Senate Republicans are continuing their total blockade of proposals for combatting foreign interference in American campaigns, signaling they won't be moved by a new Democratic effort to use President Trump's impeachment to shame them into action.
Democrats on Tuesday afternoon called up three of their top-priority election security bills they view as the least controversial, asking the Senate to pass them immediately on voice votes. Each time they were blocked by a single Republican, who under the rules could prevent further action.
The choreographed standoff underscores how the politically divided Congress is on course to do nothing more before Election Day to address perhaps the single the most pressing challenge to democracy: foreign adversaries armed with disinformation campaigns and hacking skills wresting control of a presidential contest away from the voters.
The Senate minority has moved three times in this Congress to call up collections of election security measures and force the GOP leadership to stand before the TV cameras and put a stop to consideration of each bill, many of which have already been endorsed in some form by the Democratic-majority House.
But those previous instances were all last fall, before impeachment. So this time the strategy was somewhat different: to publicly embarrass the GOP majority by declaring the bills had been made only more necessary by Trumps' acquittal last week — on charges he should be removed from office for abusing his power by withholding military aid and otherwise pressuring Ukraine to investigate one of his main Democratic re-election rivals, former Vice President Joe Biden.
"Because Senate Republicans chose to look the other way, the need for election security legislation is greater now than ever before," Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said. "We cannot trust this president to stand up for the integrity of our elections so Congress must stand up in his stead."
Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's designated agent for repelling efforts like this, revisited the GOP's policy rationale for opposing all election security policy bills: They start the federal government down a slippery slope toward federalizing elections that are conducted almost entirely by local and state governments.
The only exception McConnell has made was his agreement last year to support another wave of federal grants to the states for spending on election security ahead of the 2020 vote.
On Tuesday, Blackburn asserted the Democrats were renewing their campaign for additional legislation only to boost their campaign fundraising, and she said if her partisan opponents as truly interested in assuring the sanctity of elections they would be focused instead on opening a congressional inquiry into last week's chaotic Iowa caucuses.
"You would think after spending weeks in this chamber litigating the finer points of their disagreements with the president's foreign policy, our friends in the minority would be wary of picking another partisan fight but here we go again," Blackburn said in response to Schumer's discussion of the Senate trial.
These are the three Democratic measures that got blocked:
- Legislation by Mark Warner of Virginia — the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, which has conducted an exhaustive and bipartisan investigation of Russia's 2016 interference — that would require all future presidential campaigns to call the FBI if they are approached by a foreign power offering assistance.
- A companion measure by Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut that would compel presidential or congressional candidates to tell the FBI and the Federal Election Commission about any efforts by a foreigner to make any sort of campaign contribution.
- A bill by Ron Wyden of Oregon, dubbed the Safe Act, authorizing more federal money for modernizing voting systems and improving election security, while banning voting machines from being connected to the internet or being manufactured in foreign countries.
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.