The Senate election results in Georgia have Democrats dancing in the streets and democracy advocates cheering another seemingly successful high stress election. Turnout was extraordinary for a runoff, election officials performed efficiently, and fears of conflict and voter intimidation proved unfounded.
But there could be trouble ahead. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock will not officially become senators, and cannot swing control of Congress to their party, until they are seated by the Senate. That normally mechanical procedure could become the next round in our never-ending partisan dogfight.
If either Republican candidate contests the results — as President Trump and his allies will surely insist — it will not be Georgia's stalwart secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, with the last word on who won. Nor will it be the Georgia Supreme Court, or even the U.S. Supreme Court.
The "Judge of the election of ... members" of the Senate, according to the Constitution, is the Senate itself.
For the vast majority of elections to both the House and Senate, this quirk — let's be more honest, this flaw — in our founding document does not pose a problem. Normally, with losers having conceded, the House and Senate dispense with a vote and permit the state-certified winners to take their seats.
But little else has happened normally this year, and with control of the Senate in the balance and Mitch McConnell still in charge, we should not be surprised if another challenge to our democracy is ahead.
McConnell did try to protect the Electoral College count from objections, but he did so less on principle than to avoid politically difficult votes for his caucus. At least for the election between Ossoff and David Perdue, the closer of the two on Tuesday, there are certain to be GOP claims asserting Perdue's victory. McConnell will be tempted to call for the Senate to investigate before seating a winner — which would mean depriving himself of the gavel.
In a parallel situation from 23 years ago, the GOP-controlled Senate seated the state-certified winner in Louisiana, Democrat Mary Landrieu, even as an investigation dragged on for months before affirming her 5,000-vote victory. By that precedent, McConnell should arrange for a vote to seat Ossoff and Warnock as soon as their victories are certified.
Maybe the terrible events at the Capitol on Wednesday will bring a stop to such brinkmanship, but it should not be surprising if McConnell again ignores a precedent that interferes with his exercise of power.
Adding to the complexity are at least two contested elections where legislative bodies are playing a role. In Pennsylvania, the GOP-controlled General Assembly is refusing to seat the state-certified Democratic winner of a close state Senate election until a legal challenge is completed.
In the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has agreed that the House Administration Committee will investigate the claims of Democrat Rita Hart, who is asking the House to use its constitutional prerogative to overturn her loss in Iowa's 2nd District. Pending the outcome, the House has seated her Republican opponent, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, certified by the state as the winner by a scant 6 votes.
The most legendarily bitter incident of the House using this power was 35 years ago. The Democratic majority voted to seat one of their own, Frank McCloskey of Indiana, after the state certified the winner as Republican challenger Richard McIntyre. Selective acceptance of evidence by the majority-run panel that investigated the dispute produced a four-vote McCloskey margin and led to a Republican walkout in protest. Subsequent investigations by journalists made clear McCloskey should not have been declared the winner.
Pelosi should take steps to avoid that kind of outcome in the Iowa contest — and to set a model for any Senate investigation of the Georgia elections. The House Administration Committee has seven Democrats and three Republicans, so Pelosi should see to it that a subcommittee with equal representation of both parties is given charge of the investigation. If the panel deadlocks, the victory for Republican Miller-Meeks as certified by the state should remain in force.
Doing so would put pressure on McConnell to conduct any Senate investigation in a similar bipartisan manner. And the Senate should follow both its own precedent and the House's approach to Miller-Meeks and promptly seat the state-certified winners from Georgia pending any investigation.
More broadly, there are lessons here from the fact that our Founders gave Congress judgment over the election of its own members. Writers of a constitution today would not take that path because of the clear conflict of interest and risk of abuse by the party with legislative control.
At the beginning of the world's long democracy learning curve, the Founders naively believed parties could be kept out of governing institutions, and they failed to anticipate how a political party could use this and other ways of controlling elections to keep itself in power.
France provides an instructive comparison. Its earlier constitutions followed the American example and gave its legislature the right to judge elections, which led to abuses. France's current Constitution, ratified in 1958, ended that practice and established a Constitutional Court as the definitive source of judgment on all national elections.
Our courts have moved over time to something of a similar role, but inconsistently and incompletely. Here as elsewhere our antiquated system is very vulnerable to the partisan will to hold power. That leaves us to hope that Senate Republicans improve on their track record and do the right thing.
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.