Ahead of a vote on his resolution to force congressional oversight on the continuation of U.S. military operations in Syria, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) was feeling bullish. “Hope springs eternal,” he told The Intercept when asked whether the measure would pass. The resolution was ultimately voted down on Wednesday night, March 8, with 47 Republicans joining 56 Democrats in support of the bill. Despite the resolution’s defeat, it was just the beginning in a string of efforts to end the U.S. military operations abroad, according to its sponsor.

“Syria is my lead off hitter,” Gaetz said. “We’re going to take a trip around the globe. We may go to Yemen. We may have stops in Niger. We may have stops in Sudan. Maybe ultimately, we’ll end in Ukraine.”

The Obama administration’s ambassador to Syria, a leading voice in favor of aggressively confronting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad at the time, also backed the effort by Gaetz to force U.S. withdrawal from the country within 180 days.

Robert Ford argued in a letter to Congress in support of Gaetz’s legislation that the U.S. mission has no clear objective. “After more than eight years of military operations in Syria there is no definition of what the ‘enduring’ defeat of ISIS would look like,” Ford writes in the letter, which was obtained by The Intercept and confirmed as authentic by Ford. “We owe our soldiers serving there in harm’s way a serious debate about whether their mission is, in fact, achievable.”

Matt Gaetz sponsored a resolution in the House, supported by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, to force congressional oversight of the continued U.S. military presence in Syria.

On Tuesday evening, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, or CPC, circulated a message to its membership urging a yes vote, producing a serious bipartisan coalition. “This measure to remove unauthorized deployment of U.S. Armed Forces in Syria unless a specific statutory authorization is enacted within six months is largely consistent with previous bipartisan efforts led by CPC members to terminate such unauthorized military presence within one year, for which 130 House Democrats voted yes last year,” read the message to members.

At the same time that Gaetz’s resolution was being debated on the House floor, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took up the question of whether to end the military force authorizations that provided the legal basis for decades of war in Iraq.

“I am encouraged that the kerfuffle my Syria legislation has brought to the Republican conference may lead us to a broader discussion about the 2001 AUMF, the 2002 AUMF, and it’s obviously well past time for us to reconsider those authorizations in light of the world we live in, in 2023,” Gaetz said.

CPC member Ro Khanna (D-CA), who voted for the resolution, said that attitudes toward U.S. involvement in foreign conflict were shifting on both sides of the aisle.

“There is a new generation of thinking on two central issues: A concern about wars and entanglements over the last 20 years that have not made us safer and a concern over the offshoring of our domestic production over bad trade deals that have left the working class and middle class poorer,” Khanna said. “I believe that this new generation of political leaders can help fix those two mistakes that the country has made and that there is an emerging consensus that we should not have our troops fighting overseas without congressional authorization.”

An original version of Gaetz’s measure offered just 15 days for troops to leave Syria, but he amended it to six months in the hope of drawing real support. The new measure, a war powers resolution that is privileged on the House floor, would allow troops to stay longer if Congress debated on and authorized the intervention.

Gaetz’s introduction of the resolution, particularly with such a short timetable that would doom it to lopsided defeat, kicked off a flurry of lobbying to try to turn it into a bipartisan coalition, involving progressive groups like Just Foreign Policy and Demand Progress and conservative ones such as FreedomWorks, Concerned Veterans for America and Citizens for Renewing America. But the speed with which it came to the floor left little time for grassroots mobilization.

“The CPC has been leading on this front and nothing has changed. I wish Gaetz worked more closely with the coalition of groups that have been working on this and the CPC,” said Rep. Ilhan Omar, (D-MN) deputy chair of the CPC, who worked with Gaetz to get the legislation to a place where Democrats could back it. “Nonetheless, I am a yes on the resolution.”