Wednesday’s classified Hill briefing on the assassination of Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani seems to have gone poorly for the White House. According to Republican Senator Mike Lee, Trump administration officials not only failed to fully justify Trump’s strike but also suggested they would have had no trouble assassinating the supreme leader of Iran without prior authorization, as well. Earlier, Lee had described the meeting as “the worst briefing I’ve seen, at least on a military issue.”

“They had to leave after 75 minutes,” he told the press afterward, “while they were in the process of telling us that we need to be good little boys and girls and run along and not debate this in public.” Senator Rand Paul agreed. “I see no way in the world you could logically argue that an authorization to have war with Saddam Hussein has anything to do with having war with people currently in Iraq,” he said.

Lee and Paul’s outspokenness has been unsurprising. Both have condemned military intervention in the Middle East and voiced support for restoring congressional war-making authority for some time now. Lee, in particular, has been a leader of efforts to withdraw American support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen; Paul has joined him in this endeavor. But while the pair have garnered media attention for standing apart from their Republican colleagues, reducing their opposition to Trump’s strike to a simple anti-war stance obscures the nature of the right’s rift on foreign policy.

It’s true that their criticisms of Trump stood out all the more within a discourse on Soleimani’s assassination that has been colored by rhetoric from conservatives even more grotesque than the bluster Trump offered in his own defense. In an appearance on Lou Dobbs Tonight this week, Republican Congressman Doug Collins, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, intimated that Democrats critical of Trump were, in essence, terrorist sympathizers. “They’re in love with terrorists,” he said breezily. “They mourn Soleimani more than they mourn our Gold Star families who are the ones who suffered under Soleimani.”

On Thursday, the National Republican Congressional Committee effectively endorsed this rhetorical approach by confronting members of the Democratic caucus with the question of whether Soleimani was a terrorist. Those who ignored the question were recorded in videos the NRCC’s Twitter account captioned gleefully. “Soleimani was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans,” one read, “but @GilCisnerosCA can’t bring himself to acknowledge he was a terrorist or that America is safer with him gone.”