Congressional Republicans are confronting serious doubts they can pass Iran war funding on their own, especially as the potential price tag balloons into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
The alternative — relying on a handful of Democrats to push it through the Senate — doesn’t look any more likely as Middle East hostilities expand, energy prices rise and more Democratic lawmakers dig in against an unpopular war.
In recent weeks, some in the GOP floated using the party-line budget reconciliation process to give the Pentagon a slug of new money without needing to gather 60 votes in the Senate.
But the revelation that a war funding request could reach $200 billion has quickly cooled those hopes, given the political complications of finding offsets for the spending and the procedural gyrations it would require.
