SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
democratic party
Democrats File Sweeping Lawsuit to Stop 'Unlawful' Trump Attack on Mail-In Voting
"Our Constitution’s framers anticipated this kind of desire for absolute power."
Apr 02, 2026
President Donald Trump's executive order placing restrictions on mail-in voting in the US is now facing a sweeping lawsuit from the Democratic Party.
In a complaint filed Wednesday with the US District Court for the District of Columbia, the Democrats argued that Trump "has tried again and again to rewrite election rules for his own perceived partisan advantage," this time going after mail voting, which he has baselessly claimed cost him the 2020 presidential election.
The Democrats contended, however, that Trump has no constitutional authority to single-handedly rewrite election laws, noting that the US Constitution explicitly gave states the power to administer their own elections.
"Our Constitution’s framers anticipated this kind of desire for absolute power," the complaint states. "They recognized the menace it would pose to ordered liberty and the ways in which it would corrode self-government like an acid... They left most election authority with the states, permitted state regulations to be displaced only upon the agreement of both chambers of Congress, and established an independent judiciary to repel threats to individual rights."
The complaint then dives into the contents of Trump's order, which it says "seeks to impose radical changes to the manner and conditions under which citizens may cast absentee or mail-in ballots," and would "imminently threaten to disenfranchise lawful voters."
Specifically, the lawsuit argues that Trump is asking the US Postal Service to "take actions unrelated to the agency's statutory mandate that run roughshod over established protections for voters who rely on the mail to exercise their fundamental right" to vote in US elections.
Given that the order doesn't "stem either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself," the complaint continues, "it is an unlawful exercise of authority that must be declared invalid."
A joint statement released by Democratic leaders, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), accused Trump of trying to restrict mail-in voting as a last-ditch effort to stop voters from ousting his Republican congressional allies.
"The American people are fed up with Republicans’ price-spiking, healthcare-gutting agenda and are ready to vote them out," they said. "That’s why Donald Trump is desperately trying to rig our elections by making it harder to vote for seniors, Americans with disabilities, members of the military, rural communities, and other working families who rely on vote-by-mail. This move is blatantly unconstitutional, and we will fight against it."
Shortly after the Democrats filed their lawsuit, the Campaign Legal Center and Democracy Defenders Fund filed a complaint against the Trump executive order on behalf of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), Secure Families Initiative, and Arizona Students’ Association.
Danielle Lang, vice president of voting rights and the rule of law at the Campaign Legal Center, said that the suit was necessary to block Trump's "unprecedented" effort to "unconstitutionally assert total authority over our elections."
"Attempts to command the US Department of Homeland Security to work with independent agencies on efforts to disenfranchise eligible voters... are simply unconstitutional and violate long-standing protections for Americans," Lang added.
Elections expert Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, argued in a Wednesday op-ed for Slate that lawsuits against Trump's executive order would probably prove successful and that it "likely will be found unconstitutional by courts."
However, Hasen also warned that the order could still create enough chaos and uncertainty to throw the outcome of close elections into doubt.
"Trump is engaging in election denialism theater," Hasen explained. "It makes voters of all sides mistrust the election process and the virtues of democracy. It convinces his supporters that Democrats have to cheat to win, something that will come in handy should Democrats take back control of the House in November with the intent of beginning investigations and potentially impeachment."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Urgent Message to Democrats: Stop Dragging Your Feet and End Trump's Iran War
Many congressional Democrats seem more interested in using Trump's war on Iran to score victories in the midterms than to use what power they do have to bring it to an end.
Apr 02, 2026
President Donald Trump’s illegal, increasingly unpopular war on Iran is sinking Republican prospects for winning the midterm elections, to the delight of Washington Democrats and liberal media. A couple of weeks before the US and Israel launched their blitzkrieg at the end of February, a Senate foreign-policy aide told Drop Site News that:
A substantial number of Senate Democrats believed Iran ultimately needed to be dealt with militarily. But those Democrats, the aide explained, also understood that going to war again in the Middle East would be a political catastrophe. That’s precisely why they wanted Trump to be the one to do it. The hope was that Iran would take a blow and so would Trump—a win-win for Democrats.
Party leaders certainly have been acting as if they’re strategizing with one eye on the midterms. In a February 20 statement, titled “The Risks of Donald Trump and His Administration Dragging Us into War with Iran,” Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) supported the then-impending war—as long as it was done the right way. He complained only that “the administration has yet to articulate to Congress and the American people what the objectives or strategy would be for any potential military campaign.”
For Democrats, Gas Prices Trump Dead Civilians
At that early stage, according to The Economist, almost all congressional Democrats regarded the war as potentially illegal, but “no one wanted to be seen as an apologist for the ayatollahs.” So they ended up “focusing on lawyerly questions of process and the president’s refusal to consult Congress.”
On the fifth day of the war, Politico reported on Trump’s request for what was then to be $50 billion in supplemental war funding (an ask that has since ballooned to $200 billion), noting blandly that Democrats might find it difficult to reject “legislation the administration deems necessary for replenishing key defensive munition stocks designed to keep US troops and civilians safe.” Indeed, several Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee were already expressing support for extra billions to fuel Trump’s war.
As the killing and destruction continued and Iran restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, oil soared above $100 a barrel. That gave the Democrats their most electorally potent line of attack yet.
Democrats may have concluded that, in Politico’s words, “Trump has thrust the country into a conflict, and now Congress has no choice but to help keep things on track.” If, they suggested, he would be more specific about how the new billions would fit into Pentagon planning, they’d be happy to fund more bombs, drones, and missiles. For example, Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) told the reporters, “There is going to be a need for funding, and we need some answers before we provide it.”
Here in Michigan, we gritted our teeth as our two Democratic US senators shillyshallied around the issue. Elissa Slotkin left the door wide open for voting yes on funding. She just wanted to hear the full proposal: “I always will wait till I’m presented with a factual thing, not a theoretical thing.” Our other senator, Gary Peters, also would have no problem with voting yes on this bloody, illegal war. It was an easy decision for Peters, who will be retiring from Congress at the end of this year and will pay no political price for that vote.
Speaking with Bloomberg, Peters avoided criticizing the war itself while setting up Trump and the Republicans to take the blame for its eventual failure: “They haven’t come through with what the end goal looks like, what does victory look like?... Trump’s going to have to come before the American people and tell us what’s up.” Asked about Trump’s threat to send in ground troops, he said, “Not until I hear a justification for it,” but added, “You’re not going to win a war with an entrenched regime like Iran with just an air campaign.”
As the killing and destruction continued and Iran restricted traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, oil soared above $100 a barrel. That gave the Democrats their most electorally potent line of attack yet. No need to make a legal or moral case against the war on Iran, let alone question the US-Israeli ambition to dominate the entire region. No need to talk about American forces targeting Iranian elementary schools (one with a Tomahawk missile, the other with new, so-called “Precision Strike” missiles that deliver a fragmentation warhead designed to maximize human casualties) or the countless atrocities committed in Palestine by US-supported Israeli occupation forces (crimes that recently included using cigarette burns and sharp tools to torture an 18-month-old toddler while forcing his father to watch.) By November, a political strategist might well think, few voters would remember any of that stuff anyway. But $80 to fill up their SUVs? They’ll always respond to that; high gas prices are kryptonite to sitting presidents and their party.
And so it came to pass that in talking about Iran, Democrats became even more tightly focused on “test-driving narratives that could define the campaign season,” as The Hill put it. A party operative elaborated: “It’s show-and-tell time for Democrats. Show people the receipts—the family that canceled their summer trip because airfare spiked, the small business owner eating higher fuel costs.”
“Affordability”! “Pain at the pump”! That’s a winner!
“This Is Not Opposition to War. It Is the Logic of War Itself”
Liberals’ favorite media outlets emphasized the Democrats’ incentives for not pushing harder to end the carnage quickly. In a story titled “The Longer the Iran War Goes, the Worse It Could Be for Trump. Just Look at History,” NPR helpfully reminded its listeners that an unpopular war is just the thing to take down a president and his party. The piece was accompanied by a link to an earlier story on rising gas prices.
Then there was Rachel Maddow at MS.NOW, who, attempting a rhetorical gotcha, attributed Trump’s illegal devastation of an entire society to his ignorance and incompetence, rather than treat it as a predictable extension of Washington’s bipartisan Iran regime-change efforts over almost half a century. Her tongue-in-cheek advice to him suggests that she’s spent way too much time pondering strategies for subverting and overthrowing uncooperative foreign governments:
If you really did want the Iranian people themselves to rise up in some kind of popular uprising and totally change their form of government... you probably would have taken some steps to make sure they can organize and communicate. When you... proclaimed on that weird taped message early Saturday morning that the police and the security forces and the Revolutionary Guard must surrender and lay down their weapons, you might have given them some instructions or some way to do that, which you did not. You might not have gutted the crucial Farsi-language Voice of America communications platform...
Thankfully, though, there are writers at independent outlets who are stripping the war down to its putrid core. At The Intercept, Adam Johnson thoroughly documented how, through the first two weeks of Trump’s war, Democrats spent much of their effort demanding “hearings” and “investigations” rather than doing everything they could to stop the war or at least “make a clear, consistent moral case to the public” for why it’s an abomination. Why, he asked, should Democrats “indulge the idea this is an unsettled debate to be hashed out in drawn-out hearings? What more is there to learn? The war is illegal, unjust, and immoral.”
By skirting the fundamental issues, Johnson added, the Democrats had managed to avoid undermining “the logic of regime change, which remains the bipartisan consensus, or run afoul of AIPAC and other major pro-Israel Democratic donors.” And as a sweetener, he added, hearings in which they excoriate the administration and Republican Congress members for botching the war “may help placate Democratic voters who are overwhelmingly opposed to the war to the tune of 89%.”
Also in mid-March, Ramzy Baroud, editor of Palestine Chronicle, wrote that throughout the mainstream liberal media, despite their ample criticism of Trump’s war:
The moral foundation of anti-war opposition has largely disappeared, replaced instead by a narrow strategic debate over costs, risks, and political consequences... They tend to oppose military interventions only when those wars fail to serve US strategic interests, threaten corporate profits, or risk undermining Israel’s long-term security... This is not opposition to war. It is the logic of war itself.
“A Gift to Our Country”
Meanwhile in Dearborn, Michigan, a city that Priti Gulati Cox and I recently made our new home, we have elected officials and candidates at all levels—local, state, and federal—who offer stark contrast to the militarism and cynical geopolitics that permeate Washington.
More than half of Dearborn residents are either immigrants or descendants of immigrants from Arab countries, mostly Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and occupied Palestine. Back in the fourth month of the genocide in Gaza, the city’s mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, refused to meet with Joe Biden’s campaign manager, who’d come to Michigan to meet with Arab and Muslim-American leaders and garner their support in the 2024 elections (despite the lavish material support Biden and his party were providing to the Gaza genocide). After catching some heat for that snub, Mayor Hammoud declared, “I will not entertain conversations about elections while we watch a live-streamed genocide backed by our government.”
He wrote:“The lives of Palestinians are not measured in poll numbers. Their humanity demands action, not lip service. When elected officials view the atrocities in Gaza only as an electoral problem, they reduce our indescribable pain into a political calculation.”
Dearborn is represented in the US House by the heroic Rashida Tlaib, one of the scant few members who support Palestinian liberation and work hard to end the decades-long US-Israeli crusade of colonial domination in West Asia. And now, with Gary Peters’ retirement, Michigan has an opportunity to elect an anti-imperialist to the US Senate as well. Among the three candidates vying for the Democratic nomination to replace Peters is Detroit-area native Abdul El-Sayed.
It’s essential, he stresses, for US senators to stand up and put a total end to endless wars—and the way to start is by killing the $200 billion Iran war bill.
El-Sayed, a son of Egyptian immigrants, is a physician and a former director of health, human, and veterans’ services for Wayne County (i.e., the Detroit area). He roundly condemns Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, as well as its repeated bombing of Lebanon and Iran. His campaign pledges include ending aid to Israel, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, increasing taxes on billionaires, and enacting Medicare for All. He has told voters, “I’m one of the few major Senate candidates who isn’t afraid to call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide—and because of that, I’m one of AIPAC’S top targets to defeat.”
In a late-February campaign stop at a mosque in Genesee County, a week before the shock-and-awe kickoff of the war on Iran, El-Sayed linked the immorality of the US-Israeli wars to some of Democrats’ favorite kitchen-table issues: “We are in the month of Ramadan... None of us today, when we woke up, had to think about whether or not our home was going to be bombed... Every dollar that is spent dropping a bomb on somebody else is a dollar that is not spent providing good healthcare or good schools.”
Abbas Alawieh is a Democrat running for the state senate seat in Michigan’s District 2, which includes Dearborn. He grew up here and, like many others, he has family members in Lebanon. Israeli warplanes recently destroyed his family home in Beirut. His ailing 91-year-old grandmother thereby became one of almost a million Lebanese who were displaced by Israel’s attacks in March alone and are living under harsh conditions. And this is the third time in the past 50 years that Israel has bombed Alawieh’s family members out of that same home.
Alawieh told WDET public radio that in his campaign, he’s talking a lot about his family’s experience because “I’m running in a district where many people here have experienced the loss of their family home,” and many have had relatives killed or injured by Israeli air strikes. He added that having Dearborn and surrounding communities be home to “so many people who are being directly impacted by the war is, in a lot of ways, a gift to our country,” because they “understand, not theoretically but materially, physically, in our bodies why it is that our country must veer away from this policy of funding endless wars.” It’s essential, he stresses, for US senators to stand up and put a total end to endless wars—and the way to start is by killing the $200 billion Iran war bill.
* * *
Each weekday, a Dearborn school bus picks up and drops off neighbor kids—early elementary and preschool students, a majority of them girls—at the curb just down from our house. They run to and from the bus, laughing, with arms flying out to the side as they sway under the burden of backpacks (mostly pink ones), some of which seem half the height of the kids themselves.
After witnessing such heartwarming scenes for weeks, we woke up on February 28 to news that a US missile had struck an elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing scores of people. The number of dead has since been pegged at 175, more than 100 of them young girls. Some of the most poignant photos of the aftermath focused on students’ backpacks, scattered throughout the rubble.
Now, when the kids on our street (including one tiny neighbor who brought us goodies during Ramadan) dash along the sidewalk each morning, they still bring smiles to our faces. But they are joined in our minds’ eyes by those schoolgirls in Minab, kids none of us ever knew, kids killed by our Tomahawk missile.
Keep ReadingShow Less
AOC Commits to Opposing ‘Any Spending on Arms for Israel,’ Including Iron Dome
The progressive congresswoman has been named as a potential 2028 Democratic presidential contender.
Apr 01, 2026
A private meeting between Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and an increasingly influential progressive New York City organization on Tuesday evening revealed new evidence of Israel's "weakening position," as one journalist observed, as the potential 2028 presidential contender committed to voting against any military funding for the Middle Eastern superpower, including for "defensive" weapons.
To the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), whose New York City chapter Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) met with on Tuesday, the congresswoman's failure to vote against a 2021 funding package for Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system—instead voting "present"—represented a significant betrayal of the fight for Palestinian rights and against Israel's violent anti-Palestinian policies.
The congresswodefeman further angered solidarity organizers in 2024 when she voted in favor of a resolution to adopt a definition of antisemitism that conflates the term with criticism of Israel, and last year she voted against an amendment to strip Iron Dome funding from a must-pass defense spending bill. She then voted against the Defense Appropriations Act itself, which included spending for offensive weapons for Israel.
On Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez was clear when asked by a DSA organizer whether she would support an arms embargo on Israel, which has killed more than 72,000 Palestinians in Gaza since beginning its US-backed assault there in 2023; is currently joining the US in attacking Iran; and has killed over 1,000 people in the region in the last month as it's pledged to use Gaza as a "model" for its attacks on Lebanon.
“I have not once ever voted to authorize funding to Israel, and I will never,” Ocasio-Cortez said in response to the question. “The Israeli government should be able to finance their own weapons if they seek to arm themselves."
A member asked to clarify in a follow-up question, asking specifically, “If the moment presents itself in Congress, will you commit to voting ‘no’ for any spending on arms for Israel, including so-called ‘defensive capabilities?’”
“Yes,” Ocasio-Cortez replied, according to a partial recording of the meeting.
DSA members who attended the forum also reported that Ocasio-Cortez committed to opposing the International Holocaust Remembrance Association's definition of antisemitism, which claims that "denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor," and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis," are examples of anti-Jewish bias.
The positions expressed by Ocasio-Cortez at the DSA forum have already been embraced by other progressive lawmakers like Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), but some observers noted that Ocasio-Cortez committed to voting against all military funding for Israel as she's been named a potential contender for the 2028 presidential race.
Political strategist Chris Sosa said Ocasio-Cortez's clear position against all weapons for Israel "will echo across the Democratic Party" and is a sign of a new "common litmus test" for candidates.
"Whatever Israel’s level of popularity is right now is its ceiling, because Israel is going to take a huge part of the blame for the financial crisis and likely recession about to hit us," said Ryan Grim of Drop Site News, referring to the growing economic turmoil that's resulted from the US-Israeli war on Iran. "And while the global economy is on its knees, Israel will *still* be pushing for the war on Iran to continue. And people will have had more than enough."
"Alexandria Ocasio-Corronez breaking against Israel here is a major sign of their weakening position," added Grim.
A poll released last month by Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies found that more US voters now view Israel negatively than positively. In 2023, 47% of Americans viewed Israel in a positive light, versus 24% who had negative views of the country's government.
At Groundwork DSA, a faction within the organization that aims for the DSA to "become a genuine, mass political party," one organizer noted that Ocasio-Cortez's position sets her apart from other Democrats who are thought to be likely presidential contenders, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Vice President Kamala Harris, who refused to back an arms embargo during her 2024 campaign.
Neither Newsom nor Harris "will be ideologically willing to even consider an arms embargo against Israel," wrote organizer J. Kraush ahead of Tuesday's forum. "More importantly, they can not be swayed on the topic, precisely because there is no political or financial benefit for them to move. We can expect them to receive millions in funding from Zionist organizations such as AIPAC, especially if AOC remains a front-runner."
While establishment Democrats continue to back military funding for Israel, Ocasio-Cortez's commitment "is the right thing to do and the leadership Democratic voters want to see," said progressive organizer Daniel Denvir.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular