Almost two weeks have passed since Israel and the U.S. began attacking Iran.
The conflict has widened as Israel launched strikes on Lebanon. Iran is retaliating with strikes on Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East.
An attack on oil tankers Thursday morning prompted Iraq to suspend oil terminal operations.
In Washington, Hawaiʻi's congressional delegation has been pushing back against the Trump administration. U.S. Rep. Jill Tokuda denounced the war in Iran, saying that “it was not a war of any of our choosing.”
The House last week narrowly rejected a resolution to limit President Donald Trump’s powers in the war.
On Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz delivered a speech on the floor criticizing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, saying that Hegseth has “demonstrated a shocking lack of emotional maturity and a basic understanding of the gravity of the situation.”
To hear more from elected officials, HPR spoke with U.S. Rep. Ed Case on Thursday morning.
Interview Highlights
On the question of war with Iran
ED CASE: The first question is, can or should a president be able to take us to war without Congress authorizing it? That is fundamental to our Constitution, and it's fundamental to our War Powers Acts. We have made mistakes in this country by allowing presidents the authority to go into wars without knowing what the outcomes are, without knowing what the means are, without knowing what the risks are, and without knowing what the funding is going to be...s o that's the first question, and on that one, I voted in Congress to maintain Congress's authority.
CASE: Now the second part of the question is, should we go to war with Iran? And there are certainly things about Iran that are very, very problematic, very, very dangerous… and there may well be circumstances under which military actions — wars — with Iran are called for, but you don't go into those without knowing exactly what you're doing, exactly why you're doing it — go in on a hope and a prayer that somehow the regime is going to change and you're going to end up with a more favorable regime, which I think is what this president did. And certainly there are consequences to this war, some of which you could expect and some of which you couldn't. You could expect the oil prices to go up. We have very limited munitions stocks, and so we're exhausting those.
On the cost of war
CASE: Well, I don't intend to continue to fund this effort without the authority of Congress. That's the bottom line. You know, I'm on the Appropriations Committee. I'm on the Defense Subcommittee. I am directly responsible for funding our military and for overseeing our military, and I don't believe that Congress should fund a war which Congress didn't authorize. That's what I believe about that.
On the efficacy of war against Iran
CASE: There are elements of this action that have resulted, at least in the short term, in that part of the world being probably more safe in the midterm or something like that. But... we cannot impose our will on Iran simply by bombing them, simply by taking out their missile defense capacity. Those things don't change, and we've seen that elsewhere in the world. And so it's certainly not a good situation if we end up with an equally, if not more, intransigent and, you know, sworn enemy leadership in Iran than we did before.
Case also spoke about top local concerns, including immigration, cost of living, deep seabed mining, and FAA use of Hawai’i airspace. More information can be found at his website, case.house.gov.
This story aired on The Conversation on March 12, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Jinwook Lee adapted this story for the web.
