuclear capable Iran.”

There are good reasons to think that just isn’t so. The pivot is understandable, though. MAGA ideology may not much like foreign wars, but MAGA senators like getting crosswise with President Trump even less.

Schmitt: Redefining restraint

That’s why Marshall isn’t the only GOP official from the Kansas-Missouri region to recalibrate over the last few days. There’s also Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri.

Schmitt last year celebrated Trump’s election victory as the beginning of a new, more restrained era in American foreign policy.

The president, Schmitt told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, “will be less interventionist, and we get back to our core national interests of “defending the homeland, the Indo-Pacific, and China,” he said.

The Middle East? Not as much.

“Having these tripwires in other regions that pull us into wars, I think the American people have had enough of that,” Schmitt said then. Trump, he said, campaigned “abandoning this failed foreign policy that’s cost us trillions of dollars, that sent our men and women across the world.”

That was then. Now?

“President Trump is a foreign policy realist not an ideologue,” Schmitt wrote Saturday night on X. “He has taken limited military action to achieve a crucial objective that is in the core national interest of the United States: preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons.”

Some tripwires are more meaningful than others, it seems.

And whether that “limited military action” stays “limited” remains to be seen. Within 24 hours of Schmitt’s post, Trump was musing about “regime change” in Iran. Already, the limits are feeling a bit loose.

Moran: Congress must weigh in

Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas has never been on board with the MAGA “restraint” crowd in the GOP. He’s still got the party’s Reagan-era Cold War DNA in him. So it is no surprise he praised Saturday’s bombing raid and the pilots who carried out the mission “professionally and courageously.”

But he also believes in the Constitution, which gives Congress — not the president — authority over decisions to go to war.

Trump is the commander-in-chief “but it is Congress that has the authority to declare war,” Moran said Sunday on Topeka’s WIBW.

“When we are not attacked, the attack is not directly on us, then I think it’s really important — constitutionally, but also for the well-being of the United States, its citizens — to make certain that Congress has a say in what that military action might be,” Moran said.

It’s a fine and true statement. The question now: What will Moran do about it?

Moran, at least, pays lip-service to the Constitutional boundaries governing war and peace. Marshall and Schmitt? They seem a little more flexible.

And Marshall, in particular, seems to have a little too much faith in President Trump to do the right thing.

“The great thing is,” Marshall said last week, “I know philosophically, President Trump is not going to get us into another endless war.”

We’ll see if that’s still true next week.

This story was originally published June 23, 2025 at 1:21 PM.