Sen. Michael K. Garrett

Oil just jumped 13%. Brent crude over $105.

Somewhere, someone promised you’d get tired of winning.

They weren’t wrong.

History is being written right now. Every hour. In real time.

And I refuse, I refuse, to watch it happen without saying:

This is not who we are supposed to be.

We can still choose to be better.

The 148 little girls in Minab deserved to come home from school. And the Constitution of the United States deserved to be honored before the first bomb fell.

So tonight, I am saying out loud what I believe in my bones: the three service members who died deserve a country that honors their sacrifice with accountability. The five fighting for their lives deserve to know their government did not send them carelessly.

To the children of our service members. To the little boys and girls who will someday open a history book and read about February 28th, 2026.

They will ask us: What did you do?

I want to be able to answer.

I’m not sure they do.

But I know this: every generation of Americans has inherited a world shaped by decisions made before they were old enough to have a voice. The question that keeps me up tonight, the question that should keep all of us up, is what world are we handing to Jack and Charlotte.

I will watch them walk out our kitchen door, backpacks on their shoulders, and I will feel something I imagine every parent in America will feel this week, something that sits between love and terror and the fierce, desperate hope that the adults in charge know what they’re doing.

With every fiber of my being, I hope.

Hope is not a strategy. Hope does not bring back three American families shattered this morning. And hope does not bring back 148 little girls whose backpacks are still on their chairs.

My son Jack and my daughter Charlotte will go to school tomorrow.

I hope the Iranian people seize this moment. I hope something better rises from this. I hope the mothers and fathers in Tehran who have lived under that regime for nearly half a century find the freedom they have bled for in the streets. I hope the children of Iran get to go to school without fear.

We brought down Gaddafi & left behind a failed state that became a marketplace for terror. Every single time, we were told this was the one. This would work. This was worth it.

History hasn’t been kind to that promise.

Yet, I am a father. And fathers hold onto hope even when the evidence is hard.

It didn’t. We spent twenty years and two trillion dollars in Afghanistan, built an army, built a government, bet everything on regime change, and watched it collapse in two weeks.

I want to believe this time will be different.

I genuinely do.

We have been here before. We toppled Saddam Hussein and promised democracy would bloom in the desert.

He promised to focus on us, the families drowning in costs they cannot afford, the schools without enough teachers, the America that feels like it’s slipping through people’s hands.

Today he is in his second day of war.

Launched unilaterally. Without authorization. Constitutionally illegitimate.

They had lived under a king who sent young men to die by royal decree. They knew, in their bones, what happens when one man holds that power alone.

This war began without a single vote.

And now three mothers have a folded flag.

Donald Trump promised no new wars.

He promised peace.

The Constitution doesn’t just hope for that. It requires it.

Article I, Section 8. Congress declares war. Not a president from his residence in Palm Beach. Not a Truth Social post. Not a phone call to NBC News.

The Founders weren’t being poetic when they wrote that.

But I know what I believe, and I believe with everything in me that the people we send to Congress owe it to every one of those mothers and fathers, every one of those waiting children, to stand up, show up, and cast a vote before a single American life is put on the line.

I am a state senator.

I do not control the levers of war and peace in Washington.

That if we ask them to go, the people’s elected representatives will have looked their constituents in the eye, weighed the cost, and voted.

Last night, three families received the call no family should ever receive.

They were never asked. Neither was Congress.

But in the way a country is supposed to carry itself, in the unspoken covenant between a nation and the men and women who raise their right hand to defend it, we have made promises.

That we will not spend their lives carelessly. That we will exhaust every option first.

And children, the children of service members, who went to bed Friday night not knowing their parent was about to go to war.

We have made promises to these families. Maybe not in law. Maybe not in a resolution.

A mother who is sitting somewhere in North Carolina tonight, staring at her phone, waiting for a text from her child in uniform. Praying it comes. Terrified of the call that might come instead.

And a father. Doing the same thing across town, or across the state, or across this country.

On Saturday morning I was scheduled to speak to a community group about something else entirely.

I threw out my remarks.

Because when I looked out at the faces in that room, neighbors, friends, I could only think about one thing. A mother. Not a famous mother. Not a mother you’ve heard of.

And this morning, as missiles continue to streak across the Middle East, as Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz and threatens its most ferocious wave of attacks yet, as the entire region shudders and the world holds its breath, I have to ask the question nobody wants to answer:

What comes next?

He was a tyrant. A murderer. A man who drenched his own streets in the blood of his own people when they dared to dream of freedom. He had American blood on his hands. His death, now confirmed, is in some measure justice.

Justice and wisdom are not the same thing.

A mother somewhere in North Carolina was staring at her phone, praying for a text from her child in uniform.

Last night, for some families, that call came.

Three American service members are dead this morning. Five more are fighting for their lives.

I am not here to mourn the Ayatollah Khamenei.

I have a daughter. Her name is Charlotte. She goes to school. She hangs her backpack on a chair.

I cannot stop thinking about that.

I started writing these words yesterday. By this morning, everything had gotten worse.

Her backpack was still on her chair.

Somewhere in the rubble of a girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran, there are 148 backpacks. Hanging on 148 chairs. Belonging to 148 little girls who walked into school yesterday morning and never walked out.

I watched every minute of it.

Folks, I’m going to take some Zofran and go to bed. I’ll share my thoughts tomorrow.

Was a great conversation, Tim. Thanks for your time.

There have always been those among us with the courage to stand up, speak out, and refuse to go silent when it matters most. Be that person. The world needs more of them.