A bipartisan effort to solidify the role of Congress and the vice president in certifying election results may move forward this week, as the committee investigating the Capitol riot prepares for another primetime hearing.
The Electoral Count Act sets the rules for finalizing presidential elections; Donald Trump and some of his supporters attempted to exploit ambiguities in the law in order to keep him in the White House. When that failed, thousands of people stormed the Capitol.
Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who is leading a partisan effort to update the ECA with Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, told reporters Monday that their bipartisan group expects to offer legislation this week.
“This turned out to be a more complex task than we anticipated, as always is the case when you're delving into an 1887 law that has ambiguous and outdated language, but I do anticipate that our group will introduce the bills this week,” Collins said, according to The Washington Post.
The ECA was passed after three states submitted multiple slates of electors in the 1887 presidential contest. In order to prevent future confusion, Congress passed a law that outlines the process and procedures for counting electoral votes. But the language is vague in some areas, including the role of the vice president – which Trump attempted to exploit by having Mike Pence overturn the results.
Pence refused, Trump and many of his followers were outraged, and the insurrection ensued with some people even demanding that Pence be hanged.
According to the Post, the Collins-Manchin bill is expected to clear up ambiguities in the ECA. It will:
- Set deadlines for states to change election rules.
- Make clear that states cannot select electors after Election day.
- Increase the requirement for Congress to object to a state’s slate of electors (currently one member from each chamber).
- State clearly that the vice president’s role is purely ceremonial.
The nonpartisan group CommonSense American recently released survey data showing overwhelming support for reforming the ECA. The group found that 97 percent of Democrats and 86 percent of Republicans agree that the vice president’s role in the process must be clarified.
CommonSense American also found strong support for other elements of the ECA reform bill, including 80 percent support for barring states from changing how electors are selected after Election Day, and 76 percent backing for making it more difficult for members of Congress to object to a state’s electoral slate.
The committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot will hold its ninth – and second primetime – hearing Thursday. The panel’s members will focus on Trump’s actions on that day. Matthew Pottinger, who served on the National Security Council, and former White House press aide Sarah Matthews are both expected to testify. Both resigned their positions in response to the insurrection.
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.