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Faced with the prospect of having to uphold one of Congress’ core responsibilities, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R–La.) took the coward’s way out.

He cut and ran.

House Republican leaders canceled a vote Thursday night on a bill that called for halting President Donald Trump’s war with Iran. With some Republicans poised to break ranks and others absent, Politico reports, the war powers resolution likely would have passed—and even without Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), an outspoken critic of the war who had not yet returned to Washington after suffering a defeat in Tuesday’s primary.

With the vote canceled, the House recessed until June, thus “avoiding a political embarrassment to President Donald Trump,” notes Politico.

Instead, it is Johnson who ought to be embarrassed.

Deciding when America goes to war is a power exclusively reserved to Congress. Even though Congress hasn’t formally declared war since World War II, America’s other, recent misadventures in the Middle East were at least subject to public debate, and lawmakers granted authorization for the use of military force.

That did not happen with the war in Iran, which the Trump administration launched in February without getting permission from Congress. The Pentagon and White House made a half-hearted attempt to justify the conflict as a response to an imminent threat against American troops—but that case is far from believable, as Reason‘s Matthew Petti has explained.

Congress has been slow to respond. But, with the conflict nearing the end of its third month (and having accomplished little besides choking off vital supply chains and raising prices), America’s elected representatives are finally getting their act together.

The Senate voted earlier this week to advance a war powers resolution. “Until the administration provides clarity, no congressional authorization or extension can be justified,” wrote Sen. Bill Cassidy (R–La.) in a post on X after voting for the resolution.

Previous efforts in the House had fallen short, but the tide seems to have turned. Polls show the war is deeply unpopular, and even Republican voters are turning against it.

Under the terms of the War Powers Act of 1973, presidents have 60 days to obtain congressional authorization for an ongoing conflict. That deadline has come and gone. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has argued that the 60-day clock does not apply because the two countries agreed to a temporary cease-fire in early April.

The resolutions being debated in Congress are an attempt to enforce that limitation and order the president to withdraw American forces from the conflict. It is ultimately a symbolic gesture because Trump could veto the resolution if it passed.

All the more reason why Johnson’s cowardice is so remarkable. Why should he have to protect Trump from having to issue a veto? The president started a war without congressional authorization; he should have to own it.

This sort of cowardice is nothing new for Johnson. It calls to mind the ridiculous maneuver that Johnson and his fellow House GOP leaders used to block votes disapproving of Trump’s tariffs. They changed the House’s rules so that a “day” on the House calendar no longer counted as a day in real life, thus undermining a law meant to check executive power over trade.

Johnson is seemingly incapable of standing up to the Trump administration, even when one of Congress’ core responsibilities is at stake.

With the House now in recess until June, Trump gets a few more weeks to wrap up his undeclared and unlawful war—a conflict that Trump said was “very complete” all the way back on March 9.

“Republicans are too scared to check executive power,” wrote Rep. Brittany Pettersen (D–Colo.) on Twitter after Thursday’s vote was canceled. “They knew they’d lose. So instead of ending Trump’s illegal war in Iran, they killed the vote. Too weak to follow the Constitution. Too loyal to Trump to do their jobs.”

The post War Powers Vote Is the Latest Embarrassment for House Speaker Mike Johnson appeared first on Reason.com.

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Yale Law School professor Natasha Sarin and the Cato Institute’s Adam Michel debate the resolution, “Billionaires should pay a higher share of federal taxes.”

Taking the affirmative is Sarin, who is a professor at Yale Law School and the president and co-founder of the Budget Lab at Yale. She is also a former counselor to Secretary Janet Yellen at the U.S. Treasury Department.

Arguing against the resolution is Michel, the director of tax policy studies at the Cato Institute. He was formerly deputy staff director at the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee.

The debate is moderated by Soho Forum Director Gene Epstein.

The post Should Billionaires Pay More Taxes? appeared first on Reason.com.

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Political parties that lose major elections will often create an “autopsy report.” Hoping not to make the same mistakes twice, an autopsy lets the party take stock of its failures, learn why its candidate failed to connect with voters, and get a sense of how to do better next time.

But 18 months after Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election to then-former President Donald Trump, the Democratic Party only got around to releasing an autopsy this week. Even then, the party only did so as a result of public pressure, having previously sworn off the prospect of ever publicly releasing the report. Why is the party so dead set against learning from its own mistakes?

The 2024 election “was a punch to the gut, and people were pissed off,” Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairman Ken Martin wrote Thursday in a statement accompanying the report’s release. “How, we all asked, could Democrats have lost to Donald Trump again? How did we blow through billions of dollars? And where do we go from here?”

The resulting report paints a bleak picture for Democrats. “We must admit and accept some hard truths about our Party,” it cautions. “Since the high point of the 2008 Obama landslide…the Democratic Party has vacillated between stagnation and retrogression. In doing so, we have lost the confidence we once received from everyday Americans—and election results show it. In the sixteen tumultuous years since that historic election, Democrats have lost ground at every level of government.”

This is actually the first time in more than a decade that Democrats have publicly taken any such introspection.

When Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016, the party appointed then-Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D–N.Y.) to compile an autopsy, only to effectively bury it. Politico reported at the time that “members were not allowed to have copies of the report and may view it only under the watchful eyes of [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] staff.”

One person who recognized the folly in this strategy was Ken Martin.

“The DNC spent a lot of time and money on [a 2016 autopsy], and it wasn’t even released to the DNC members,” Martin said in February 2025. “Was there any utility in doing that?”

As to whether the party would compile and release a report for the 2024 election, Martin added, “Of course it will be released, right? It will be released to our members, and we all have to learn from that. There has to be some lessons that we bring on so that we can operationalize it.”

But when it was completed in December, Martin said he wouldn’t release the report, which he called “a distraction from the core mission.”

The decision was controversial. Last month, when Martin appeared on the progressive podcast Pod Save America, host Jon Favreau brought up his previous pledge to release the report and asked, “Why did you change your mind on that?”

Martin averred that the report itself was less important than the “lessons” it contained, “and we released those lessons.”

This week, the DNC bowed to pressure and finally released the report, though not without immediately disavowing it; each page bears a disclaimer that it “reflects the views of the author, not the DNC,” which did not receive “the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein and therefore cannot independently verify the claims presented.”

Indeed, the document contains numerous highlights and notations of issues to be corrected.

“When I received the report late last year, it wasn’t ready for primetime. Not even close,” Martin explained this week. “I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards. I don’t endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it. I could not in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on it. But transparency is paramount.”

Of course, Martin is only releasing the report because of public pressure. In fact, CNN released a draft of the report hours before Martin did.

Martin added that he saw no reason to release the report in December because Democrats had done well in state and local elections the previous month. But the report had some caution on that front.

“Our candidates have proven incapable of projecting strength, unity, and leadership, and voters have drifted away,” it warned. “Indeed, many of our critical Democratic wins can be attributed to negative partisanship—where Republicans have nominated deeply flawed candidates, and we have been able to convince some Republicans and most Independents to support Democrats in those contests.”

“This remains true even in the face of the ‘Blue Wave’ in the most recent elections,” it added. “2025 gubernatorial and mayoral wins in Virginia, New Jersey, New York City, Detroit, and elsewhere may lead to a false sense of security and a belief the Democratic Party has again found ways to bring the voters back to the booth with their messaging.”

Flawed though the report may be, it still provided useful information and advice to be cautious about its recent electoral successes.

But ignoring the evidence of its own unelectability has become something of a trend among Democrats. Even examining the 2020 election, when Joe Biden defeated Trump, would have been useful. “Instead, Democrats apparently took Trump’s unfitness as so manifestly self-evident that it was not worth interrogating why 74 million people voted for him in 2020, and whether they would do so again,” I wrote after Harris’ loss in 2024.

In fact, the 2024 autopsy mentions another Democratic Party postmortem conducted after the 2022 midterms, which laid out a number of recommendations for future campaigns. “Unfortunately, none of these recommendations were implemented on the proposed timeline, if at all,” it notes. (“No evidence or sourcing provided for this claim,” the DNC retorts.)

Democrats often talk about Trump as an existential threat to the country and the rule of law—and the argument is compelling. Just this week, Trump settled his own lawsuit against the government, steering an arbitrary multi-billion dollar sum into an account he controlled while exempting himself from future investigatory scrutiny, as he and his children repeatedly benefit financially from various government actions.

And yet while Trump is deeply unpopular, the Democratic Party fares little better in polls of voters. Why is that? Perhaps a report dedicated to its most recent major loss, compiled and distributed to party officials, could shed some light.

The post Democrats Tried To Bury 2024 Election Autopsy appeared first on Reason.com.

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The Trump administration’s announcement that it had established a large, taxpayer-financed “Anti-Weaponization Fund” was an odd addition to an already-odd news cycle. The pool of $1,776,000,000—1776, get it?—was born out of a settlement between President Donald Trump and the IRS; the chief executive had, in some sense, sued himself after a contractor leaked his tax returns to The New York Times in 2019. Those funds will be used, the Justice Department said, “to hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare.”

The development has drawn widespread criticism for reasons one might assume: allegations of corruption and self-dealing. But its inception raises larger questions about what processes exist for alleged victims of government misconduct, how hard it is for anyone to get compensation when their constitutional rights are violated, and why that is.

It is not yet clear exactly who will benefit from the Anti-Weaponization Fund. But Vice President J.D. Vance offered a hint this week when he invoked Tina Peters, whom Colorado Governor Jared Polis granted clemency last week. “This is a woman, who, at worst—if you believe everything that the prosecutors said about her—committed misdemeanor trespassing, and somebody threw the book at her,” Vance said at a White House press briefing. “This innocent grandmother was going to spend 10 years in prison, completely disproportionate to any misdemeanor trespassing that I’ve ever seen. Was that fair? No. Is it reasonable for her to get some compensation for the fact that she was treated unfairly? I think the answer is yes.”

Peters was not convicted of “misdemeanor trespassing.” She was convicted of four felonies and three misdemeanors—none of which were trespassing—in connection with an illegal scheme she executed as Mesa County clerk that she hoped would substantiate her allegations that the 2020 election had been stolen. As Reason‘s Jacob Sullum summarized earlier this week, Peters secured “unauthorized access to voting machines…by falsely identifying Gerald Wood, a local I.T. consultant, as a county employee, and allowing Conan Hayes, another promoter of Trump’s stolen-election fantasy, to pose as Wood.” Hayes used Wood’s bogus credentials to copy the voting machine software in May 2021 after Peters disabled security cameras, though she recorded the process with her phone. Images from that footage, one of which featured the county’s passwords, eventually made their way online.

Her nine-year (not 10-year) sentence was indeed severe. Per the judge, it was partially influenced by her beliefs, so her sentence commutation—despite the great deal of outrage it has elicited—is defensible on First Amendment grounds. That’s especially true when considering she will have spent about a year and a half in prison, which still amounts to significant accountability.

Peters was not pardoned, though. She is not “innocent,” as Vance claimed. She was convicted by a jury, and will remain a felon after her release next month. We have an important check on overly harsh prison terms in this country: clemency. It was exercised.

That Peters and others might get taxpayer-funded checks not in spite of committing crimes—but because they committed crimes—is a revealing window into the Anti-Weaponization Fund. That perversity intensifies when you consider that our system all but ensures that people whose constitutional rights were violated by the government face a grueling battle for recourse. Many end up with nothing at all. One of the most vocal opponents to reform there: Donald Trump.

The summer of 2020 saw a wave of support for reforming qualified immunity. Under that legal doctrine, a plaintiff may plausibly allege that a state or local government employee acted illegally and infringed on his rights. But he will still be barred from going before a jury and asking for damages if he cannot show that the misconduct was “clearly established” as unconstitutional in prior case law. It is, in theory, supposed to nuke vacuous claims.

But that is not what happens in practice. It is the reason why a mother could not sue after a deputy sheriff shot her 10-year-old boy while aiming at a nonthreatening dog; or why two men could not sue after law enforcement allegedly stole $225,000 from them during the execution of a search warrant; or why a local citizen journalist could not sue after police contorted an obscure statute to arrest her. Without prior court precedents explicitly spelling out that such actions ran afoul of the law—as if officers needed to be put on notice, for instance, that stealing under such circumstances is illegal—the plaintiffs’ cases were extinguished before they could even begin.

The momentum around reform has waned, to put it mildly. But at its climax, during Trump’s first term, his administration described any attempt to modify the doctrine legislatively as a “non-starter.” On the campaign trail for the 2024 election, Trump briefly revived the issue and emphasized that he wanted to “indemnify [police] against any and all liability”—which is already effectively the case. (Even when plaintiffs do overcome qualified immunity, governments pay out damages almost 100 percent of the time.) 

Legal inaccuracies notwithstanding, Trump’s position on the issue has been firm and consistent. He has sided with the government, not the little guy, when it comes to questions about what victims of state abuse are entitled to. If Peters is an apt mascot for his Anti-Weaponization Fund, it appears his sympathies do sometimes operate in the reverse, so long as the little guy is the one accused of misconduct, and so long as that misconduct sufficiently flattered him. But a mom whose young son was mistakenly shot by law enforcement remains out of luck.

The post Trump's 'Anti-Weaponization Fund' Is Built on a Contradiction appeared first on Reason.com.

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As Republicans and Democrats continue their mid-decade redistricting grudge match that could determine which party controls Congress after November, Americans may learn a truism about legislative elections. That is, voters don’t really select the politicians who represent them. Politicians choose their voters, resulting in “skewed, unrepresentative maps where electoral outcomes are virtually guaranteed,” as the Brennan Center explains.

The process has long been known as gerrymandering, named in 1812 after Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry. Per Smithsonian magazine, Gerry signed a state Senate redistricting map drawn up by his fellow Democratic-Republicans that shifted from a county-based model to one filled with “carvings and manglings” designed to strip power from the competing Federalists. Critics noted the district looked a lot like a salamander.

It worked, and states with one-party dominance have long had a field day designing districts that guaranteed their dominance. I once lived in a Los Angeles County supervisorial district that meandered from the eastern edges of the San Gabriel Valley to Marina del Rey, with the obvious purpose of consolidating every scarce Republican vote to bolster Democratic chances in the other districts. Both parties do it, but the latest battles are particularly noxious.

The problem with gerrymandering is obvious. It magnifies the political extremes, as candidates are incentivized to appeal solely to a pre-selected group of partisan voters. We can see that in any number of current congressional races after the Proposition 50 redistricting changes. As a result, we elect representatives who have no incentive whatsoever to reach across party lines—but solely to satisfy their political base. It quashes the representation of many voters and undermines the faith people might have in the democratic process.

Recently, Republicans have cheered after the Virginia Supreme Court tossed out heavily gerrymandered, voter-approved maps that would have obliterated Republican representation. Fair enough, but I’ve yet to hear more than a few Republicans criticize Texas and other GOP states that gerrymandered to eliminate Democratic seats. They did that at the behest of Donald Trump, who didn’t hide his raw partisan goals. “Texas will be the biggest one. And that will be five (GOP pickups),” Trump said.

This is more obscene than usual because redistricting typically is handled once a decade. But Republicans triggered this mid-decade war to stop a likely Democratic tsunami in November, which means that states will now constantly redistrict whenever they can secure an advantage. The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in a Louisiana case that tossed aside a majority-black district was ostensibly done to stop one form of gerrymandering. But the court has given red states more latitude to dissolve Democratic seats.

California’s Prop. 50 was defensive and is temporary, so it was understandable. But it still means that voters in conservative, remote Siskiyou County will be lumped in with liberal voters in more populous Marin County outside San Francisco. That assures that their rural concerns will get no more attention in Congress than Black Louisianans will receive in a state dominated by conservative white voters. The whole process is downright un-American.

In this recent round, Republicans are entirely to blame. In the new MAGA-fied GOP, winning is everything, and there’s no quarter given for concepts such as fairness. Frankly, Trump has tapped into Americans’ most divisive instincts, as he puts his short-term zeal for vengeance above the long-term good of the country.

It’s sad, and the success of the GOP’s efforts will cause both parties to continue toward what Rep. Blake Moore (R–Utah) rightly calls a race to the bottom. A few other representatives have likewise called for a ceasefire, but whatever party is on the winning side of this race will never back down, given the current scorched-earth culture. Even more depressing, this scenario essentially puts an end to the good-government experiment in nonpartisan redistricting reform. Democratic states have typically done this, but now that’s a sucker’s game.

I’ve long called for measures that improve representation in ways that don’t attempt to change the partisan balance—but simply better reflect the views of voters and make elected officials more responsive to their needs. One long-dead proposal in California would have expanded the number of Assembly seats given that our current lower house has one representative for every 483,000 Californians. Good luck getting a meeting with your Assembly member in that set up, but I fear that such ideas are nonstarters in the current political climate.

“The ordaining of laws in favor of one part of the nation, to the prejudice and oppression of another, is certainly the most erroneous and mistaken policy,” wrote Benjamin Franklin. He feared that poor representation would “create great and violent jealousies and animosities between the people favored and the people oppressed.” Yet here we are—until Americans place their national identity above their partisan loyalties. As the nation celebrates its 250th anniversary, it’s a good time to consider a truce.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

The post In Gerrymandering Fight, Democracy Is Losing appeared first on Reason.com.

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