Rep. Zach Nunn has postponed a planned “Top Gun” themed fundraiser with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that had drawn criticism over its timing — at the start of a war that has already resulted in U.S. casualties.

The Iowa Republican announced the postponement Thursday on social media.

Nunn had said Hegseth would appear at the fundraiser on Saturday, hours after the initial U.S.-Israeli airstrikes in Iran. The event, called “Top Nunn” and billed as a “salute to the troops,” was scheduled for later this month in a Des Moines suburb.

On Tuesday, the Pentagon publicly identified the first U.S. deaths in the war, troops who were killed by an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait. The six soldiers were assigned to an Army Reserve command based in Nunn’s district, and two of them were from Iowa.

The announcement of the fundraiser drew strong condemnation from Democrats, who accused Hegseth of leveraging the war for political purposes. Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesperson Katie Smith attacked Nunn’s event as “callous and disqualifying” in a statement on Wednesday.

Nunn, a former intelligence officer for the Air Force, explained the postponement in a social media post while offering condolences to the families of the troops who were killed.

“Operation TOP NUNN is postponed. We will have more to share about the event soon, and all ticket holders will be notified of the new date,” Nunn said. “Our prayers are with the families and our action is with our troops on the frontlines.”

Nunn said he plans to attend the arrival of the remains of the six soldiers at Dover Air Force Base on Saturday along with President Donald Trump.

Nunn paid his respects to the six soldiers in a speech on the House floor Thursday and led a moment of silence.

In replacing ousted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Donald Trump is opting for one of the more reliable strategies to guarantee a quick Senate confirmation — nominating a senator.

Trump’s choice of Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma sets up a relatively straightforward process, with some Senate Democrats already indicating they are open to voting for him.

“We’ve been successful at whipping everybody the president has nominated, and I expect the same for Markwayne Mullin,” Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 2 Senate Republican, said Thursday.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune separately told reporters that he wanted to move Mullin’s nomination “quickly.” Trump did not indicate in his Truth Social post when he would send Mullin’s nomination to the Senate, but said he would take over “effective March 31.”

“He’s obviously pretty well-vetted around here, so hopefully we can get the process going,” Thune said.

Mullin thanked Trump for the nomination in a statement Thursday and said, “I look forward to earning the support of my colleagues in the Senate and carrying out President Trump’s mission alongside the department’s many capable agencies and the thousands of patriots who keep us safe every day.”

Noem was confirmed 59-34 by the Senate, but she lost the confidence of many of the lawmakers who voted to confirm her more than a year ago. Republican Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska both called on her to step down after DHS agents killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti in Minneapolis and she labeled him a “domestic terrorist” without evidence.

Both Tillis and Murkowski praised Mullin Thursday in the immediate wake of Trump’s announcement.

“He’s a man of his word. I think he’ll go in, get experts in there, and prove to be an executive with the right kind of skills, and get things squared away quickly,” Tillis said, adding that the decision was good for Trump’s “legacy.”

Tillis noted separately that Mullin “likes dogs,” an apparent reference to a story Noem included in her memoir about killing a misbehaving dog named Cricket.

Murkowski said she had a “great deal of respect” for Mullin.

“He has been a really good liaison between the Senate, actually the whole Congress, and the White House,” Murkowski said. “I’ve got strong respect for the guy, so I think he’ll do a good job

Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, a member of GOP leadership, acknowledged that Mullin’s nomination is unlikely to be unanimous, but he thought he would be treated “fairly” by his Senate colleagues.

It’s rare for current or former senators to see their nominations to administration posts derailed, but it has happened — most famously in 1989, when the Senate rejected John Tower’s nomination as Defense secretary amid charges of alcoholism and womanizing. More recently, Sens. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) withdrew their nominations under then-President Barack Obama in 2009.

Republicans can confirm any of Trump’s nominees on their own as long as most of their own members stay united. But they’ll get at least a little help: Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) said Thursday he will support Mullin’s nomination — a nod that could be especially important because he’s on the committee that must advance Mullin’s nomination to the full Senate.

Other Senate Democrats, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, are telegraphing they will oppose Mullin as they also blockade DHS funding over the department’s aggressive immigration enforcement tactics.

“The Senate should not consider any DHS Secretary nominee until DHS and ICE are reined in,” Schumer wrote on X Thursday, saying he would vote against Mullin.

But other Democrats, including Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, left the door open to supporting the eventual nomination.

“I’m open to it, but he’s going to have to make real changes,” Coons said.

There is one potential pitfall: Mullin reportedly recently called Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the chair of the DHS-overseeing committee, a “freaking snake.” Paul has broad latitude to schedule and advance the director’s nomination.

Spokespeople for Paul didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Mullin’s nomination.

Katherine Tully-McManus, Meredith Lee Hill and Calen Razor contributed to this report.

As most congressional Republicans fall in line behind President Donald Trump’s decision to attack Iran, Rep. Warren Davidson is among the few choosing to speak out.

The six-term Ohio lawmaker — a former Army ranger who won the seat vacated by former Speaker John Boehner in 2015 — defied an intense whipping campaign from White House officials and House GOP leaders and voted Thursday to support a measure calling for the end of hostilities with Iran.

“The moral hazard posed by a government no longer constrained by our Constitution is a grave threat,” he said on the House floor ahead of the vote.

Davidson has only occasionally broken with Trump in the past, but he made clear almost immediately after the initial U.S. and Israeli strikes Saturday that he had concerns about the legal basis for the war.

While some of his fellow Hill Republicans saw Davidson as one of the few in their ranks who might stand publicly against the overseas military operation, others believed he would ultimately fold — particularly after he said he was willing to be convinced of the legality of the strikes.

Ultimately, though, Davidson was not persuaded after an administration briefing Tuesday.

He raised sharp concerns in a closed-door House GOP meeting the next morning, confronting Speaker Mike Johnson in a tense back-and-forth over the need for a vote on the war, according to four people in the room granted anonymity to describe the private meeting.

Davidson took particular issue with Johnson telling reporters the previous night that it was “shameful” that any lawmaker would vote for the war powers resolution. Doing so, the speaker said, would be siding with “the enemy.”

Davidson raised constitutional concerns and pushed back on Johnson’s argument that Congress didn’t need to weigh in at this point. There needed to be an up-or-down vote, he argued.“Warren was not giving in,” said one House Republican granted anonymity to describe the private meeting. According to the people in the room, Johnson tried to smooth over the flareup by telling Davidson they were “simpatico” and “I love you, brother,” at the end. Davidson declined to discuss the altercation.

“I made my thoughts known publicly,” he said leaving the meeting, referencing a social media post in which he criticized the speaker’s comments by name the previous night.

Davidson, 56, is a relatively low-key character among the cadre of hard-right House Republicans, who tends to speak tersely to reporters and pick his spots in fighting for fiscal discipline and civil liberties. But he has a long record of taking on party leaders, dating back to his first House campaign where he ran as a critic of Boehner while seeking to fill his seat.

He quickly joined the hard-line House Freedom Caucus after his election. But he was expelled from the group in 2024 after he endorsed against the group’s chair, then-Rep. Bob Good of Virginia, in a competitive GOP primary that Good later lost.

Davidson also garnered attention last year after joining Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky as the only House Republicans to oppose an initial vote on the GOP’s sprawling domestic policy megabill, citing fiscal concerns.

He later voted for the megabill’s final passage, and he has so far avoided direct criticism from Trump — earning a presidential reelection endorsement in November: “HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!”

If Trump were to now change his mind, he would have little recourse: Davidson has no Republican challenger, and the Ohio candidate filing deadline passed more than a month ago.

Now Davidson is once again allied with Massie on Thursday’s Iran vote, where both have raised constitutional concerns about the administration’s lack of consultation with Congress and its failure to make a public case for military action, as well as more substantive objections to entering a new foreign war.

“The constitutional sequence is you engage the public before you go to war, unless an attack is imminent. And imminent means, like, imminent, not like something that’s been over a 47-year period of time,” Davidson told reporters Tuesday.

That approach stands in stark contrast to the rhetoric from Johnson, who has said checking Trump’s war powers while strikes are underway would be “dangerous” and Trump is “well within his legal authority” to lead an expanding war in the Middle East with no approval from Congress.

Davidson has also singled out administration officials’ public statements on the justification for the war — particularly Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s argument that the U.S. sought to preempt Iranian retaliation on American assets for a strike it knew Israel was planning.

He called those comments “troubling” while also avoiding direct criticism of Trump. Ahead of the Tuesday briefing, Davidson gave the commander-in-chief the benefit of the doubt.

“President Trump has been an Iran war skeptic since before he was even a candidate,” he told reporters. “He found something persuasive. So I go into [the briefing] assuming there’s something that I will find persuasive.”

A day later he announced he was voting to restrain Trump — a case he made in principled, not personal terms.

“For some, this debate will be about whether we should even be fighting in Iran,” he said on the floor Wednesday. “For me, the debate is more fundamental: Is the president of the United States, regardless of the person holding the office, empowered to do whatever he wants? That’s not what our Constitution says.”