As early as this weekend, Sen. Chris Coons will head to Dover in his home state of Delaware to witness a solemn moment he’s already dreading.
There he will watch as service members unload the flag-draped cases containing the remains of six U.S. Army reservists killed in Kuwait Sunday when an Iranian missile struck their compound. Coons has invited his Senate colleagues to join him for the dignified transfer of those first casualties of the war President Trump launched against Iran.
The White House said Trump plans to be there as well, though a time for the transfer has yet to be announced. But Coons said he wants his Republican colleagues to see what he has seen—and heard—countless times before so they understand the cost of a war they are allowing the president to wage without congressional authorization.
“They are memorably awful. They are the very least we owe our service members and their families,” Coons told National Journal, his voice cracking. “But there is a sound that a mother makes when her son comes off the back of a plane that you will never forget, and you should be there to witness that, because that then should bear on your heart as you vote for or against more funding, longer scope, to send more troops.”
Is it too late? The Senate Wednesday rejected a war-powers measure that would have required congressional approval for future military action in Iran. The 53-47 vote was almost exclusively along party lines, similar to Thursday’s 219-212 House vote rejecting the resolution.
If GOP lawmakers are going to change their minds on Iran, they’ll need their voters to tell them to do so—especially during primary season when Trump’s base has outsized influence on Republican rank-and-file members. Polls have shown overall opposition to the war but with some key caveats: An NBC poll of 753 registered voters taken from Feb. 28 through March 3 (with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.6 percentage points) found 77 percent of Republicans supporting the strikes. That number rises to 90 percent among those who identify as MAGA-aligned.
It helps explain why Republican Sen. Jim Justice of West Virginia has embraced the action in Iran even as he acknowledges the costs of the war: U.S. casualties and increasing energy prices. Justice says his voters are supportive of intervention in Iran “in the short run.”
“I think what our president is doing is something that is on the cusp of really changing the footprint of the world,” Justice said. "If we could absolutely make that footprint and have real peace where we have free trade and we have real peace in the Middle East—heaven to Betsy, it would mean everything, versus just this. I mean, does anybody think if we don't do anything, things are going to get better?”
Justice, who represents a state Trump won with 70 percent support in 2024, acknowledges “you’re going to have casualties” as a result of the conflict. But he said his constituents remain squarely behind the decision to go to war made by a president who campaigned on less foreign involvement, not more.
“I would tell you without any question, in my mind, they're very supportive of what's going on at this point,” Justice said.
Another Republican member of Congress who might have potentially joined Democrats in trying to stop the war is Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, a former combat veteran whose decision not to seek reelection means she’s less vulnerable to the pressures of MAGA voters in her states. The six who died Sunday were in the 103rd Sustainment Command, an Army Reserve unit based in Des Moines.
Instead, Ernst is giving her full-throated defense of the attack on Iran.
“These young men and women gave their lives in support of a noble mission: protecting their fellow Americans and keeping our homeland secure,” Ernst said on the Senate floor Wednesday. “We’ve already lost too many lives at the hands of Iran, but as long as the Iranian regime chants ‘death to America,’ the lives of our citizens will continue to be threatened.”
After the aircraft transporting the bodies lands at Dover, Coons said, he plans to watch the “carry team” of military personnel transfer the remains to a waiting vehicle. The remains will then be transferred to the mortuary facility located at Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations on the Air Force base.
The Delaware Democrat said he hopes the jarring sight of those cases will prompt GOP senators to abandon the “magical thinking going on about how quickly this can be brought to an end."
"As has long been said," he added, "you can start a war of choice at your timing of choice, but you don't get to end it, because the enemy also gets a vote.”
Coons, who occupies the seat President Biden once held, recalled how the then-senator warned a local chamber of commerce gathering he attended in the run-up to the Iraq war not to minimize the dangers and tragedy headed America’s way.
Coons recalled what was a prevailing feeling about the war at the time: “Everybody’s behind it. 'Oh, this is important. We need to do this for our country.'” But Biden, he recalled, “sort of wagged his finger at the room and said, ‘Remember this moment; lots of young Americans are going to come home in body bags, and for years.’"
"So," Coons said, "we should be careful about our enthusiasm for opening a door into chaos and conflict in the Middle East where we can't see the other side of it.”
