As Congress continues to plod its way through a series of high-profile, and in some cases critical, bills before departing Washington for the December recess, a pair of election reform bills appear to be left by the wayside.
Last week, Congress averted a government shutdown by approving a short-term spending bill and leaders are negotiating on two more legislative priorities this week: an annual defense authorization bill and a measure to prevent the United States from defaulting on its debts.
Those and other bills leave little, if any, room for Senate consideration of the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which so far have been blocked by Republicans.
Monday morning reports on the congressional schedule detail efforts to pass the National Defense Authorization Act, which sets policy for the Pentagon each year, and an increase in the debt ceiling, a move that allows the federal government to take on more debt without resorting to extraordinary measures such as default.
Democrats are also hoping to push through the Build Back Better Act, a massive increase in social safety net spending that Republicans oppose. And the Senate GOP may force a vote on a measure to block implementation of President Biden’s vaccine mandate for private companies.
Congress is scheduled to begin the December recess on Dec. 13, leaving just a few days to complete the agenda. But few on Capitol Hill expect that schedule to hold, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has said he wants the major legislation all completed by Christmas.
Even if they were to stay in town longer, there’s little talk of election legislation making another appearance on the Senate floor.
A coalition of more than 200 organizations advocating passage of the elections bills issued a letter Thursday calling on Congress to delay the recess so it could take up to the two measures.
“The most important step that Congress can take to protect the array of issues our organizations advocate for is to pass these vitally important voting rights bills in order to ensure that all Americans’ voices are heard in our democracy,” reads the letter, signed by members of the Declaration for American Democracy coalition and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
The Freedom to Vote Act is a wide-ranging collection of changes to elections, campaign finance and ethics rules. It’s the successor to the For the People Act, which was blocked this summer by Senate Republicans after passing the House. Moderate Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia negotiated changes, with hope of bringing on enough Republicans to overcome a potential filibuster, but the GOP remains united in opposition.
Similarly, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act has been blocked by Senate Republicans after being passed by House Democrats. That bill would restore a provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required states with a history of racial discrimination to get approval from the Justice Department before changing election laws. That provision, known as “preclearance,” was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013.
“This legislation must be a top priority on the remaining agenda for the year, and we urge you to stay in session to do whatever it takes until these bills are passed because inaction is not an option,” the advocates wrote in their letter.
Voting rights groups have also called for Senate Democrats to abolish the filibuster or at least modify the rule so election legislation can be passed by a simple majority. But lawmakers have resisted those calls for now.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.