Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.) said late Tuesday that the U.S. military made the world “safer” by bombing three nuclear sites in Iran.
“They ran a flawless attack on Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan,” Schneider, who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said during an interview on NewsNation’s “On Balance with Leland Vittert.”
“Unquestionably, they executed as well as we could have hoped for, and they came home safely, and we’re grateful for that,” he added.
“The world is safer because of what they did,” Schneider continued.
The Illinois Democrat, who co-chairs the Abraham Accords Caucus, refrained from giving his overall assessment of the operation when asked if he would describe the strikes as “good.”
“The jury’s still out,” Schneider said, later adding, “We need to get the battle damage assessment. We got to get the details.”
Schneider also addressed why he thinks so few Democrats have been willing to come out publicly to praise the operation.
“I think in this moment of hyper-partisanship on both sides, people react first and then think. Not everybody. There were some in my party who immediately called for impeachment. They called the action unconstitutional,” Schneider said.
Schneider said he thinks President Trump “should have come to Congress” first, but he acknowledged the “tension” in the U.S. Constitution about where the authority lies to order a strike like the one this past weekend.
“Constitution gives Congress the sole responsibility for taking our nation to war, but, it also, in Article II, gives the president responsibility for keeping our troops safe, protecting Americans around the world,” Schneider said. “There is a tension there.”
“But the tension is a safeguard, and the president should have notified at least or certainly the gang of 8 – the leaders in the Congress,” he added.
Several news outlets reported Tuesday that an internal U.S. government report found strikes on the three facilities over the weekend delayed Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months, despite initial assertions from Trump administration officials that those sites had been destroyed.
The assessment also said Iran had moved much of its enriched uranium before the strikes, according to multiple news outlets.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday at the NATO summit in the Netherlands that a leak investigation was underway, while Trump blasted the news outlets that reported on the internal assessment as “scum.”
Trump and other top officials have been adamant that the nuclear facilities were “obliterated,” even as experts have said it would take days to determine the extent of the damage.
