Speaker Mike Johnson said Wednesday that lawmakers are waiting for the White House to formally request emergency cash to support the war in Iran, as administration officials reportedly consider seeking up to $50 billion.

In an interview, Johnson said he hadn’t heard yet about a specific funding level but that “we’ll pass a supplemental when it’s appropriate and get it right.”

“We’re waiting on the White House and [the Pentagon] to let us know, but we have an open dialogue about it,” he said when asked whether Congress could pass a $50 billion supplemental funding bill.

Passing any emergency funding will be a major fight on Capitol Hill, with Democrats already decrying the lack of details about how much the military is spending and Republican fiscal hawks wary of more spending. Reuters reported Tuesday that Deputy ‌Defense ⁠Secretary Steve Feinberg has been leading Pentagon work on a roughly $50 billion request.

Asked about a $50 billion request in a separate interview, Majority Leader Steve Scalise said, “Well, we’re nowhere close to that.”

“I mean, yesterday at the briefing, it was brought up that there may be a need for a supplemental,” he added. “But we’re still just in the first few days of this conflict, and there’s no no ask yet from the Department of War for a supplemental.”

Scalise said, “When that time comes, we’ll obviously have very serious conversations because it’s important that the Department of War have the tools they need to keep America safe.”

House Foreign Affairs Chair Brian Mast (R-Fla.) said in an interview that he didn’t know the specific number yet but that he would support an emergency funding bill of tens of billions of dollars.

The House Ethics Committee launched a formal investigation into Rep. Tony Gonzales Wednesday, establishing a panel to probe allegations that the Texas Republican “engaged in sexual misconduct towards an individual employed in his congressional office” and “discriminated unfairly by dispensing special favors or privileges.”

The announcement comes as Gonzales faces a 12-week runoff campaign to keep the Republican nomination for the south Texas seat he has held for three terms. He narrowly trails challenger Brandon Herrera in the latest returns from Tuesday’s election but neither candidate is on track to win an outright majority, setting up a May 23 runoff.

Gonzales has denied wrongdoing and thus far resisted calls from within his own party to resign as details of an alleged relationship with a former staffer, Regina Santos-Aviles, have emerged in recent weeks. She died by suicide after setting herself on fire in 2025.

Gonzales did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, navigating a tight GOP majority, said last week that he wanted to see how the election played out and that Gonzales was entitled to due process. It could take months or longer for the Ethics Committee to finish its investigation and recommend any discipline.

Gonzales is alleged to have pursued a sexual relationship with Santos-Aviles and tried to coerce her into sending explicit photos, according to text messages published by the San Antonio Express-News and other publications. Blue Light News has not independently reviewed the messages.

House rules prohibit members, such as Gonzales, from having “a sexual relationship” or engaging in “unwelcome sexual advances” with their staffers.

The Ethics Committee’s deliberations are usually shrouded in secrecy, and it sometimes takes years to deliver any sort of conclusion. Allegations that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) accepted improper gifts relating to the 2021 Met Gala, for instance, were not ruled upon until 2025.

Similarly, the Ethics panel took several years to issue a report on a 2020 stock trade made by the wife of Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) that was alleged to have been done using nonpublic information. Kelly was scolded in 2025 by the committee for not fully cooperating with the investigation with a strongly worded letter of disapproval.

Meredith Lee Hill contributed to this report.

Lindsey Graham’s effort to convince Donald Trump to attack Iran began — to the surprise of no one familiar with the relationship between the South Carolina senator and the president — on the golf course.

After the 2024 election, the pair hit the links to discuss a second-term agenda for the resurgent president, and Graham had lots of advice.

In an extensive interview Tuesday in his Capitol Hill office, Graham recalled pushing Trump to “blow some shit up” to combat drug trafficking. He talked about taking on Big Tech by challenging the legal underpinnings of their industry dominance. And he counseled Trump to build on agreements he’d brokered between Israel and U.S. allies in the Middle East.

That last part, Graham emphasized, would require confronting the elephant in the region.

“We were thinking about this early, early on about how Iran is a spoiler for expanding the Abraham Accords and stability in the Mideast,” he said. “I told him before he took office … if you can collapse this terrorist regime, that’s Berlin Wall stuff.”

That launched an ongoing conversation that continued for months, culminating in a flurry of one-on-one lobbying “in the last several weeks,” Graham said. The two also talked about Iran during a Thursday White House meeting that wrapped less than 48 hours before the beginning of the vast joint U.S.-Israeli operation aimed at Iran’s missile and nuclear programs, its civilian and military leaders, as well as other key targets.

Trump’s decision to go to war was the latest indication that hawkish voices he once publicly resisted — none louder than Graham’s — have dominated his second-term decisionmaking. It was also a full-circle moment for the veteran GOP senator, who has spent decades pushing administration after administration to take military action against Iran with no success until now.

Graham’s triumph was never a given. He described a “real contest” within the administration about whether or not Trump should take military action to end a geopolitical rivalry 47 years in the making.

Another person with knowledge of the internal debate said that, within the administration, the idea of striking Iran had very few vocal backers other than U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. That left Graham among those leading the charge from outside and inside.

In public, Graham used frequent cable news hits and hallway interviews in the Capitol to play up the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear and missile programs — even after Trump ordered a June strike to destroy its most sensitive nuclear facilities. He also used Trump’s preferred medium — TV hits — to lavishly praise him, frequently referring to him as “Reagan Plus” for his dramatic impact.

Privately, he appealed to Trump’s attraction to swaggering action and risk-taking over quieter moves — not to mention the term-limited president’s growing concern with his legacy.

“There was a real fight not to do it,” Graham said. “Let Israel do it by itself or just not do much. So we talked a lot about this: ‘Mr. President, you want to have your fingerprints on this. You want them to know America will fight.’”

A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Graham said the successful January capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro put Trump “in the mindset to follow through.” But he wasn’t certain until late last month when Trump sent a second aircraft carrier near the region that Trump would ultimately take action.

The strikes have opened Trump up to criticism from Democrats, key European and Middle Eastern allies and even some members of his own party, who have questioned the rationale for the sweeping operation and what the endgame will look like. Polling indicates the American public remains wary of sliding into another “forever war” in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan.

As he makes the rounds defending Trump — both publicly to TV cameras and privately to Middle Eastern allies — Graham has tried to hammer home that the U.S. is not nation-building in Iran. Where the country goes next, he said, remains up to the Iranian people.

“If they want to reconstitute their country, to build more nuclear weapons and more missiles to hit us, we’ll treat the new people like we did the old people,” he said. “I just don’t believe it. I think they’re going to find a way to … be a different country.”

He went on to dismiss the famous “Pottery Barn rule” articulated by former Secretary of State Colin Powell before the Iraq War more than two decades ago.

“‘You break it. You own it.’ That may be true for a consignment shop, but it’s not true for foreign policy,’” Graham said. “If there’s a threat, break it.”

But Trump’s strategy has opened him up to questioning from some of his own supporters, who believe it’s a far cry from the “America First” approach he preaches. The president and some of his top advisers pledged during the 2024 campaign that his second administration wouldn’t rush into foreign entanglements. And Trump during his 2025 inauguration speech said his administration’s success would be measured in part by “the wars we never get into.”

Many of those statements have resurfaced online since this weekend’s strikes, but Trump is now singing consistently from Graham’s interventionist hymnal, and the senator said he’s not concerned Trump will back down amid the criticism and that he’s “in it to win it.”

“He’s a hard sell, but when you sell him, he’s all in,” said Graham, who argued that “America First is not ‘head in the sand.’”

The strikes have sparked a bipartisan push in Congress to block Trump from taking additional military action without congressional signoff. That effort is expected to fall short, but it inspired a lively debate during Senate Republicans’ closed-door lunch on Tuesday — and Graham was in the middle of it.

He pushed back after Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) criticized the lack of consultation with Congress and GOP leaders for not holding hearings, according to two people with knowledge of his comments who were granted anonymity to disclose the private moment.

While Graham’s defense of aggressive military action is nothing new, Trump’s outright embrace of it is. The idea that the pair would be working in tandem on a new Middle East war would have been unthinkable a decade ago, when Graham was running for president himself and roundly criticizing the outsider candidate’s isolationism.

As recently as 2019, Trump publicly criticized Graham’s history of advocating for military intervention in the Middle East after Graham urged him to be more aggressive after Iran bombed Saudi oil production facilities.

“It’s very easy to attack, but if you ask Lindsey, ask him how did going into the Middle East, how did that work out? And how did going into Iraq work out?” Trump said at the time.

Graham said one of his rules is to not “take yourself out of the game” just because of a past disagreement and that it paid off with a now-trusting relationship with a two-term president.

“If you had told me in 2016, I’d wind up being one of his better friends, closest adviser and admire him as commander-in-chief, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Graham said, adding that “what the president sees in me is somebody that can deliver.”

One person close to the White House, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said that if anyone had an outsize influence on Trump’s decision to attack Iran it was Graham. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who favors a hands-off foreign policy approach, made a similar observation about Graham’s impact on Trump’s Venezuela strategy, telling reporters that his GOP colleague should be “banned from going to the White House.”

“That’s sarcasm,” Paul clarified.

Other corners of the party’s libertarian-leaning wing have been more blunt. Doug Stafford, Paul’s chief political adviser, called Graham a “warmongering fool.” And Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) told reporters after a closed-door Iran briefing Tuesday that “Lindsey Graham hasn’t seen a fistfight he hasn’t wanted to turn into a bombing raid.”

Graham, meanwhile, is looking ahead as he back-channels with Trump and allies in the Middle East. He wants to put together a bipartisan coalition in the Senate to finish the job he talked about with Trump on the golf course — enshrining the full normalization of Israel-Arab relations with a Senate-ratified treaty.

And he is coordinating closely with Trump. The two spoke Tuesday morning, and the president has indicated he’s closely watching Graham’s TV sales pitch for the war, including declarations that the “mothership of terrorism is sinking” and the “captain is dead.”

“He called me and said … ‘I like that — stay on TV,’” he said. “Something tells me I will.”

Dasha Burns and Jack Detsch contributed to this report.