WASHINGTON—The House of Representatives has voted down a resolution that would place guardrails on the United States’ ongoing military operations in Iran.

A war powers resolution for President Donald Trump’s Operation Epic Fury failed in a 212–219 vote on March 5.

Four Democrats broke with their party to vote against the bill: Reps. Jared Golden (D-Maine), Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), Juan Vargas (D-Calif.), and Greg Landsman (D-Ohio).

Two Republicans, Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), voted in support of it, setting them apart from their party.

The resolution would have mandated congressional authorization of U.S. involvement in the conflict, which began with Israeli and U.S. strikes on Iranian targets on Feb. 28.

The chamber rejected the measure just a day after the Senate voted against its own war powers resolution on the conflict.

The first wave of Israeli and U.S. strikes, which began after nuclear talks collapsed, killed Iranian leader Ali Khamenei.

Iranian counterstrikes have targeted U.S. military installations and other sites across the region, including in Israel, Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait.

The Senate’s measure failed in a 47–53 vote on March 4. All Senate Republicans opposed it except Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a libertarian-leaning lawmaker who has stressed that “war must be declared by Congress.”

Every Democrat in the Senate supported the resolution except Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.). Days ahead of the vote, Fetterman, a strongly pro-Israel Democrat, described himself as “a hard no.”

Following the unsuccessful House vote, Rep. Chris DeLuzio (D-Pa.) told reporters that Fetterman and other members of Congress “who refuse to step up ... and support this war power resolution are in the wrong.”

Article I of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. Yet Article II makes the president the commander in chief of the Army and Navy, granting him a scope of authority that gradually widened during the latter half of the 20th century.

Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, defended the legality of the combat operations in an ABC News interview, saying they amounted to self-defense against Iranian provocations.

He said notification provided to Congress in a briefing after the strikes showed that “the president was well within his Article II authority to go out there and defend [the United States] against an imminent threat, which is what this was.”

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), a former speaker of the House, said on the House floor before the vote that the chamber was having “two debates.”

“One is the debate as to the Constitution of the United States,“ she said. ”The other is whether Iran should have a nuclear weapon, which we all agree they should not. But that doesn’t mean the Constitution of the United States should be a casualty of that because you want to take a shortcut to war.”

Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), ranking member of the House Intelligence committee, told reporters that briefings he has received on the conflict “have not been friendly to the administration’s explanations to the American people.”

“The argument is that Israel was going to attack Iran and then Iran was going to attack the United States,“ he said. ”It’s not clear that either of those things were true, but it is also problematic on another level, which is that we are supposedly the biggest superpower in human history, and the idea that we have no influence on those two things happening, of course, is pretty absurd.”

Landsman, one of the Democrats who did not support the resolution, explained his thinking in an interview before the vote took place, saying he has an alternative resolution that makes it clear that troops can remain in the region.

“This is not good policy. What’s better policy is to allow the military and our allies to finish this particular operation,” he said in an interview on C-SPAN.