Most Americans don’t want this war, and among Democratic voters, 89 percent say the United States should not have attacked Iran. Yet with bombs killing Iranian children, all the legislative opposition to Donald Trump’s war that congressional Democrats could manage this week was a feeble procedural, symbolic quibble — in the form of a War Powers resolution by Republican Rand Paul of Kentucky and Democrat Tim Kaine of Virginia — demanding that the president halt the war until Congress has given its permission. On Wednesday, the Republican-controlled Senate voted that down.

The failure of that resolution is the fault of the Republican majority, of course. But for the Democratic tepidity, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York deserves significant blame.

As Aída Chávez reported last week, Democratic Party leadership tried to derail even this pathetic effort to throw sand in the gears of this insane war, making sure to delay the vote until the war was already underway. Schumer and House Minority leader Hakeem Jeffries worked to undermine and delay the vote because they knew that the antiwar position was popular with the Democratic base, but they weren’t personally interested in defying the elite security consensus, sources told Chávez.