Donald Trump views his personnel choices as one of the biggest mistakes of his first term; this go-around, he has been much more adept at making picks suited to his extreme governing ambitions.

First-term roadblocks like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, have become second-term rubber stamps like Pete Hegseth, Susie Wiles, Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, and Tulsi Gabbard and Bill Pulte. As a result, a president who was prevented from governing as much more than a traditional conservative in his first term has come much closer to his vision of an imperial presidency this time.

However, there is a select group of first-term picks who Trump can’t replace: the ones who wear black robes. Even in this term, Trump’s most extreme policy forays have repeatedly been thwarted at the Supreme Court, not just by the three liberal justices and Chief Justice John Roberts, but also by a fifth (and often sixth) vote supplied by a rotating mix of Trump’s own appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh.

Consider, for a moment, how different Trump’s second term would be if he had managed to appoint Supreme Court justices in his first term more in the mold of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, both of whom have sided with him in a suite of major cases. In this alternate reality, Trump would currently be:

• Imposing sweeping and unlimited tariffs on every country in the world.

• Deploying National Guard troops to major cities across the country.

• Using the Alien Enemies Act to quickly deport migrants without due process.

• Reshaping the Federal Reserve to secure his desired interest rate cuts.

• Singlehandedly redefining the meaning of American citizenship.

His presidency would look much more like the one he imagined: unleashed, unrestrained, and asserting unilateral control over much of American life. Instead, Roberts and the liberal trio joined with Gorsuch and Barrett to block Trump’s tariff dreams in Learning Resources v. Trump; with Kavanaugh and Barrett to prevent National Guard deployments in Trump v. Illinois; (seemingly) with Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett to mandate more than 24-hour notice for migrants being deported under the Alien Enemies Act in A.A.R.P. v. Trump; with Kavanaugh to block his firing of a Federal Reserve governor in Trump v. Cook; and with Kavanaugh and Barrett to overturn his executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants in Trump v. Barbara.

The birthright citizenship ruling was handed down just yesterday — I was inside the courtroom, more on that below — on the last day of the court’s term, which makes this a perfect time to revisit my dataset on Trump’s win-loss record at the court.

Below, I’ve charted each of the 44 actions the court has taken in Trump-related cases since his re-election. Note that the court has sometimes taken more than one action in the same case, which is why some cases are listed multiple times. Also note that I’ve included two cases involving Trump in his personal capacity, his (pre-inaugural) January 2025 attempt to forestall his sentencing in a New York criminal case and his appeal of a verdict requiring him to pay $5 million to the writer E. Jean Carroll, which the court refused to hear this week.

For each justice, cases where they sided with or against Trump are noted in green or red; a case where Trump won, and a justice did not indicate that they dissented, is noted in light green, while a case where Trump lost, and a justice did not say that they dissented, is noted in light red. I’ve also coded some cases as “mixed,” meaning there were key parts of the court ruling that were both a win and loss for Trump.

If we look at how often each justice has sided with Trump, a court that is generally referred to as 6-3 — and sometimes as 3-3 — really starts to look like a 2-1-3-1-2 court.

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas basically always side with Trump on the right, while Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson basically never side with Trump on the left. Moving one layer in, Justice Neil Gorsuch occasionally breaks with Trump, while Justice Elena Kagan occasionally sides with him. The crucial bloc of swing votes comes from Chief Justice John Roberts, and Trump-appointed Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

This obviously plants the median of the court well to the right, and when Trump has tried to execute standard-issue conservative policies, the middle bloc (and, thus, the court as a whole) has swung his way. The justices, for example, have blessed many of Trump’s border security efforts, his attempts to terminate Temporary Protected Status for various groups of migrants, and his policies toward transgender people.

Most notably, earlier this week, in Trump v. Slaughter, the court overturned a 1935 precedent known as Humphrey’s Executor and empowered the president to fire the heads of independent agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, an ability Trump has sought — and which aligns perfectly with a long-running conservative project to place the headless federal bureaucracy more clearly under the authority of the elected president.

In my dataset, Trump has won much more often than he’s lost (25 wins, 11 losses), but seven of the wins can really be consolidated together as one, since they are all related to the president’s ability to fire members of the executive branch, a foundational belief for many of the court’s conservatives, who were coming up in the legal world as the unitary executive theory began to percolate.

While Trump’s losses are fewer, they contain many of Trump’s biggest swings — and nearly all of the times he has tried to go beyond the conservative legal project and apply his own, more extreme governing vision.

A perfect example is Slaughter’s twin case, Trump v. Cook, which was also handed down on Monday. In Slaughter, Trump was trying to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission. Legal conservatives have been trying to gut independent agencies for years, and the court happily handed him a win. But in Cook, Trump was trying to fire a Federal Reserve governor. It is true that some right-wing libertarians have long despised the Fed, but generally most business-minded conservatives appreciate the stabilizing impact of the central bank. The court told Trump that he was fine to fire the FTC’s Slaughter, as head of the executive branch, but (at least for now) that he could not fire the Fed’s Cook.

Why one but not the other? I’ve read both opinions, and it’s certainly not obvious. Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion in Cook didn’t even mention Slaughter or attempt to reconcile the Fed ruling with the FTC ruling, which he also wrote. Justice Brett Kavanaugh did, in a concurrence, writing that the Federal Reserve “occupies a unique role in the U.S. Government and maintains critical responsibility for the stability and success of the U.S. and world economies” and “follows in a distinct historical tradition of central bank independence,” though this felt like more of an assessment of the longtime status quo (and the risks in upsetting it) than constitutional analysis.1

Then again, what could be more conservative than refusing to upset the status quo? Trump, who loves to rock the boat, might buck against that trait, but his conservative Supreme Court appointees often cling to it.

The same dynamic can be seen in the court’s immigration jurisprudence. Trump’s attempts to terminate temporary status for some migrants, use race as a factor in immigration stops, and turn away asylum seekers at the border have been sanctioned by the justices.

But his most extreme moves, where he has deviated from conservative orthodoxy to try to do things no president (Democrat or Republican) had done before, like invoke the Alien Enemies Act in peacetime as a way to deport migrants to a foreign mega-prison without any semblance of due process, have been met with a firm “no.”

Then, yesterday, came the court’s ruling in the birthright citizenship case that was perhaps closest to Trump’s heart, the only one for which he attended the oral arguments. This was one of Trump’s most daunting (attempted) uses of presidential power yet, an attempt effectively to rewrite the Supreme Court’s long-standing interpretation of a constitutional amendment simply by executive order.

I sat in the courtroom on Tuesday as the justices released their opinion on birthright citizenship, as well as their opinion in an unrelated case on states banning transgender athletes from playing in women’s and girls’ sports, another case where the conservative outcome won out. In both cases, as I listened to Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, respectively, read summaries of their majority opinions aloud, I was struck by how much the sensibilities of the conservative justices diverged from Trump’s (even in the latter case, where his preferred side won).

Roberts waxed poetic about the importance of birthright citizenship in his bench statement: “Those who fought the Civil War to treat all Americans as equal…knew that equal citizenship was the key to lasting peace,” he said, a line that does not appear in his written opinion.

Similarly, Kavanaugh’s statement from the bench (and his written opinion) included a distinctly un-Trumpian flourish about transgender athletes. While ruling that Title IX and the 14th Amendment allow schools to separate athletics according to biological sex, Kavanaugh closed by adding a note of respect to transgender young people.

“Most of the biological female and transgender student-athletes who are involved in transgender sports disputes around the country are teenagers or in their early twenties,” Kavanaugh wrote in his opinion. “Those student-athletes want to play sports. Their desire to compete warrants respect. No student-athlete on either side of the issue, whether a biological female or transgender, deserves to be ostracized or vilified.”

Reading the court’s opinions, one gets the sense that if Trump ever tried to mimic the style of his court appointees, rather than expect them to replicate his, he might find more success before the court. In Cook, the court did not foreclose the possibility that Trump might ever be able to fire a Fed governor; rather, they ruled that he had not followed sufficient process in doing so. In Barbara, Trump’s case might have been strengthened if he had limited his executive order to ending birthright citizenship for the children of so-called “birth tourists,” parents who are in the U.S. on temporary visas.

Even the justices who did not believe Trump’s order should be automatically struck down seemed concerned about restricting the children of illegal immigrants who have been in the U.S. for an extended time.

“Is a child born here to parents who have long chosen to make this Nation their permanent home not a citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment solely because his parents’ presence violates statutory law?” Justice Neil Gorsuch asked in his dissent. “If those parents are not domiciled here, then where are they domiciled? And if the answer is nowhere, how can we reconcile that conclusion with this Court’s longstanding recognition that every person is domiciled somewhere?”2

Mostly due to a quirk of who he was listening to — typical conservatives like Leonard Leo, who Trump now calls a “sleazebag” — Trump ended up nominating three Supreme Court justices who would have been more at home in the Bush-era GOP, while the two Presidents Bush nominated the two most Trump-like justices on the bench.

If only he had managed to find justices in the mold of Thomas and Alito (and to secure their confirmations), Trump would likely be governing as a largely unrestrained president today: deporting whoever he wanted, tariffing whoever he wanted, restricting citizenship, presiding over a roving domestic army of National Guard troops, and reshaping the Fed. Instead, at each of these crucial turns, Trump has been thwarted by one or more of his own chosen SCOTUS justices.

When Trump has hewed to conservative legal principles, the Supreme Court has not stood in his way. But the minute he has stepped outside of movement orthodoxy, his nominees have slapped him down, yielding a president who has succeeded in unlocking the ability to govern according to the wildest dreams of Ronald Reagan, but nothing more.

Will Trump get the opportunity for a do-over, the chance to name a Supreme Court nominee who could rule in a truly MAGA mold, not just with principles frozen in amber from the 1980s?

For about five minutes yesterday, it seemed like he might. Shortly after I left the court on Tuesday, I glanced at my phone to see a notification that NPR’s veteran legal correspondent Nina Totenberg — the dean of the Supreme Court press corps — had reported that Justice Samuel Alito was planning to retire.

I raced back into the court’s press room, where everyone was furiously trying to confirm Totenberg’s apparent scoop. Quickly, however, NPR retracted the report. The Supreme Court’s spokeswoman, who rarely speaks on the record, appeared in-person in the buzzing press room to give an impromptu statement. “NPR’s reporting regarding Justice Alito is inaccurate,” she told us. No retirement announcement, at least for today.3

Of course, for Trump to truly change the balance of the court, he would have to replace one of the seven justices who have ruled against him in a major case — not Thomas or Alito, the only two who could potentially retire. But another SCOTUS pick would give Trump the chance to put at least one MAGA-fied justice on the court for several decades.

On the lower court level, it seems that Trump is already learning from his first-term mistakes: he has now nominated three of his own personal lawyers to the appellate bench. If he gets another Supreme Court pick, expect Trump to cast his gaze more in that direction. His first-term appointees haven’t exactly lived up to his expectations.

These opinions were just handed down, so I want to take some time to actually read them before writing on them, but expect more to come soon. In the meantime, let’s talk about partisan mythmaking and a lingering belief that our current president and his predecessor both shared…

Which modern political figure said this while promoting a piece of election legislation: “They know the only way they can win is to cheat.”

The answer is Jaime Harrison, then the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who said it about the Republican Party in 2021 after the Democratic elections bill known as the For the People Act was blocked.

If you guessed Donald Trump, well, in a sense you’d be right as well. “The only way they can win is to cheat,” the president said in March about the Democratic Party while calling on lawmakers to pass the Republican elections bill known as the SAVE America Act.

Both of the last two presidents have now made elections bills central to their legislative agenda, expending a significant amount of time, energy, and political capital in hopes of advancing these competing measures.

The For the People Act — which would have expanded early voting and vote-by-mail, mandated automatic and same-day voter registration, made Election Day a national holiday, set up independent redistricting commissions, and reformed campaign finance rules — was designated as H.R. 1 and S. 1 during the Biden administration, a mark of its primary importance to the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. It was quite literally No. 1 on their agenda, and Democrats spent an entire year repeatedly trying to advance the measure, as well as a slimmed-down version called the Freedom to Vote Act.

Similarly, there is no question that the SAVE America Act — which would require Americans to provide documentary proof of citizenship before registering to vote, and to provide photo ID before casting a ballot — is currently President Trump’s top political priority. He has posted about the bill on Truth Social almost 200 times since taking office and has threatened twice now to throttle other GOP agenda items in order to focus attention on the elections measure.

Back in March, Trump announced that he would not sign any bills into law until the SAVE America Act was passed, saying: “It must be done immediately. It supersedes everything else. MUST GO TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE.” (He quickly dropped the threat.) Then, last week, he abruptly called off a signing ceremony for a major bipartisan housing package, saying it was “hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency.” In addition, some of Trump’s allies are saying they will completely paralyze the House floor until the SAVE America Act advances in the Senate, though this move is without his blessing.

For both Presidents Biden and Trump, these measures were so important to them that — out of all the major bills each year that run into the roadblock that is the Senate filibuster — these were the ones that led each of them to call on the Senate to lift its 60-vote requirement. Biden was unsuccessful in urging the Democratic-led Senate to change the filibuster rule in favor of the For the People Act, as Trump has been in his push for the GOP-led Senate to do the same for the SAVE America Act, but it is revealing that these were the bills that each man most wanted to catapult over the filibuster threshold.

In both cases, the Biden-era Democratic Party and the Trump-era Republican Party were explicit about their emphasis on these bills stemming from the same assumption: in the ongoing battle for the hearts and minds of the American people, not only do both parties think their ideas are right — they’re also sure that their ideas are winning. Both parties seem to believe they command a clear and overwhelming majority of the American public.

Sure, they know, in an era where power in Washington rapidly seesaws from one party to the other, that they win about as many elections as they lose. But to this each side has a simple answer: Yes, their own party might not win every time — but if only the playing field was level, they obviously would. The other party wins only when they’ve cheated, and somehow rigged the game. That’s why, as the Republican president and Democratic party chair made clear, it was so important for their party to pass a bill setting new election rules as one of their top priorities after entering the White House.

Of course, in both cases, it’s been a bit odd to hear Democrats in 2021 or Republicans in 2025 insist that legislation was urgently needed to un-rig elections … right after winning them. (As GOP Rep. Thomas Massie put it last week: “I think it’s ironic that we control the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House — and we’re yelling ‘election fraud’? I mean, we won all the damn elections.”) But, each time, the ruling party has insisted that their grasp on power was tenuous, vulnerable to being unfairly snatched from them at any time.

“We feel if they can do these voting rights laws and other voting rights laws, we will never have a majority — that’s the bottom line,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in 2022 about the Republican state-level voting laws that the For the People Act was intended to combat. “Republicans will lose power—likely for a long time—if we don’t get SAVE America passed,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) wrote earlier this year.

The bills were presented, under both administrations, as the only way to avoid permanent minority status, and to secure the permanent majority that their party obviously deserves, if only the elections were conducted fairly. Democrats are “doing everything possible [to fight the SAVE America Act] because they know if we get this, they probably won’t win an election for 50 years, OK, and maybe longer,” Trump said in March. “Republicans know that when more people vote, Democrats win,” the Democratic Party wrote on X in 2021, explaining why legislation to expand voting access was necessary.

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There is much that is ironic about these mirror narratives that the two parties cling to, but nothing more so than this: Both parties are so convinced that their future victories are contingent on elections bills that, if passed, likely wouldn’t help them win elections.

Numerous political science studies in recent years have come to the same conclusion: laws expanding or restricting voting access hardly ever have an actual impact on the partisan outcome of an election, contrary to each party’s firm belief.

This is true of expanding vote-by-mail, as the For the People Act would have done; four Stanford professors found in a comprehensive 2020 study that universal vote-by-mail “does not affect either party’s share of turnout or either party’s vote share.” (That means the same is also true of limiting vote-by-mail, as Trump wants the SAVE America Act to be amended to also do.) It’s also true of automatic voter registration, another For the People Act provision, which data from Pennsylvania, Oregon, and elsewhere shows does not benefit either party. And it’s true of making Election Day a holiday, which one Princeton study found would have little impact on turnout whatsoever, much less on a partisan basis.

To look at the SAVE America Act, meanwhile, studies have found that voter ID laws do not meaningfully benefit either Republicans or Democrats. A proof-of-citizenship requirement likely would not either; according to an analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center, equal percentages of Democrats and Republicans have documentary proof of citizenship on hand. States that currently require proof of citizenship for voter registration include Arizona, which has a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators, and New Hampshire, which has a Republican governor and two Democratic senators.

If anything, the Bipartisan Policy Center analysis suggests that Trump’s SAVE America Act could slightly favor Democrats, because — even though members of the two parties have equal access to either a birth certificate or a passport — it is more common for Democrats that their accessible proof is a passport, which are more likely to have a voter’s current name than their birth certificate. (Studies have also long shown that voter ID laws in Republican-led states can similarly backfire, because they motivate Democratic voters to go to the polls. The benefit is minimal, which means neither party really gains much in the end, but the evidence is clear that Republicans certainly do not stand to gain.)

Both parties have fallen for the same myth that there is some special tweak they can make to election laws that will guarantee them power, but studies routinely show that each party’s favored changes would have little impact on their likelihood to win elections. Election laws tend to “target a small group of voters and barely influence turnout,” one 2023 study found. “When turnout does change, it tends not to change disproportionately more for one party or the other.” In general, another pair of scholars wrote in 2021, “turnout, in the range seen in the United States for the past 70 years, has little to no systematic partisan effect.”

When parties shrink or grow the pool of voters, thinking this will ward off alleged chicanery from the other side and secure their side victories going forward, they are usually not doing much. As MIT’s Adam Berinsky has written, while these laws are focused on lowering or erecting barriers to registering to vote or voting, “the direct costs of registration and getting to the ballot box are only part of the picture.”

“The more significant costs are the cognitive costs of becoming engaged with and informed about the political world,” Berinsky found. If someone has already crossed that threshold of mentally deciding to engage with politics, they are likely to end up registering and voting no matter what obstacles are or are not put in their way. Elections laws don’t change much, then, because their impact is mostly only felt by the pool of people who have already decided to vote and likely will vote no matter the legal requirements; to the extent this universe can be grown or shrunk by law, the Democratic and Republican segment of the pool tends to grow or shrink in tandem, wiping away any partisan advantage to either side.

It can be tempting to laugh at how much time each party is wasting on laws that will not do much, but this dynamic is more tragedy than farce.

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For one thing, the constant insistence by each party that they command a silent majority of the country, and therefore can only be defeated when their opponents cheat, has trickled down to the electorate in plainly dangerous ways. 67% of Republicans believe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election, while 51% of Democrats believe Trump did not legitimately win in 2024, according to a December 2025 poll by YouGov. On the Republican side, this led to the deadly Capitol riot in 2021.

Looking ahead to this November’s races, pluralities of both parties already preemptively smell fraud, according to a recent poll by Politico. 43% of Trump 2024 voters believe Democrats will try to steal the 2026 midterms; 58% of Harris 2024 voters believe Republicans will try to do the same. Of course, their fears are not identical: Politico asked both groups whether they are more worried about ineligible people voting (the type of “voter fraud” that the SAVE America Act was written to combat) or eligible people being kept from voting (the type of “voter suppression” that the For the People Act was intended to respond to).

Surprise, surprise: 52% of Trump 2024 voters said they were more worried about voter fraud, while only 22% said they were more worried about voter suppression. 58% of Harris 2024 voters said they were more worried about voter suppression, while only 16% said they were more worried about voter fraud.

Of course, neither is truly as pernicious a threat as the parties allege: there is no evidence that non-citizens vote in American elections in any sort of widespread way, and no evidence that so-called “voter suppression” laws have any success in suppressing votes (including when looking at specific political, racial, age, or gender groups). The fact that political leaders have convinced their voters otherwise is obviously an unstable place for a democracy to reside.

But there is also a more mundane tragedy hidden here.

It is hard to win the presidency, and there is only so much a party can do once they have won it. The fact that each party, upon winning control in Washington, has plowed so much time and capital into bills they falsely believe would help keep that control in place means that other bills — ones that could actually have a real-world policy impact — are inevitably crowded out.

Most immediately, right now, we can see that with the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, the most significant housing bill at the federal level in more than 30 years, which passed the Senate in an 85-5 vote and the House, 358-32, but has not yet become law because Trump refuses to sign it without the (unrelated) SAVE America Act.

Per the Constitution, if Trump does not sign or veto the bill within 10 days, it will become law with or without him — though he has not yet ruled out vetoing the measure, which would render its future unclear.

There are also other bipartisan bills advancing through Congress that Trump’s single-minded focus on the SAVE America Act could cause issues for. Today, for example, the House is set to vote on the KIDS Act, a package of bipartisan child digital safety bills on social media, age verification, AI chatbots, data privacy, and online drug sales.

Meanwhile, Senate committees have recently advanced bipartisan bills on everything from college sports to cameras at the Supreme Court. It is unclear whether Trump’s refusal to sign the housing bill extends to other bipartisan measures — I asked the White House, but all they sent me in response was Trump’s Truth Social post canceling the signing ceremony — or when the logjam on the House floor by Trump’s allies will be cleared.

I spent a day last week running around the Capitol asking lawmakers if they were worried about other bipartisan priorities running into Trump’s blockade. “I can’t answer that for you,” Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) told me. “Most bipartisan priorities are awful,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said. “It’s the president’s prerogative,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) replied. “Have you ever read the Constitution?”

I said I had, and agreed it was the president’s prerogative whether to sign bills into law. “See, you just answered your own question,” Kennedy said. When I followed up, asking whether — granting that the president could refuse to sign bipartisan bills into law — it would concern him as a member of the legislative branch if Trump began doing so, Kennedy ignored the question.

At least one Republican lawmaker, Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) at least acknowledged the possible concern when I asked her if Trump’s stance on the housing bill was a bad sign for the CLARITY Act, a bipartisan crypto bill Lummis has championed.

Lummis said she thought Trump would be willing to sign other bills into law, but said she planned to “stay in touch with the president about that” as the CLARITY Act advanced. “I’m going to make sure that I visit with him, but I think it’s going to be OK. But I’m a glass-half-full person.”

I wanted to ask Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS) about the pending defense authorization bill working through his Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) about his public lands bill that recently passed in the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, but I wasn’t able to flag either of them down.

With all of these irons in the fire, Congress is in the midst of a notably productive period — as long as the president’s focus on election law doesn’t get in the way. Instead of trying to end the Senate filibuster, he could be promoting bills that would likely be able to surmount it, just like the housing bill (which many Republicans also believe would be a political boon in an election year). Congress only has so much time; it is revealing how Trump is calling on lawmakers to spend it.

Then again, can we be surprised by Trump’s focus on the SAVE America Act? After all, as we have been told by two successive administrations now, the president’s party is just One Neat Trick away from a permanent majority. If only politics were as easy as its practitioners imagine.

House Speaker Mike Johnson had several bills teed up for a vote this week, but he was forced to scrap his plans due to an uprising from several conservative members.

The details of this specific revolt are unique — Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna is saying she will shut down the House floor until the Senate passes the SAVE America Act election bill — but the broader trend is very familiar.

We have seen this happen again and again (and again and again and again and again and again) in the last two years, as Johnson’s plans get suddenly waylaid when the House Freedom Caucus decides they’d like to make a stink. Votes get canceled. One-half of the legislative branch freezes in place. And Republican lawmakers snipe at each other until a fix is agreed to. (In this case, one moderate House Republican said that Luna holding up the “House floor business over what the Senate won’t do is like beating your dog when your neighbor doesn’t mow his lawn”).

How did the House Republican Conference get to be this way, and is there any way to put it back together again?

There’s no one better to answer those questions than John Leganski, who spent more than a decade as a close aide to former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, running his floor operation. Leganski was by his boss’ side during perhaps the most chaotic moment in recent congressional history: McCarthy’s 2023 speakership election, which took several days and 15 ballots, longer than any speaker election since 1860.

Leganski is out with a new book, “Glory, Grief, and the Gavel,” recounting his time on the Hill. He traces the House GOP’s turbulence through the days of John Boehner and Paul Ryan, all the way to McCarthy’s 2023 election and eventual ouster later that year. If you watched any of the 2023 balloting, then you remember how dramatic it was from afar. Leganski does a great job bringing that drama to life, while sprinkling in tons of behind-the-scenes details from the contest. It’s why the book is causing “so much angst in the House Republican leadership,” per Punchbowl News.

In a new installment of the Wake Up To Politics Book Club, I speak with Leganski about:

• How the House GOP became so ungovernable

• What changes can be made to fix it

• The secret initiation process the House Freedom Caucus uses for new members

• The new House GOP rebels moving up through the ranks

• Why he thinks Hakeem Jeffries is more of a thermometer than a thermostat

• How Trump gets House Republicans in line

• The stories you read that have actually been planted by congressional offices

• And more

Everyone can watch the first part of the video, but the full thing above — and transcript below — are available to paid subscribers. If you watch Congress closely, or want to better understand how the institution works, I think you’ll enjoy the conversation.

Transcript

GF: John, thank you so much for being here.

JL: Gabe, thanks for having me on, man. I appreciate it.

GF: Thank you. So, John, it’s 2026. The speaker’s election was three years ago, just about. As you write in the book, there’s not too many books about speaker elections. We have a lot of books about presidential elections, not too many about speaker elections — although they obviously can be quite consequential for our political process. So tell us a little bit why you decided to write this book. Why now? What can the 2023 speaker’s election tell us, three years later, that you think is important to return to and how do you think we still are seeing its shadow in our current political ecosystem?

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Attention, we are told, is the currency of modern-day American politics. Jack Schlossberg is good at getting it.

Schlossberg, the 33-year-old grandson of John F. Kennedy, has used his family name and self-described “silly goose” style — watch him skateboard while reciting poetry, or joke about having a child with Usha Vance — to amass an enormous audience on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. His posts frequently turn into national headlines and sit-down cable interviews on the secrets of politics in the age of social media.

One thing he isn’t good at getting: votes.

Schlossberg has spent the last six months running in the Democratic primary in New York’s 12th congressional district, joining several others in pursuit of the seat long held by retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler in Manhattan. His famous lineage, as well as his skill in getting attention through unique, often absurd, social media posts, has guaranteed him a level of coverage that most House candidates can only dream of, including interviews with the top editors of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, as well as profiles in every major publication. “The Kennedy Scion Riding Online Fame Into a Big-Money Primary,” the Wall Street Journal called him.

The primary was last night. Schlossberg finished with 10.8% of the vote, a distant third. With a fraction of Schlossberg’s 2 million social media followers,1 Micah Lasher (26,000 followers) and Alex Bores (130,000) each got more than triple his number of votes, 39.1% and 35% of the total, respectively.

In fairness, Schlossberg is not alone.

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Earlier this year, Kat Abughazaleh — another political influencer, with a social media audience of 1.5 million — sought the Democratic nomination in Illinois’ 9th congressional district. Abughazaleh came closer than Schlossberg, but she lost as well, drawing 26% of the vote to Daniel Biss’ 29.5%.

In 2025, Deja Foxx tried to similarly convert her perch on political social media (total following: 795,000) into a position of political power, seeking the Democratic nod in a special election for Arizona’s 7th congressional district. “A Political Influencer Could Seriously Win a Seat in Congress,” Politico said. Not quite. Foxx won 22% of the vote to Adelita Grijalva’s 61%.

Each of these candidacies has followed the same pattern. A political influencer launches a campaign for Congress. The national media goes crazy, covering them closely. They run against a local elected official, who lacks online fame but boasts political experience and connections on the ground: Bores and Lasher are each New York state assemblymen whose districts overlap with NY-12; Biss is the mayor of the city at the heart of IL-9; Grijalva was a member of the county board of supervisors, and sat on the local school board for 20 years before that.

In each race, the local official received the imprimatur of the longtime House member who was vacating the district: Nadler endorsed Lasher; Jan Schakowsky endorsed Biss; Grijalva’s father Raúl had been the congressman from AZ-7 until his death opened up the seat. And each time, the veteran official won. Local connections beat out online buzz.

It’s not surprising that social media influencers are trying to run for office: masters of previous attention economies have tried to do the same whenever their given medium was at the peak of its dominance. The Gilded Age newspaper barons Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst both served stints in Congress. (Even earlier, Benjamin Franklin — who you could say was an influencer, just dispensing hot takes through almanac entries instead of tweets — owned a printing press while serving as governor of Pennsylvania). The 1920 presidential election featured two newspaper publishers squaring off against each other: Republican Warren Harding (of the Marion Star) vs. Democrat James Cox (of the Dayton Daily News).

In the second half of the 20th century, prominent writers and columnists like William F. Buckley Jr., Upton Sinclair, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and Jimmy Breslin all tried to go from commenting about politics to becoming politicians (running, respectively, for New York City mayor, California governor, New York City mayor, U.S. House and U.S. Senate from New York, and New York City Council president, all unsuccessfully). The radio and TV era saw people like Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, and Al Franken run for office.

There is, clearly, an insatiable and timeless instinct among people who talk about politics for a living to eventually think, Hey, I know as much about what’s going on as these bozos, and I have a huge audience of people who listen to what I have to say. I should throw my hat in the ring. (No, this isn’t a campaign announcement.) Social media influencers are no exception to this centuries-old trend. But so far, they’ve been really bad at it.

In addition to Schlossberg, Foxx, and Abughazaleh, there is also Cenk Uygur, co-host of “The Young Turks” (which commands 6.6 million followers on YouTube), who ran for a House seat in California in 2020, landing in fourth place with 5.9% of the vote. (The Democrat who advanced instead was a state legislator.) On the Republican side, the pro-Trump influencer CJ Pearson (combined following: 1.8 million) sought a state House seat in Georgia that same year. He lost to a county commissioner whose only social media presence is a Facebook account with 774 followers. Not 774,000. 774.

Spend enough time on political social media and you will encounter all of these names. Online, they’re powerhouses. It made no difference on the ballot.

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There are, of course, a handful of exceptions. Brandon Herrera, whose pro-gun YouTube page “The AK Guy” has 4.2 million subscribers, came within 354 votes of ousting then-Rep. Tony Gonzales in a Republican primary in Texas in 2024. Then, this year, he bested Gonzales by 859 votes in the first round of a rematch; they would have gone to a runoff, but Gonzales dropped out after the revelation that he had an affair with a staffer who then killed herself. Assuming that he wins the Trump +15 district in November, The AK Guy is headed to Congress.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was already a prominent QAnon influencer when she unexpectedly won her first primary in 2022, and Lauren Boebert, who had several viral moments before entering politics, are also arguable exceptions — though for both Greene and Boebert, posting was a side-hustle. Each were also business owners (Greene ran a CrossFit gym and a construction company; Boebert ran a gun-themed restaurant).

Many of the influencers I’ve mentioned came from the extremes of their parties, but this column is not arguing that primary voters are prone to rejecting candidates from the far-left or right. In fact, the Democratic Socialists of America had a triumphant primary night in New York just yesterday, as three of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s handpicked congressional candidates rode to victory, ousting two incumbent House members and the handpicked successor of a third.

However, primary voters do seem to reject candidates for whom their only experience is talking about politics into a camera. Right-wing candidates with business experience (Greene, Boebert) and left-wing candidates with working-class backgrounds (AOC) can still win with similar ideological platforms as the aforementioned influencers, as can state legislators like Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib. (Mamdani’s candidates last night included a state assemblyman and the former New York City comptroller. Darializa Avila Chevalier, who ousted Congressional Hispanic Caucus chairman Adriano Espaillat, is a PhD student and local activist.)

After all, there are plenty of ways to build the sort of local relationships that a successful congressional campaign requires. Posting just isn’t one of them. The influencer-candidates have faced persistent questions about how rooted they were in their local community: Abughazaleh and Uygur didn’t even live in the districts they ran in when they launched their campaigns. Much of Foxx’s political work had been done outside of her district. Schlossberg, meanwhile, entered his race with barely any work experience; his CV consisted mainly of four months working at the Obama State Department and six articles while working as a political correspondent for Vogue during the 2024 election. On his financial disclosure form, he reported zero earned income from 2025, though he was kept afloat by four multi-million-dollar trust funds.

Several of these next-gen candidates also faced concerns about their work ethic: The New York Times reported that Schlossberg often disappeared for long stretches during the campaign, including to take naps. (Schlossberg has noted that he was still grieving the recent death of his sister during the campaign.) Abughazaleh once slept through a candidate forum. (She said that she had narcolepsy.)

The candidates, perhaps accustomed to interfacing only with boosters on social media, often resent this scrutiny. “People are obsessed with geography over the issues,” Uygur said. “You guys are so focused on the timeline of my résumé,” Schlossberg groused in (another) Times interview. “Yeah, I mean, I think people are right,” he told The Guardian sarcastically. “The Democratic party has been way too cool. We’ve been too exciting… What we really need right now is to just act like social media doesn’t matter, and being cool isn’t important.”

“I understand that content creation is a new profession and that for a lot of people it’s not synonymous with a quote-unquote real job,” Schlossberg told The New Yorker. “But I’ve been arguing with evidence supported by facts, very clear arguments made on behalf of the issues that I think are important.”

These primary outcomes should challenge our assumptions about the importance of attention in our changing political environment. Some analysts, like Chris Hayes and Ezra Klein, have argued that attention is the lifeblood of modern politics, the most important commodity for a candidate to have. But who is better at getting attention than online influencers, who are essentially attention merchants? Schlossberg, in particular, is an attentional mastermind.

But his loss and those of his contemporaries show that the mere ability to grab attention may not be all it’s cracked up to be, even in the very-online year of 2026. We also know that local and national campaigns are different: somewhat paradoxically, the latter might be easier to win, at least for attention-grabbing candidates, since there is no expectation that a candidate will shake every hand or kiss every baby in a nationwide campaign. When running in a congressional district, however, person-to-person relationships will clearly take you a lot farther than social media follows. (It has also been noted that many of the influencers I’ve written about raised huge gobs of money … but mostly from donors out of state, reflecting large bases of support — sometimes even larger than the size of their congressional district — just not in the place they needed it the most.)

A focus on attention underrates the lingering power of these local political machines — be they incumbents handing their seats down, or the power of an endorsement from a Trump or a Mamdani, and the groundswell of door-knockers and organizers that come with that. Every time these influencers run, they give interviews insisting they have found a new way to campaign: that is, entirely online. Journalists generally take these claims seriously, either because profiles of these influencer candidates are good for clicks, or because they genuinely believe that these candidates have found a novel way to spin attention into votes.2

And yet, each time, old-fashioned politicking wins out.

Even on the national level, there is much that a focus on attention can miss. Donald Trump, for example, receives more attention than anyone else in politics, perhaps more than any president in recent memory. He is also historically unpopular. All press is not, as he (and some of his critics) believe, good press. It also matters whether that press is magnifying ideas and arguments that Americans agree with.

Just as we see this with influencers who try to become legislators, we also see this with legislators who try to become influencers, for whom boring, standard-issue Local Official type also seem to be a Kryptonite. On the left, the attention-grabbing representatives Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman were defeated by a county prosecutor and a county executive, respectively, in 2020 primaries. On the right, Steve King lost to a state legislator in a 2016 primary; so did Madison Cawthorn in a primary in 2020.

In fact, for all the talk about lawmakers trying to be TikTok stars, it doesn’t seem to be a great career move. In addition to the four listed above who lost primary challenges, Matt Gaetz and MTG have since resigned. Jasmine Crockett, the Texas Democratic congresswoman known more for her viral moments than her legislative record, failed to win a Senate primary earlier this year, while Nancy Mace, the rabble-rousing South Carolina Republican, came in a dismal fifth place in a gubernatorial primary a few months later.

In case you haven’t caught onto the theme, Crockett lost to a more mild-mannered state legislator, while Mace came up short against a lieutenant governor and a state attorney general who both lack her skill for the dramatics.

Cawthorn once boasted about hiring more communications than legislative staffers in his congressional office. Perhaps he should have re-thought his strategy. There is no question that social media prowess can play a role in 21st-century politics, and it is not as though boring candidates always beat attention-getters. But attention-getters generally need some sort of résumé, or proof of legislative accomplishments, to be successful. Voters don’t appreciate being treated like social media followers: even in this online age, they seem to expect more from their legislators than just content.

And they certainly don’t seem to be thronging to candidates whose only life experience is as political influencers. By now, several of these candidates have run, and their social media followings have brought them enormous media buzz and hype — but not political success on the ground. Remember that the next time you start hearing rumblings about the next great influencer-candidate. You can probably put your Hasan Piker or Candace Owens for Congress poster back where you found it.

I’ll be using the channel to post all sorts of videos explaining and analyzing our political moment, building on the thrice-weekly newsletters. I’m excited to chat about politics with you in the same non-partisan style you know, but in a new way, using a new medium.

You can watch the intro video below. If you could take a moment to subscribe here, it would be so helpful as I start to grow WUTP on a new platform — and it’ll ensure that you get all the new videos directly to your feed. More to come soon!

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Now, let’s talk 2028…

Pete Buttigieg is headed back to Iowa. Ro Khanna and Andy Beshear were just in South Carolina. JD Vance is everywhere promoting his new book and the Iran ceasefire deal. Marco Rubio, conspicuously, is not.

The 2026 midterms are still a little more than four months away. But the jockeying for 2028 has already started.

We obviously have a long way to go before the 2028 elections, and my main focus here at Wake Up To Politics in the coming months will be covering the midterms, the Trump administration, and other more immediate topics. But since whispers about the next presidential contest have already started, I wanted to take some time to lay out an opening baseline for how I’m thinking about the 2028 race, which we can then return to and update as time goes on.

This may seem like a premature exercise, but thinking about 2028 can also help fulfill one of the main functions I try to serve in WUTP: helping you see around corners and think deeply about how American politics is changing and evolving, and spotting where it’s headed. After more than a decade of the Democratic and Republican Party platforms revolving almost completely around Donald Trump (whether in support or opposition), 2028 will be a fascinating moment where the future of both parties will be up for grabs.

It’s never too early to think about who might grab it, if only to inform who (and what) is worth watching until then.

Republicans

I mostly believe the talk about a heated Vance-Rubio primary is overblown.

The whole reason Trump chose Vance as VP was to serve as his ideological heir, and unless Vance loses Trump’s trust in a big way, I expect he’ll be the GOP nominee in 2028.

History is certainly on Vance’s side, and stacked against Rubio. The last time a sitting vice president ran for the presidency and lost his party’s nomination, it was in 1952, when Harry Truman’s running mate, Alben Barkley (who was 74 years old at the time), came up short against Adlai Stevenson.1 Generally, when sitting VPs run, they don’t even face much of a challenge: Al Gore, for example, won all 50 states in the 2000 Democratic primaries, the only non-sitting-president to ever do so. George H.W. Bush won 42 states in the 1988 GOP primaries. You probably remember Kamala Harris’ glide path to the 2024 nomination (not that it involved winning any primaries).

Of course, the ultimate decider in the 2028 Republican primary is likely to be Donald Trump, who has little use for history, so if he wants to buck those precedents and have a contested nomination fight, he’ll probably get it. In fitting with his management style dating back to his business days, when he believed that the best work would emerge through competition among his subordinates, Trump is clearly enjoying pitting Vance and Rubio against each other.

Vance himself has compared this to “The Apprentice,” joking last month: “I just don’t think it sounds like the president of the United States to have a televised competition for who would succeed him as his apprentice. I just think that’s not at all what you would expect the president to do.”

My prediction is that Trump will allow this to go on as a shadow primary for as long as it amuses him, but eventually sit the two men in a room, and anoint Vance as the nominee and Rubio as his running mate. Trump enjoys messy competitions up to a point, but there will also be an appeal in a clean succession process, where Republicans aren’t picking over or debating his legacy, and instead enter 2028 with a pre-determined ticket.

All of this could be complicated by Trump’s expected discomfort with being replaced. He will likely try to push off any 2028 conversation for as long as he can, to postpone seeming like a lame duck. If Vance makes any moves too early, it could backfire. I’m also curious how long Rubio stays in the Cabinet. If Trump does give Vance his endorsement, but Rubio still wants to make a play for the crown, it would be pretty difficult for Rubio to challenge the president’s handpicked successor while serving as secretary of state in the same administration.2 If Rubio does step down sometime in mid-2027, he would have a bit more room to maneuver than Vance, since he would no longer be directly in Trump’s employ.

Vance and Rubio aren’t the only two Republicans positioning themselves for 2028: Ted Cruz is trying to carry the neocon mantle. Rand Paul could try to bring the party in a more libertarian direction. Tucker Carlson remains a wild card. But — at least at this point — it’s hard to imagine any of them having much of a shot, especially if Trump (who still commands 80%+ approval among Republicans) makes his wishes known.

A recent poll from the left-leaning firm Navigator Research found that Vance is about as popular as Rubio among non-MAGA Republicans, and much more popular among MAGA Republicans, which will make him hard to beat. He has also been much more assiduous than Rubio about laying the groundwork for a bid, most importantly as RNC finance chairman, a role that has brought him into close contact with deep-pocketed donors.

From there, my other hot take about Vance is that he’s underestimated as presidential timber in a general election. I’ve written before about this chart from the right-leaning Echelon Insights, which fielded a poll asking 18 questions on social and economic policy, and then sorted respondents into four categories: Conservatives (socially conservative, fiscally conservative); Liberals (socially liberal, fiscally liberal); Libertarians (socially liberal, fiscally conservative); and Populists (socially conservative, fiscally liberal).

Liberals vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. Conservatives vote overwhelmingly for Republicans. Libertarians are a tiny percentage of the population. Increasingly, the real American swing voters are the culturally conservative, economically liberal Populists. According to Echelon, this is the median position of the American voter (64% of voters are economic liberals, 53% are cultural conservatives, according to their data), which also tracks with many of the stances I identified last week as commanding a public opinion supermajority.

Trump has tried to hit this combination rhetorically, but has never actually governed like an economic liberal. Vance is probably the candidate best suited, in either party, to nail this synthesis, which surveys show is the sweet spot of the American electorate (or at least the refuge of many independent voters). His cultural conservatism is without question; reportedly, he has also tried pushing the Trump administration in a more economically liberal direction behind the scenes, from pushing for a millionaire tax as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill to encouraging more antitrust enforcement.

Vance, unlike Trump, loves pointing to places where he diverges from the business elite. In a recent podcast interview with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, Vance spoke about the “Christian economic tradition of trying to uplift the poor and supporting your community and being there for people who are really struggling” — and criticized the “business side of the Republican Party” for not heeding that tradition.

The vice president is also adept at channeling anti-establishment sentiment (which is also highly popular these days), but doing so in a calmer tone than Trump (whose combative tone is routinely identified by swing voters as a turn-off). It’s famously hard to be a vice president, when you have to live in the president’s shadow and go to bat for an agenda that isn’t your own, but Vance has tried to show this persona at times, including during the 2024 vice presidential debate, with his recent book where he expressed regret for his “childless cat ladies” comment (something Trump would never do), and in an interview last week where he even charmed Joy Behar of “The View.”

None of this is to say Vance doesn’t have vulnerabilities. He can be awkward at times. He can be too online, spending a lot of time on Twitter (including in spaces that go far beyond the ideological mainstream). A former venture capitalist, he is trying to thread a tough needle on AI, and his boosterism of the unpopular technology threatens to undercut the more populist, anti-business, anti-establishment platform I was describing earlier.

I don’t think the Iran war (or deal) is as big of a vulnerability for him as others do, mostly because a lot will happen between now and 2028, and other issues will likely be on the front-burner. His recent criticism of Israel could cause issues with some Republicans in a primary — “ABDJD2028,” the ardently pro-Israel Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) recently tweeted (“Anyone But JD 2028”) — though, once again, it places him in the American mainstream in a general election.

Vance certainly has his downsides, and there is no question succeeding Trump will be hard, either because he will make life difficult for Vance in a primary, his successor will have to unite a coalition that one man will have kept together for 12 years, and because the Trump administration is not exactly popular among the general electorate. But (especially matched with Rubio as a running mate), I do think Vance’s ability to blend Trumpism with a more genuine populism (and put a smoother voice on it, more adept at reaching a broader cross-section of voters) is not to be underestimated.

Democrats

Another theme I’ve hit on in recent years is that, while Donald Trump has been an improbably successful electoral phenomenon (at least by the “I’m president and you’re not” standard), that strength has often not carried down to downballot Republicans in swing states, where right-wing Trump imitators have generally failed against generic, moderate Democrats.

For that reason, Democrats have a large bench in several of the states Kamala Harris lost in 2024. Since they need to win these states to win the White House in 2028, it probably makes sense to start there, with Mark Kelly or Ruben Gallego in Arizona or Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania or Jon Ossoff or Raphael Warnock in Georgia. (Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan also fits into this category, but it doesn’t seem like she plans to run.)

Of these names, Ossoff is undoubtedly receiving the most buzz right now (see the New York Times, Politico, or the New York Times again), and I think there’s good reason for that. If he wins re-election in purple Georgia by a large margin this November, he is likely to rocket to the top of the 2028 speculation.

As with Vance, Ossoff has been trying to establish somewhat in the populist lane, championing bills to lower prescription drug costs and counter “corporate price gouging” while also taking steps to moderate on immigration. He has also been moving into more anti-establishment rhetoric, working across the aisle on banning congressional stock trading and using a series of viral speeches to highlight allegations of Trumpian corruption (and to take on what he calls the elite “Epstein class”).

None of the three candidates Democrats have nominated since Obama have been steady communicators; my main prediction for 2028 is that the party will fall over itself for the first candidate who can speak fluidly both on the stump and off the cuff, and Ossoff checks those boxes (an admittedly low bar, but one the party hasn’t cleared in three consecutive election cycles). Successful presidential candidates also generally defy running in one lane of their party or the other (Obama and Trump are both examples of this); Ossoff is a moderate Democrat who receives praise from the leftist Hasan Piker.

He doesn’t even figure in the current polls, however, nor do most of the other people I named above. Per the Race to the WH average, the current polling top tier is Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

Until proven otherwise, I think the Harris/Newsom lead is mainly a product of name ID. The general rule (except when sitting VPs are running; see above) in presidential primary polling is that the people who are leading this far out generally don’t become the nominee, from Hillary Clinton (2008) to Jeb Bush (2016). That early support usually flows to the biggest names in the race, who people know and recognize. But it often doesn’t stick once fresher alternatives emerge.

Harris has recently been trying out a new outsider, anti-system persona, but a recent interview with Don Lemon shows that she isn’t necessarily better at smoothly articulating it than she was her previous platform. Asked by Lemon if the Electoral College should be eliminated, she replied: “That should be a discussion that we should have. I don’t think that we should eliminate that as a point of discussion for potential action.” I’m just not sure that sort of lawyerly, speaking-without-saying-anything is what’s going to meet the moment for Democrats in 2028.

Moving further down the list, Buttigieg is an interesting candidate, though his main Achilles heel is the same as it was in 2020: his lack of support among Black voters. It’s hard to win a Democratic nomination without support from Black voters. (This is also, by the way, the biggest point in Harris’ favor right now.) Ocasio-Cortez is well positioned to occupy the progressive lane left by Bernie Sanders (without anything approaching her name ID, Ro Khanna and maybe even Chris Van Hollen seem to be planning to run in this lane as well). Progressives are coming off of a run of primary successes, which could continue this week in New York. Young, charismatic, and often clever about where she positions herself in the party’s internal fights, there’s no question AOC will be a force to be reckoned with in a primary.

The 2028 Democratic field will be wide open. Every bit as much as the GOP, the Democratic Party has spent more than a decade existing in the shadow of Donald Trump and will be hungry for new ideas and new faces — and to try new things. All three of the candidates that Democrats tried against Trump were fixtures of the party establishment who made little effort to criticize their own party or separate themselves from its most unpopular features, even as Trump delighted in doing that within the GOP, recognizing that we are living in a moment when party establishments are unpopular.

I’m sure there are names we aren’t thinking of who will rise in the 2028 conversation between now and then. If James Talarico or Graham Plater (yes, even with the scandals) win their races in November, expect them both to receive presidential buzz. I’m sure celebrities like Mark Cuban and Stephen A. Smith will take a look as well. A lot can happen in two years.

General election

The last point I’ll make about the 2028 contest is that I think it’s under-discussed how young it is likely to be. Below, I’ve charted the ages of the major party presidential nominees since 1864, as well as how old some of the prospects we’ve discussed today will be on Election Day 2028.

2028 is likely to be the first race since 2012 to feature a nominee who’s in their 50s or younger, and it’s possible that it will be the first race since 2000 where both nominees are.

If the race is between JD Vance (who will be 44) and someone like Jon Ossoff (41) or AOC (39), it will be the youngest presidential matchup since 1960, between John F. Kennedy (43) and Richard Nixon (47).

Maybe it’s naive, but I’m curious if that will change our politics or Americans’ perceptions of it. We have been living in an era where presidents, no matter what they do, are fairly unpopular, with frustration towards the political system and the economy rising year after year. My pet theory is that having a young, charismatic president who is a fluid communicator and tries to speak to voters beyond their base may do funny things to our politics. We think that this dissatisfaction and frustration is endemic — and it certainly is global (look at the UK, about to have their seventh prime minister in 10 years) — but perhaps the type of politicians each party has been putting forward has contributed more than we think.

2028 will be an opportunity not just for new candidates, but new ways of thinking: contenders who try to straddle their party’s divides in interesting ways, fusing and synthesizing different ideological agendas without hewing to the more calcified politics of the past. Don’t underestimate the power these messages could have, from either side of the aisle, when they come from candidates who can articulate their ideas with fluency and ease.

Again, it’s a low bar. But, at least according to the American electorate — many of whom have been “double haters” of both parties’ candidates in the most recent cycles — it’s one neither side has cleared in a while.

But first, as we often do on Friday, I wanted to give you an update on what happened in Congress this week. Only the Senate was in session this week, but they managed to do quite a lot!

• The Senate voted 84-8 to advance the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, the most significant housing bill to move through Congress in more than 30 years. (I wrote about the legislation here and here, and I’ll have more to say as it moves closer to becoming law.)

• By voice vote, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the bipartisan Sunshine in the Courtroom Act (which would grant all federal courts the discretion to allow cameras in their courtrooms) and the bipartisan Cameras in the Courtroom Act (which would require the Supreme Court to allow cameras in its courtroom, unless a majority of justices vote not to for a specific case).

• The Judiciary panel also passed — again by voice vote — the bipartisan NO FAKES Act, which would allow people to sue if their likeness is used to create an AI deepfake without their authorization.

• The Senate Commerce Committee approved the bipartisan Protect College Sports Act, which would create a national framework for name, image, likeness (NIL) rules in college sports. The bill passed the panel in a 19-9 vote, with 13 Republicans and six Democrats in favor and two Republicans and seven Democrats opposed.

• The Senate Health Committee unanimously passed a series of bills, including the Charlotte Woodward Organ Transplant Discrimination Protection Act (which I covered in 2024), prohibiting hospitals from denying organ transplants to people with disabilities. The panel also began consideration of the Ensuring Timely Access to Generics Act, a bipartisan bill that aims to lower the cost of prescription drugs. The committee voted 15-8 (with four Republicans joining all Democrats) to add the bipartisan INSULIN Act (which would cap the cost of insulin at $35 a month) to the legislation.

OK, now let’s talk Iran.

Here are six thoughts on the agreement:

#1: The Iran war is ending how it started. When the conflict began earlier this year, I called it “Trump’s Disembodied War” because of his bizarre disappearance from public view for its opening days. All of the normal features of a wartime communications strategy were absent: Trump gave no Oval Office address to announce the strikes; it took several days for the Pentagon to give a briefing; the Sunday shows that first weekend featured an interview with the foreign minister of Iran, but nothing from Trump, JD Vance, Marco Rubio, or Pete Hegseth. For several days, Trump spoke to the public through only pre-recorded videos or brief phone calls with reporters.

The result was a war that the public never really bought into, or understood the need for, partially because Trump never tried to sell it to them. According to Silver Bulletin, the war never reached higher than 40% support; for a while, it was mired closer to 35%. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll last month, only 31% of Americans said that Trump had clearly explained his goals in Iran. 66% said that he had not.

The peace has been every bit as confusingly (which is to say, barely) explained as the war. The U.S.-Iran memorandum of understanding (MOU) was signed electronically by both sides on Sunday. The text was not released until Wednesday, when (instead of simply publishing it) a Trump administration official read it over the phone to reporters.1 It was then signed again remotely on Wednesday night. The White House has refused to say if the document that was signed on Sunday was different than the document that was signed on Wednesday. A copy was not given to members of Congress until Thursday. When Israel, with whom the U.S. launched the war, initially asked for the text, they were reportedly rebuffed.

It is also unclear whether the MOU contains the full extent of what was agreed to. A senior U.S. official assured reporters in a White House briefing call on Monday that “everything we do will be transparent, there’ll be no side deals, the MOU will be released.” But VP Vance seemed to allude to unwritten Iranian commitments on Thursday, muddying the waters.

In all, it has been yet another shambolic public rollout, perfectly mirroring how the war itself was launched. It has also served to underline that Trump has lacked a consistent message on Iran this entire time, especially since his comments about the deal have only compounded the original confusion over why he launched the war.

In his statement announcing the first strikes, Trump warned that Iran was developing long-range missiles that would “soon” be able to “reach the American homeland,” which was one of the reasons why the U.S. had to go to war. “We’re going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground,” he said at the time.

During a press conference this week, however, Trump expressed openness to Iran retaining its missiles going forward. “I mean, they have to have some because other people have some. You’ve got to have some… Am I going to let Saudi Arabia have missiles, but they can’t have them?” he said. “Missiles aren’t the problem,” Trump added, despite the fact that destroying them was one of the few war aims that was clearly articulated. “They hurt a little location, but they don’t blow up the planet.”

In the last 48 hours, Trump has similarly left the door open to Iran continuing to enrich uranium for a civilian nuclear program (despite saying the opposite earlier this month) and downplayed the need for the U.S. to obtain material Iran has already enriched (which he had previously insisted on). If Trump does not even seem to know why he launched the war, or what he is demanding from Iran, how could he expect the American people to?

#2: Now, the deal itself. As part of the agreement, both the U.S. and Iran pledged to cease fighting and to reset to the pre-war status quo, with the U.S. ending its naval blockade of Iran and Iran reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

Notably, the MOU raises the possibility that Iran will be able to charge tolls for passage through the Strait of Hormuz down the line, by saying that Tehran commits to no-toll passage for 60 days and then to work with its neighbors to “define the future administration” of the strait after that. This opens the door to a significant change from the pre-war status quo, though it does not make clear whether it will take place.

In addition, the U.S. also pledged to immediately lift sanctions on Iranian oil, another change to the status quo favorable to Iran.

The MOU pushes everything else off to another round of negotiations, which it says will last 60 days (but will almost certainly take longer).2 Iran committed to discussing the future of its nuclear program and the fate of its already enriched uranium as part of those talks, while the U.S. said it would terminate all of its sanctions on Iran, release frozen Iranian assets, and work with regional allies on a $300 billion fund for Iranian reconstruction as part of the next agreement. The details of those concessions have not yet been finalized. (The White House has said that no U.S. taxpayer funds will be used as part of the reconstruction fund, though American companies are expected to invest.)

Iran also committed not to work towards developing a nuclear weapon, though this was its public stance already. The last notable feature is that, while the next phase of negotiations is ongoing, the U.S. said that it will not deploy more forces to the Middle East and Iran said it will not work more on its nuclear program (which it says is purely for civilian purposes). This is a change from the pre-war status quo, when the two sides were negotiating but without either committing to freeze their movements in this way (though there won’t be any way for either side to verify that the other is upholding these commitments).

#3: Where does that leave us?

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Is America actually a 50-50 country?

I know, I know: all our normal indicators say the answer is a definite “yes.” The 2024 election was decided 50%-48%. The U.S. House is divided 50%-49%. The Senate is 53%-47%. According to a CNN poll out yesterday, 46% of the country says they lean Republican, while 45% say they lean Democratic.

But if we’re so evenly divided, why doesn’t it show up when you ask about the issues?

Last week, the Pew Research Center released the latest version of their Political Typology study, which posed 80 questions to 10,000 Americans, and then ran a cluster analysis to sort them into nine distinct ideological groups: two solidly on the right, the “No Apologies Right” (comprising 9% of the country) and “Faith First Conservatives” (12%); two solidly on the left, “Leftward Progressives” (7%) and “Loyal Liberals” (11%); two that lean to the right, the “Unconventional Right” (12%) and “Pragmatic and Polite Right” (11%); two that lean to the left, the “Order and Opportunity Left” (18%) and “Left-Out Left” (12%); and one that doesn’t fit neatly into either ideological camp, the “Tuned-Out Middle” (9%).

If you’re curious about which group you fall into, you can take a shortened version of the quiz here.

We’ll return to those labels in a moment. For now, I want to dwell on something I started to notice as I combed through Pew’s extensive data.

Pew asked its respondents about all the different issues that dominate American politics: abortion, guns, taxes, health care, voter ID, crime, the list goes on. They specifically chose the issues that are most divisive, the ones that were most likely to highlight the cleavages in American life. And yet, even on this list of issues manicured to draw out what divides us, it ended up showing a lot more unity than you might think.

In fact, when you look past how each individual group responded to each question, and focus on the topline numbers for Americans at large, there are very few questions on which we’re divided 50-50. On almost every issue, a supermajority of the country appears to coalesce around one stance or the other.

65% say that illegal immigration is a big problem. And 65% support a path to citizenship for the illegal immigrants who are currently here. 60% believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. And 56% say they at least somewhat believe that human life begins at conception. 63% believe that America is strengthened by its diversity. But 57% believe that efforts to promote diversity in schools and workplaces have failed to make life more fair. 58% want to raise taxes on the wealthy, and 63% want to raise taxes on corporations. 67% believe that sex and gender are determined at birth, and 73% are uncomfortable with transgender athletes competing on sports teams that don’t match their sex at birth. 69% agree with vaccine mandates at public schools. 81% disagree with the idea that prison sentences are currently too long. 65% say climate change is a big problem, but 60% oppose phasing out gas cars. 57% believe that people being too easily offended is a big problem, while 70% say it’s personally important to them to try to say things that won’t offend people. 80% support requiring voters to show photo ID. 59% support no-excuse absentee voting. 83% say violent crime is a big problem. 76% say the same about gun violence. 70% have confidence in the police. 76% have confidence in the military. 61% oppose Trump’s tariffs. 68% believe the federal government should provide health care for all Americans. 91% view the deficit as a big problem. 81% oppose reducing Social Security benefits.

It may seem like I’m cherrypicking here, but I’m really not. A handful of Pew’s questions do show a truly evenly divided nation — the important question of whether the federal government should be bigger or smaller came down 53%-46%; the question of whether the U.S. has a responsibility to help Ukraine was split 50%-47% — but beyond those, there is almost always a side that commands a roughly 60% majority, if not more.

This should change our conceptions about the nature of American division. We think of Democrats and Republicans as bitterly fighting for American support on all of these “divisive” issues, but the truth is that there is an active competition over very few of them: Americans have decisively picked a camp on almost every question.

There’s almost nothing that the U.S. is truly split 50-50 on except for party affiliation.

The Centrist Party?

Whenever you see it argued that America is not a 50-50 country, it usually means someone is trying to make one of three points:

• That America is not divided, because actually there is a silent majority in favor of conservatism.

• That America is not divided, because actually there is a silent majority in favor of progressivism.

• That America is not divided, because actually there is a silent majority in favor of centrism.

I hope the list of ~60%-or-higher issues above dispels the first two notions. A silent conservative majority would probably not support tax increases or a path to citizenship. A silent progressive majority would probably not be so trusting of police or believe that sex and gender can only be determined at birth.

What about the third argument? It’s one I hear all the time: pointing to polls showing a rising number of Americans identify as Independents, people will often argue that most voters fall somewhere in the middle of the two partisan extremes. If only there was a third party that could capture this expansive center, they say, it would be destined for the White House, perhaps by combining the above policy platform with an anti-establishment rhetoric that also unites the country (75% say they are frustrated with the government; 72% say they have almost no confidence in elected officials).

The list of America’s issue stances makes this an alluring proposition; the majority stances do tend to be ones shared by political moderates. The next question, then, is whether it’s the same majority, and whether they could then form a political party of their own. After all, if this was a stable coalition that aligned with 60% of the country, it would easily become an all-powerful political force.

Remember: 60% is no small number in American politics. 60% is the proportion of the Senate you need for a majority to be filibuster-proof. 60% is the proportion of the presidential popular vote that some political scientists have pegged as meriting a landslide.

Here is what it looked like the last three times a presidential candidate got somewhere around that benchmark: Lyndon Johnson’s 61% of the popular vote in 1964, Richard Nixon’s 61% in 1972, and Ronald Reagan’s 59% in 1984. A 60% majority is pretty much good for winning almost every state:

The issue is, there is not a stable 60% majority behind the stances I laid out above.

Clearly, neither the Democratic nor Republican Party memberships are as ideologically homogeneous as we think they are: otherwise, parties that control ~50% of the country wouldn’t routinely control just 30% or 40% of the country on their issue stances. Each of them have a good chunk of their members who appear to be defecting on certain questions. But the messy middle isn’t any more homogeneous.

Here’s where it’s helpful to bring in the Pew typology. Pew found that each political coalition has two “anchor groups” who overwhelmingly back their party platforms: “Loyal Liberals” (think Kamala Harris) and “Leftward Progressives” (think AOC), and “Faith First Conservatives” (think Mike Johnson) and the “No Apologies Right” (think Donald Trump). Taken together, these groups are 17% and 21% of the public, respectively.

That leaves the middle five groups on the political spectrum, which represent 62% of the country. Once again, we find a group hovering around that magic 60% number. If these five groups all embraced the moderate positions I laid out above, they could easily team up with an agreed-upon platform, swamp the extremes on either wing, and concoct a 49-state landslide.

But they don’t.

Below, I’ve taken a sampling of questions from the Pew data and pulled: the percentage of Americans who hold the stance; the percentage of people in the middle five groups on the spectrum, our hypothetical “Centrist Party,” who hold the stance; and the percent of the country made up by Centrist Party members who hold the stance.

What we find is that around 60% of the country holds each of these stances, which we knew. And that this support is largely built on backing from the Centrist Party, the vast majority of whom embrace each of these positions. But not 100% of them. Since the Centrist Party groups comprise 62% of the country, if 100% of the party agreed with each stance, you could get to supermajority support for each stance just based off support from centrists alone.

But since the “party” is not unanimously behind any of these beliefs, you only get to around 40-45% national support for each stance based on Centrist Party support. That’s an impressive number, but it’s not a majority. To get to a majority on, say, believing that illegal immigration is a big problem, you would need to “borrow” 8% of the country from the right-leaning “anchor groups.”

But what happens to that 8%, all rock-ribbed conservatives, once they learn that your party platform also believes that taxes on the wealthy should be raised? Suddenly, your majority is lost.

The numbers just aren’t there: the 60% consensus is really built on a floating majority, which means an electoral majority built from the middle would be just as unstable and ideologically mixed as the two current party coalitions built from either side. Because it contains internal dissent, it would need support from the wing groups in order to solidify majority support for any of its positions, just as much as the wing groups need support from the middle to win majority support on any of their positions.

And because the “anchor groups” are highly politically engaged, and the middle groups are not, it makes a lot more sense to build a political coalition based on the “anchor groups” and occasionally borrowing from the middle, rather than a coalition based on a disengaged middle that borrows from the wings. Engagement trumps disengagement every time.

The Centrist Party would need wing support from somewhere: it could either pick some stances from one party and some stances from the other (and likely lose any hope of attracting either wing) or it could pick stances from one party (at which point you’ve simply recreated a less powerful version of that party, since your base would consist of that party’s least engaged and reliable members).

Even though the Centrist Party, based on the numbers, seems like it would be more electorally powerful, its own lack of ideological uniformity means it would run into the same need to build a borrowed coalition for its issue stances as the current parties, but this time you would have a coalition that was even less likely to vote. It looks like we’re stuck with two parties driven by the wings for the foreseeable future, rather than a viable party driven by the middle.

Also, don’t forget: this analysis focuses purely on the ability of a party to get to 50% based off support for its issue positions. I haven’t even gotten into the systemic difficulties that a third party would run into, or the fact that not all votes are driven by agreement with a party’s policy platform.

Why this data matters

There is still a lot we can learn from the Pew numbers.

First, we find proof — yet again — that America’s polarization is emotional, not ideological. We are not really divided 50-50 on very many issues. From issue to issue, there is generally a stance with broad public acceptance (it’s just that this majority isn’t composed of the same people for each question). That means that, yes, we have sorted ourselves almost evenly into two political parties and, yes, members of each party strongly dislike members of the other (even though they probably agree with that other party on more than a few issues). But we are not nearly as ideologically split as we sometimes think we are. Our disagreements are much more driven by personalities (who will get to patch together a coalition of firm and loose supporters, which loose supporters will they target, which ones will defect) than they are on policy, about which we overwhelmingly agree across domains.

It also helps illuminate the reality of the two party coalitions.

The four “anchor groups” on the wings may be driving both party platforms, but neither party would exist without the five groups in the center, who make up 56% of the Republican Party and 65% of the Democratic Party. (Of course, these majorities are less likely to participate in politics, especially in primary elections, than the more engaged minorities, which contributes to the imbalance in power.) Both parties are textured and ideologically complex. A full 14% of the GOP is made up of voters who Pew codes as belonging to the center-left side of the spectrum, while 15% of the Democratic camp is made up of voters whose issue positions Pew codes on the center-right.

There is so much political coverage about whether the “Leftward Progressives” (think Bernie) and the “No Apologies Right” (think Tucker) have abandoned their party coalitions: Has the far-left broken with the Democrats? Has Trump lost the far-right over Iran? In reality, 96% of Leftward Progressives (and 97% of Loyal Liberals) identify as Democrats; 99% of the “No Apologies Right” (and 95% of Faith First Conservatives) identify as Republicans.

That means any leftist Democrat who defiantly quits the party, and any rightist Republican who does the same, is a statistical anomaly, representative of an infinitesimally small slice of the American electorate. Each party’s real issue, at least in numerical terms, is with the groups towards the center of their coalition: only 65% of the “Order and Opportunity Left” (think Josh Shapiro) identify as Democrats, and just 56% of the “Pragmatic and Polite Right” (think Mitt Romney) identify with the GOP.

Media coverage massively overrates the size of the anchor groups — which, again, make up 17% (the two left-most groups) and 21% (the two right-most groups) of the nation — at the expense of the vast, under-covered middle. This is probably at least partially because there are often no prominent media figures who fall into these groups, and oftentimes few or no national politicians.

Take, for example, the “Left-Out Left,” which is economically liberal (74% support raising taxes on the wealthy) but moderate on social issues (41% believe illegal immigration is a big issue, and 53% believe gender is determined at birth, massively more than the groups to their left). They are also one of the groups least likely to have a college degree (only 29% of them are college educated, fewer than any group on the right) and one of the most racially mixed. Basically no one with this issue profile exists in professional politics, except maybe Bernie Sanders c. 2016 or John Fetterman (though Sanders has since moved away from his pro-gun, anti-immigration, anti-woke positioning, and only 13% of the “Left-Out Left” group have a favorable opinion of the Israeli government, so Fetterman isn’t quite in step with them either). They’re called “left out” for a reason.

Very few in the media fall into this group, and very few of the people the media quote (politicians, operatives, pundits, activists, etc.) fall into this group, which is how a segment that’s even bigger (12%) than either the democratic-socialist “Leftward Progressives” (7%) or the MAGA “No Apologies Right” (9%) gets to be massively under-covered.

This might be fair enough as far as electoral power goes — as discussed, the far-left and far-right groups are far likelier to vote, which means they wield more clout within their electoral coalitions even if they make up a smaller slice of them — but it leaves audiences with a skewed image of America. It also means the members each party sends to Congress are similarly unrepresentative, with 0% of Senate Democrats in favor of photo ID at the polls (a stance held by 69% of their party coalition, per Pew) or 0% of House Republicans voting to codify Roe (a stark drop from the 38% of their coalition who believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases).

Dwelling on the areas where Americans overwhelmingly agree can also underline the unrepresentative nature of media coverage. According to Pew, just 10% of Americans view China as a partner, while 7% say the same about Russia. And yet, Hasan Piker gets coverage for his fawning venture to China, just as Tucker Carlson does for his trip to Russia. These stances are interesting and provocative precisely because they are so rare — but because that then leads to a rush of media coverage, suddenly they seem a lot more widely held than they really are.

It’s understandable to cover the new, the unusual, the interesting. But it must be done in a way that is grounded in real data, ensuring that audiences know that even if a provocative stance is receiving coverage, that should not be mistaken for thinking that a sizable swath of the American public actually holds it. 10% of the country is a lot of people in raw terms: more than 30 million Americans! But it is a small amount as a percentage of the country. Humans are often bad at holding both ideas in their head at the same time. We are such a big country that we forget that even millions of people — many more people than you will ever meet in your life — form only a small American minority.

These same lessons apply to issues like the measles vaccine (supported by 84% of the country) or transgender athletes participating in the sports teams of their choice (opposed by 73%), both of which are covered as though they are much more contested issues than they are in real life — though, of course, both stances also wield disproportionate power in our politics, for some of the reasons we’ve discussed.

In reality, Americans are already overwhelmingly congregated on one side of most issues; the question is simply, out of the two parties with whom they agree on some things but not others, which one will they choose to vote for (or will they vote at all). But just because that split always tends to come down 50-50, it does not mean most people are blindly accepting all the issue stances of the party they choose to join.

We are an “evenly divided” country that happens to agree on quite a lot.

Last week, surrounded by Republican lawmakers in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump signed the Secure America Act into law.

The measure, which will fund Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda, was the 98th law and second major party-line package of his second term, following the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Its enactment was a significant legislative accomplishment for the president, especially as it came after the bill was temporarily derailed by Trump’s $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

The story behind the law was long and twisting. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) were supposed to be funded for the next fiscal year by October 1, 2025, like all government agencies. But none of the government was funded by then, sparking a 43-day shutdown that lasted until mid-November. The entire government was then funded by a continuing resolution that lasted until the end of January. By then, Congress had approved all of its annual appropriations bills — except the one for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This was right after the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, who were shot by ICE and CBP officers, respectively, while protesting Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota; Democrats refused to fund either agency unless the dollars were accompanied by reforms.

This led to a DHS-specific shutdown that ended up stretching on for another 76 days. At points during this time it seemed like the two parties might be able to agree on ICE reforms to unlock the funding (Markwayne Mullin, the senator-turned-DHS secretary, was negotiating a deal that would have offered significant concessions), but the talks fell through. Ultimately, the two parties agreed to disagree. In April, lawmakers decided to fund all of DHS — except for the controversial parts — through a normal appropriations bill (meaning it was subject to the 60-vote filibuster threshold), while Republicans would fund ICE and CBP through a party-line reconciliation bill (taking advantage of a specialized process that requires only a simple majority to advance).

The Secure America Act was that reconciliation bill, bringing an end to the 252-day saga between the start of the fiscal year and the point when funding for ICE and CBP was finally resolved. Note that through this entire time, including two extended shutdowns, neither agency actually stopped operating in any way, because they had already received a huge funding plus-up from the One Big Beautiful Bill (the last GOP reconciliation bill), far above what they were set to receive from the normal appropriations process (and ended up receiving through the Secure America Act). As we will see, the Secure America Act also went beyond what a typical appropriations bill would have done, funding ICE and CBP for the entire rest of Trump’s second term, ensuring that the agencies can operate for the next three years without risk of a Democratic shutdown.

For the One Big Beautiful Bill, I put together a series of comprehensive guides to help walk WUTP readers through the measure, to ensure you understood every provision of a very consequential law (and, hopefully, help give you the tools to read a piece of legislation for yourself). This morning, I want to do the same thing for the Secure America Act — but don’t worry: unlike the One Big Beautiful Bill, which was 331 pages and took six newsletters for us to get through, this law is only five pages. We’ll be done in one day!

The brevity is largely due to the simplicity of the law’s purpose (funding ICE and CBP, versus the several different goals stuffed into the Big Beautiful Bill), but it is also because of what’s missing from the package. As it turns out, some of the most important features of the Secure America Act are what it doesn’t say. We’ll discuss that further down; for now, let’s start out with what it does say.

I promise: I won’t go word-for-word. You can follow along with the exact text of the bill here, but we’ll follow its basic structure below.

A close reading of the Secure America Act

This is how the bill starts. Note the bill number (S. 2): normally, bills are numbered by the chamber (“H.R.” or “S”) and order they were introduced in. There’s an exception for the first 20 bills, though: S.1 through S. 10 are reserved for the majority party’s leadership, to be used whenever they want in the congressional session for the bills that are most important to the majority; S. 11 through S.20 play the same role to highlight the priorities of the minority.

Republican leaders have not introduced S. 1 yet. This was S. 2. The GOP has used three of its other reserved slots, for bills on immigration, abortion, and transgender participation in women’s sports. (Democrats have not used any of their slots, perhaps a telling indication of a party uncertain of its priorities in the Trump era.) The House follows this same practice: the Big Beautiful Bill was H.R. 1.

As we continue reading, we can also see the bill’s formal title (“An Act to provide for reconciliation pursuant to title II of S. Con. Res. 33”) and its “short title,” the Secure America Act. Typically, the first section of a bill is devoted to giving itself a more catchy name.

As we’ve discussed in the past, the reconciliation process allows majority parties to skirt the 60-vote filibuster, but only for bills that follow a strict regulation known as the Byrd Rule, which requires every part of a reconciliation bill to focus on taxes or spending. For this reason, minority parties — just to be difficult — will often raise an objection to the section of a reconciliation bill that gives itself a “short title,” since that is a part of the bill that has nothing to do with taxes or spending. Democrats chose not to do that this time, however, so this bill is officially the Secure America Act (unlike, for example, the Inflation Reduction Act and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, both of which are officially known by their longer, formal titles.)

Then, we have the table of contents, which gives us an idea of the more substantive content we’re about to start reading.

And we’re off to the races! This provision, as you can read, pours $9.55 billion into the CBP coffers in order to hire, pay, and train Border Patrol personnel who aren’t involved in immigration enforcement. (We’ll get to them later.) This includes any number of administrative and support staffers who work for CBP but aren’t actually on the ground apprehending illegal immigrants.

It also includes “processing coordinators,” a position that was created during the first Trump administration to handle intake and processing for individuals apprehended by Border Patrol agents, as well as transporting them to Border Patrol custody and overseeing “care and hospital watch, feeding, and cleaning duties” at Border Patrol facilities. (Before, all of these functions had to be performed by Border Patrol agents themselves.)

The overall $9.55 billion being given to CBP in this section is available through September 2029 — except any funds that are used to hire processing coordinators expire in October 2028, ensuring that a smaller chunk of the cash goes to hiring these officials, who have been compared to social service workers for the immigration system.

I won’t include the entire text of this section, but it basically provides $7.45 billion to ICE through September 2029, also for hiring, paying, and training personnel who aren’t directly involved in immigration enforcement.

As a reminder: CBP is generally in charge of handling security at the border, while ICE oversees interior immigration enforcement in the rest of the U.S. (although this distinction has become muddied in the Trump era, as some Border Patrol agents have been deployed away from the border).

The main sub-agency within CBP is the Border Patrol. ICE, meanwhile, includes two main units: Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), which investigates transnational crime, and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), which apprehends, detains, and deports illegal immigrants in the interior of the U.S.

Because this section handles non-immigration-enforcement ICE personnel, it covers the funding for HSI. The section also specifically says that $108.5 million of the $7.45 billion should be used to hire and pay HSI personnel who investigate cases of child sexual exploitation and rescue the victims.

This was a provision championed by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), with an assist from former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow. According to Fox News, DHS currently has only seven forensic analysts dedicated to child exploitation investigations; this provision will fund 200 additional investigators and analysts, the largest-ever federal investment in combatting child trafficking.

This section gives $3.45 billion more to CBP (again, through September 2029) for procuring new technology for screenings at the border.

That includes “new nonintrusive inspection equipment and associated civil works, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other innovative technologies, as well as other mission support, to combat the entry or exit of illicit narcotics at ports of entry,” as well as upgrading “border surveillance technologies” and the “biometric entry and exit system” at the border.

It also includes funding for a new generation of AI-powered autonomous surveillance towers that are set to be constructed across the southern border (continuing a program that expanded under the first Trump and Biden administrations).

And here’s $2.5 billion more that will go to DHS, to be used between now and September 2029 for any of the purposes outlined in the previous three sections. There are no specifications beyond that, giving the department pretty broad leeway in how it wants to use these funds.

Now we’ve made it to Title II of the law, which is everything that’s covered under the jurisdiction of the Senate Judiciary Committee — which means the actual immigration enforcement funding. (Title I was everything under the jurisdiction of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which oversees much of DHS, but not the functions related to immigration law. Committee jurisdictions can be confusing.)

This first section of the title provides $13.02 billion to CBP for hiring, paying, and training the personnel who are involved in carrying out immigration enforcement activities.

And this is the accompanying provision for ICE, which will receive $31.075 billion for carrying out immigration enforcement activities — including hiring, paying, training, and equipping officers, agents, investigators, and attorneys; transporting and deporting illegal immigrants; improving technology, including body cameras; maintaining facilities, among other uses.

Here’s an interesting part of this section, which says that $350 million of the new ICE funding has to be specifically earmarked for immigration enforcement activities in places that are not “qualified cooperating jurisdictions”:

What’s a “qualified cooperating jurisdiction”? Basically, there’s something called a Section 287(g) agreement, which ICE signs with cities and states to formally deputize their local law enforcement officials to carry out immigration enforcement. There are several forms this can take, including local corrections officers screening people who are already being held in their jails to see if they are illegal immigrants and then, if they are, flagging them for ICE or empowering local police officers to make immigration arrests in the course of their routine police duties.

More than 1,900 jurisdictions in 39 states (shown on the map below) have Section 287(g) agreements. You’ll notice that several Democratic-led states ban their cities from entering into these agreements, including California, Washington, and Illinois.

This provision of the Secure America Act will specifically require ICE to use certain funds to focus on these blue cities and states that don’t have Section 287(g) agreements.

And here’s the final section of the law: another broad, wrap-around grant of funding, this one giving $2.5 billion to ICE for carrying out any of these immigration enforcement activities outlined above or in Section 100051 of Public Law 119-21 (which is the part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that provided funding to ICE).

Congratulations! You’ve read the entire Secure America Act.

In total, the law provides $38.5 billion in funding to ICE, $26 billion to CBP, and $5 billion that can be used by either agency — a total of $69.5 billion. The funds are all available for the next three years.

By way of comparison, ICE received $10 billion in funding in Fiscal Year 2025. After receiving $75 billion over four years in the One Big Beautiful Bill (starting in 2025), and now $38.5 billion over three years in the Secure America Act (starting in 2026) — assuming the funding is spaced out evenly — that comes out to an annual budget of around $32 billion for the rest of Trump’s term. ICE was already the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency after the One Big Beautiful Bill; now, it will be operating with more than triple its previous budget.

What the Secure America Act doesn’t say

The new law is so short for a few reasons. First, of course, it doesn’t include any of the potential ICE reforms (requiring judicial warrants, banning arrests at schools or churches, expanding use of body cameras) that Democrats and Republicans had been discussing before negotiations collapsed and the GOP decided to fund ICE and CBP alone.

Second, there were several provisions that were originally planned to be in the bill that fell out. This includes $1 billion that the initial Judiciary Committee draft was set to provide to the Secret Service (including for security upgrades to the new White House ballroom), which was taken out when the Senate parliamentarian ruled that it didn’t comply with the Byrd Rule. (Republicans likely could have re-worded it so that it would pass the Byrd test, but GOP senators didn’t fight for it, likely a sign that enough of them had concerns about funding the ballroom anyway.)

The initial draft also called for $1.457 billion to be provided to the Justice Department, including to fund anti-fraud efforts, as well as programs combatting drug crimes and terrorism. This funding ended up being stripped out of the final package as well, likely to make it so that Democratic amendments involving the DOJ (such as proposals aimed at the “Anti-Weaponization Fund”) couldn’t be construed as germane to the bill, and therefore would have required 60 votes, instead of 51, to be added to the bill during the extended voting series known as a vote-a-rama.

But finally, the bill is short because it is very vague. Appropriations bills generally include very specific language, or at least come with detailed committee reports with very specific language, governing how the funds being given to the executive branch will be used. Because this measure skirted the normal appropriations process — part of a growing trend of majority parties taking advantage of the reconciliation process so they can appropriate without bipartisan input — it included none of these normal strictures.

That means ICE and CBP will have much more free rein to use this funding than they normally would, not just because the law creates two big pots of money that are basically available for DHS to be used at will, but also because even the pots of money attached to more specific purposes lack the specificity that appropriations bills usually include. Appropriations bills also often set up strict regimes requiring agencies to make regular reports to Congress on how they are using the funds allocated to them; the Secure America Act includes none of these requirements.

A key way that Congress sets limits on how the executive branch uses funding is through provisions creatively known as a “limitation provision.” These are peppered all throughout appropriations bills: Agency X is given Y Dollars to Do Z Thing, provided that none of these funds are used to do A, B, or C.

There are several “limitations provisions” that are typically included in ICE funding bills. Here’s an example from Fiscal Year 2024 (the most recent time ICE funding went through the regular appropriations process), prohibiting any funds in that package from being used to place restraints on pregnant women in DHS custody:

Here’s another example from that same FY 2024 law, prohibiting any funds in the law from being used to destroy documents pertaining to deaths or sexual assault that take place in DHS custody:

These limitation provisions — which are generally attached to ICE appropriations every year, with bipartisan support — were not included in the Secure America Act, which effectively functioned as this year’s ICE appropriations bill.

Notably, Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) introduced an amendment to the Secure America Act that would have added these limitations back into the bill. Interestingly, Democrats didn’t force a vote on the proposal, even though this was during a vote-a-rama, when there is no limit to how many amendments either party can put up for a vote.

A Democrat familiar with the budget process told me that party leaders typically decide which amendments will be put up for a vote during a vote-a-rama — hundreds are generally proposed, but only dozens are actually voted on — though, in theory, there is nothing stopping any individual senator from going rogue and insisting on a vote on their amendment. The Democrat said that, during past reconciliation fights, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) had tried to ensure that no Democratic amendments actually succeeded during vote-a-ramas (to be able to say that the final product is the work of Republicans alone), and that Schumer typically sought to coordinate the amendment votes so that they all aligned with a central message. In this case, that central message was largely about Trumpian corruption (hence the many votes on the Anti-Weaponization Fund), which — cynically, along with the fact that it might have passed — could explain why Murray’s amendment was not brought to a vote.

No matter the reason, the amendment was never brought up, which means a process that was jumpstarted by a Democratic effort to add more restrictions on ICE could actually end with the agency facing fewer restrictions, including ones relating to the treatment of pregnant women and the destruction of important records.

The Democratic source noted that in the House GOP’s proposed Fiscal Year 2027 DHS appropriations bill, which passed in committee last week, some of the traditional limitation provisions were made retroactive, so that they would include Secure America Act funds, by terming them as prohibitions on any federal funds being made available for a certain purpose, rather than just prohibitions on funds in that specific act.

For example, the GOP used this device to ensure that language about prohibiting DHS from blocking members of Congress from visiting ICE facilities applied to all federal funds, which would retroactively include the Secure America Act. While the FY2027 bill includes the limitations regarding pregnant women and record destruction, however, it does not make those limitations retroactive. “That was a choice,” the Democratic source said, pointing out that it shows the GOP was aware that the reconciliation bill lacked those limitations, but actively chose only to apply some of them to the Secure America Act funds.

There have already been legal fights around DHS trying to avoid congressional site visits by arguing that they were using One Big Beautiful Bill funding (which also lacked limitation provisions). The Trump administration has largely lost these battles, although the Democratic source said that Trump’s arguments would now have stronger legal standing, since before some ICE funding was coming from the Big Beautiful Bill and some was coming from regular appropriations, muddying the waters. Now, all of the agency’s funding will be coming from the two reconciliation packages, making it less likely that — say — hypothetical money used to destroy records of deaths in ICE facilities would have come from legislation that included the limitation provisions.

Democrats could hypothetically try to retroactively add these provisions in the Fiscal Year 2027 appropriations bills. Indeed, nothing is permanent just because it is in a reconciliation bill: in FY2027, especially if Democrats control the House, they could try to claw back some of the Secure America Act money and threaten a shutdown if Republicans don’t agree. Of course, they would have to use other agencies as leverage, however: even if Democrats force a shutdown in hopes of altering the Secure America Act, ICE would still have access to its vast store of funding unless or until any changes to the Secure America Act are actually written into law.

ICE will not be immune from being used as a negotiating point in future shutdown fights. But it will be immune from being shut down itself while those disputes play out, at least in the next funding fight and potentially for the entire rest of the Trump era.

The use of reconciliation to advance, with only 51 votes, bills that would typically require 60 votes has already poked enormous holes in the legislative filibuster. The increased use of this device for funding that typically goes through the regular appropriations process, in turn, spells trouble for the future of spending negotiations across party lines. If majority parties can unilaterally ram through large pots of funding, making them shutdown-proof and free of significant limitations for extended periods of time, why wouldn’t they? The long-held tradition that the two parties work together to set funding levels in Congress, keeping spending stable (and consistent restrictions in place) no matter who is in the White House, may soon be a thing of the past.

Donald Trump had a vision about how the war in Iran would end.

Iran would publicly admit that “their Navy is gone and resting at the bottom of the sea” and that “their Air Force is no longer with us.” Their “entire Military” would walk out of Tehran, “weapons dropped and hands held high, each shouting ‘I surrender, I surrender’ while wildly waving the representative White Flag.” And their “remaining Leadership” would sign “all necessary ‘Documents of Surrender,’ and admit their defeat to the great power and force of the magnificent U.S.A.”

Sounds nice, huh? Trump first posted this imagined scenario on Truth Social on May 18, and he seemed to be quite enamored of it: the president rarely recycles his social media posts verbatim, but he did so here, blasting out this exact same message on May 26 and then again on June 1. The post was purposefully hyperbolic: it was written to make the point that even if the above chain of events took place, “The Failing New York Times, The China Street Journal (WSJ!), Corrupt and now Irrelevant CNN, and all other members of the Fake News Media” would still announce that “Iran had a Masterful and Brilliant Victory over The United States of America,” such is the extent of their bias against him.

But Trump clearly put some thought into it: the description was elaborate enough, and he posted it enough times, that it did seem to be lurking in the back of his head as a hoped-for endgame to the war.

It was, unfortunately, a complete fantasy.

It appears — emphasis on “appears” — that the war is now coming to a close, at least according to the president. “We ended the war with Iran today,” Trump said at a telerally for a Georgia gubernatorial candidate last night, after announcing on Truth Social that a peace deal was about to be finalized.

However, no one is shouting “I surrender, I surrender” or waving a white flag. “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” Trump wrote on social media in March. Those were headier times. Three months later, Trump is signing a deal with Iran, and it is not, in fact, unconditional. Instead, the war is ending as it was always going to, with a negotiated settlement where both sides are being forced to make concessions.

In fact, despite Trump’s declarations of victory, it isn’t even clear what exactly will change if the still-unreleased deal is signed this weekend in Europe, as Trump says it will be. Consider:

• Before the war began on February 28, the U.S. and Iran were not attacking each other, the Strait of Hormuz was open, and Iran had not made any firm commitments about its nuclear program.

• Then, between February 28 and April 8, the U.S. and Iran were attacking each other, the Strait of Hormuz was closed, and Iran had not made any firm commitments about its nuclear program.

• Since April 8, the U.S. and Iran have mostly not been attacking each other, the Strait of Hormuz has mostly been closed, and Iran has not made any firm commitments about its nuclear program.

• And now after this deal (if it takes effect), the U.S. and Iran will once again not be attacking each other, the Strait of Hormuz will be open, and Iran will still not have made any firm commitments about its nuclear program: Tehran will merely have agreed to a 60-day extension of the ceasefire during which the actual nuclear talks can be held.

Which places us, in the broadest sense, roughly where we were already, except for the Strait of Hormuz being open — which itself simply places us roughly where we were before the war. (Also recall that the April ceasefire deal was supposed to reopen the strait as well, so a promise to reopen the strait only brings us back to where we were in April. That time, Trump did not restart attacks even when it became clear that the strait was staying closed, nor did he return to a full war footing on the multiple occasions that the ceasefire was violated in other ways.)

Of course, this is simplifying matters somewhat. The U.S. and Iran have been at war, in some form, for more than three months, even if for much of that time, the conflict has existed in a sort of limbo state where we weren’t completely at war but also not completely at peace, which may just continue after this deal as well. Still, surely some things must have changed in all that time?

Below, we’ll take a close look at what the Iran war has and hasn’t accomplished, by judging it against the yardstick Trump himself set out at the conflict’s start. Then, we’ll cast forward a bit: if nuclear negotiations really are about to start in earnest, how should we judge an ultimate U.S.-Iranian nuclear deal (if one ever materializes)?

We’ll look at the 2015 Obama-era nuclear deal that Trump has scorned, and consider what agreement Trump could ink that would count as considerable progress beyond the Obama deal, and what would merely turn the clock back (at best) to the pre-Trump status quo that he derided.

Grading Trump on his own terms

Obviously, the most significant wartime change to Iranian society has been that the country’s supreme leader of 37 years, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in a U.S.-Israeli attack. Still, if one of the objectives of Trump’s war was regime change — and it has never been fully clear whether it was — then that goal has not been accomplished.

The ranks of Iran’s leadership have undoubtedly been hollowed out by the war — around 50 of the country’s top officials have been killed — but the government in Iran today consists of the same regime that was in charge before the war, starting with Khamenei’s own (severely wounded) son Mojtaba as the new ayatollah. The U.S. and Israel seem to have overestimated the likelihood of the war leading to a popular uprising within Iran (“When we are finished, take over your government,” Trump told the Iranian people at the outset of the war. “It will be yours to take”). Reportedly, the U.S. and Israel were also nursing a plan for former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to take over the country as part of the war effort. That didn’t happen either.

The war has been devastating to the Iranian economy, which has lost at least one (maybe two) million jobs since the conflict began. If you think our 4.2% annual inflation rate in the U.S. is bad, consider that inflation is at 77.2% (!) in Iran. Again, this is a case of the war succeeding in battering Iran into terrible shape, but still in a way that seems to have undershot Trump’s hopes: as terrible as the Iranian economy is, the regime has stubbornly refused to surrender, even under the pressure of a U.S.-led blockade.

Of course, this is largely because the war has allowed Iran to unlock a key piece of leverage that has also harmed the U.S. (and world) economy: closing down the Strait of Hormuz. (This is something Trump was warned about before the war, but does not appear to have planned for.) Our economy is still performing leagues better than Iran’s, of course, though the war has pushed U.S. inflation to its highest level in three years, creating an urgent political problem for the president.

What has he gotten in exchange? Let’s consider the five objectives Trump laid out in a Truth Social post towards the beginning of the war:

1) “Completely degrading Iranian Missile Capability, Launchers, and everything else pertaining to them”: According to the New York Times, U.S. intelligence agencies have assessed that Iran still retains about 70% of its missile stockpile, 70% of its mobile launchers, 90% of its underground missile storage and launch facilities, and access to 30 out of 33 of its missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz.

2) “Destroying Iran’s Defense Industrial Base”: According to an intelligence assessment reported by CNN, significant damage was done to Iran’s military industrial base — but it doesn’t appear that the damage was long-term. The intelligence agencies have reportedly found that “Iran’s military is reconstituting much faster than initially estimated,” with the country already restarting its drone production during the existing ceasefire, while also rebuilding the missile launchers and military production sites that were destroyed during the fighting. The agencies said that Iran could fully reconstitute its drone attack capability in as soon as six months.

3) “Eliminating their Navy and Air Force, including Anti Aircraft Weaponry”: This is the score on which the U.S. appears to have been the most successful. According to estimates by Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the U.S. has destroyed 90% of Iran’s regular naval fleet and about 80% of the country’s air defense systems.

4) “Protecting, at the highest level, our Middle Eastern Allies”: Iran has repeatedly attacked Israel and the U.S.’ Gulf allies throughout the war. In terms of Tehran’s ability to threaten America’s allies in the Middle East going forward, there is no indication that Iran has agreed to stop supporting Hamas, Hezbollah, and other regional terrorist groups as part of the “memorandum of understanding” (MOU) that Trump says is soon to be signed, although the text of the tentative agreement has not yet been publicized.

5) “Never allowing Iran to get even close to Nuclear Capability”: And finally, Trump’s most important goal. According to Axios, as part of the forthcoming MOU Iran will commit to never acquire a nuclear weapon — which may sound like a significant concession, until you recall that Iran has long insisted it is not trying to have a nuclear weapon. Iran also affirmed under the 2015 nuclear deal that it would not “ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons,” so such a commitment is merely a reheated version of the same promise Obama got, regardless of how much worth you put into it at either point.

From there, if the MOU does take effect (still an “if” as of this writing), that’s when the U.S. and Iran will start diving into the real nitty-gritty of nuclear negotiations, to see what concessions Tehran will agree to in order to make good on that commitment. That’s when it starts becoming relevant to compare Trump to the Obama-era baseline that he so derided.

Below, we’ll look at what would be a success in the next phase of the U.S.-Tehran negotiations — and take a step back to assess the bigger picture of Trump’s current political position.

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If the deadline comes and goes without a deal, it will largely be because President Donald Trump threw a grenade into the negotiations, announcing plans to install Bill Pulte as acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to succeed Tulsi Gabbard.

Pulte, who does not have any relevant national security experience, currently serves as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, a role he has used to investigate several Trump foes (including New York Attorney General Letitia James, Sen. Adam Schiff, and Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook) for mortgage fraud.

Democrats have said they will not vote to renew the controversial surveillance power, known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, if Pulte is placed atop the intelligence community, where he could potentially weaponize the tool for domestic political purposes. Republicans have reportedly pushed Trump to back down on Pulte, or at least to quickly announce a more experienced nominee to serve as DNI on a permanent basis, in order to appease Democrats and avoid a lapse in Section 702.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) was even deployed to the White House on Tuesday to press this case to the president. But Trump rebuffed Johnson’s entreaties; in fact, he doubled down, pointedly announcing on Truth Social that Pulte will still be taking over as acting DNI, and will be doing so even earlier than had been previously planned. With less than 72 hours to go until the deadline, Section 702 talks are now at a standstill.

As is often the case in the Trump era, this is an important policy conversation that has now been completely disrupted by the president — even though Trump and his machinations are actually the least interesting part of the debate. Even before the president remade the negotiations into a fight about Pulte, Section 702 was controversial in its own right, an issue that scrambled party lines and produced a fascinating set of competing coalitions.

If American politics is truly, as is sometimes theorized, a horseshoe — not a straight-line spectrum, with the far-left and the far-right on opposite ends, but curved, so the two extremes meet — then this might be the issue that provides the ultimate proof.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was enacted in 1978, as a way to rein in government surveillance after the abuses of the Nixon era. However, it has been amended over time into offering intelligence agencies even greater powers than the ones the original law was trying to curb.

Section 702 was added as part of a bipartisan FISA amendment passed in 2008, in order to formalize a program that the George W. Bush administration had already been carrying out in the wake of 9/11. The provision gives intelligence agencies the authority to surveil non-Americans located abroad, if they have reason to believe that the surveillance will produce important foreign intelligence information.

Under the law, the government can compel “electronic communication service providers” — think AT&T, Verizon, Google, Microsoft, etc. — to assist them in collecting the phone, email, text, or other communications of the foreign target. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) has to annually approve the broader categories of foreign intelligence that can be collected under Section 702, and the processes used to collect them, but no judge has to sign off on each specific target.

The law makes very clear that it cannot be used to “intentionally target any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States,” or to “intentionally target a United States person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States” — which means it cannot be used to target a U.S. citizen anywhere, whether they are in the country or abroad.

But there is a “but.” Non-Americans located abroad often text, or email, or call American citizens. If an intelligence target is communicating with an American, the Section 702 surveillance will also sweep in the American’s side of the conversation, which is known as “incidental collection.” These communications are then stored in the same vast database that houses everything collected under Section 702; if agencies like the FBI or CIA are carrying out an unrelated investigation later, they can search the database for an American’s name, and retrieve any incidentally collected communications that were picked up through the Section 702 process.

This is known as a “backdoor search.” There is an approval process before doing this but, once again, no judge is involved — which means there is no warrant given out before the government accesses an American’s communication, as there normally would be. Critics of Section 702 argue that this is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, which protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” Proponents of the law say it is a vital national security tool.

Both sides bring emotionally charged anecdotes to the discussion. Critics point to the revelations that the FBI searched the Section 702 database to see if there were communications linked to more than 100 different Black Lives Matter protesters, as well as to several January 6 rioters, seemingly attempting to use information collected under Section 702 for domestic law enforcement investigations, even though FISA is only meant to be a foreign intelligence tool.

Proponents argue that the ends justify the means, pointing to the major intelligence victories that the government says it has used Section 702 to score. According to the CIA, it was Section 702 surveillance that allowed the U.S. to uncover a planned terrorist attack at a Taylor Swift concert in Austria, saving countless lives.

These arguments don’t track along the normal partisan lines. “Our government is spying on us,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) declared on the House floor in April, as part of a Section 702 debate. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) used almost identical language on X last week, writing: “No more government spying on law-abiding Americans. We need to reform FISA 702.”

On the other side of the debate, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) argued: “I cannot, for the life of me, understand what is left to object to on this tool because I can promise you that if we were having this debate a week after 9/11, there wouldn’t be a single soul on this floor voting against this bill.”

Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) has invoked a similar threat. “Three months from now, if FISA 702 is dark and there’s a bomb in Grand Central, there will be very little doubt in my mind … that that occurred because we shut down our most important counterintelligence,” he told Politico.

The horseshoe is starting to come into view. Questions of foreign policy and national security are increasingly starting to split both political parties internally — to the point that it can be hard, frankly, to identify what either party’s foreign policy actually is. A President Vance or Rubio on the one hand, or a President Ocasio-Cortez or Newsom on the other, likely wouldn’t handle questions of taxation, or abortion policy, or health care, or LGBT rights much differently than another of their co-partisans.

How would they handle the conflict in Iran? Or Ukraine? Or a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan? I honestly think there would be four different answers, pointing to a much larger degree of division within the parties on foreign policy questions compared to the disagreements on domestic policy, which are more differences of degree than kind. Heck, Vance and Rubio are currently serving in the same administration, and no one thinks their Iran policy would be the same; meanwhile, the idea of an Ocasio-Cortez approach to Taiwan is so uncertain that she doesn’t even seem to know what it would be herself.

The Section 702 debate is an interesting proxy for these divides, which pit hawks against doves, but even more than that, seems to lie on the crucial axis of modern American politics, around which many of these foreign policy debates (among others) seem to revolve: establishment vs. anti-establishment, trust in experts and authority vs. skepticism, technocrat vs. populist, stuffy vs. crunchy. These are less questions of policy orientation, as economic and social questions are, than questions that get at a broader worldview: how one views the government/the elite/those in charge, and whether they view themselves as among that group or positioned against it.

Section 702 is the ultimate of these horseshoe issues because unlike other internal party splits, where the fights are fairly lopsided — yes, there are some on the far-right who are opposed to the war in Iran, but there aren’t many — this one actually is heavily contested within both parties, forming an exact mirror image of each other.

I can prove it. The last time Section 702 was up for reauthorization, in April 2024, the House voted on an amendment by right-wing Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) to require government officials to obtain a judicial warrant before accessing Americans’ communications swept up as part of Section 702 surveillance.

128 Republicans voted for the requirement, while 86 Republicans voted against it. 84 Democrats voted for the requirement, while 126 Democrats voted against it. That means the proposal failed in a perfect 212-212 tie, the rare issue that divides Congress evenly — but not along party lines. Civil libertarians on both sides of the aisle argued that it would help cure potential Fourth Amendment issues with the status quo, while national security hawks in each coalition said that it would slow down law enforcement, potentially impeding critical investigations into thwarting urgent attacks.

Now that Section 702 is up for renewal again, with its most recent authorization set to lapse on Friday, we can also see another familiar facet of these establishment/anti-establishment issues coming into play: where you stand depends on where you sit. As it turns out, for many American politicians, whether or not they are reflexively anti-government seems to depend a lot on whether their party controls the government.

President Trump himself was once a leading critic of Section 702, an outgrowth of his skepticism of the intelligence apparatus that carried out investigations of him in the past. “KILL FISA,” Trump urged Republicans from his Biden-era wilderness in 2024. Now that he leads the intelligence apparatus, however, Trump has urged the GOP to renew Section 702 without any changes, which he has framed as a humble act of sacrifice on his part.

“While parts of FISA were illegally and unfortunately used against me in the Democrats’ disgraceful Witch Hunt and Attack in the RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA Hoax, and perhaps would be used against me in the future, I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country!” Trump wrote in April.

Many GOP lawmakers have followed suit: for example, House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) wrote last year that Congress should pass a warrant requirement as part of the next FISA renewal, but has now reversed himself to push for the clean reauthorization that Trump has called for.

However, other members of the House GOP right flank have held firm, uniting with Democrats — who, even before the Pulte appointment, now have many more opponents of Section 702 reauthorization in their ranks than during the Biden era — to defeat two April attempts by Speaker Johnson to extend the surveillance tool, before both parties agreed on the short-term extension that is set to lapse this week. Seven Senate Republicans then sided with Democrats to block a procedural vote in the Senate on advancing FISA renewal as well.

As part of the 2024 Section 702 reauthorization, Democrats and Republicans ended up agreeing on 56 bipartisan reforms, which the FBI has said led to a dramatic drop in the number of Americans who its agents searched for in the Section 702 database. The two parties were once again discussing various reforms, before Trump threw a wrench into the process with the Pulte appointment.

Unless a short-term patch is approved by Friday night, the Section 702 authority is poised to expire — with the asterisk that the FISA court has already approved use of Section 702 through March 2027, which means the authority will technically persist until then, instead of going completely dark this weekend. (However, it will have much less secure legal footing, which means tech companies could refuse to comply when the government demands they hand over communications.)

Any resolution of the dispute will likely depend on Trump naming a more conventional DNI, though that will only punt the broader questions about Section 702 for a few more years, not answer them. As both party platforms on national security continue to morph, with anti-establishment voices appearing to gain a bigger foothold on both sides, it is possible that the absence of any Trump personnel spats will make the next Section 702 fight even more contentious, not less.

The truth is, the Trump-specific fights (and Trump’s unique power to keep his party in lockstep) are covering over the most interesting divides on FISA, uniting each party and pushing them both back to their corners. It’s the next reauthorization debate that might split the two coalitions apart, dredging up one of the few issues that so comprehensively divides both parties.

Maine’s Senate primaries are tomorrow, but we already know the outcome of both races. Incumbent Susan Collins, who is running for a sixth term, is set to win the Republican primary; Democrat Graham Platner will be nominated to challenge her.

I rarely write much about primary contests that are so lacking in suspense, but for Maine, I will make an exception, both because it is one of the key states that will decide control of the Senate this November — and because of the sheer amount of controversy swirling around Platner.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that an ex-girlfriend of Platner’s, Lyndsey Fifield, alleged that Platner was sometimes “physically threatening” towards her, especially after drinking, “leaving her shaken and sometimes afraid.” Fifield said that Platner “regularly grabbed her by the shoulders — sometimes hard enough to leave marks — and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.”

During another argument, Fifield recounted, “he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was ‘calm.’” Fifield eventually fell asleep inside the room. Fifield works professionally in Republican politics, including past stops at the Heritage Foundation and Nikki Haley’s 2024 presidential campaign.

In interviews with the Times, two other ex-girlfriends of Platner’s also raised concerns about his behavior, while three more described him positively. Fifield’s allegations (which Platner denies) came after the revelation (which he admits) that his wife discovered that he had been sending sexually explicit texts to several women shortly after they were married. And after the controversy about his (now-covered) tattoo, which resembled (unknowingly, he has said) a Nazi symbol. And after his past Reddit posts were unearthed, showing him blaming women for being raped and mocking a Purple Heart recipient.

Here are eight thoughts on the Platner situation:

#1: I do not know whether Fifield’s allegations are true. The Times spoke with friends of hers who confirmed that her relationship with Platner was “emotionally volatile,” but were unable to corroborate the physical altercations she described. (Fifield said she did not tell anyone about them at the time, and did not expect they could be corroborated.)

I do know that Democrats, in the past, have run with allegations of sexual misconduct no matter their level of corroboration, such as Christine Blasey Ford’s claims against Brett Kavanaugh, for which there were no eyewitnesses or anyone who had been told about them at the time — and, of course, that Republicans (who are now taking the allegations against Platner on faith) dismissed the allegations against Kavanaugh on those grounds. This does not mean that the claims against Platner, or Kavanaugh, are false or true. But it does speak to a bipartisan relationship with allegations of sexual misconduct that seems to be largely situational, without coherent standards: when confronted with allegations that lack corroboration, both parties appear to judge a case almost entirely based on their previous opinion of the alleged perpetrator.

#2: This means that there is no longer any political home for “believe all women” as a mantra, although wasn’t that true already? It’s not as if Tara Reade’s allegations against Joe Biden (which also lacked corroboration) gained much purchase in 2020.

Still, you can see the awkwardness of this transition playing out, as some Democrats continue to embrace Platner while also saying they believe Fifield. “I think he should apologize. I believe what he did was wrong, was misogynistic, was toxic or volatile,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who held a rally with Platner on Friday, told NBC News. “I know he’s ashamed of it and I certainly think it would be appropriate to apologize and say how he now understands why it’s important to stand up to a misogynistic culture.”

“I believe her,” Khanna said even more directly, speaking to CBS News about Fifield.

The issue being, of course, that Platner has denied Fifield’s allegations, which means Khanna is essentially saying that Platner should apologize (and feels shame) for something Platner insists did not occur. It is hard for these stances to co-exist. If Khanna believes Fifield, does it bother him that Platner doesn’t? Does he think Platner is lying? Does he mind that, presumably, no apology is forthcoming, even for something that Khanna himself views to be a credible allegation of physical aggression?

#3: Even if no one but Platner and Fifield know the truth about the allegations of aggression, can we all agree that Platner is almost certainly being dishonest about the tattoo?

I will be honest here: I consider myself to be fairly well-informed about history — though I am not a “World War II buff,” as Platner has apparently been since he was a teenager — but if I had seen the below image of a Totenkopf at a tattoo parlor (or on someone’s body) before this Senate campaign, I would not have recognized it as a Nazi symbol and probably would have assumed (as Platner said he did) that it was a skull-and-crossbones. Maybe that’s an embarrassing oversight on my part, but it’s the truth.

For that reason, I am willing to believe that Platner also didn’t recognize the symbol when he put it on his body, on a night of drinking in 2007 while in the Marine Corps. But it does not seem possible that Platner went the next two decades without recognizing the symbol — if for no other reason than CNN has reported that Platner literally replied to a Reddit post about the Totenkopf in 2019 and noted in his response that U.S. service members sometimes use similar symbols.

On top of that, Fifield not only told the Times that Platner would refer to the tattoo as “my Totenkopf” (and that he and other members of his unit specifically selected the symbol because they viewed themselves as a “death unit” like the SS), but also shared texts that she sent to her friends last summer (months before Platner says he was aware of the tattoo) saying that he “has a Nazi tattoo on his chest.”

Platner says he did not know what the symbol was until late last year, but what are the odds that his ex-girlfriend would have been aware of it but never told him, or that he commented on a thread about the symbol seven years ago but didn’t realize it was on his chest? (“Well, she certainly didn’t send that text to me. So whoever she sent it to and was talking to, that’s — I can’t say why, but I will say that I certainly didn’t know,” was Platner’s defense when asked about Fifield’s text by MSNOW.)

It seems fairly likely to me (especially since she has texts as evidence) that Fifield is telling the truth about the tattoo (at least about him knowing what it was in the intervening years), and that Platner is not telling the truth about the tattoo. That doesn’t necessarily mean Fifield is telling the truth about her other allegations, or that Platner is not telling the truth about the other allegations, but it is a telling sign.

#4: As I wrote before the latest allegations against Platner, it is then up to every Maine voter to decide where their line is for unacceptable behavior, and whether the allegations against Platner place him on the other side of it, just as Texas voters will have to do the same regarding the allegations against Ken Paxton.

Do they believe the allegations against Platner? If not, why not? If so, are they disqualifying? If not, would they feel the same if there was an “R” next to his name? Is there a line at which he would lose your support? Is their calculation changed, on the one hand, by the fact that this race could decide control of the Senate? Is it changed, on the other, by the fact that Susan Collins is a moderate who voted to convict Donald Trump after his second impeachment — the sort of Republican whose defeat Democrats often mourn, and who they often say the entire party should be more like?

Every voter will have to decide these questions for themselves. This question of whether to embrace unsavory personal qualities in the name of preferable policy outcomes is the same calculation many Republicans have been performing in regards to Donald Trump for years (although it has been strange to see some Democrats suggest that it is a phenomenon that started with Trump, or that his candidacy is when voters started overlooking allegations of sexual misconduct: Bill Clinton, anyone?)

Considering all that has been alleged against Trump, it is certainly hard to take seriously comments like this one by RNC Chairman Joe Gruters, responding to the Platner allegations (“Every single Democrat needs to come out and condemn this, or they are complicit. Full stop”), though it also becomes harder to take seriously Democratic calls that Republicans abandon Paxton.

#5: I can’t say how Maine’s voters will perform these calculations. There is obviously a sizable faction of Maine Democrats who have been willing to support Collins in the past, which might mean that they will be willing to do so again when confronted with a candidate with so many vulnerabilities. But there is also reason to believe that these same Democrats might be done giving leeway to Collins, in a year that is expected to be so favorable to Democrats and when the Republican president’s approval rating is so low.

I’ll tell you one thing: although I am normally a relative defender of polling (see here after 2022 and here after 2024), I make an exception for Maine, one state that pollsters just do not seem to have cracked. The most famous example is Collins overperforming her polling by 12 points (!) in 2020, but as Nate Silver points out, Collins also overperformed her polls by eight points in 2014 and seven points in 2008.

It’s entirely possible that pollsters have finally figured out Maine this year, but considering how much Collins tends to overperform by, I won’t be placing bets on it. This is a case where I just won’t be watching polling much either way: I’ve been burned too many times before. We’re flying blind. (The RealClearPolitics average currently shows Platner with a 7-point edge.)

#6: Out of all of this, the greatest mystery for me remains how Platner emerged from nowhere to become the presumptive nominee in one of the cycle’s marquee Senate races.

Or, not “nowhere,” exactly. Platner has marketed himself as a working-class oysterman, though it does seem there are some holes in that story. Platner came from wealth: his grandfather was a renowned architect who designed the Windows of the World restaurant that once sat atop the World Trade Center, as well as a brand of pricy chairs that was beloved by Donald Trump; the candidate himself attended the prestigious Hotchkiss School, although he was expelled. Also complicating his story as an oysterman, on his campaign financial disclosure form, the only significant compensation he reported from his oyster business came from a restaurant owned by his mother. His parents paid $200,000 of his $205,000 home.

His sudden rise appears to have been facilitated by Fight Agency, a political consultancy whose leaders count Zohra Mamdani, John Fetterman, and Ruben Gallego as past clients. According to Politico, Fight heard about Platner through a network of “union officials, community organizers and grassroots progressives”; they are the reason why a political unknown was able to launch his campaign with a slickly produced video and a profile in the New York Times.

We also know that Platner’s parents are active in local Democratic politics, including as donors, per the Times, and that he spent time in D.C. working as a bartender on Capitol Hill and socializing with various political operatives (including, on the Republican side, Fifield).

How he got onto Fight Agency’s radar and became a Senate candidate in the first place is still somewhat hazy to me, although the fact that he was able to catch on so quickly once he was in the race remains an impressive political feat, speaking to his talents as well as to the very real frustrations many Democrats feel towards their party establishment.

#7: Speaking of, what is Janet Mills doing? The 78-year-old governor ran a lackluster campaign against Platner before eventually exiting the race — only to reappear last week by saying, “People have the impression that I ‘withdrew’ or ‘dropped out,’ but I simply suspended active campaigning. I am still on the ballot.”

What? Was Mills telling people to vote for her? Is she still running against Platner? If nominated, would she return to the race? Like her whole campaign, it wasn’t exactly clear. If Mills had made a comment like that in the last few weeks, and then started aggressively campaigning against Platner, it’s possible that she could have stopped him from winning the Democratic nomination. But her vague comments, matched with no real return to the campaign trail, are the definition of “too little, too late.”

However, since Mills will be on the ballot, as she said, it will be interesting to see what percentage of the vote she gets tomorrow as a zombie candidate. If she receives a significant chunk of protest votes, it could raise pressure on Platner to drop out. According to Maine law, after he wins the Tuesday primary, Platner could withdraw by July 13 and be replaced by a nominee chosen by state Democratic officials. There is no sign he plans to do that, or would have much incentive to (from his perspective, why get out when he has even odds of winning and doesn’t feel much allegiance to the party?), but that is the theoretical escape route.

#8: The fact that Democratic primary voters didn’t have much of a choice for a key Senate seat beyond a septuagenarian governor and a scandal-plagued outsider obviously doesn’t speak well of the Maine Democratic Party. I thought about writing a piece comparing the Maine Democratic Senate field and the California Democratic gubernatorial field — another blue state with a long list of Democratic elected officials, but seemingly none anyone was excited about — but the truth is, the contexts are very different.

In Maine, it’s not really a question of available talent, it’s just that most of the credible candidates were afraid to go up against Collins, so they ran for governor instead (that primary field is packed), or liked her enough that they didn’t want to run against her, in the case of Jared Golden, the moderate Democrat in a Trump-won district who once worked on Collins’ staff. And that’s how the party ended up with one establishment favorite and one outsider, and then once the establishment candidate barely campaigned and never caught fire, just the latter.

To his supporters, Platner’s outsider status is obviously part of the draw — and it certainly differentiates him from those who have gone up (and failed) against Collins in the past — although the thing about running for city council and then state legislature and then House and then Senate is that it means you are repeatedly and comprehensively vetted along the way, as we are now watching happen in real-time.

Approximately 364 days out of the year, the modern Senate is highly structured and predictable.

The 365th day is when they have a vote-a-rama. (Yes, it’s really called that.)

Let me try to explain how the Senate ended up with this bizarre, hours-long ritual, which I was inside the chamber to watch on Thursday.

The Congressional Budget Act of 1974 was the law that set up the federal budget process. It envisioned Congress passing two budget resolutions each year, which would serve as blueprints laying out the topline levels of what the federal government would spend. The first crack at a budget resolution (which would be advisory in nature) would be passed in the spring; then the second (which would actually be binding) would be passed in the fall.

But, of course, there was always the possibility that fiscal circumstances would change between the two resolutions. Lawmakers needed a way to efficiently bridge any potential gaps between the advisory and binding budgets — so the 1974 law set up a process by which the chamber could pass a bill alongside the second budget resolution, to make changes to any laws that had been passed since the first budget resolution that deviated from the new spending target.

Most bills in the Senate are subject to unlimited debate unless 60 senators vote to invoke “cloture” (this is what’s known as the “filibuster” rule). But for this one bill, called a “reconciliation” bill because it would be reconciling the two budget resolutions, the Congressional Budget Act set a hard 20-hour limit on debate. 60 senators wouldn’t be needed to force a final vote; one would take place automatically after 20 hours of debate, since the framers of the 1974 law imagined that this bill would just be for minor changes, the type of thing that wouldn’t require unlimited debate. Just this once, a bill would be able to advance with the support of just 51 senators, instead of 60.

To make a long story short, Congress quickly gave up trying to pass two budget resolutions a year. (In fact, they hardly ever even pass one budget resolution as part of the annual spending process anymore.) But the reconciliation process remained in the law, a relic of a previous era of (much more precise) budgeting, but one that still allowed for bills to be advanced with just a simple majority — a powerful weapon as filibusters became more and more common.

Over time, the reconciliation process (originally intended to cut spending that had been passed in excess of Congress’ agreed-upon goals) has been used to pass some of the most expensive signature initiatives of recent presidents, like the final parts of Obamacare, the 2017 Trump tax cuts, the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act under Biden, and the One Big Beautiful Bill last year. I guarantee you that if you asked almost anyone in Washington, they wouldn’t be able to tell you what the reconciliation process is actually supposed to be reconciling (although now you can!). But they know that, in a world where 60 votes are hard to scrounge together for partisan priorities, reconciliation is how slim majorities get their biggest policies accomplished.

For a long time, there was still a firm wall between the annual appropriations process (through which the two parties fund the government in a bipartisan way, at a 60-vote threshold) and the reconciliation process (which majority parties use to pass their partisan add-on priorities). That wall began breaking during the Biden era, and has now fully collapsed. Over the course of the last several months, Democrats have refused to fund the immigration enforcement agencies ICE and CBP through the regular appropriations process, so Republicans are now using the reconciliation process to fund the agencies in a party-line vote.

At about 4:50 a.m. this morning, the Senate passed the resulting Secure America Act, which would fund the two agencies for the rest of President Trump’s term, bypassing the regular appropriations process. (ICE would be given $31 billion through 2029; CBP would be given $13 billion.)

Why in the wee hours of the morning? Because there’s one more detail I didn’t mention. The “cloture” process that is normally used to shut off debate in the Senate (at a 60-vote threshold) also cuts off the amendment process for a bill. But because debate over reconciliation bills ends naturally, without going through the cloture process, there’s no way for majority parties to avoid amendment votes on a reconciliation measure.

So the majority party gains a powerful way to pass legislation. But the price is that they have to let the minority offer whatever amendments they want, a freedom that is normally tightly restricted. It’s the one day a year that the Senate cosplays as an open legislative body. In Washington, this rare amendment free-for-all is known as a vote-a-rama. (Outside of the two vote-a-ramas it has held for reconciliation, the Senate has allowed amendment votes on only three bills this year, out of the 100+ it has passed.)

Yesterday’s vote-a-rama took 26 amendment votes and 18 hours. Hanging over all of it was President Trump’s recent announcement of a $1.776 billion fund to be disbursed to his allies who argue that the Biden administration “weaponized” the government against them, potentially including those who were prosecuted for participating in the January 6th riot.

Normally, this is the sort of thing that senators from both parties would grumble about, but never be forced to vote on. But because Trump announced the fund right in the middle of the reconciliation process — the one time when anyone can force a vote on the Senate floor — he created the possibility that the vote-a-rama would be used to rein in the “anti-weaponization” fund.

So, just to sum up: We have a process that was created to make technical changes but has ballooned into a powerful legislative tool, completely accidentally. It isn’t normally used to fund regular agencies like ICE, but because the minority party refused to, it’s being used for that purpose this year. Because of a quirk buried inside an already quirky process, when the majority party uses it, the minority party can force votes on any amendments they want. And because it just so happened that Trump announced his “anti-weaponization” fund right as this process was kicking off, the Senate was actually going to have to vote on it — an accident of timing built on top an accident built on top an accident.

Before the vote-a-rama began, because there were so many GOP senators who were angry about the fund, there was significant talk of a coming “Republican revolt” against the president: a dramatic moment when Republicans would support a Democratic amendment undoing the “anti-weaponization” fund, which would have been one of the most significant moments of GOP legislators standing up to Trump this term.

Spoiler alert: that moment never came to pass. I spent all of Thursday at the Capitol, watching up-close as the promised “Republican revolt” started out with some momentum, but slowly fizzled as the day went on. Here’s what I saw:

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As America approaches its 250th birthday, I’ll be writing a series of pieces taking a step back, looking at our political system and ways to improve it. This morning, I share my biggest-picture idea for a political reform that could increase trust and transparency in government. — Gabe

Tom Kean won the Republican nomination to serve another two years as the U.S. Representative from New Jersey’s 7th district last night. Congratulations, Mr. Congressman. Normally, when a candidate wins an election, they hold a victory party. Kean didn’t, nor did he deliver remarks in any other setting after the results were announced.

This would be surprising if it weren’t for the fact that Kean, a sitting congressman, has been missing for almost three months. He last voted on the House floor on March 5; he has missed 104 votes since then. His office has barely explained his disappearance and reporters who have searched for him have come up empty. Reportedly, not even the House Republican leadership knows where Kean is. Kean issued his first statement on the matter yesterday, saying that he will “transition from virtual work to in person work within a matter of weeks,” at which point he pledged to be “completely transparent as to the nature of my medical condition.” Until then, nothing. Kean continues to receive his $174,000 salary and to run for re-election.

The weird thing is, this isn’t even the first time something like this has happened recently. In July 2024, retiring Rep. Kay Granger (R-TX) mysteriously stopped showing up for House votes; she would never cast another vote again for the rest of her five months in office. It was later revealed that Granger had been living at a memory care facility in Texas; her son eventually confirmed that she had been “having some dementia issues.” She continued drawing her taxpayer-funded salary the entire time, without ever disclosing her medical issues or offering a public explanation of her absence.

There isn’t much the House can do in a situation like this. No one can force a member to resign; there is no way for voters to recall them. Technically, any member who hasn’t publicly declared that they are absent due to “the sickness of himself or of some member of his family” is supposed to have their pay docked, though this is never done in practice. It is also hard to imagine two-thirds of the House agreeing to expel a colleague because of a medical absence — it would surely be seen as impolite — and the House Ethics Committee, the chamber’s internal accountability arm, does not generally probe these sorts of issues.

Which means someone who is paid almost $200,000 annually can simply fall off the face of the Earth, without explaining it to his constituents or his leadership, depriving an entire congressional district of a working House member.

This is far from the only way that Congress fails to police itself. Here is the lede of a story yesterday from CNN:

After the White House Correspondents’ Dinner several years ago, a congressman asked a young female staffer from another office to have a threesome. A few months later, he pulled the staffer onto his lap and tried to kiss her.

In 2023, a male chief of staff messaged a former congressional intern looking for a job and propositioned her sexually, writing that he would “own” her and offering to Venmo her money if she complied.

A member of Congress texted a senior leadership staffer in 2017 asking the color of her underwear while she was in his sight line.

Gross, gross, and gross. None of these three women reported their experiences to the Ethics Committee, CNN said, because they knew it involved a convoluted process that can take years to wind through, and even then, often ends in no punishment for the member but consequences for the victim, since their names are often released, which can make it difficult for them to find another job in politics.

On Capitol Hill, one source told CNN, the Ethics panel is known as the “member protection service,” because of its reputation for treating fellow members of Congress with kid gloves. (Especially in an era of slim majorities, members of the panel are often incentivized not to blow the whistle on their same-party colleagues, if it could lead to a resignation and cause vote-counting problems for their leadership. This then becomes a non-aggression pact between the two parties.) It has been 18 years since the Senate Ethics Committee punished anyone within its jurisdiction and 15 years since the House Ethics Committee has recommended a censure, even though plenty of censurable conduct has taken place since then.

Across all three branches of government, the internal accountability mechanisms that exist are broken.

After Watergate, inspectors general were installed across the executive branch to investigate agency misconduct. But IGs can be fired by the president, and Trump purged 17 of them immediately upon entering office. There is also no IG position for the White House itself, which leaves no one to investigate, say, the president’s 3,711 stock trades in the first quarter of this year, many of which involved companies with business before the government. The White House is supposed to receive conflict-of-interest guidance from the Office of Government Ethics, the head of which Trump has also fired and replaced on a temporary basis with a succession of his own close aides, rendering it toothless.

In the judicial branch, the Supreme Court adopted an ethics code in 2023, but it came with no way (and no one) to enforce it. Lower court judges are at least subject to something of an internal ethics process led by a body called the Judicial Conference, but it leaves much to be desired. Just last month, a Judicial Conference committee released a report finding that a district court judge had engaged in sexual intercourse with a law enforcement officer … in the judge’s chambers … during business hours … while the judge’s staff could hear … and lied when they were confronted about it.

Despite all this, the Judicial Conference affirmed another panel’s decision that the judge should only have to write letters of apology to their clerks, and should not even be publicly named (much less punished), in part because their fellow judge “had otherwise rendered exemplary service to the court.” This despite the fact that the judge was loudly having sex in their office while on the clock working for American taxpayers. The word “otherwise” is doing a lot of work there. (Media reports have since identified the judge as Eleanor Ross, an Obama appointee based in Atlanta.)

The three branches are supposed to investigate themselves, and each other. But the internal mechanisms often fail because of excessive chumminess in the legislative and judicial branches (no one wants to investigate a colleague and, too often, perpetrators of misconduct are given brownie points for “otherwise…exemplary service”) and because the president can fire anyone who investigates him or his appointees in the executive branch. Congress also regularly abdicates its responsibility to investigate the other branches, generally letting the judicial branch work its problems out for itself and only expending real resources probing the executive branch when the president hails from another party. And neither side now trusts the executive branch to properly prosecute public officials, with allegations of “weaponization” looming over both the Biden and Trump administrations.

It’s time for a fourth branch of government that can hold the other three accountable.

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This Accountability Branch could house the inspectors general that are currently arrayed, without much job security, across the executive branch. A White House inspector general could be added to investigate the president and his closest aides, as well as a Congressional Inspector General, who could offer legislative aides and constituents a safe and reliable way to blow the whistle on congressional misconduct, and a Judicial Branch Inspector General, who could apply the same scrutiny to federal judges and justices.

These IGs would not have prosecutorial power, but — because the prosecutorial process is clearly not working when it comes to public officials, with the Justice Department either over- or under-prosecuting depending on whether the party affiliation of the subject matches the party of the president — there could be another outfit in the fourth branch, a permanent and independent Office of Special Counsel, that is charged with prosecuting any referrals related to current or former executive branch officials, members of Congress, or judges.

This way, any allegations against officials who are supposed to be working in the public trust can be comprehensively scrutinized by independent examiners, whether it be sexual harassment or financial misconduct or members who are disappearing without explanation. If these misdeeds rise to the level of potential criminality, a Special Counsel would automatically kick in, so the decision to prosecute a Democrat or a Republican isn’t left to a Democratic or Republican administration.

Clearly, what we’ve been trying — hoping that officials will police themselves — has not been working. A big change is necessary to ensure that true accountability is brought to our government.

Who would watch the watchmen? Fourth branch officials would not be completely free agents; they would still be presidentially nominated and Senate confirmed (for terms longer than one presidency, maybe 10 or 14 years), but unlike the current officials who carry out these functions, they could not be removed by the president and they would not be colleagues of the people they are charged with investigating. (They could still be impeached and removed by a supermajority of Congress.) No more executive branch officials investigating executive branch officials, congressmen investigating congressmen, or judges investigating judges: real accountability can only be meted out by actors with some measure of independence. (Full independence breeds excessive power, which is why they would still be subject to the confirmation process. But the current investigators are plainly not independent enough, and provisions could be made to ensure the positions are filled if the political branches refuse to fill them.) You could also have a Fourth Branch Inspector General, just in case allegations of misconduct arise against the examiners as well.

In the short-term, if there are — as I suspect — many incidents of wrongdoing hiding under the surface that the Fourth Branch would begin to uncover and bring out into the open, it is possible that trust in the government would decline. (Though, at 17%, it is not possible to go much lower.) But, over the long run, as these violations are brought into the light, and as Americans see that they are actually being dealt with — not just allowed to fester — those trends might start to reverse. The Fourth Branch could then begin to restore Americans’ confidence in their government, since voters would finally be sure that official misconduct would be addressed, not just swept under the rug or answered with a slap on the wrist.

As we speak, across the government, there is a sitting Republican congressman accused of breaking campaign finance rules and threatening to blackmail an ex by releasing her nude videos, a sitting Democratic congressman accused of making advances toward two interns, a sitting Democratic congressman and sitting Republican congressman both accused of having affairs with staffers, an (unnamed, of course) federal judge who has copped to creating an abusive workplace, not to mention a president who appears to be engaged in all manner of self-dealing — and those are just a handful of the cases that we know about. In each one, there is no expectation that the current ethics processes will succeed in quashing the alleged wrongdoing, which means these officials will continue to serve with minimal scrutiny and no punishment.

There might be some concern that the creation of a Fourth Branch would deprive Congress of its oversight function — but, really, what kind of oversight has Congress been performing to this point? When Congress is controlled by the same party as the White House, it holds no investigative hearings, and when Congress is controlled by a different party than the White House, it holds hearings that are often more publicity-fueled circuses than serious fact-finding missions.

Neither extreme is ideal; it would be much better to have a group of apolitical officials who can carry out sober and serious investigations. Congress can still continue to hold legislative and appropriations hearings, and could still pass new laws to respond to the misconduct uncovered by the Fourth Branch, but would much really be lost by having fewer “oversight” hearings where lawmakers bloviate for the cameras and more investigations carried out by people who are actually interested in arriving at a full version of the facts?

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Once you accept the premise that three branches are not enough, there are jobs you could potentially place under the Fourth Branch, to assume functions that the three existing branches have simply shown themselves to be incapable of independently performing.

In the coming weeks, the Supreme Court is set to rule on a series of cases on the president’s ability to fire heads of what we typically call “independent agencies,” though we all understand these agencies are parked (somewhat awkwardly) within the executive branch. The justices are expected to allow the president to fire members of agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, under the logic that there can be no limits on the president’s power over his own branch, while blocking him from firing a governor of the Federal Reserve, under the logic that … well, it’s not exactly clear.

I think it’s possible to think that the Constitution makes the president the head of the executive branch, which means he is able to fire members of that branch, and to think that 237 years of experience has taught us that might not be working well. Some of these agencies, especially the Fed, could be placed within the Fourth Branch, to insulate the agencies from the president but in a completely constitutional way (since the Constitution would have to be amended to create this new branch anyway).

This would lead to some difficult decisions about what would stay in and what would stay out. Ideally, from my perspective, the test would be “is this something we want to be responsive to political dynamics.” This test might call for splitting up some of the independent agencies as currently constituted. It is reasonable to want trade or communications regulations to be in the hands of political actors who voters can either re-elect or defeat; we want these policy decisions to be responsive to the electoral will. But individual decisions over applying these policies to, say, corporate mergers or network licensing? Maybe those are roles we do want segregated from the political system.

Similarly, nearly all experts agree that setting interest rates should be responsive to the long-term fluctuations of the economic cycle, not the short-term fluctuations of electoral politics: that was the whole point of the Federal Reserve in the first place. Campaign finance oversight, currently performed by a Federal Election Commission that has been idle for upwards of a year, also comes to mind as a function that inherently suffers from being overseen by political officials, due to the massive and inherent conflict of interest (not unlike, on the state level, legislators who are allowed to draw their own districts). You could also imagine the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ in-house auditor, or the various statistics agencies (like the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau) as prime candidates for Fourth Branch treatment.

We would want to be careful about this, of course, in order to avoid creating a too-large class of bureaucrats completely detached from electoral accountability. Policy on health care and climate change and guns should change with administrations; you might not agree with every change, but as voters in a democracy, we should have a say over them.

But there are some tasks, like setting interest rates or reporting joblessness or public-sector prosecutions, for which there is very little democratic advantage in having them be politically controlled. In fact, the democracy suffers when these tasks are influenced by political actors who can use these levers to meddle in elections and reduce the information or choices offered to the voters, by skewing the state (or appearance) of the economy or by trying to imprison political rivals. It is only this limited group of tasks, which largely don’t involve policymaking and mostly involve checking policymakers (or neutrally applying the policy they set) — and which the political branches have proven themselves unable to independently conduct — that should be constitutionally set aside and freed from political control.

There’s one more issue that has come up frequently in recent months that our current system cannot answer, but that the Fourth Branch could. We have standing doctrine in our country, which is generally a good thing: it means people can only sue over things that harm them. If I write something in this newsletter you don’t like, you can’t just sue me because you’re unhappy. You would need to show you’ve been injured by it, to ensure that the courts aren’t bogged down by frivolous lawsuits.

But, once again, there is a narrow band of cases that this status quo leaves us without a fix for, and it’s been rearing its head in different ways for months now. If the president refuses to enforce a law (like, say, a TikTok ban), oftentimes no one will have standing to challenge his illegal action. Ditto if he starts a war without congressional approval. Or if he sets up a fund to pay his allies. There could also be a Fourth Branch Solicitor General; if a certain number of lawmakers believe the president is ignoring a law passed by Congress, they could petition this figure to review the case and, if he agrees, sue the president in court, to ensure illegal actions can be stopped even when they lack an obvious plaintiff.

The idea of independent officials reviewing the rest of the government isn’t novel. It is embedded in the logic of inspectors general, even if these figures haven’t been independent in practice, creating the need for this reform. You can also see this understanding elsewhere around the globe. In Taiwan, for example, there are five branches (or “yuan”) of government: the Executive Yuan, the Legislative Yuan, the Judicial Yuan, the Examination Yuan (which oversees entrance into the civil service), and finally the Control Yuan (to which citizens can submit complaints about government misconduct, and which can then investigate public officials and ultimately censure them or initiate impeachment proceedings against them, and propose other remedies to discovered wrongdoing).

We need a Control Yuan of our own. There are things that the current three branches of government are simply not equipped to do, especially when it comes to policing their own misconduct. Some of the fixes we have tried to bridge this gap have either been ineffective, like inspectors general or internal ethics bodies, or of questionable constitutionality, like “independent” agencies. It is time to amend the Constitution to create a Fourth Branch that can police the others and restore trust in government by bringing misconduct out of the shadows and, finally, into the sunlight.

Good morning and happy Monday! June is officially here. The year is a bit more than 40% over. The 2026 midterms are 155 days away.

At the beginning of a new month, I thought it would be a good time to take a step back and take stock of some of the storylines I’m tracking, to give a sense of what to watch in June:

Waiting for a peace deal

The Iran war has been in a state of ceasefire for longer (56 days) than it was in an active state of fighting (38 days), though a formal peace deal has yet to be inked, leaving the conflict in suspended animation.

Axios reported on Thursday that the two sides were nearing agreement on a “memorandum of understanding,” which would extend the ceasefire for 60 days — and call for “unrestricted” shipping through the Strait of Hormuz — while broader negotiations begin on Iran’s nuclear program. President Trump discussed the deal with his advisers in the Situation Room on Friday, and reportedly requested several edits, which have now been sent to Tehran.

The exact contents of the deal remain uncertain, as do Trump’s requested changes. Because of the leadership vacuum in Iran, it often takes some time for negotiating points to make their way through the government’s upper levels, which means it could be several days before the U.S. receives a response to Trump’s new offer, though officials say the talks are in their closing stages.

However, there still seem to be several sticking points just with the MOU, including over billions of dollars in Iranian funds that Tehran wants unfrozen and whether the deal would include a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon. (Israel has continued advancing in its deepest incursion into Lebanon in decades.) And that’s just the MOU. Discussions over the bigger questions about the future of Iran’s nuclear program, and of its existing stockpile of highly enriched uranium, haven’t even started yet.

The shaky state of ceasefire — both in the sense that a full peace deal appears to be ways off, and in that the ceasefire itself has been repeatedly violated, including in an exchange of fire over the weekend — ensures that the war will continue to hang over the Republican Party’s political prospects, especially if the Strait of Hormuz does not immediately reopen and it takes some time for gas prices to go down.

Trump’s approval rating has, for the moment, seemed to stabilize at just above 38%, around the record low from Trump’s first term and from Joe Biden’s term, as if there is an iron law that presidential approval ratings can dip to 38% but will never go below that mark. For now, at least, the bleeding seems to have stopped and the rating seems to be stagnating rather than declining — though, of course, that could always change, and 38% isn’t exactly an ideal level of support to be stuck at.

Congress is back!

The Senate returns to Washington today and the House returns tomorrow after a Memorial “Day” recess that suspiciously seems to have lasted more than a week.

Close readers will recall that lawmakers left town a bit dramatically, with Senate Republicans declining to advance Trump’s ICE funding bill because of concerns over his $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.” While Congress has been out of town, the fund has been paused by a federal judge, while another judge reopened the Trump/IRS suit it originated from (a move that could also potentially imperil the fund). However, these moves will likely not be enough to satisfy Senate Republicans, especially those in the “YOLO Caucus” who have called for legislatively imposed limits on the money.

It will be left to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to pick up the pieces in the days ahead, laboring to find a compromise that his conference can agree to, in order to both advance funding for immigration enforcement and rein in the anti-weaponization plan.

Another big deadline facing Congress is June 12, when a key government surveillance authority is set to expire, sparking internal tensions over an extension within the GOP. Lawmakers are also attempting to move forward with a housing bill, an aviation bill, and the farm bill — plus the House still has to vote on another resolution ending the Iran war, a vote that was postponed before recess because it appeared it had the votes to pass.

Primary season

Another big slate of primaries is set to take place tomorrow, including the closely watched California gubernatorial race and the Iowa Senate primary.

In California, a slew of heavy hitters like former Vice President Kamala Harris and Sen. Alex Padilla declined to run for governor, leaving behind a wide-open field that for a time was led by then-Rep. Eric Swalwell, until he was forced to flee the race as well. Under the state’s election system, the two top vote-getters — regardless of party — will advance to the general election in November. Polls currently show that those two contenders are most likely to be Democrat Xavier Becerra, the former congressman, Biden-era Secretary of Health and Human Services, and state attorney general, and Republican Steve Hilton, the former British political operative turned Fox News host.

A slew of other Democrats are in the next polling tier, including billionaire Tom Steyer and former Rep. Katie Porter, as is Republican sheriff Chad Bianco, all hoping to claw their way to one of the two tickets for advancement.

Meanwhile, in Iowa, Republican Sen. Joni Ernst is retiring and Rep. Ashley Hinson is on a glide path for the GOP nomination to succeed her. The Democratic primary has become a brawl between state Rep. Josh Turek (a moderate and champion Paralympic basketball player who is favored by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer) and state Sen. Zach Wahls (a fierce Schumer critic who has become the favorite of Elizabeth Warren and other progressives). The race has become a test of Democratic sentiment toward their party leaders nationwide.

Also coming up later this month: New York’s congressional primaries on June 23. In the state’s 10th congressional district, Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman is facing a primary challenge from former New York City comptroller Brad Lander in a contest that has been dominated by disputes over Israel. In the 12th district, state Reps. Micah Lasher and Alex Bores, Kennedy scion Jack Schlossberg, and Trump ally-turned-critic George Conway are squaring off in the Democratic primary to succeed longtime Rep. Jerry Nadler. In the 13th district, Congressional Hispanic Caucus chair Adriano Espaillat is in the fight of his political life against a democratic socialist 38 years his junior who’s backed by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Finally, on June 9, Democrats will hold a consequential primary where the outcome is pre-ordained — though members of the party wish it wasn’t — as the party is poised to nominate oysterman Graham Platner to take on Republican Sen. Susan Collins. Platner had been plagued by a trail of scandals already when news broke this weekend that he had exchanged sexual messages with multiple other women not long after marrying his wife, creating yet another controversy for the upstart candidate.

SCOTUS watch

If it’s June, it means the Supreme Court is about to become the center of the political world.

The justices typically release their biggest opinions of the term this month before adjourning for the summer. This year, we are waiting on rulings on President Trump’s birthright citizenship order and his ability to fire a Fed governor and other independent agency heads, as well as decisions on transgender sports bans, mail-in ballots, and laws that prohibit illegal drug users from possessing firearms.

So far, the justices are scheduled to release opinions every Thursday of the month, though additional opinion releases could be scheduled.

Will the justices rule on whether Trump can add his name to the Kennedy Center? That will have to wait ’till next term.

On November 6, 1991, President George H.W. Bush did something deeply patriotic.

Voters in Louisiana had gone to the polls a few weeks before, as part of the state’s unique election system, in which gubernatorial candidates of both parties compete against each other in a first-round election in October and then — if nobody fetches a majority — the top two vote-getters advance to a runoff in November.

Bush had been a strong supporter of the incumbent governor, Republican Buddy Roemer. But Roemer had been eliminated after the October round, when he finished third. Now, the runoff was looming and reporters wanted to know who had Bush’s support: the lead Democrat in the race, Edwin Edwards, or the remaining Republican.

Of course, Bush himself was a Republican, so you might not think it was much of a decision. But I haven’t yet told you who the Republican candidate who advanced to the runoff was. It was David Duke.

Yes, that David Duke: the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, who denied the Holocaust, had previously described himself as a Nazi, and called for Jews to be exterminated and for African-Americans to be returned to Africa. Now you see the issue.

Bush was about to leave on a trip for Rome when he was asked by a reporter if he would urge Louisianans to vote against Duke, his own party’s candidate. “Yes, strongly,” Bush responded.

He left no ambiguity about where he stood. “When someone asserts that the Holocaust never took place, then I don’t believe that person ever deserves one iota of public trust,” Bush said. “And when someone has so recently endorsed Nazism, it is inconceivable that such a person can legitimately aspire to a leadership role in a free society. And when someone has a long record, an ugly record, of racism and of bigotry, that record simply cannot be erased by the glib rhetoric of a political campaign.”

“So, I believe that David Duke is an insincere charlatan,” he concluded. “I believe he is attempting to hoodwink the voters of Louisiana, and I believe that he should be rejected for what he is and what he stands for.”

After boarding Air Force One, Bush went back to talk with journalists some more. A different reporter put the question to him even more directly: if he were a Louisianan, how would he vote? “Well, I would do what Buddy Roemer said,” the president replied. “Which was that he would end up voting for Edwards.”

Indeed, Roemer — the Republican incumbent — had said after being defeated in the first round that he would be casting his runoff ballot for Edwards, the Democrat, and encouraged his 412,000 voters to do the same. Edwards and Duke had drawn 34% and 31% of the first-round vote, respectively, so Roemer’s 27% had the power to decide the race.

When Edwards ultimately beat Duke in the runoff, 61% to 39%, Roemer’s support for Edwards was credited for helping push the Democrat over the finish line. Exit polls showed that 75% of Roemer voters heeded the governor’s urging and backed Edwards in the runoff; surveys also showed that this critical slice of voters were largely Bush devotees as well, which means the president’s harsh condemnation of Duke likely played a role. It was the definition of putting country before party.

I’m bringing all of this up because of this week’s Texas Senate primary runoff, in which the indicted-and-impeached state attorney general Ken Paxton defeated incumbent Sen. John Cornyn for the Republican nomination.

My aim here isn’t to equate Paxton with Duke. The two men are very different, as are their (alleged or confirmed) misdeeds. But Bush’s 1991 statements are an impressive example of a party leader clearly drawing a line of acceptable conduct and placing a member of his own party outside of it, even if it meant sacrificing political power for his party. I’m not here to express an opinion on whether Paxton belongs outside of that line as well. But you know who does have an opinion on that? John Cornyn. Or, at least, he did.

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Good morning! There was no newsletter on Monday for Memorial Day, but I still wanted to make sure you got three newsletters this week, so I’m doing an extra-special bonus mailbag edition for all subscribers.

There were two big questions I received that I wanted to tackle this morning: is Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” legal and is the IRS immunity his administration is claiming to be giving him actually binding?

I hope this will help clear up questions many of you sent in about the settlement. This newsletter is available to all subscribers, but this is a great example of the mailbag editions that are often sent out to paid subscribers on Fridays. If you like this one, and want to receive more of them, make sure to sign up to be a paid subscriber and you’ll get access to every mailbag column!

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Let’s dive in…

All the Anti-Weaponization Fund legal battles

Q: What can be done to stop the Trump “slush fund”? And who is doing it?

Ironically, at this point, it seems like the most likely way the Trump administration’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” could be curbed is through a piece of legislation that President Trump has been championing for months, the Republican party-line package to fund ICE and CBP.

Senate Republicans abruptly left town last week and postponed work on the package in order to give themselves more time to discuss how to address the Anti-Weaponization Fund in the bill. (If Republicans don’t add any restrictions, or even if they do, Democrats will force embarrassing votes on amendments relating to the fund, which the GOP is hoping to preempt.1) The GOP conversations on this are still underway, but MSNOW reports that options being discussed include “eliminating the program altogether, giving Congress more of a say over who’s appointed to the commission overseeing the fund, getting the judicial branch involved in the process, and creating concrete standards for eligibility to benefit from the fund.”

That last bit about creating specific standards could include prohibiting January 6th rioters who committed violence against police officers from accessing the funds.

Of course, whatever provision the GOP agrees to will have to bring together at least 50 out of the 53 Republican senators and 215 out of the 217 Republican House members, since this is being added to a bill that is poised to pass along party lines.2 That will not be an easy task, considering the range of opinions on the fund within the GOP. It’s also possible that the Senate GOP internally agrees on an amendment with restrictions, but then enough Republicans vote for a Democratic amendment to end the fund completely; that would then need to pass the House, where the GOP’s right flank could then have objections.

It’s going to make for a fascinating fight within the GOP — as one of the few times that a consensus has formed among Republican lawmakers that they should rein in President Trump, though it remains to be seen exactly how — which will resume in earnest when the Senate returns from recess on Monday.

Meanwhile, there are also several legal battles underway to try to challenge the Anti-Weaponization Fund in the courts.

There are a lot of potential legal issues at play here. Way back in February 2025, I wrote that one of the biggest obstacles to the second Trump administration (like in every administration) would be the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946, which prohibits federal agencies from acting in a way that is “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.” Modern presidential administrations (especially the move-fast-and-break-things Trump team) frequently try to act in an “arbitrary” and “capricious” manner, and then courts will ding them for it and undo the action.

Here, you could imagine challenges against the Anti-Weaponization Fund arguing that it was “arbitrary” and “capricious” (basically, that the Justice and Treasury Departments rushed into this proposal, without going through a proper and transparent process) or that it was “not in accordance with law” (since there is no statute that creates the fund or empowers the Attorney General to appoint the commission that is being set up to oversee it).

The statute the Trump administration has pointed to is 28 U.S. Code § 2414, which created the Judgment Fund, the pot of money that is being used here, an unlimited appropriation set up by Congress in 1956 for the Attorney General to dip into whenever the DOJ enters into a settlement. However, the law says that it can be used either for “payment of final judgments rendered by a district court” (which this is not) or “compromise settlements of claims…for defense of imminent litigation or suits against the United States.”

That might sanction a settlement with Trump himself, who was suing the IRS in this case over the leaking of his tax returns. But January 6th rioters and other alleged victims of “weaponization” weren’t suing the IRS! The settlement itself says that it is also meant to resolve other lawsuits Trump had filed over the 2022 Mar-a-Lago raid and the Russia investigation, which is how it links itself to “other well-known examples of Lawfare and Weaponization” who could also bring lawsuits against the U.S. and therefore should be given relief through the $1.776 billion fund.

Will those count as “imminent litigation or suits against the United States”? That is another question the courts could decide. In addition, the Justice Department has said under previous administrations that money can only be drawn from the Judgment Fund for a settlement out of court if a monetary payment was likely to be ordered in court if the case had continued. Trump’s case against the IRS wasn’t exactly airtight, so you could imagine an argument over whether this settlement was actually one that a court was likely to order.

The list of legal hurdles goes on. The Appointments Clause of the Constitution requires that all “Officers of the United States” — a murky designation which has been interpreted to mean anyone who wields a lot of authority without someone directly supervising them — have to be confirmed by the Senate. The five commissioners who will oversee this fund will not be Senate-confirmed, but (per the settlement) they are given broad authority to hand out almost $2 billion in government funds. Does that raise an Appointments Clause problem?

Others have also pointed to Section 4 of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits the U.S. from paying “any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.” This was written after the Civil War to make sure the U.S. government didn’t repay the debts incurred by the Confederacy. I’m not sure that it applies here, not only because a court would have to determine that January 6th qualified as an “insurrection,” but also because the fund doesn’t really purport to be paying anyone back for their debts incurred as part of carrying out the Capitol riot itself. It is about paying rioters back for legal fees incurred once the government prosecuted them for January 6th. That’s a bit different (and, even if applied, would only stop the fund from aiding January 6th rioters, not undo it completely).

Either way, the issue won’t be finding a legal argument to make against the fund. It will be finding someone to make it. Remember, in the U.S., to bring a lawsuit, you need to prove that you have “standing”: that you have been directly injured by the thing you are challenging in court.

So far, three groups have filed lawsuits against the Anti-Weaponization Fund. They all use a mix of different legal arguments from those above to say the fund is illegal. Here’s who they are and how they argue that it affects them:

• Two police officers who defended the Capitol on January 6th, who argue that the fund “sends a clear and chilling message” that “those who enact violence in President Trump’s name will not just avoid punishment, they will be rewarded with riches,” and therefore injures them because it “increases the already sizeable risk of vigilante violence” that the two police officers face after testifying about January 6th.

• A watchdog group called CREW, who argue that they are injured because they routinely request government records to put together reports, draft complaints, and testify before Congress, and the way the fund is set up, it won’t let them do that, because the settlement didn’t require the fund to preserve its records.

• A January 6th prosecutor who was fired by the Trump administration, a California professor who was arrested in an ICE raid, the city of New Haven (which has been sued by the Trump administration as a sanctuary city), and the National Abortion Fund (whose member clinics have been protested at by defendants who were pardoned by Trump), who argue that they have been victims of weaponization, but they will not receive relief through the Anti-Weaponization Fund, and therefore that the fund is discriminating against them.

None of these are perfect lawsuits, and some of these arguments are a bit of a stretch. The strongest is probably those who allege that they are victims of weaponization who won’t receive relief — the only issue being, How do they know they won’t receive relief? They claim in their lawsuit that the funds will only go to Republicans, but the administration says that’s not true.

To be clear, I’m not saying that a fired January 6th prosecutor is going to be paid out by the Anti-Weaponization Fund. But it will be difficult to prove that in a court of law until they make a claim to the fund, and that claim is rejected or substantially delayed. Which means it might take some time before someone with meaningful standing emerges to sue the fund, although — who knows — it may already be congressionally overridden (or scaled down) by then.

IRS immunity?

Q: How influential will the DOJ ban on Trump audits be on any future corruption charges? Will it even be enforceable?

In addition to the aforementioned settlement, the DOJ also released an addendum by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche asserting that the U.S. is “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from prosecuting or pursuing any claims relating to tax returns filed by Trump, his family, their business, or other “related or affiliated individuals”

It’s hard to say how binding this will be. It probably won’t be possible to be tested until a future Democratic administration, which could try to bring tax charges against Trump, at which point he would surely sue and say the U.S. had violated its settlement agreement.

Then, the Democratic administration would probably try to argue that the settlement was illegally crafted. There are already a group of retired federal judges trying to make this argument, urging the judge in the original Trump/IRS lawsuit to reopen the case in order to investigate the legality of the settlement. They argue that lawsuits have to be “adversarial” — two parties actually fighting each other over something, not just colluding to bring about a certain outcome — and because Trump was suing his own government, this lawsuit was not.

That judge might not want to heed their urging to wade back into the case, but a Democratic administration could try to raise a similar point to argue that the lawsuit wasn’t adversarial, which means the whole underlying case was fake, which means the settlement is moot, which means a tax case against Trump could go forward.

President Donald Trump seems pleased about the outcome of last night’s Texas Republican Senate runoff.

“Congratulations to Ken Paxton on such a tremendous win, and to John Cornyn for having run a strong and powerful race but, more importantly, having had a truly great career,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “John will remain my friend for a long time to come, as we both watch Ken become a fantastic, common sense Senator, one who is respected by all.”

Cornyn was a 24-year incumbent who once served as the second-highest-ranking Senate Republican and, just last year, came within five votes of becoming Senate Majority Leader, one of the most powerful positions in Washington. As recently as 2020, he won the GOP primary for his seat by 64 percentage points.

But in the last six years, Cornyn helped negotiate the bipartisan 2022 gun control package following the Uvalde shooting in his state (earning a rebuke from the Texas GOP) and cast doubt on Trump’s ability to win the 2024 election. “I think President Trump’s time has passed him by,” Cornyn told reporters in 2023, adding: “I don’t think President Trump understands that when you run in a general election, you have to appeal to voters beyond your base.”

That was enough to fuel a primary challenge by Paxton, the Texas state attorney general with much stronger MAGA bona fides (while Cornyn was voting to certify the 2020 election, Paxton was bringing a case to the Supreme Court attempting to challenge the results). Senate Republicans spent months furiously lobbying Trump to endorse Cornyn, and the president reportedly had a Truth Social post drafted and ready to go lending the senator his support. But then a last-minute gambit by Paxton crusading for Trump’s signature election bill led Trump to give Paxton his “Complete and Total Endorsement” last week.

Paxton ended up trouncing Cornyn, 64% to 36%, in last night’s runoff.

It’s not hard to see why Trump feels strengthened by the result. It represents yet another Republican incumbent he has picked off, completing a revenge tour that has unseated five Indiana state senators, Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, and Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie.

And that’s just in the last three weeks. With Cornyn’s ouster, of the 52 Republicans who were in the Senate when Trump took office in 2017, only 22 are sure to be there still next year. John McCain died. Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, Richard Burr, and others retired. Cory Gardner was ousted in a general election. Cassidy and Cornyn were ousted in primaries. Trump will have succeeded in changing the face of the Senate GOP. The president is already eyeing incumbents to potentially challenge in primaries in 2028. (Watch out, Rand Paul.)

But there are two reasons to think that Trump’s feeling of triumph may be short-sighted.

Blexas?

If you created a dream Democratic opponent in a lab, it would be hard to do worse than Ken Paxton.

Indicted on securities fraud charges in 2015. Impeached for alleged bribery by his own party in 2023. His wife filed for divorce “on biblical grounds” (read: she says that he cheated on her) in 2025. Election denier and all-out MAGA acolyte.

At the beginning of this year, gamblers on Polymarket gave Republicans 75% odds of winning the Texas Senate race. Now, it’s plunged to 54%.

On the other side of the coin, Democratic nominee James Talarico isn’t exactly an ideal candidate either.

A pastor and state legislator who has sought to cloak Democratic stances in the language of Christianity, Talarico suffers from what one might call a Kamala Harris Problem: having made statements during the Peak Woke era of the early 2020s that he is trying to steer away from now, but which are still captured on video and in screenshots.

“God is non-binary” (which Talarico wrote on X in 2021) will be to the 2026 Texas Senate race what Harris’ support for sex-change surgery for transgender prisoners (the subject of one of Trump’s most effective ads) was to the 2024 presidential race. In the same time period, Talarico also said that “radicalized white men are the greatest domestic terror threat in our country” and boasted about having the first office in the Texas Capitol to “add pronouns to our official business cards.”

The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which fought bitterly against Paxton in the primary, is already signaling its strategy for November: ignoring their own nominee and going negative on Talarico. In a statement last night, the Senate GOP campaign arm blasted Talarico as a “radical leftist.” Talarico will surely use the mirror language to attack Paxton.

Moderate Republicans who backed Cornyn in the primary but are skeptical of Paxton may well decide the race; Talarico has already begun reaching out to them. “To Senator Cornyn’s supporters: you have a place in our campaign,” he wrote last night. That shows that he has learned, however belatedly, a valuable lesson from the senior senator from Texas: “When you run in a general election, you have to appeal to voters beyond your base.” We’ll see if Paxton internalizes the same.

I’m not here to tell you who will ultimately win the race. Democrats, of course, are running against history in Texas, which is the state out of all 50 that has gone the longest (32 years) without electing a Democrat statewide.

If Paxton loses to Talarico, especially when there was a much less vulnerable nominee on offer in Cornyn, that will obviously be a reason for Trump to rue the primary result he’s crowing about now. But even if Paxton falls short, his nomination could still be a drag on the GOP in less obvious ways as well.

Just the fact that the Texas seat is now competitive — even if Republicans ultimately win it — is a pain the party might not be able to afford in a potential “blue wave” year. Running campaigns in Texas, a state with almost 32 million residents, is expensive. Almost $130 million was spent in the Cornyn-Paxton contest, making it the most expensive Senate primary on record.1 And that was just the primary. If Republicans have to expend a similar sum to hold onto the seat in November, that means precious dollars will have to be diverted away from states like Maine, North Carolina, Ohio, and Alaska.

Paxton could theoretically still win his seat and lose the Senate for the GOP, if his campaign is costly enough that it drains resources from those other four states and helps tip them towards the Democrats. There are also several downballot House races in Texas where having Paxton at the top of the ticket could depress much-needed Republican turnout.

The worst-case scenario for Republicans is Paxton loses. But the best-case scenario, that he wins after a hard-fought race that makes life difficult for other candidates, isn’t exactly helpful either.

Cornyn unleashed

A new “YOLO caucus” is emerging on Capitol Hill of Republicans who are leaving town in January, either because they’re retiring or because Trump ousted them in primaries, and no longer feel compelled to do the president’s bidding for their last few months in office.

Cassidy, for example, voted to advance a resolution to end the Iran war last week, after previously voting against seven similar measures. It’s interesting how the same war can look different to the same senator before and after Primary Day, isn’t it?

I wouldn’t necessarily expect Cornyn, who is more moderate than Paxton but not as moderate as Cassidy, to flip-flop on the war the next time it comes up for a vote. But Trump has a slew of policy priorities before the Senate that are much more about Trump personally than they are about conservative policy — his ballroom and “anti-weaponization fund” come to mind — and here you could expect Cornyn to join the growing club of Republicans throwing up roadblocks. (Again, this will make for an awkward transition for a senator who was proposing to name a highway for Trump just this month, but what can Texas voters do? Vote against him?)

It’s also worth remembering that the Trump Cabinet currently has three vacancies: Attorney General, Labor Secretary, Director of National Intelligence. Any successors will need to be confirmed by the Senate, which means Trump is now partially reliant on people whose careers he’s put an end to. That will be enough to confirm the Marco Rubios of the world, but perhaps not the Tulsi Gabbards.

In both chambers, these dynamics leave Trump without much of a working majority: in the Senate, Trump loses any party-line vote on which he’s lost four Republicans. The ousted Cornyn and Cassidy, the retiring Thom Tillis and Mitch McConnell, the moderates Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, and the dissident Rand Paul create seven possible defectors.

In the House, Trump currently loses any party-line vote with three Republican dissenters, in a chamber that includes the ousted Massie, retiring Don Bacon, and vulnerable members like Brian Fitzpatrick, Tom Barrett, and Kevin Kiley.

Ironically, this high watermark for second-term GOP dissent also comes at the same time as Trump is actually asking Congress to do things for once, including passing a reconciliation bill to fund ICE and CBP that is now stalled due to concerns over Trump’s plan to disburse $1.776 billion to his allies.

Trump doesn’t seem to care much about either one of these potential worries.

He doesn’t seem to mind that he’s possibly alienating lawmakers whose votes he needs: last week, for example, he bashed Fitzpatrick (to the congressman’s wife, a Fox News correspondent), who later that same day vowed to “kill” the anti-weaponization fund.

And he doesn’t seem consumed with an animating need to keep control of Congress: the jury is still out on whether he will apply the same focus to the November midterms that he has to unseating Republican incumbents.

This is short-sighted on his part. Trump has pointed to a possible Democratic impeachment effort as one of the few reasons why he cares about Republicans keeping control of the House — although, if anything, Democrats impeaching Trump could help him politically, based on previous experience.

But there are things Trump should fear much more than another going-nowhere impeachment push. A Democratic House majority means non-stop investigations of the president: of Trump and Iran, Trump and Venezuela, Trump and ICE, Trump and corruption, Trump and the January 6th pardons, Trump and DOGE, and every other scandal you can think of. His presidency will be consumed under an investigative cloud of hearings and subpoenas.

Add in a potential Democratic Senate majority — which Trump may have helped create by ensuring Cornyn’s defeat — and Trump can kiss goodbye any hopes of new Cabinet secretaries, or new federal judges, or new Supreme Court justices if any vacancies emerge in his last two years in office. Already, he may struggle with contentious Senate confirmation votes for the rest of this year after unleashing so many YOLO senators.

The victories that Trump is celebrating today could be planting the seeds for nightmares down the road.

Have a great long weekend and thank you to all of those who made the ultimate sacrifice in service of our country. — Gabe

What a week of highs and lows for Donald Trump.

Trump entered the week having pulled off a major power play against a Republican incumbent, succeeding on Saturday in not just ensuring Sen. Bill Cassidy’s (R-LA) defeat in a primary challenge, but dooming him to a dismal third-place finish. Cassidy ended up with just 24.8% of the Republican vote, the worst primary performance for a sitting senator in almost 50 years, his punishment for voting to convict Trump in his January 6th impeachment trial.

The president then followed that up on Tuesday by purging another GOP dissenter, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY). Crossing Republicans off his enemies list, Trump and his team seemed to feel as invincible as ever. “Do not ever doubt President Trump and his political power,” White House communications director Steven Cheung posted Tuesday night. “Fuck around, find out.”

That was then.

Over the last 24 hours, Trump faced the most significant revolt from Senate Republicans of his second term, an unexpected show of force by GOP lawmakers at the exact moment when Trump’s power over them had seemed absolute.

The split emerged after Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced this week that a settlement had been reached in the case President Donald J. Trump v. Internal Revenue Service, Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against his own administration over the leaking of his tax information by an IRS contractor in his first term.

As part of the agreement, the Justice Department declared that it is “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from carrying out any audits or prosecutions related to tax returns filed up to this point by Trump, his two eldest sons, or their family business.

The sitting president seemingly strong-arming his acting AG (and former personal lawyer) into granting him and his relatives sweeping tax immunity was galling enough. But the settlement went even further, setting up a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that the DOJ said would be used to compensate other “victims of lawfare and weaponization” by previous administrations.

The funds are set to be disbursed by five officials chosen by Blanche and removable by Trump at any time. No limits are spelled out on who these officials can decide to give the money to, which means everyone Trump views as being unfairly targeted by the U.S. government — from pardoned January 6th rioters to those ensnarled in the Russia investigation — could benefit (and are already plotting for how to receive their piece of the pie).

Such a Weaponization Fund had long been discussed in the Trump orbit, but advisers had been uncertain where to find the money, according to CNN. Trump’s lawsuit created the perfect opportunity, courtesy of something called the Judgment Fund, “a permanent, indefinite appropriation” created by Congress in 1956 that the DOJ is allowed to dip into whenever it enters into settlement agreements.

The president’s lawsuit against his own government had unlocked the ability for his appointees to steer upwards of $1.7 billion in taxpayer dollars to allies of the president, potentially including ones who violently attacked the U.S. Capitol.

This circle of self-dealing was a bridge too far for many Senate Republicans. And I don’t just mean typical Trump critics like Cassidy (who referred to the pot of money as a “slush fund”), Mitch McConnell (who called it “utterly stupid” and “morally wrong”), and Susan Collins (“I do not believe individuals that were convicted of violence against police officers on January 6 should be entitled to reimbursement of their legal fees”).

In addition to these usual suspects, there was also Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), who said that he was “not a big fan” of the fund and didn’t “see a purpose” for it. Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL), who earlier this month promised to always be loyal to Trump, said that she didn’t want any rioters who assaulted police officers on January 6th to receive funds. “Somebody described it as a galactic blunder, and I think that’s probably true,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), another Trump ally, said.

“We can’t help the president with a budget reconciliation package with this hanging over us,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) added.

Indeed, this furor is coming at the worst possible time for the president. The Senate was poised this week to advance a party-line reconciliation package to fund ICE and CBP, infusing more than $50 billion into immigration enforcement, one of Trump’s top priorities.

As part of the reconciliation process, senators are required to go through a ritual known as a “vote-a-rama,” in which every senator has the right to offer unlimited amendments, and they all have to receive a vote.

Republican senators were already reeling at the prospect of facing Democratic amendments barring any funds in the package from going towards Trump’s proposed White House ballroom. (The president had wanted the bill to include $1 billion for boosting White House security, including for the new ballroom, though the GOP was preparing to drop that push due to political and procedural concerns.) Now, amendment votes on the so-called “slush fund” were inevitable as well, which threatened to put GOP senators in a tricky spot.

Blanche was dispatched to the Capitol for a damage-control meeting with Senate Republicans. It didn’t go well. According to Punchbowl News, as many as 25 GOP senators spoke up, “all in opposition” to the Anti-Weaponization Fund. The “incredibly hostile” meeting ended with Republicans considering whether and how to proactively add provisions restricting the fund into the reconciliation package, in order to preempt Democratic amendments.

Deciding they needed more time to figure out their next steps, Senate Republicans decided to head to recess early, postponing the vote-a-rama that was supposed to take place Thursday. That guarantees that Republicans will miss Trump’s June 1 deadline for the package to be sent to his desk, a significant embarrassment for the president. (The Senate is not set to return to Washington until that day.)

Adding insult to injury, House Republicans also skipped town early on Thursday in order to avoid taking a politically costly vote inflicted on them by the president. The House had been scheduled to take up a Democratic resolution to end the war in Iran; GOP leaders decided to postpone the vote until June to give them more time to whip their members, since it looked like the measure had enough votes to pass. The Senate similarly advanced a resolution to end the war this week, which means that — had Republicans not canceled the vote — majorities of both chambers of Congress were likely to be on the record against the war for the first time, another blow to Trump.

I’ll be honest: I was not expecting this amount of GOP pushback against Trump, certainly not in a week when he had flexed so much power over them, and certainly not in a way that would derail his legislative agenda so profoundly. Beneath the paywall, I dig into the reasons why this was the moment — after 16 months of controversies — that Senate Republicans decided to draw a red line.

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President Trump scored yet another victory in his intraparty revenge tour Tuesday, as Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) was defeated by a Trump-endorsed primary challenger, three days after Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) met the same fate and two weeks after a group of Republican state legislators in Indiana did as well.

The main takeaway from last night’s results is that Trump, despite the fact that he has rarely been less popular nationally, has never been more powerful within the Republican Party. After these latest victories, some Republicans are speaking about Trump’s sway over the party with almost religious fervor: “The power of Donald Trump is real,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said after Massie’s defeat. “Donald Trump was saved by G-d so he could save the world,” Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL) wrote, celebrating his colleague’s ouster.

But within Congress, Massie and Cassidy’s departures will also reverberate for reasons that have nothing to do with Trump himself — and which are different for each man.

Cassidy’s defeat represents the loss of yet another dealmaker. With the Louisianan gone, at least seven of the 10 senators who negotiated the bipartisan infrastructure package — only five years ago! — will be out of office come next year. Cassidy also helped broker the bipartisan gun control deal the next year, in addition to having worked with Bernie Sanders on drug prices and with Chris Murphy on a landmark mental health package.

I have written previously about the risks of Congress losing dealmaking moderates like Cassidy; they are real and only getting more so. But today, I want to dwell on what is lost when the Massies of the world are run out of Washington: the cranks, the curmudgeons, the contrarians.

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Most members of Congress blend together. Almost all of them carefully toe their party line; if their leadership says to vote “yea” or “nay,” or heel, or jump, they do so. They could cut out the middleman and hand their voting card over to Hakeem Jeffries or Mike Johnson, and no one would notice any difference.

That’s never been Massie’s style. In his 13 years in Congress, Massie has been the sole dissenter in votes to sanction China, Iran, and North Korea. He has voted “no” on almost every government spending bill that has come up for a vote. In 2014, he voted against awarding a Congressional Gold Medal to Jack Nicklaus, and in 2020, he forced an in-person vote on a Covid relief bill, angering both parties by making them come back to Washington during a pandemic.

These are not popular positions. But Massie does not believe in sanctions, no matter how odious the country in question. He does not believe in massive spending bills, no matter what is being spent. He doesn’t think awarding medals is a good use of Congress’ time. And he thought that, maybe, a $2.3 trillion package (the largest stimulus bill in U.S. history) shouldn’t be approved without a recorded vote.

More recently, this stubborn streak has put him crosswise with the president, on issues like the Epstein Files, the war in Iran, the One Big Beautiful Bill, and tariffs. But unlike Cassidy — who voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial and refused to endorse him in 2024 — Massie’s issues with Trump were not about whether Trump should be president, or whether he is fit to hold the office.

Massie is simply suspicious of Jeffrey Epstein, opposes foreign intervention, supports deficit reduction, believes tariffs should be imposed by Congress, and has held these beliefs for years. He has always supported Trump for president, but when Trump diverged from Massie’s position on these questions, Massie had no problem breaking with his fellow Republicans. After all, he’s had a lot of practice doing it, before Trump ever entered the equation.

Massie has long been a thorn in everyone’s side, and it’s no surprise that it was ultimately his undoing. But the thing is: Congress has always had this sort of lone dissenter, that member who is comfortable being the “1” in a 434-1 vote, the resident Crank. And it needs one. Every group does. It needs the person who says, “I know we all agree on this, but are we sure?” They are an obstacle to unanimity, a guardian from groupthink.

This is a long and storied role in Congress, and with Massie on his way out the door — courtesy of Trump, who has no patience for principled contrarianism — it’s not clear there will be anyone to fill it.

America was founded by Cranks: John Adams spent months pissing off everyone in the Continental Congress, until they finally agreed to declare independence. (Though that didn’t stop him from also defending the British soldiers who participated in the Boston Massacre, because he believed in the right to counsel. Total Crank Move.) Then, once independence (and, ultimately, the new Constitution) became mainstream, another group of Cranks protested and dissented and got us the Bill of Rights.

The First Congress had a Crank. William Maclay was a senator from Pennsylvania who basically hated everyone he came across. Cranks are often the skunk at the garden party, the ones telling everyone to slow down and remember that even if things seem good now, they might not be forever. In Maclay’s case, he bitterly fought George Washington’s uses of executive power at a time when everyone loved George Washington, trying to remind his colleagues that Washington would not be president forever.

“He is but a man, but really a good one, and we can have nothing to fear from him, but much from the precedents he may establish,” Maclay wrote in his diary, which is the most detailed account we have of the First Congress. When George Washington appeared before Congress to propose a treaty, and again to deliver the State of the Union, Maclay encouraged lawmakers to be careful about how they responded. (Some wanted to send Washington a tongue bath of a letter in response.) He tried to ensure that the president’s salary wouldn’t be inordinately high (and that the president wouldn’t get extra money to spruce up his residence as well).

Maclay thought that Washington was trying to import the “British mode of business,” and that his allies wanted to give the president “every appendage of royalty.” When the question of presidential immunity from prosecution came up, Maclay pushed back: “I said that, although President, he is not above the laws.” Cranks are often ahead of their time.

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Later, Adams’ son John Quincy followed in his father’s cranky footsteps. As a former president, JQA returned to serve in the House. Without any higher heights to climb, he had few cares to give. He became the congressional contrarian, laboring mightily to repeal the House’s “gag rule” — which prevented debate over slavery — and rising again and again to try and read abolitionist petitions into the congressional record, until eventually (after an eight-year battle) the gag rule was rescinded by a successful motion from the former president.

Oregon Sen. Wayne Morse, who I wrote about on Monday, was a Crank. So was the iconoclastic Wisconsin Sen. William Proxmire, who used to give out the Golden Fleece Award, given to the use of government spending that he deemed most wasteful that month. (Example: a National Science Foundation grant to compare whether sunfish were more aggressive when they drank tequila or when they drank gin.) There was also Iowa Rep. H.R. Gross, another legendary penny-pincher, who even pushed back against spending federal funds to pay for the gas that would fuel the Eternal Flame at John F. Kennedy’s gravesite.

There are familiar Crank themes throughout history. They’re often opposed to government spending and opposed to foreign intervention. They’re usually a little conspiratorial in nature. They’re often fierce defenders of civil liberties, even in times of war, when it isn’t popular to stand up for a particular group’s freedom of speech.

No one likes Cranks in their time. But they’re often vindicated down the road. Morse was so comfortable in dissent that he was one of two senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which authorized LBJ to use force in Vietnam without a formal declaration of war. (His “early prophecies and warnings about Vietnam were such that we all owe him a great debt,” a Republican colleague later acknowledged.) For the rest of his tenure, every time a measure came up (even an appropriations bill) that would have the effect of supporting the war effort, More voted “nay.”

Similarly, no one looks back fondly on the “gag rule.” Proxmire gave a speech on the Senate floor every day for eight years — more than 3,000 speeches in all — stubbornly pushing his colleagues to ratify the Genocide Convention, until finally they did so. Time magazine once referred to Gross as a “useful pest.”

“But, as self-appointed caretaker of the congressional conscience, he has his own unique value,” the magazine continued. “The House needs a man like H. R. Gross—although one is probably plenty.”

Indeed, you don’t want a chamber of ideologically unflinching one-man operators. But having one or two in every generation, to hold a mirror up to the rest of Congress, is better than a chamber full of yes-men who never question the party line or the reigning consensus of their day, be it adoration for George Washington or support for Vietnam. (In a recent interview, Massie referred to such go-along lawmakers as “NPCs,” video-game lingo for “non-player characters.”)

In the modern era, these cranks have often been located on the extreme ends of the ideological spectrum: libertarians on one end of the aisle, democratic socialists on the other. Bernie Sanders can be a Crank, and he has used that stubbornness to slowly move the center of gravity in the Democratic Party on several issues, including the minimum wage and health care. The first time he introduced a resolution to block an arms sale to Israel, in 2024, it received 18 votes. When he did so again last month, its support had grown to 40 senators.

On the right, Massie is the inheritor of a tradition established by another former Kentucky congressman, Ron Paul, who was known as “Dr. No” for his practice of opposing every bill that he did not believe was explicitly authorized by the Constitution. Massie, who lacks Paul’s medical degree, has been nicknamed “Mr. No.” Trump, meanwhile, calls him “Rand Paul Jr.,” a nod to Paul’s son, now a Kentucky senator and fellow thorn in the president’s side. Kentucky seems to be the hotbed of the latter-day Congressional Crank Caucus.

If there is any issue on which Massie will one day seem prophetic, it will possibly be the national debt, which — as of last month — has now ballooned to equal the size of the entire U.S. economy. I cannot say whether our $31 trillion debt will ever spark the crisis that some believe it will, but if it does, Massie (who invented his own wearable debt clock to pin on his lapel, offering a visual reminder of its amount while walking around the Capitol) will have a right to feel some vindication.

Cranks are not perfect. They’re often gadflies who don’t play well with others. They frequently court controversy, and Massie is no exception. He was accused of antisemitism in 2023, when he seemed to suggest that members of Congress were more interested in “Zionism” than “American patriotism,” and again last night, when he said that he had difficulty conceding to his rival because “it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.” (Gallrein is not Jewish, but was backed by several pro-Israel groups, helping make their race the most expensive House primary in history.) Then again, his criticisms of Israel have certainly gained more popular support with time. In 2023, one month after October 7th, he cast a 420-1 vote against a resolution affirming Israel’s right to exist. (He explained that he supports Israel’s right to exist, but disagreed with language in the measure that conflated anti-Zionism with antisemitism.) In 2024, he was the only House Republican to boycott an address to Congress by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

One issue with Democrats and Republicans always voting in blocs in Congress is that Democrats and Republicans nationwide are not nearly as homogenous. According to a recent poll, Republicans are split, 45% to 44%, on whether they have confidence in Netanyahu. Is there any reason why the 44% should not have representation among congressional Republicans? There are so many issues where 20%, 30%, 40% of a party’s members feel one way, but none of the party’s members in Congress represent that stance — unless free-thinking dissenters like Massie are willing to step out of line.

To name one example, according to this week’s New York Times/Siena poll, 23% of Republican voters disapprove of the war in Iran. But only about 1% of Republican lawmakers have voted against the war, including Massie. Just yesterday, another joined this faction: Cassidy, whose “yea” vote helped advance a Senate resolution to end the war for the first time since it started. Did Cassidy, who has voted “nay” on the last seven of the same resolutions, suddenly change his mind? Or did he change his vote now that he no longer has to worry about facing a Republican primary electorate, now that he has been defeated?

What are the odds that the true number of anti-war Republicans in Congress isn’t at least closer to the number among Republican voters? There is a time for lawmakers to vote in accordance with their districts, but there is also a time for lawmakers to vote in accordance with their consciences — and not just once they no longer fear being defeated for re-election. Congress needs lawmakers like Massie, who has been voting his conscience on Iran since the beginning of the war, precisely because he has so much practice breaking from the pack.

Mirror dynamics exist on the Democratic side. Former Sen. Joe Manchin, a certified Crank, pushed back against big-spending Democratic legislation during the Biden era and warned that the Biden administration moved too far to the left to win re-election. In the fullness of time, after an inflation spike and Kamala Harris’ defeat, there are many Democrats who wonder whether they should have heeded Manchin’s warnings. No organization benefits from groupthink.

Cranks are often targeted. Morse lost re-election because of his early opposition to Vietnam. Manchin is no longer in office, without a home in either party. In 1938, Franklin D. Roosevelt took on a group of Cranks who opposed his court-packing plan, supporting their opponents in Democratic primaries in an (ultimately unsuccessful) effort to purge his party of dissenters.

Trump — less popular than FDR, but even more powerful within his party — has now succeeded where Roosevelt failed, having ousted Massie, who he had called “the worst Congressman in the long and storied history of the Republican Party.”

Ironically, Trump has some of the qualities of a Crank. He is an old man, as they often are. He is stubborn. He is willing to cut against the grain, and fight back against the consensus positions of his own party and of Washington at large. Sometimes, he has even done so on the precise issues Massie is now battling him on.

But Trump is as ideologically flexible as it comes, and now appears to have dropped these contrarian ideas like isolationism. Massie has long since recognized that casual relationship to ideology that Trump and many of his voters hold. Back in 2017, he recounted traveling around Kentucky the year before, and realizing that many of the voters who had once supported him and the two Pauls were now on board the Trump train.

“All this time,” Massie said, “I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron and me in these primaries, they weren’t voting for libertarian ideas — they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along.”

Even though Trump has sometimes been a lone dissenter, he has no tolerance for others doing so, certainly not when it means dissenting against him. Massie has opposed deficit-busting bills and foreign adventurism under presidents of both parties (there aren’t many members of Congress who voted against Obama’s intervention in Syria and Trump’s intervention in Iran). And he has long said that tariffs are the province of Congress, even as he has simultaneously said that they should replace the income tax, a Crank position if I’ve ever heard one. (How many lawmakers are pro-tariff, but insist they receive a vote in Congress?)

“We haven’t had a vote on tariffs since I’ve been in Congress,” Massie wrote back in 2019. “Similar to war powers: the power to tax is vested solely with Congress yet Congress is full of weak leaders on both sides of the aisle who won’t assert our authority or exercise our responsibility.” As soon as those positions caused issues for Trump, Trump cut him loose.

Trump has tried to purge other Republicans for even less. Last week, he called for the ouster of an ally, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), who committed the sin of campaigning for her friend Massie. (Boebert was also one of the four Republicans, with Massie, who signed the discharge petition to force a vote on releasing the Epstein Files. This is another issue that required crankery to force into the open, but once it did, suddenly everyone was on board: the bill ultimately passed unanimously.) Just yesterday, Trump endorsed a primary challenger against Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who has generally stood by Trump in the last decade, because Cornyn “was very late in backing me” in 2024.

“John Cornyn is a good man, and I worked well with him, but he was not supportive of me when times were tough,” Trump said.

Trump’s endorsement will undoubtedly make it harder for Republicans to keep the Texas Senate seat: Cornyn’s challenger, Ken Paxton, has been indicted, impeached, and scandal-plagued. Trump doesn’t care. He would rather be the unquestioned king of a minority party than the tenuous leader of a broad but fragile coalition. He has long since proven that he would rather control something like 35% of the country, as long as he controls it with an iron fist, than try to negotiate his way to something larger.

Ultimately, this is unhealthy for a political party, if only for the obvious reason that a solid lock on 35% (plus occasional support from a slice of independents) will sometimes produce victories, but never in a reliable way. Groups that lack dissent will inevitably steer in a worse, less popular direction — more uniform, more orthodox, less appealing to potential converts — which is why you need the 434-1s, the Massies, as a party, and a nation, to raise red flags. Sometimes, they might dissent when it doesn’t count, but that also means they’ll be less afraid than others to dissent when it does. Even if they start out lonely, Cranks rarely give up, which means through stubbornness and persistence, they occasionally bring others around, sometimes to an important cause that they were early to champion. They create a permission structure for issues to go from 434-1, to 425-10, to 385-50, to 335-100, all the way until fringe positions slowly become mainstream and even a majority.

In January, without the gentleman from Kentucky, things in the House might move a little faster. Votes will be a little more unanimous. But when the umpteenth 435-0 vote flies by, or another vote divides perfectly along party lines, just remember what is missing without Massie.

The seat is currently held by Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE), the former governor whose family owns the Chicago Cubs. Ricketts is running for his first full term, after being appointed in 2023 to succeed former Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE), who resigned to become a college president.

To oppose him, Democrats are fielding … nobody?

The Nebraska Democratic Party announced almost a year ago that they planned to stay out of the race and instead endorsed Dan Osborn, a third-party candidate who previously ran as an Independent for the state’s other Senate seat. Osborn, a mechanic and former union leader with a heterodox mix of views — he is pro-border wall, pro-gun rights, pro-legalizing marijuana, and pro-raising the minimum wage — lost his 2024 race by seven points in a state Kamala Harris lost by 20.

“We believe a coalition of Dems, Indys and Republicans can beat Ricketts and break up the one-party rule,” Jane Kleeb, the Democratic state party chair, wrote on X last year. “We like the odds of a mechanic vs a billionaire.” It’s a strategy Democrats are also pursuing elsewhere, in hopes of taking on Republicans without the Democratic Party label hanging around their necks.

The Nebraska state party couldn’t stop candidates from running in the Democratic primary, however, and soon a 79-year-old anti-abortion, Trump-supporting pastor named William Forbes threw his hat in the ring. Democrats accused Forbes of being a Republican plant, running at Ricketts’ behest to take votes away from Osborn. (“The Nebraska Democratic Party made a deliberate, principled decision not to field a candidate in the U.S. Senate race,” Kleeb said in a March statement, accusing Forbes of “running to trick voters.”) Forbes denied the allegations.

A pharmacy technician named Cindy Burbank quickly jumped in the race as well, with the explicit promise that she would drop out and make way for Osborn if she won the Democratic primary. This launched a brief legal battle, when Nebraska’s Republican secretary of state removed Burbank from the ballot, arguing that she was not a “good-faith candidate” since she was only running to drop out. The Nebraska Supreme Court ultimately ruled in Burbank’s favor.

Meanwhile, the primary for a pro-weed third party was also gripped by drama. It has been revealed that Burbank paid the filing fee for Mike Marvin, who was running as a candidate of the Legal Marijuana NOW Party. Other leaders of the party have accused Marvin of being a plant as well, alleging that he, too, plans to drop out in Osborn’s favor, which Marvin denies.

The primaries were finally held last week in the race CNN has dubbed the “craziest election in the country,” and the results yielded the best-case scenario for Osborn: both Burbank and Marvin won their primaries. That gives Osborn his best shot at a one-on-one race against Ricketts.

It will still be an uphill battle for the Democratic-backed Independent; the last time Nebraska elected a non-Republican to statewide office was 2006. (Ironically, Ricketts — then a businessman — was the Republican nominee who came up short that year, losing to Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson.) On Polymarket, Osborn’s odds of winning the race are pegged at 39%, which still makes him an underdog, of course, but is nothing to sneeze at in such a deep-red state. Strange things can happen in years when the incumbent president is polling at such a dismal low.

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Those sort of odds mean it is not ridiculous to start thinking through what it might look like to have an Independent in the Senate, a body where the two-party system is so ingrained that your party membership dictates everything from where you sit to where you eat lunch, with only two options for each.

And not an Independent like Bernie Sanders or Angus King, both of whom caucus with the Democrats and operate as party members in everything but name. (Sanders is even a member of the Democratic leadership team.) Unlike them, Osborn claims he would not caucus with either party. I recently received a reader question about how exactly this would work:

Q: Dan Osborn, an Independent, is claiming that if he wins in Nebraska he will not caucus with either party. Has that ever happened? I realize his chances are slim but I am curious. Do you think he would cave and choose a side, in order to get committee assignments, etc?

As this questioner guessed, it is very unusual to have a senator who is not a member of either party caucus.

The last five Senate independents — former Sens. Joe Lieberman (CT), Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), and Joe Manchin (WV), and then Sens. Sanders (VT) and King (ME) now — all caucused with a party (interestingly, all sided with the Democrats).

The last time there was a senator who didn’t caucus with either party, it was Sen. Dean Barkley (MN), but that was a bit of a special case, since he was appointed by Gov. Jesse Ventura — a member of the Reform Party — to briefly fill a seat during a lame-duck session, when a vacancy was created by a death. Barkley only served for two months, never joined a party, and apparently the issue of committees never came up, presumably since Congress was on winter break for most of the time he was in office.

Keep marching back in time, and you get Sens. Jim Jeffords (VT) and Harry F. Byrd Jr. (VA), who caucused with the Democrats; James Buckley (NY), brother of William F., who caucused with Republicans; and Bob Smith (NH), who ran for president on the Taxpayers’ Party line and briefly became an Independent but who appears to have kept his Republican committee assignments for the handful of months during which he left the GOP.

To find a senator who didn’t caucus with either party from the beginning of a Congress — when committee assignments are handed out — as Osborn would be doing, you have to go all the way back to 1953. And, friends, it did not go well.

The senator in question was Wayne Morse of Oregon. Like Osborn, he was a populist. He was also an iconoclast and a curmudgeon and, frankly, a bit of a crank. Morse was a Republican, but he left the party after Dwight Eisenhower took office in 1953, feeling that the GOP had moved too far to the right. Morse was then in his second Senate term. He didn’t like that Eisenhower had tapped the conservative Richard Nixon as his VP. He didn’t like that the GOP platform called for repealing the New Deal. And he didn’t like that Eisenhower hadn’t condemned McCarthyism, which Morse ardently opposed.

That meant the Senate on January 3, 1953 had 48 Republicans, 47 Democrats, and one Morse. On the first day of the new Congress, he marched into the chamber with a folding chair, which he planned to set up in the aisle, right in between the Democratic and Republican sides of the chamber. “Since I haven’t been given any seat in the new Senate, I decided to bring my own,” he told reporters.

When asked how he would receive committee assignments as an Independent senator, Osborn has invoked a Senate rule that requires every senator to sit on two committees. The rule technically doesn’t mention anything about parties, even though they are how the assignments get divvied out now.

Morse invoked the same rule in 1953. He quickly learned, however, that the rule says every senator has to sit on two committees; it doesn’t say they get to choose which two.

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At the beginning of that year’s Congress, the Republican and Democratic leaders came forward to submit their lists of proposed committee assignments for Senate approval, which is normally a mere formality. Neither party wanted to give Morse any of their slots. So they merely gave all of their own members the seats they wanted, and then offered to give Morse the two committee spots remaining, the ones nobody had claimed: seats on the Committee on Public Works (which oversaw federal buildings) and the Committee on the District of Columbia (which oversaw the nation’s capital).

Incidentally, today, you could imagine both of those committees being a prime slot for a publicity-hungry senator, since they would offer a platform with which to battle President Trump’s recent D.C. renovation projects. But in 1953, nobody wanted them, and certainly not Morse. He said that they were “garbage can” appointments, and he declined to accept them.

Morse then waged a lonely crusade to get himself more favorable assignments, citing a different Senate rule that allows for committee assignments to be made one by one — with senators filling out ballots listing out everyone they wanted to serve on a given committee. Morse wanted seats on the Armed Services and Labor Committees. For those two panels, he insisted that the Senate vote by ballot.

“The case which the Senate must decide is new,” Morse said in his typically grandiose fashion. “No such combination of facts and law has been before the Senate in precisely the same posture… I stand before the Senate, not as a member of either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, but as an Independent.”

Every senator filled out their ballots for Morse’s desired committees, starting with Armed Services. The members selected for the panel by the two party leaders all received 80+ votes. Morse received seven. He did not press his motion to vote on the Labor Committee by ballot, agreeing to submit the matter to the Rules Committee to decide.

The process took months, during which Morse would take to the Senate floor every Friday afternoon to give long speeches, which he referred to as conducting “my committee work” out in the open, since he had no actual committees to sit on.

After the folding chair spectacle on the first day, he had agreed to sit on the Republican side of the aisle, but eventually, he decided he wanted his own section: a corner of the Democratic side — which he referred to as the side for the minority parties (plural) — that would be the one-man section of the Independent Party.

Other senators rose to protest; Morse traded barbs with each of them. “If we move the Senator’s seat, as he requests, what assurance do we have that he will not wish to move somewhere else in about 30 days?” Sen. Homer Capehart (R-IN) asked.

“I assure the Senator from Indiana that one great difference, of many differences between the Senator from Oregon and the Senator from Indiana, is that I take pride in my intellectual flexibility,” Morse replied.

Capehart tried another tack. “Does that mean, in the case of the Independent Party which the Senator from Oregon is trying to start, or perhaps has already started, that if I wanted to join the party I would have to wait for perhaps 60 days before joining, because at the end of 60 days the Senator from Oregon might have new facts which would convince him that he should not after all start a new party?” he asked.

Morse was ready with a quick retort. “I am sure my good friend from Indiana is speaking hypothetically,” Morse said. “I cannot imagine the Senator from Indiana ever having the intellectual flexibility which would cause him to want to become a member of an Independent Party and to place in first position an independent judgment on the facts pertaining to issues.”

Mic drop.

Frustrated, Capehart finally said, “My personal opinion is that the able Senator from Oregon thoroughly and completely and 100 percent enjoys being different.”

“I wish to assure the Senator from Indiana that I would not· enjoy being like him,” Morse responded. “I enjoy that kind of difference.”

At that point, the presiding officer interjected to express his “regret” that the Senate had no rule limiting senators to speak only about topics germane to pending business. “It would not be half so much fun,” Morse gleefully replied.

Morse had a sharp tongue, but these quick ripostes hardly helped him win his colleagues over. His effort to change his seat stalled in the Rules Committee, as did his effort to join his desired committees. Morse would continue to be a thorn in the Senate’s side for years, though his colleagues would gain a grudging respect for him. During his days giving those long Friday afternoon speeches, senators called him the “Five O’Clock Shadow”; by the time he retired in 1969, he was admiringly called the “Tiger of the Senate.” He had been one of only two senators to oppose the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, in 1964. The passage of five years had vindicated one of the war’s earliest, most vocal critics.

As for Osborn, Republicans have alleged that the mechanic is merely a Democratic plant — how many plants can one Senate race have? — and that he is only pretending to be non-partisan now, so he can caucus with the Democrats if he wins. Indeed, the Senate Democrats’ main super PAC spent almost $4 million supporting Osborn in 2024; he isn’t exactly the free agent that he claims to be.

After flirting with independence, many third-party senators have ultimately decided to caucus with a major party, often finding it too logistically challenging to make it on their own, once questions like committees come into play. It’s in neither party’s interest to help someone who won’t help them win the majority; conversely, a third-party senator can often win the committee jackpot if they agree to nudge a party over the finish line.

Even the most stubbornly principled senators can fall victim to this grubby horse-trading. Morse eventually accepted his “garbage can” assignments in 1953, acknowledging that no one was in any mood to give him anything else. But when the new Congress started two years later, Senate Democratic Leader Lyndon B. Johnson offered Morse seats on the prestigious Banking and Foreign Relations Committees in exchange for joining the Democratic fold and helping Johnson become Majority Leader.

Morse took the deal. Senators who claim complete independence rarely stay that way.