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How 41 Senators Could End the Iran War and Rein In Defense Spending
Forty-one is the number of senators needed to stop the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act—a massive bill that sets defense policies and authorities—and push for key modifications.
Sep 11, 2026
In the days after the September 11, 2001 attacks, I joined Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, the Institute for Policy Studies, YES! Magazine, and hundreds of other signatories in calling for “Justice, Not Vengeance.” We argued that the United States should find and prosecute those responsible for 9-11 rather than launch wars against countries that had not attacked us.
We were right to worry: The wars that followed cost trillions of dollars and countless lives, and left the country less secure, not more.
Twenty-five years later, Congress faces a similar test—and a similar warning sign. The United States and Israel are at war with Iran, a war of choice that could prove even more disastrous than the decision to go to war with Afghanistan and Iraq.
While responsibility for the war lies with the Trump administration, Congress has a say in what happens next—if it chooses to act.
When the Senate reconvenes after their recess, they will face the question of approving the NDAA. Senators should use their leverage to change the disastrous direction of this administration’s defense policies.
Likewise, Congress can rein in historic levels of military spending and reject proposals to spend billions of dollars on a new generation of nuclear weapons, funded by taxpayers and historic levels of debt. And it can say no to the rapid development and deployment of AI weapons, an especially important step at a time when AI agents are already going rogue.
All it would take is 41 US senators. That is the number needed to stop the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)—a massive bill that sets defense policies and authorities, with a proposed price tag of $1.5 trillion.
The NDAA passed the US House of Representatives on July 22, but it has stalled in the US Senate.
Under Senate rules, 41 senators can filibuster to stop a bill from moving to the Senate floor for a vote, and the Democratic caucus has 47 senators. So, even in the minority, the Democratic senators—along with any Republicans who oppose “forever wars”—could prevent the NDAA from advancing without modifications.
When the Senate reconvenes after their recess, they will face the question of approving the NDAA. Senators should use their leverage to change the disastrous direction of this administration’s defense policies.
What specifically could 41 Senators do?
- Rein in the spending: Proposed defense spending is at the highest level in real dollars since World War II—a 38% increase over last year’s spending, funded by taxpayers and a national debt that has reached 124% the size of the entire US economy. This spending is unsustainable and unaccountable; the Pentagon just failed its eighth consecutive audit. Congress should restore the inspector general positions the Trump administration eliminated.
- End the war in Iran: Require a War Powers Act resolution, with appropriate guardrails to set the terms for an end to the war. Set limits on the use of taxpayer funds for the conflict.
- Reset our relationship with Israel. Cut military aid to Israel until it withdraws from Gaza, ends the spreading of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and stops threatening its neighbors with unilateral military action. Strip Section 1217 from the Senate version of the NDAA, which would create a US-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative merging research, development, and deployment of military technologies with the Israeli military.
- Work for nuclear safeguards, not new weapons systems: End authorization for a new generation of nuclear weapons that includes the development of intermediate-range systems designed for use in regional conflicts. This risks turning nuclear weapons from a deterrent into a first-strike weapon of aggression. Require robust new arms-control talks aimed at reducing nuclear arsenals; none currently exist since the New START treaty expired on February 5, 2026, leaving the US and Russia with no binding limits on their strategic nuclear arsenals for the first time in decades.
- Stop illegal and ill-advised uses of the US military: Enforce the Posse Comitatus Act's prohibition on using US troops on American soil. End the extrajudicial killings of unidentified people on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, now numbering 227. Prohibit using the military to threaten Canada, Greenland, and other allies as part of efforts to seize their territory.
- Put guardrails on AI-controlled weapons: This field is moving faster than Congress can track, and the NDAA is already the battleground. The House and Senate versions each include provisions on autonomous weapons and human oversight. But the same bill also directs the Pentagon to build a department-wide system for deploying agentic AI at speed and scale, pushing adoption forward even as the human-oversight rules meant to contain it remain unsettled. Congress should preserve and strengthen the human-oversight provisions, not let them get traded away in conference, and should require that no lethal-force decision—including nuclear launch decisions—is ever delegated to an algorithm. Three in four Americans agree: Decisions to kill should be made by people, not machines.
In January of this year, President Donald Trump called for raising the US spending on defense to $1.5 trillion, but has been uncharacteristically quiet about this eye-watering level of defense spending ever since.
Perhaps his silence is because he can see how deeply unpopular the US-Israel war against Iran has turned out to be. Sixty eight percent of Americans say it is not worth the costs, according to a July survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a level of unpopularity that parallels Americans’ views of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And there is no end in sight. In spite of President Trump’s bragging about an imminent US victory in Iran, The Wall Street Journal reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has extended Middle East deployments into 2027.
The US already spends more on the military than any other country—more than twice as much as China and five times as much as Russia. The enormous sums devoted to military spending, and the taxes and debt used to finance them, make the priorities of the American people more difficult to achieve.
Instead of ramping up dangerous conflicts and new weapons systems, we should fund an economy that meets the needs of our families, deploys solutions to the climate crisis, and makes healthcare and housing accessible to everyone. Instead of mounting debt, we should invest in prosperity for future generations.
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Warning AI 'Could Mean the Demise of Humanity,' El-Sayed Backs Development Pause
"Enough is enough. We need to make sure that the pace of development isn't outpacing the pace of risk."
Sep 10, 2026
Democratic US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan on Wednesday called for a pause in advanced artificial intelligence development, warning that the technology is progressing faster than governments and researchers can establish meaningful safeguards against potentially catastrophic consequences.
"You might have woken up like me to this tweet from a guy you probably never heard of until today. His name is Jacob Coxon," El-Sayed said in a video posted to social media. "Up until yesterday, he worked for an AI lab called Anthropic, one of the leading-edge AI research organizations in the world. He quit yesterday. He quit because he's worried that the technology that he was building could end humanity."
"That's something we should be paying attention to," the 41-year-old epidemiologist stressed.
Coxon said on social media that neither OpenAI—whose rogue machine agents recently hacked outside systems on multiple reported occasions—nor Anthropic "is acting responsibly" as they race against competitors at home and abroad to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), an advanced AI that can understand, learn, and apply knowledge of any subject as well as or better than a typical human.
"They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives," he emphasized. "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt."
El-Sayed said that the AI Under Democracy plan his campaign released in July—which called for a new federal regulatory agency akin to the Food and Drug Administration to oversee development of artificial intelligence technology—doesn't go far enough. Instead, he is now backing a pause in AI development, as urged by US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) last month.
Earlier this month, Sanders and Congressman Greg Casar (D-Texas) introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, with the Vermont senator arguing that "the future of humanity cannot be left in the hands of a handful of Big Tech oligarchs."
Many of those oligarchs and other AI pioneers also believe their products could one day wipe out humanity, but are rushing to build them anyway so that their competitors don't reap the rewards of being the first to achieve AGI.
Sanders is also reportedly preparing to convene a bipartisan Senate hearing next week on the dangers of AI, with special guests set to include Geoffrey Hinton, who quit Google in 2023 so he could sound the alarm on what he estimates is a 10–20% chance that AI could cause human extinction within three decades.
"Enough is enough," El-Sayed said Wednesday. "We need to make sure that the pace of development isn't outpacing the pace of risk. We cannot, in a race against China or a race for these corporations to be the dominant AI manufacturer, inadvertently create products that slip human control, that could fall into the wrong hands, that could mean the demise of humanity."
"That is a risk none of us ought to be able to bear, and it certainly shouldn't sit with the richest, most powerful corporations in the world on incentives that are driven by their greed rather than our well-being," he added. "So the time for action is now."
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Sanders Sets Briefing on 'Extraordinary Dangers' Posed by Breakneck AI Development
The session is scheduled to feature experts, including Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, who quit Google so he could warn of the potentially existential risks posed by unchecked AI advancement.
Sep 09, 2026
US Sen. Bernie Sanders is set to convene a bipartisan hearing next week focusing on the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence technology, a move that comes amid more warnings from experts about the potentially existential threats posed by unregulated AI development.
Axios reported Wednesday that Sanders (I-Vt.) will hold the September 16 hearing on what he called the "extraordinary dangers" posed by AI as a growing chorus of scientists and technology insiders warns that the race toward ever-more-powerful systems—which will likely one day surpass and then far exceed human brainpower—could ultimately threaten humanity's survival.
The briefing is set to feature three experts: Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist often called the “godfather of AI;" Max Tegmark, an MIT physicist and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute; and Ajeya Cotra, an AI safety researcher who recently helped investigate OpenAI's agents autonomously hacking the open-source software platform Hugging Face.
Hinton—who quit Google in 2023 so he could speak more freely about AI's dangers—has estimated that there is a 10–20% chance AI could cause human extinction within three decades. He has warned of the great difficulty of controlling increasingly intelligent machines that will likely one day achieve superintelligence and ultimately be beyond the ability of humans to control. Hinton has repeatedly argued that relying on profit-driven corporations to self-regulate AI development is a dangerous mistake.
Tegmark has also spent years sounding the alarm. In 2023, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter signed by more than 30,000 researchers, technologists, and others calling for a six-month pause on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.
Cotra wrote in a 2022 analysis that unchecked artificial intelligence development would likely lead to a “full-blown AI takeover.” The following year, she said she believed there was roughly a 50% chance AI would be making most important economic and societal decisions by around 2040, while warning that continued scaling of existing techniques could produce misaligned systems and a machine takeover.
Experts say the recent headline-grabbing rogue AI hacks underscore the problem of alignment. As AI advances to the point where it will likely outsmart humans one day, the challenge of ensuring that advanced systems reliably pursue goals that match what humans actually want becomes increasingly difficult—and dangerous.
Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) recently introduced legislation that would ban the creation of AI systems capable of surpassing human cognition and pause advanced AI development until a federal regulatory framework is established.
"In the interest of humanity... pause AI development," the senator urged tech titans last month. "It is not too late to avoid disaster. Stop building machines that humans cannot control."
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The Very Clear and Easy Case for Abdul El-Sayed
And why Mike Rogers would be a disaster for the country.
Sep 09, 2026
The Democratic establishment, along with AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, spent between $60 million and $70 million trying to prevent Dr. Abdul El-Sayed from winning Michigan’s Democratic primary—roughly 11 times the money backing El-Sayed.
He won nonetheless and now faces the Republican nominee, Mike Rogers, in a race that will help determine control of the Senate after the midterms in November.
I hope Michiganders elect El-Sayed, who will be a great US senator.
After receiving an advanced degree in public health, El-Sayed worked as an epidemiologist. Informed by this experience and expertise, he advocates access to healthcare as a right and not a privilege.
He also advocates economic security for all, financed by a tax system that asks more from the wealthy. He’s a champion of civil rights. He’s a fighter for affordability against predatory landlords, monopolistic corporations, and billionaires who turn their wealth into political power.
Most Jewish Americans have values that align with Dr. El-Sayed’s. He believes in social justice—that government can be a force for good as it helps expand opportunities, protect rights, and advance the common good.
Yet AIPAC is continuing its battle against El-Sayed. It is expected to put tens of millions of dollars behind Rogers, some of it disguised behind other PACs. “Our members remain determined to ensure that voters reject Dr. El-Sayed and his radical anti-Israel agenda in November,” said Deryn Sousa, a spokeswoman for AIPAC.
El-Sayed is no more anti-Israel than I am.
Being opposed to Benjamin Netanyahu’s extreme right-wing Israeli government is not the same as being anti-Israel. Nor should it be equated with being antisemitic. Nor, for that matter, should opposition to Netanyahu and his government be seen as condoning the brutal Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, in which 1,200 were murdered and 251 taken hostage. It was an atrocity and a crime against humanity.
I believe Netanyahu is a war criminal and that his government has committed genocide in Gaza. I’m appalled that he and it continue to allow and excuse horrific violence on the West Bank against Palestinians. For this reason, I don’t believe the United States should arm Netanyahu’s government with destructive military equipment.
This doesn’t make me anti-Israel. For decades I’ve advocated a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, and I continue to believe it’s the only sane and reasonable way for these two peoples to peacefully coexist.
This certainly doesn’t make me antisemitic, either. I’m Jewish. Some of my relatives died in Hitler’s gas chambers. My mother and father were told they were unwelcome in the small town they moved to when I was a toddler because, according to the group of old men who met them at the doorstep of our new home, it was a “Christian community.”
Like me, Dr. El-Sayed opposes what the government of Netanyahu has done and continues to do. El-Sayed has affirmed that “Jewish Israelis and Palestinians alike have the right to peace, dignity, and self-determination.” He has acknowledged the horror of October 7, condemned all forms of antisemitism, and been highly critical of Israel’s war in Gaza and abuses in the West Bank.
Ten days ago El-Sayed publicly apologized for any misinterpretation people might have placed on remarks he made after a man attacked a synagogue in a Detroit suburb in March. The man, Ayman Mohammad Ghazali, had lost four relatives in an Israeli airstrike on Lebanon the week before.
In a video response at the time, El-Sayed condemned the attack. He added that “hurt people hurt people,” a reference to what happened to Ghazali’s family. Critics accused El-Sayed of justifying Ghazali’s actions.
If you read the transcript of what El-Sayed actually said, it’s clear he was merely trying to explain and give context for the violence. “What I was trying to do was offer context for why it happened, but it wasn’t the time for context,” El-Sayed said in apology. “And you don’t ever want to trample somebody’s pain.”
There is enough pain on all sides—pain for Israelis and Palestinians, for Muslims and Jews. Which is why it’s so important that all of us think clearly and carefully. Being anti-Netanyahu isn’t being anti-Israel, nor is it being antisemitic.
It’s also critically important that the good people of Michigan oppose Mike Rogers, who endorsed and voted for legislation last year that cut Affordable Care Act insurance for millions of Americans, weakened Medicaid and food assistance to less affluent citizens, and provided tax breaks to the very rich.
Rogers has warmly and enthusiastically praised Trump. He’s failed to publicly condemn or even criticize Trump’s bigoted statements about ethnic communities in the United States. He hasn’t said a word against Trump’s unconscionable pardon of the more than 1000 insurrectionists who rioted at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. This includes those found guilty of the most heinous acts, causing grievous bodily harm to law enforcement officers.
My view is we need smart, committed progressives such as Abdul El-Sayed in the Senate. And we need right-wing Trump suckups such as Mike Rogers out of the Senate.
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Talarico Protests as Texas Swing County Plans to Close 92 Polling Places
“The most powerful people in this county, the most powerful people in this country, don’t want us to be able to vote easily."
Aug 31, 2026
Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico is pushing for one of Texas' most important swing counties to drop plans to close nearly a third of its polling places before November's midterms.
Amid public outcry, the Commissioners Court for Tarrant County—which contains Fort Worth and borders Dallas—plans to hold a vote on Tuesday on whether to shutter 92 of the polling places used in the 2022 election, many of which serve the city's poorer and minority populations.
If Democrats flip the Senate this November, the road to that outcome will almost certainly run through Texas. A Democrat has not won a statewide election there since 1994, but Talarico may be in a position to break the trend—leading Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton in most polls.
Tarrant County narrowly supported then-Rep. Collin Allred, the Democratic challenger to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) in 2024. Talarico said the closure of polling places was meant to suppress turnout and help Republicans cling to their advantage in the state.
“The most powerful people in this county, the most powerful people in this country, don’t want us to be able to vote easily,” Talarico said at a press event Sunday, during which he argued that the closures would result in longer travel for voters and lower turnout, especially in heavily Black and Latino communities.
"We're here fighting for the rights of everybody," Talarico added. "The problem is when we let voting rights become a partisan issue. That's when we walk down a very dangerous path in this country."
Proponents of the closures have described them as a way for the county to save money, rather than a political tactic.
“We’re clearly not trying to suppress the vote,” state Rep. Matt Shaheen (R-66), the chairman of the Texas House Elections Committee, told the Associated Press. “That’s a silly accusation.”
But Republican officials in Tarrant County have, in the past, explicitly tied closures of certain voting locations to partisan aims. In 2024, Republican County Judge Tim O'Hare attempted, unsuccessfully, to remove several early voting sites on college campuses, a move that the county's GOP chairman said would have been "a serious win for Republicans in Tarrant County."
In 2025's off-year elections, Republicans voted 3-2 to reduce the number of polling locations by more than a third and cut funding for free bus rides to the polls for low-income residents. The previous year, they introduced new rules blocking what they derided as "left-wing" groups from registering voters inside county buildings.
At the state level, meanwhile, Texas has carried out unprecedented mid-decade redistricting to hand more US House seats to Republicans at the behest of President Donald Trump. And following Trump's false assertions that his loss in the 2020 election was marred by fraud, Texas introduced several new restrictions on mail-in voting that were found to have significantly reduced turnout.
Tuesday's scheduled vote in Tarrant County comes after commissioners opted to table an earlier proposal that would have shuttered nearly half the county's polling places.
An analysis of that plan showed that the lowest-income third of ZIP codes would lose nearly 58% of their Election Day polling sites, while the highest-income third would lose just under 22%. Majority-minority ZIP codes would have lost nearly 52% of their polling places, while majority-white ones would have lost just a third of theirs.
A similar analysis has not yet been conducted for the new proposal. But civil rights groups still argue that the proposal will disenfranchise many voters.
"Cutting the number of poll sites, especially at such a large scale, will harm Tarrant County voters and their right to participate in the democratic process—and cause particular harm to Black, Latino, and [Asian American and Pacific Islander] voters who already face significant barriers to exercising that fundamental right," wrote groups including the ACLU, the Legal Defense Fund, and the Texas Civil Rights Project, in a letter to the Commissioners' Court on Friday.
They emphasized that the polling places slated to close under the new proposal were clustered in areas such as south and southeast Fort Worth and central and eastern Arlington, which have predominantly nonwhite populations.
Tarrant County Commissioner Alisa Simmons, a Democrat who is running to unseat O'Hare as county judge and spoke alongside Talarico on Sunday, argued that while it was an improvement on the earlier proposal, "dropping 92 Election Day polling places is crazy."
"We should not compare this proposal to the worst proposal," she said. "We should compare it to the access that Tarrant County voters actually had in 2022."
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The Most Dangerous Person to the Michigan Senate Race Lives in Ohio
Dennis Kucinich could tell voters from experience that if Michiganders elect Mike Rogers, he will remain silent as our soldiers die, as family finances deteriorate, and as we become more hated around the world.
Aug 27, 2026
Which is the "All War, All the Time" party that impoverishes your family and makes us less safe? Which party lies to get us into wars, lies after they get caught, and then just issues additional lies as they are now doing in Iran and as they once did in Iraq?
This question is now playing out in Michigan in the Senate race. However, there is an out-of-state person who could definitively answer that question.
While the epic battle between Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers wages in Michigan, the most dangerous man to one of the candidates resides in Cleveland, Ohio. His name is Dennis Kucinich. He was a 16-year member of the House of Representatives overlapping with Mike Rogers for a number of those years, especially when the Authorization for Military Force in the Iraq War was being debated in late 2002.
Kucinich is dangerous because no one interested in the welfare of American families, its soldiers, our national security, and personal liberties could vote for Rogers if they knew the evidence Kucinich produced before the War.
Did Mike Rogers call out: Let’s stop and more carefully look at the shaky and inconclusive evidence before we send our kids off to die and to kill hundreds of thousands?
Evidence that Mike Rogers and 214 other Republicans ignored. In fact, the All War, All the Time party only had six GOP members vote against the war. Unfortunately, Democrats have an All War, All the Time faction as well. These AIPAC-bred and -fed types are now mumbling how they can’t in good conscience support El-Sayed.
The Greedy Oil Party {GOP), of course, continues to vote the same war-mongering way as shown with their support of the Gaza genocide and the Israel-First War on Iran.
In 2002 Kucinich masterfully destroyed the Bush-Cheney web of lies justifying the illegal and immoral war. His evidence-packed memo pointed out that we were going to war against a country that did not attack us, had no means to do so, and had never expressed a desire to do so.
The fact that Iraq was not an imminent threat is not just my jaundiced opinion as a 40-year adviser to Dennis. Six artificial intelligence (AI) platforms—ChatGPT. Claude, Saner, Gemini, Deep Seek and Grok—were presented with a simple question:
Do you agree or disagree with the following conclusion: On Oct. 2, 2002 when Dennis Kucinich presented his eight-page memo against the Authorization for Use of Military Force there was already enough contradictory and qualifying intelligence available to Congress that the Bush administration's presentation of Iraq as an established, urgent WMD threat was not justified by the underlying evidence?
They all agreed that Dennis and other sources had already raised enough questions to halt the rush to folly. Certainly, no prudent, patriotic official would send 4,418 of our brave men and women to die violently in a foreign land.
But Mike Rogers did.
Over a million Iraqis likely died as a result. We wasted trillions of precious dollars as the Greed Only Party filled the pockets of the Military-Industrial Complex and their donor-owners.
But Mike Rogers’ culpability gets worse. When Hussein Kamel—Saddam’s son-in-law in charge of WMD concealment—was interviewed by the CIA and other intelligence agencies in 1995 after defecting, he disclosed that all the WMDs had been destroyed.
This devastating disclosure came out in late February 2003. The Newsweek article continued the shredding of the Greedy Oil Party web of lies which forced the Bush-Cheney administration to accelerate their war plans. While they had stenographers at The New York Times and other major media, Americans were getting queasy.
But the mainstream corporate media continued the pro-war propaganda. In one two-week period the media accuracy group FAIR noted that of 393 guests discussing the war, only 1 was from an anti-war group. A stunning 75% were current or former government or military officials.
Meanwhile Kucinich was making hundreds of speeches on the House floor and giving as many media interviews as possible in an effort to stop the war.
Did Mike Rogers call out: Let’s stop and more carefully look at the shaky and inconclusive evidence before we send our kids off to die and to kill hundreds of thousands? He didn’t speak out then, and he hasn’t spoken out now about the Gaza genocide or the wild WMD lies being used again by the All War, All the Time party.
Kucinich could clarify that Michiganders can elect Mike Rogers who will remain silent as our soldiers die, as family finances deteriorate, and we become more hated around the world. You can’t kill all the girls and teachers in a school and expect the world to like or respect us. In one recent United Nations General Assembly only 1% of the rest of the world’s population outside the Unites States and Israel voted with us.
Or they can elect Dr. Sayed who recognizes that the proposed 2027 National Defense Authorization Act budget for the war and surveillance is bloated with waste, fraud, and abuse. The average family of four in our society will see over $30,000 expended annually in our national budget going forward. This figure comes from the Chalmers Johnson logic that the official Pentagon budget of $1.5 trillion may be as much as double that figure.
If one conservatively uses $2.5 trillion as the accurate budget, one arrives at the $30,000 yearly figure for American families of four. Most Americans don’t know, for example, that the $488.2 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs is not included nor the hundreds of billions we will spend to pay the interest on previous war borrowings.
My modest proposal is for Mike Rogers to send Dennis and Elizabeth Kucinich halfway around the world on a two-month all-expenses paid vacation to the Maldives. Considering the damage Dennis could do to his campaign, it would be money well spent.
Dollar for dollar it would be far more effective than the Islamophobia and fear-of-immigrants ads that the GOP is currently peddling across the country.
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Trump-Backed Darline Graham Bashes 'Government-Run Healthcare,' Glorifies Working While Sick
“Government-provided healthcare is a bad idea. I’d rather Americans work long, hard hours, not receive sick leave, and die young," said one critic, "is one hell of a message.”
Aug 26, 2026
The precise point Republican US Sen. Darline Graham was making was unclear Tuesday evening when she attacked her Democratic opponent, Dr. Annie Andrews, for supporting what Graham called "government-run healthcare" and then pivoted to the story of her parents' early deaths.
But some observers wondered whether the lawmaker from South Carolina, who took over the Senate seat of her brother, the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, last month, was arguing for the continuation of a system in which many Americans can't get the healthcare they need.
Graham, who has worked at the state workforce agency and the South Carolina Commission for the Blind, spoke after winning a special runoff election against US Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC). She was endorsed by President Donald Trump and will now face Andrews, a pediatrician, in the November midterm election for a full Senate term.
Speaking to supporters, Graham criticized Andrews for supporting "bad idea after bad idea," including "government-run healthcare." Andrews has spoken out against the Republican Party's cuts to Medicaid and Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies. Her website states support for "policies like a public option that expand access to affordable healthcare for all South Carolinians."
Graham said she has "a different background and vision for our state," describing her childhood growing up "in one room in central South Carolina" before explaining her parents' personal experience with healthcare and working "long, hard hours to make ends meet."
Darline Graham: Government run health care…. bad idea after bad idea. Annie Andrews backs it all. I have a different background. My parents worked long, hard hours. If that were sick, they had to get up and go to work. My mother passed away when I was 11 and my father just over… pic.twitter.com/fvFCrmudhi
— Acyn (@Acyn) August 26, 2026
"We didn't take vacations," she said. "If they were sick, they had to get up and go to work, because if the doors weren't open, we weren't making money."
She then added, "My mother passed away when I was 11, and my father just over a year later," before saying she has "worked hard for the people of South Carolina" and understands "the struggles facing South Carolina families because I've faced them too."
Andrews responded on social media that Graham's "family suffered and died without healthcare and apparently [she] thinks yours should too.
"Call me crazy, but as a doctor, I believe there are few responsibilities more fundamental to government than keeping its citizens healthy and safe," she said. "No family should have to suffer simply because generations before them did."
Other observers were perplexed about the message embedded in Graham's story.
“'Government-provided healthcare is a bad idea. I’d rather Americans work long, hard hours, not receive sick leave, and die young' is one hell of a message," said journalist Ahmed Baba.
A "straightforward reading" of Graham's statement, said Matthew Sitman of the podcast Know Your Enemy, would point to a proposal that "more parents of 11-year-olds die."
Graham's official website does not appear to outline any healthcare proposal. The senator said this week that voters she has met around the state are "talking about the rising cost of healthcare and affordability," but declined to name legislation or describe any proposals for tackling the issues.
The healthcare advocacy group Protect Our Care found last week that the Republican Party's $900 billion in cuts to Medicaid and its decision to slash ACA subsidies have left 8 million people across the country without health coverage so far, affecting Americans in all 50 states.
In South Carolina, Protect Our Care said, 235,000 people have lost their ACA subsidies or coverage under Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program. Premiums have doubled for more than 587,000 South Carolinians in the past year, while 14 hospitals, clinics, and nursing homes have been forced to shut down or are on the verge of closing due to the healthcare cuts.
Healthcare facilities in the state are facing a $1.5 billion loss in funding and have seen a 26.9% spike in care that they are providing without reimbursement from Medicaid or other public programs.
"South Carolinians are dropping coverage they can no longer afford, delaying care, rationing medications, and living with the constant fear that an emergency could push them deeper into debt," said Protect Our Care.
Writer and engineer Hayden Clarkin suggested voters in the state may not be convinced by a "healthcare proposal" that appeared to amount to, "If you’re sick, you have to get up and work."
A 2020 poll by Data for Progress on behalf of the advocacy group Medicare for All NOW found that 77% of Democratic voters in South Carolina supported "expanding Medicare so that it becomes the primary insurer for all Americans."
Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) noted that should Graham win a full Senate term, she will benefit from the "government-provided healthcare" she had attacked as a "bad idea."
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'Vance Is a Dirtbag': Troy Jackson Responds to VP Downplaying ICE Killing in Maine
"To come here and say, 'Have some perspective'? You ought to have some damn perspective," Jackson said in a video reply to the vice president.
Aug 25, 2026
Troy Jackson, the Democratic US Senate nominee for a critical seat in Maine, denounced Vice President JD Vance on Monday for downplaying the killing of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian national who was killed by a federal immigration agent last month in Biddeford.
During a visit to Maine on Monday, Vance told residents who are "so worried about that situation" to "have a little bit of perspective." Vance added that "we can absolutely investigate every shooting and we will, but we can also secure our border and ensure that that poison stops coming into our country." (The legal representative for Durán Guerrero's family said no federal agencies have reached out as part of any investigation into the killing.)
Jackson, the former president of Maine's Senate who is running to unseat Republican US Sen. Susan Collins, responded to the vice president in a video message posted to social media.
"JD Vance is a dirtbag," said Jackson. "There was a young man who had a Social Security number, he had a job, I mean, he had a life. He had a family. To come here and say, 'Have some perspective'? You ought to have some damn perspective. I mean, you don't even know what the hell's goin' on. You got a rogue agency that's going around, pulling people out of homes."
Jackson then turned his attention to Collins, who recently voted for legislation that included around $70 billion in funding for US immigration agencies, including nearly $40 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). After an ICE agent killed Durán Guerrero last month, Collins refused to say she regretted her vote to boost the agency's funding.
"I want to know: What are you doing about it, Susan?" Jackson asked. "She gave them an additional $70 billion to pull this shit off. We lost a person that JD Vance seems to not give a shit about. And that should piss us all off. So I want to know: Do you agree with JD Vance dismissing the killing of this young man? Because I tell you what, 'concerns' and all that does nothing for all of us, does nothing for that family, and I'm sick of your 'concerns.'"
My response to @JDVance saying we should "have a little bit of perspective" on ICE murdering a young father pic.twitter.com/fNRxN9oBiF
— Troy Jackson (@TroyJackson207) August 24, 2026
During his remarks in Brewer, Maine on Monday, Vance said Collins is "doing an amazing job" and characterized her as "the most independent member of the United States Senate," even though she votes with President Donald Trump around 96% of the time.
Misha Linnehan, a spokesperson for the Maine Democratic Party, said in response to the vice president's remarks that "Susan Collins voted to give Donald Trump and JD Vance $70 billion to send armed ICE agents into Maine with no guardrails."
"Now that a man has been killed," said Linnehan, "JD Vance thinks Mainers need to ‘have a little bit of perspective’ about children losing their father and a wife losing her husband—does Susan Collins agree?"
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'Flashing Red Warning Sign' for Lawmakers: Poll Shows Voters Reject US-Israel Military Integration
"It is the height of absurdity that Congress is even considering a proposal to become more entangled with the Israeli military and use our tax dollars to subsidize their weapons companies."
Aug 18, 2026
A new poll of US voters published on Tuesday offers a warning for congressional lawmakers backing a plan to deepen military ties between the United States and Israel, finding that a clear majority of voters oppose the proposal—which some critics have called "treasonous."
The Data for Progress survey of 1,217 likely US voters—conducted August 3–7 for Demand Progress and the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) Policy Project—revealed that 61% of respondents oppose legislation in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2027 that would integrate Israeli weapons companies into the Pentagon at a level exceeding that of any other country. That figure rose to 78% among Democrats and 73% among independents.
“This poll is a flashing red warning sign for any member of Congress who supports the defense authorization bill," Demand Progress senior policy adviser Cavan Kharrazian said in a statement. "A clear majority of voters do not support further integrating the Israeli military and Israeli military companies into the Pentagon, which the NDAA is set to do."
NEW POLL: 61% of Americans - including 78% of Democrats and 73% of Independents - oppose a measure moving through Congress to integrate Israeli weapons companies into the Pentagon. Read more of the results from our poll with @demandprogress.bsky.social andconducted by @dataforprogress.org.⬇️
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— IMEU Policy Project (@imeupolicy.bsky.social) August 18, 2026 at 8:14 AM
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted last month 216-212, mostly along party lines, in favor of a record $1.15 trillion NDAA. The military spending bill contains Section 219, a provision that would create a US–Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, accelerating joint defense research, development, testing, and integration of technologies including artificial intelligence, missile defense, and counter-drone systems.
Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) submitted an amendment to strip Section 219 from the NDAA. The measure failed to pass.
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who voted against the NDAA, described Section 219 as “an outrageous threat to our country’s security and autonomy."
The Senate version of the military spending authorization bill has a related provision—Section 1217, the United States-Israel FUTURES Act—and the two chambers will need to reconcile their NDAA legislation before the final language is decided. Reconciliation is not expected to occur before November at the earliest.
“It’s time for Congress to listen to the American people for once, and not the same voices who always want to cut Israel a blank check," Kharrazian said. That "blank check" has totaled more than $174 billion in non-inflation-adjusted aid since the modern state of Israel was founded in 1948.
The new poll found that 57% of respondents believe the Israeli military and Israeli weapons companies should not receive increased access to US military systems. Fifty-one percent said Israel benefits more from the US-Israel relationship, compared with just 12% who said the United States benefits more.
Although Republican voters support the Pentagon provision by a 16-point margin, when asked about it without additional context, they are considerably less enthusiastic about the idea of granting any foreign military special access, opposing it 62%-27%.
Forty percent of surveyed voters said they believe that the US-Israeli relationship is "too close," compared with 42% who say it is "about right." Among Democrats, 56% say relations are too close, versus just 23% who say about right. Twenty-two percent of Republicans and 43% of Independents said US-Israeli relations are too close.
Asked if they think President Donald Trump is too supportive of Israel's right-wing government, 49% said yes, compared with only 33% who said the president is giving Israel the right amount of backing and just 8% who believe he's not giving the key ally enough support.
Respondents' views of Israel itself have deteriorated markedly, with 44% saying they now view the country less favorably than they did three years ago—compared with just 17% who say their views have improved amid the war of annihilation in Gaza that United Nations experts, human rights groups, and a South Africa-led case currently before the International Court of Justice call a genocide, as well as the wider Israeli occupation, colonization, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid in Palestine.
Looking only at the past six months, 41% of respondents said their view of Israel has become less favorable, versus 16% who say it has become more favorable. Among Democrats, the split is 56%-13%; among Independents it's 42%-11%.
“Israel is a nation committing genocide that just dragged the American people into a disastrous war that is still hitting our pocketbooks," IMEU Policy Project executive director Margaret DeReus said, referring to the Iran War. “Senators take an oath to do what is best for the American people above all; to uphold that oath, they must scrap this ridiculous proposal.”
"It is the height of absurdity," DeReus added, "that Congress is even considering a proposal to become more entangled with the Israeli military and use our tax dollars to subsidize their weapons companies."
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Bernie Sanders' Bill Would End Social Security Garnishment Over Student Debt
“In the richest country in the history of the world, no senior should have their Social Security payments taken away from them to pay back student debt."
Aug 17, 2026
US Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday introduced legislation that would prohibit the federal government from garnishing Social Security payments from older Americans and people with disabilities who default on their student loans, a move that comes amid a debt crisis made worse by education cuts in President Donald Trump's so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The Stop Social Security Garnishment Act, co-sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.), would bar the Treasury Department from seizing Social Security payments, including Social Security Disability Insurance, to collect on defaulted federal student debt.
“As a result of Trump’s disastrous cuts to education, an increasing number of seniors are in danger of having their Social Security checks garnished to pay back student loans they took out decades ago. That is beyond unacceptable,” Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement.
“In the richest country in the history of the world, no senior should have their Social Security payments taken away from them to pay back student debt," the senator added. "This is especially true when seniors throughout the country already cannot afford the skyrocketing price of healthcare, prescription drugs, groceries, and housing. Congress must pass this legislation.”
Sanders' bill comes as more than 9 million Americans are in default on their federal student loans, according to the latest Department of Education data. Republicans' One Big Beautiful Bill, which was signed into law by Trump last year, contains the biggest cuts to education in US history while making federal student loans less forgiving for borrowers, in part by attacking repayment protections that could help avert defaults.
Student loan delinquency reached 10.6% in the second quarter of 2026, up from 10.3% in the first quarter, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is moving millions of borrowers off the Biden-era SAVE repayment plan, raising concerns among borrowers that higher monthly payments could push more people into delinquency and default.
Under current law, borrowers can generally enter default and be subjected to collection measures after missing payments for 270 days.
All told, student borrowers are collectively on the hook for nearly $2 trillion in loan debt, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Over $233 billion of that amount is in default.
Sanders aims to "put an end to this absurdity and ensure no Social Security payments are taken away from older adults or individuals with disabilities due to student loan debt."
The Stop Social Security Garnishment Act is endorsed by organizations including the American Federation of Teachers, Protect Borrowers, Student Debt Crisis Center, American Association of University Women, Debt Collective, Social Security Works, and the Alliance for Retired Americans.
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