There will be plenty of coverage around the likely drama involved in picking up where House and Senate Republicans left off before this most recent week off. (For a recap, see our last post.) So we’re not going to go into any detail about what might happen with the reconciliation bill (originally only for two departments in the Department of Homeland Security; now enlarged with funding for the President’s ballroom project and overshadowed by the announcement of the President’s plan to pay off political allies with funds from the Department of Justice) or the FISA extension or the housing bill that’s been pingponging between chambers because you can read in sources like Politico about these marquee issue.
We will note that the Iran War resolution postponed in the House before the recess may be up for a vote this week, along with a resolution to remove US troops from Lebanon and a discharge petition (number 8) to put forward a bill authorizing support for Ukraine. Three privileged resolutions, of which one is a discharge petition (meaning it has 218 co-sponsors meaning at least a few House Republican co-sponsors), is a lot for one week. Especially when all three are expressing opposition to various administration stances and might get some House Republican votes.
Now, procedurally, these three votes should go to the House Floor this week. But, as we’ve seen several times, most recently the week before last, Speaker Johnson is fine with adjourning the House instead if he thinks he won’t like the result of a vote. So we’re sticking with “may happen” until it actually does.
The bulk of the bills on the Weekly Schedule both uncontroversial and largely about public lands’ matters. One bill, S. 254: ARTIST Act, which amends the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 to protect the cultural practices and livelihoods of producers of Alaska Native handicrafts and marine mammal ivory products, would go to the President for signing if it passes in the House.
There are 44 committee meetings across both chambers this week with the bulk of them focused on or another stage of the appropriations process. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will appear four times in front of committees this week, starting with Senate Foreign Relations on Tuesday. Ostensibly, the hearing is about State’s budget request for the upcoming fiscal year, but one would expect he will also get questions about the ongoing war against Iran and the rumored plan to attack Cuba soon.
See everyone on Friday for the recap!
Legislative Preview for June 1, 2026 was originally published by GovTrack.us and is republished with permission.
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.