Six senators filed onto the War Powers Resolution (WPR) this week, bringing the total to thirteen co-sponsors: Jeff Merkley, Kirsten Gillibrand, Chris Van Hollen, Mark Kelly, Raphael Warnock and Andy Kim, joining the seven who filed the following day . Under WPR procedure, the earliest privileged-resolution floor vote is around next Thursday. The House killed its version 219 to 212 , with only Rand Paul's Republican equivalent crossing in the previous three Senate attempts. Thirteen is roughly a quarter of the Senate Democratic caucus, still well short of the fifty-one votes needed.
Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, both on record criticising Trump's 'annihilation' rhetoric, have not signalled a floor-vote crossing. The forty-seven to fifty-three failure pattern from prior Senate attempts remains the base case. The procedural question is whether the four-deadline overlap changes Republican calculations. The vote lands in the same seven days as the OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) GL-U licence expiring , the two-week ceasefire window closing, and the Macron-Starmer summit outcome.
If Treasury lets GL-U lapse without a successor, three hundred and twenty-five tankers loaded under its terms lose legal cover for cargoes entirely lawful eight weeks ago. Shippers and their P&I (Protection and Indemnity) insurers face enforcement exposure on a licence Treasury has gone silent on for almost a month. The intersection matters because a Republican senator reading a trade-press headline about stranded tankers is processing a different political signal from one reading about a coordinated European framework out of Paris that same week. The procedural vote is unchanged; the context arriving in the same week is not. Four deadlines, one week, and no signed presidential instrument behind any of them.
