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A look at this week's congressional agenda, including House votes on Iran, Ukraine, FISA, appropriations, and key legislative priorities.
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Legislative Preview for June 1, 2026
Jun 04, 2026
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.
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Can Governing Survive Without Continuity?
Jun 03, 2026
Modern societies depend on continuity.
Electric grids are built over decades. Infrastructure systems require long investment cycles. Defense planning depends on sustained procurement and strategic consistency. Climate adaptation, energy systems, artificial intelligence governance, public health preparedness, and fiscal stability all require institutions capable of maintaining long-term priorities across multiple administrations.
The gap between winning and governing has a downstream consequence. Policies now reverse rapidly between administrations, and the systems that depend on stable direction find it harder to absorb the discontinuity.
In several major twentieth-century policy domains, broader governing coalitions sustained longer planning horizons across administrations even during periods of sharp political conflict. The interstate highway system, Cold War defense planning, postwar alliances, and major infrastructure and research investments unfolded across multiple political cycles because enough institutional continuity existed to sustain them. Stronger committee structures that rewarded specialization, a shared information environment rather than the partisan-sorted media of today, and political coalitions still organized around governing priorities rather than mutual opposition all helped sustain that continuity.
Those conditions have weakened. The institutional habits that once carried major commitments across administrations have eroded. At the same time, the systems that those commitments support — grids, infrastructure, defense, technology, public health — have grown more interconnected and less forgiving of reversal.
Consider energy.
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 created the most significant federal commitment to domestic clean energy investment in a generation. Within two years, a change of administration and a follow-on law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025, phased out many of those incentives and rescinded grants tied to active projects. Manufacturers canceled projects already underway. Sixteen projects were canceled in the first quarter of 2025 alone.
Tribal nations were among the hardest hit. Of the $484 million in grants awarded to 46 tribes in 2024, roughly 85-90% have since been clawed back. Tribal energy costs, already among the highest in the country, remain elevated as a result. The grants were obligated money — funds the federal government had committed and that recipients had begun to spend. Private capital committed alongside those grants — for development, engineering, and site preparation — was stranded. The money spent before the reversal is not returned, and the energy capacity it was meant to produce does not exist.
The cost of that whiplash is not only domestic. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in early 2026 in response to U.S. and Israeli strikes, and at the time of this writing, the strait remains effectively closed under a conditional ceasefire, with roughly one-fifth of global oil consumption transiting the route under normal conditions. The United States does not need Middle Eastern oil. Domestic production is more than adequate, and what the country imports from Canada and elsewhere reflects refinery economics and market choice rather than necessity. But oil prices are set globally, and American consumers pay the shock at the pump regardless of where the barrels originate. The IRA was building exactly the capacity that would have reduced that exposure, accelerating the shift to electricity in transportation, heating, and industry. China and other countries moving faster on clean-energy buildout are better positioned to absorb the kind of disruption the Hormuz closure represents. The United States canceled the policy that was reducing its vulnerability a year before events proved its worth.
Democracies depend on disagreement and political change. They also depend on institutions capable of sustaining long-term priorities across political transitions. Rapid technological change, instantaneous communication, and tightly interconnected economic and information systems compress political time horizons in ways the Civil War, the Depression, and the Cold War did not.
Whether American coalitions can adapt to those compressed horizons is the open question. The clearest early evidence will come from voters, not parties. Realignments tend to show up first in local and state elections before they reach national politics. The 1960s civil rights realignment was visible in Southern state results before it shaped a presidential election. The Tea Party shifted primaries and special elections before it shifted Washington.
The current picture is harder to read. Some voters appear to be moderating, choosing candidates who promise to govern rather than fight. Some are moving further toward the extremes of their party, rewarding candidates who treat the opposing side as the primary threat. Some are disengaging from electoral politics altogether. Which of these patterns gains ground over the next several cycles will tell us more about whether the coalitions can reorganize than any analysis of current party behavior.
Edward Saltzberg is the Executive Director of the Security and Sustainability Forum and writes The Stability Brief.
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Supporters of President Donald Trump, February 09, 2024 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
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Can Coalitions Built on Opposition Still Govern?
Jun 02, 2026
Political parties are supposed to do two things at once: win elections and govern. Those are not the same skill.
Winning elections requires assembling coalitions large enough to secure power. Governing requires maintaining enough internal agreement to make decisions, negotiate trade-offs, allocate resources, and sustain policy direction once power is achieved.
American politics reveals the tension between those two functions.
The first essay in this series described how political coalitions can weaken long before political institutions visibly destabilize. Parties may remain electorally competitive even as the alliances inside them become more internally strained and socially divided, and less capable of producing coherent governance.
One reason is that opposition itself has become one of the strongest forces sustaining political coalitions.
For much of American history, political coalitions were organized primarily around governing agendas: industrial growth, labor rights, anti-communism, tax policy, civil rights, or the role of federal power. Internal disagreements existed, sometimes intensely, but coalitions remained viable because their factions still shared enough governing priorities to stay together.
Coalitions can be reshaped underneath stable-looking institutions. The forces driving that change vary across eras. Today, opposition politics has become one of the strongest. In 1971, two months before being nominated to the Supreme Court, Lewis Powell wrote a confidential memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce arguing that American business needed to organize itself politically with the same discipline and long horizon that its critics had brought to academia, courts, and media. The memo helped catalyze a wave of institution-building in think tanks, legal advocacy, and political operations whose effects became visible across the following decades, from the Reagan realignment through the Gingrich revolution and the Tea Party movement. That a sitting Supreme Court nominee would write such a document remains a striking moment in American political history, regardless of one's view of its merits.
I watched part of what followed. The Republican administration that established the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the National Environmental Policy Act in 1970 had treated environmental regulation as a bipartisan concern. By the early 1980s, running water-pollution enforcement contracts for that same agency, I was watching the posture reverse. Economic-impact tests gained weight against health and environmental findings, and political appointees arrived with industry ties earlier administrations would have treated as conflicts.
That kind of reshaping took time, and the Powell memo did not cause it on its own. A parallel institutional buildup, organized around different priorities, eventually reshaped the other party as well. The two buildups are not perfectly symmetric — the Powell-era institutional architecture has a more continuous documented history than its counterparts on the left, and the contemporary record of governing failures is correspondingly skewed. The result, on both sides, was political coalitions whose internal coherence increasingly depended on shared opposition to the other side rather than shared governing priorities.
That shift changes how political coalitions maintain cohesion. Opposition politics lowers the amount of internal agreement required to sustain a coalition electorally. Parties can remain unified so long as resisting the opposing side remains the dominant shared priority. Governing requires something different. Coalitions must establish priorities, sustain compromises, and make trade-offs among factions whose interests diverge once governing decisions carry real consequences.
The result is a growing gap between electoral cohesion and governing coherence.
Both parties have demonstrated this pattern in recent years, in mirror image. In 2017, Republicans held the House, the Senate, and the presidency after campaigning for seven years on repealing the Affordable Care Act. They could not pass a replacement. The factions that had united against the law could not agree on what should replace it once governing required them to choose.
Four years later, Democrats held unified control and campaigned on a Build Back Better agenda whose broader social-spending elements collapsed inside their own coalition. A narrower piece survived as the Inflation Reduction Act. The factions held together to win the election. They could not hold together to legislate the full agenda.
Those failures do not necessarily prevent parties from winning the next election. Opposition politics can sustain electoral cohesion even as governing continuity weakens.
That dynamic shapes how government functions. Congress struggles to sustain durable bipartisan governing agreements on long-term issues. Executive authority expands as legislative compromise weakens. Elections reward coalition breadth. Governing requires coalition discipline. Administrations rely on executive action because stable legislative coalitions capable of sustaining long-term policy settlements become harder to assemble and maintain.
Donald Trump did not create these pressures, but his rise accelerated many of them. His political success demonstrated how powerfully opposition politics and anti-establishment sentiment could reorganize coalition behavior inside one of America's two major parties. Opposition to Trump simultaneously became a major unifying force inside the Democratic coalition, helping hold together groups whose internal disagreements became more visible once governing responsibilities returned.
The problem emerges when political coalitions can still win elections but no longer sustain durable governing agreement across administrations.
A political system can produce winning coalitions and failing governments at the same time. That is increasingly what American politics looks like.
The next essay turns to what coalition fragility costs when grids, infrastructure, and defense planning all require horizons longer than any single administration.
Edward Saltzberg is the Executive Director of the Security and Sustainability Forum and writes The Stability Brief.Keep ReadingShow less
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The Fragile Promise of the Ballot
May 31, 2026
Recent Supreme Court decisions such as Shelby County v. Holder and Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee were not just redefinitions of election law; they marked a critical shift away from the federal government’s duty to ensure equal ballot access—a duty fundamental to democracy.
The consequences were swift and broad. Within hours, Shelby County, Texas, imposed strict voter ID rules that federal officials had previously blocked under the Voting Rights Act’s pre-clearance provisions. Soon after, North Carolina reduced early voting and eliminated same-day registration. Across parts of Alabama, Georgia, and other Southern states, polling places closed or moved, often in communities with large Black populations. What once required federal review could now proceed quickly.
Meanwhile, supporters argue these rulings protect election integrity and return constitutional authority to states. The Court’s conservative majority contends portions of the Voting Rights Act reflect an earlier era and place outdated burdens on local governments. From this perspective, current conditions do not justify federal oversight.
Nevertheless, the evidence for widespread voter fraud remains negligible, while these laws impose uneven burdens on voters. Elderly, rural, student, and disproportionately Black and Latino communities still face the longest lines, fewest polling places, and greatest bureaucratic obstacles. The issue is no longer whether discrimination precisely mirrors the past, but whether the law recognizes it when it takes more sophisticated administrative forms.
The significance of these decisions lies not only in their immediate effects but also in what they reveal: The Supreme Court is narrowing the national commitment to protecting democratic participation. Where the Voting Rights Act once embodied active federal defense of democracy, the Court now treats voting inequities as isolated technicalities, underestimating their systemic impact.
This shift was particularly evident when Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was effectively dismantled in Shelby County. I am old enough to remember the national optimism surrounding America’s supposed racial progress. At that time, many declared the country had moved beyond the conditions that made federal oversight necessary. Yet history moved faster than that narrative. Almost immediately, legislatures introduced new voting restrictions, revised district maps, and narrowed pathways to participation.
What emerged was not the overt disenfranchisement of the Jim Crow era but a strategic transformation: democracy increasingly shaped through procedure and administration, not force or explicit exclusion. Today’s voter suppression manifests through policy and design, quietly maintaining barriers and undermining the ideal of equal participation.
History suggests such moments of regression are never permanent. From Dred Scott v. Sandford to the era of poll taxes and literacy tests, institutions have often lagged behind the nation’s democratic aspirations. Progress has depended less on judicial inevitability than on sustained civic pressure from ordinary citizens insisting the Constitution apply to them fully.
That pressure continues. Voting-rights groups stay in courtrooms and statehouses. Grassroots organizers keep registering voters in communities long targeted for exclusion. Citizens still wait in long lines, believing participation matters—even when systems seem designed to exhaust their faith.
The Supreme Court may interpret the law, but it cannot alone answer the central democratic question: Who is entitled to full participation in American public life? That question persists—and history suggests it will always depend on both judicial action and citizens resolutely defending democracy’s unfinished promise against new forms of exclusion.
Rev. Dr. F. Willis Johnson is a spiritual entrepreneur, author, scholar-practioner whose leadership and strategies around social and racial justice issues are nationally recognized and applied.
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Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people