Congress Is Not a Cheering Section: What the Midterms Owe the Middle East

On 3 October, 2026, the Washington Stand, the publishing arm of the Family Research Council (FRC), ran an article under the heading “The Midterms and the Middle East.” Strip away the pieties and the argument is short. The White House has a Middle East policy. That policy needs a Congress willing to fund it and stay out of its way. Voters must deliver one in November. Nowhere in the piece does the author pause to ask what the policy is for, how much it costs or when it ends. Those questions, apparently, belong to a less loyal class of citizen altogether.

An odd thing to publish in a country whose founding document gives the legislature, not the executive, the power to declare war and to pay for it. Madison did not write Article I as a courtesy. He wrote it because he had watched kings spend other people’s sons and other people’s money without asking either. The FRC now invites voters to treat that safeguard as an obstacle. Protect the president from Congress, the article pleads, and the region will somehow sort itself out.

Will it? The past three years offer a test. American aircraft, munitions and intelligence have flowed into Israel’s operations in Gaza, the occupied West Bank, Lebanon and Syria under a 2001 authorisation written for Al-Qaeda and a 2002 authorisation written for Saddam Hussein. The air campaign against the Houthis in Yemen began and ended without a vote. The strikes on Iranian nuclear sites in June 2025 prompted a War Powers resolution that died in the Senate within days. In each case the executive acted, briefed a handful of lawmakers afterwards and dared the rest to object. Hardly anyone did. The Washington Stand calls this cohesion. A more honest word is absence.

Scholars have said so for years, and not only from the left. Researchers at the Quincy Institute have contended that Congress surrendered its war powers not in one dramatic vote but through decades of small deferrals, each reasonable on its own.

Analysts at the Brookings Institution have warned that the ceasefire agreed in Gaza in October 2025 left the United States holding commitments, including a military coordination centre in southern Israel and a stabilisation force it helps to bankroll, that no appropriations bill ever named.

Carnegie’s Middle East programme has stipulated repeatedly that military aid untethered from political conditions buys influence over nothing. Chatham House has observed that Washington’s partners increasingly plan around American inconsistency rather than American intent. Four institutions, four vocabularies, one diagnosis: the legislature has stopped legislating foreign policy and started applauding it.

Consider what a functioning Congress would have demanded by now. A written statement of what US involvement in the Levant is meant to achieve; in terms a sergeant or a taxpayer could recognise. A public ledger of transfers to Israel since October 2023, in dollars and in tonnes, matched against the end-use reports the State Department owes by law and routinely withholds. Dated benchmarks at which American participation in the reconstruction and policing of Gaza would wind down. Hearings in which the people who planned these operations explain them under oath. None of this is radical. Britain’s parliament voted on Syria in 2013 and the government lost. Washington has held no comparable vote on anything in the region since 2002.

The FRC’s platform treats support for Israel as an article of faith, which is its right. Faith, though, does not file budget requests. When a movement asks voters to shield a foreign policy from scrutiny, ask what that policy would look like if it had to defend itself.

Israel heads to its own polls this autumn, and the government that emerges may differ sharply from the one Washington has armed since 2023. An American executive that has promised everything and conditioned nothing will inherit whatever comes, and a Congress that never asked will have no standing to object.

So, the choice in November is not the one the Washington Stand describes. Nobody is asking voters whether they admire the president or the prime minister in Jerusalem. The ballot asks whether the 119th Congress’s habit of looking away should become the 120th’s too. A House that attaches purposes to appropriations, insists on reporting with consequences and fixes conditions for ending engagements before they begin would not be sabotaging American policy. It would be giving American policy a spine it currently lacks.

Operational continuity is what executives say when they would rather not be asked. Accountability is what legislatures are for. Anyone who wants the United States to carry weight in the Middle East should want the second more than the first, because a strategy that cannot explain itself to the people paying for it is not a strategy. It is a habit, and habits are what midterms exist to break.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.