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'They Were Afraid It Would Pass': House GOP Cancels Iran War Powers Vote for Second Straight Day
"The GOP doesn't care about your skyrocketing costs for gas, groceries, and everything else. They only care about appeasing Trump," said the House minority whip.
May 21, 2026
After four US Senate Republicans on Tuesday helped Democrats advance a war powers resolution intended to halt President Donald Trump's illegal war on Iran, GOP leadership in the House of Representatives canceled a similar vote on Wednesday, and again on Thursday.
Progressive and Democratic Party leaders in the House were quick to call out Republican leadership, including Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), who Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) said "has cemented his legacy as the speaker who handed the most corrupt president ever complete control over the House."
"Republicans can run from Trump's disastrous war, but they can't hide. Thousands are dead, and gas and grocery prices are up, and progressives will not stop demanding votes... until the war is actually ended," Casar pledged, as Americans prepared to spend an estimated extra $3.5 billion on gasoline over the holiday weekend.
CPC Chair Emerita Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) similarly said on social media: "Republicans just called off the vote on a war powers resolution because they were afraid it would pass and Trump's war of choice in Iran would be ended. This is absolutely ridiculous, and a failure of leadership from the Republican Party."
House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) also accused Republicans of refusing to hold a vote "because they knew it would pass," adding: "The GOP doesn't care about your skyrocketing costs for gas, groceries, and everything else. They only care about appeasing Trump."
Absences were the apparent issue for the House GOP on Thursday. Eight Republicans were not there for votes, according to C-SPAN Capitol Hill producer Craig Caplan, and retiring Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), who joined with nearly all Republicans to block a resolution last week, had made clear that he intended to support the measure this week.
Cheered on by colleagues, Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) took to the House floor to demand answers about the schedule: "Are we not voting on it because the American people are sick and tired of this illegal war that is costing tens of billions of dollars? Gas prices are through the roof. People can't afford their groceries. Is that why you're pulling it? You guys don't have the guts or the balls to vote on this."
Republican Congressmen Tom Barrett (Mich.), and Brian Fitzpatrick (Pa.), and Thomas Massie (Ky.) had broken ranks and joined Democrats for last week's vote. While Massie was absent on Thursday after a stinging primary loss earlier this week, "some Republicans believed Fitzpatrick and Barrett would vote for the resolution again Thursday before they pulled it," Politico reported.
Fitzpatrick confirmed that, telling Punchbowl News' Briana Reilly: "They're claiming they have two more days to bring it. I was prepared to vote for it."
After the cancellation, the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) said that "as tonight shows, the deck is stacked against pro-peace Americans: Even when a majority of Americans oppose a war, and a majority of Congress opposes a war, congressional leaders find ways to cancel a vote so that the war can continue!"
"This cowardice makes a mockery of the democratic process—but it will not silence Americans who are in the right that oppose this catastrophic, illegal war," NIAC added. "We will keep up the momentum until we bring this disastrous and backfiring war to a close."
Erik Sperling, executive director of Just Foreign Policy, suggested Thursday that "the best thing" for Trump and the GOP would be to lose a war powers vote, because then the president "would have cover to make a deal with Iran and let gas prices come down."
The cancellation of the war powers vote was part of what Politico's Meredith Lee Hill called "a BIG mess" in the chamber "as lawmakers want to leave for Memorial Day recess," given that "reconciliation 2.0 is already iced," and a "GOP-led bill to create a women's museum is set to fail amid a GOP revolt." That vote was held, and failed as expected.
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After Castro Charges, Critics Ask: When Are Indictments Coming for Trump-Hegseth 'Extrajudicial Murders'?
"Apparently you're not allowed to kill people in international waters now?" said one progressive organizer.
May 21, 2026
Over the last eight months, at the direction of President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the US military has bombed at least 57 boats and killed close to 200 people—among them fishermen, a young man known in his town for his indoor soccer playing, and working people who had recently struggled to make ends meet—in what human rights experts have called "murders" and extrajudicial killings.
But the indictment filed this week regarding unlawful killings by government forces in the Caribbean region had nothing to do with Trump's boat bombing spree, which the White House has claimed it aimed at stopping drug trafficking. Instead, the target of the indictment filed by the US Justice Department was 94-year-old former Cuban President Raúl Castro, who was charged with one count of conspiracy for his alleged role in shooting down planes that flew into Cuba's airspace in 1996.
The planes were operated by an anti-Fidel Castro group, Brothers to the Rescue, and four Cuban-Americans were killed in the operation.
In expressing support for the indictment, US Rep. Carlos Giménez (R-Fla.), a Cuban-American immigrant, said that "there will be consequences to pay if you harm American citizens in international waters, in international airspace for no reason at all, and believe me, this was no reason at all."
Michael Galant, a member of the secretariat of the Progressive International, commented with feigned surprise: "Apparently you're not allowed to kill people in international waters now? Someone tell Hegseth."
The organization's co-general coordinator, David Adler, added, "I simply do not understand how we, as a country, tolerate the hypocrisy of indicting Raúl Castro for defending Cuban airspace—while our own government celebrates the extrajudicial assassinations of innocent fishermen sailing across the sea below," while Ryan Grim of Drop Site News noted the indictment also followed the bombing of a school in Iran—an attack that investigators said was likely carried out by the US.
The indictment of Castro, noted the Progressive International, was set to coincide with Cuba's Independence Day and came as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants who has long desired regime change in the communist country, mused that the Cuban government has "plundered billions of dollars, but nothing has been used to help the people"—echoing his criticism of Iran, another target of the US military under Trump.
The timing of and ramp-up to the indictment was "a piece of political theater calibrated to one audience only: the Miami exile lobby that has spent decades pursuing its commercial and ideological vendetta against the Cuban Revolution," said the group's Cabinet.
"US officials themselves acknowledge they do not believe Cuba is an imminent threat, nor actively planning to attack American interests—and yet in the same breath, the administration has laundered a set of alarming claims about Cuban drone acquisitions, presented with all the breathless urgency of a casus belli," the Progressive International added, referring to Axios' reporting last weekend on claims from an administration official that Cuba is preparing to attack the US with drones—a report that ultimately acknowledged the Cubans are not planning any preemptive strikes on the US but are rather thought to be strategizing on self-defense as the US intensifies its anti-Cuba rhetoric and continues the oil blockade it imposed in February.
The Cuban embassy in the United Kingdom on Thursday said it rejected US claims about the downing of the Brothers to the Rescue plane, which it called "an irrefutable act of sovereign self-defense" that took place after "25 deliberate, calculated violations of our national airspace" by the exile group.
"To criminalize our nation, the US manipulated the official [International Civil Aviation Organization] investigation, deliberately erasing the first six minutes of radar and radio recordings to conceal the territorial incursion," the embassy asserted. "The narrative of an attack in international waters is an absolute juridical fraud."
In a column at Common Dreams Thursday, Codepink co-counder Medea Benjamin added that she was in Cuba in 1996 when the planes were shot down. The leader of Brothers to the Rescue, José Baulto, she said, openly stated that he was "trained as a terrorist by the United States," and said after one mission in which the group dropped leaflets over Havana that the group was seeking "confrontation.”
"The Cuban government repeatedly warned Washington, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and international aviation authorities that these flights were illegal and dangerous. US officials knew the risks," wrote Benjamin. "The hypocrisy of indicting Raúl Castro nearly 30 years later is staggering, given the long history of anti-Cuban extremists operating from US soil to wreak havoc against the island with bombings, sabotage, and airline terrorism."
Those US-based extremists include the perpetrators of the 1976 midair bombing of Cubana Flight 455, a commercial airliner carrying 73 crew and passengers, many of them teenage members of Cuba’s junior Olympic fencing team.
The Trump administration's boat bombings, meanwhile, have been called likely "war crimes" by some legal experts and "murders" by others. The White House has insisted the US is in an "armed conflict" with drug cartels in Latin America, but no conflict has been officially declared. In at least one instance, US military members were ordered to bomb the survivors of an initial strike—a clear violation of international law.
The US in the past has treated suspected drug trafficking as a criminal issue—not one to be dealt with militarily. Before the boat bombings began, one top military legal adviser warned Pentagon officials, “There is no world where this is legal," and said carrying out the attacks could expose everyone involved, from top White House officials to rank-and-file service members ordered to carry out the strikes, to legal liability.
"The same US government now pursuing charges against Raúl Castro has itself been carrying out deadly strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, strikes that have killed at least 193 people since September 2025, with no transparency or due process," wrote Benjamin.
Following the Castro indictment, the Progressive International called on "governments, movements, and peoples of conscience everywhere to call out this escalation for what it is—a naked effort to recolonize Cuba and the hemisphere at large—and to stand firmly against it."
"We have seen this playbook before—in Iraq, in Libya, in Venezuela, and in other sites of manufactured consent for illegal war across the world. The Progressive International will not stand silent as it is deployed against Cuba," said the group. "Hands off Cuba."
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In Leaked Audio, Zuckerberg Tells Meta Workers He's Been Using Them to Train AI Ahead of Mass Layoffs
"AI is a freight train, but the future is not a foregone conclusion," said one engineer, urging his colleagues to sign a petition to stop Meta's use of an AI tracking program. "It’s not too late to pump the brakes."
May 20, 2026
Meta employees reported Wednesday that in the company's offices on the day mass layoffs hit thousands of their colleagues, fliers were taped to walls urging workers to sign a petition in support of stopping the company's new artificial intelligence data tracking program—which CEO Mark Zuckerberg touted late last month as a way for its new AI models to "learn from watching really smart people do things."
A day before about 8,000 Meta employees began receiving emails notifying them that they were being laid off—a process that began in Singapore at 4:00 am local time Wednesday and continued in European and US offices in their respective time zones—the labor-focused media organization More Perfect Union shared a leaked audio file in which Zuckerberg was heard explaining how the AI training program worked.
"The average intelligence of the people who are at this company is significantly higher than the average set of people that you can get to do tasks," said Zuckerberg. "So if we're trying to teach the models coding, for example, then having people internally build tools or solve tasks that help teach the model how to code, we think is going to dramatically increase our model's coding ability faster than what others in the industry have the capability to do, who don't have thousands and thousands of extremely strong engineers at their company."
LEAKED AUDIO: In an all-hands meeting on April 30, Mark Zuckerberg tells employees that he's training AI on them ahead of mass layoffs.
"The AI models learn from watching really smart people do things... The average intelligence of the people who are at this company is… pic.twitter.com/lt9eeJ3cwh
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) May 19, 2026
He assured the company's 78,000 employees that "no human is looking at or watching what people are doing on their computers... None of the data is being used for looking at what people are doing or surveillance or performance tracking or anything like that. It's purely just that we are using this to feed a very large amount of content into the AI model so that way it can learn how smart people use computers to accomplish tasks."
Zuckerberg explained how the employees have been used to train the model that could potentially replace many of them days after Meta announced it was planning to lay off about 10% of its workforce as the company invests heavily in AI, spending $125 billion to $145 billion on the technology—more than double what it spent last year.
The New York Times reported earlier this month that employees "revolted" when they learned about the AI tracking program, and expressed fears that they had unknowingly been training a model that would ultimately replace them.
An engineering manager asked on the company's internal communication platform how workers can opt out of having their computer activity monitored to train the AI model, only to be told by chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, "There is no option to opt out on your corporate laptop."
Another employee told Bosworth, “Your callousness to the concerns of your own employees is concerning."
On Monday, The New York Times reported, employees learned that in addition to the layoffs, another 7,000 workers will be reassigned to help develop AI tools.
About 2,000 employees began working this month on a new Applied AI and Engineering team, which is set to use the data gathered by the AI tracking program Zuckerberg described to build AI tools. Those who volunteered to join the group would not be included in this week's layoffs, the Times reported.
"Every company is training AI on their employees," said Chen Avnery, an independent adviser on AI governance and data platforms. "Meta just said it out loud. The question stopped being, 'Will AI replace you?' a year ago. Now it's whether you're building the agents or generating their training data."
More than 1,000 people in the company have signed the petition calling to halt the AI data program, according to the newspaper.
Software engineer Mack Ward urged his colleagues to sign on earlier this month, telling them in an internal post that "AI is a freight train, but the future is not a foregone conclusion."
"It’s not too late to pump the brakes and consider how we, society, want to go about this,” Ward said. “Speaking up is never easy, but ‘easy’ isn’t what you were hired to do.”
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'AIPAC Lost!' Democratic Socialist Chris Rabb Wins US House Primary in Pennsylvania
"This victory would not have been possible without the work of thousands of working class people across Philadelphia organizing for a better world."
May 20, 2026
"Standing against genocide is good policy and good politics!" proclaimed the grassroots group Track AIPAC after Pennsylvania state Rep. Chris Rabb won the Democratic US House primary in the state's 3rd Congressional District in Philadelphia.
Rabb, a democratic socialist, was outspoken in his criticism of Israel and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and his support of Palestinian rights during the campaign—aligning himself with a growing majority of Democratic voters while the pro-Israel lobby worked to secure a victory for one of his opponents, Dr. Ala Stanford.
314 Action Fund, a super political action committee (PAC) that supported Stanford, covertly received $500,000 from the powerful but increasingly toxic pro-Israel lobbying group, despite the fact that Stanford claimed she did not take money from AIPAC.
Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro, a vehement supporter of Israel who butted heads with Rabb over US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the state, also reportedly worked behind the scenes to defeat the progressive.
With 92% of votes in early Wednesday morning, Rabb had secured 44.3% of the vote compared to 24.1% for Stanford and 29.5% for a third candidate, Sharif Street.
Chants of "AIPAC lost!" rang out at Rabb's victory party in Philadelphia.
“AIPAC LOST” chants at the Chris Rabb victory party pic.twitter.com/zfZJafLxVo
— James🔻 (@GoodVibePolitik) May 20, 2026
In a victory speech to supporters, Rabb said his campaign—which also centered on his calls for Medicare for All; a Civilian Climate Corps to work toward decarbonizing the US economy; and universal basic guarantees for housing, childcare, and other essentials—had been dismissed by the Democratic establishment
"They told me this wasn't possible. That's what they said," said Rabb. "I don't know who 'they' are, but I know who we are. I'm looking at 'We the People.' And I'm not talking about 'We the People' 250 years ago. That was a much smaller 'we.'"
Rabb was outspoken in his criticism of the Democratic establishment during his campaign, and said in a one interview that a key question facing the party is whether it is "prepared to listen to the base that demands this progressivism because what many people are calling progressive are pretty much standard things in other nations where universal healthcare is the thing, where there's no notion of healthcare insurance, it's just healthcare."
This is how the guy who just won in the bluest Congressional district in the country talked about the Democratic Party and its messaging. pic.twitter.com/DsaVMi76eB
— Jacobin (@jacobin) May 20, 2026
Rabb secured endorsements from influential progressive leaders including US Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), and Summer Lee (D-Penn.) as the election drew near.
Should he win the general election in the deep-blue district in November, journalist Prem Thakker noted, he'll be one of at least four democratic socialists in the US Congress, including Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
Others whose primaries are coming up include former Rep. Cori Bush in Missouri and Darializa Avila Chevalier and state Rep. Claire Valdez in New York.
Ryan Grim of Drop Site News credited progressive organizations, including pro-Palestine super PAC American Priorities and the Justice Democrats, with giving crucial support to Rabb's campaign.
"And Rabb himself ran an exceptional race, building on years of relationships he built among progressives and activists in the city," said Grim. "And also AIPAC royally screwed up, got caught trying to spend money through 314 Action to prop up a flawed candidate, and then never recovered when she flopped."
Khanna said that along with Tuesday night's loss in Kentucky of Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, who has joined Democrats in pushing for the release of files related to sex offender and President Donald Trump associate Jeffrey Epstein and for a stop to Trump's military assault on Iran, the primaries sent a clear message to candidates.
"If you take a stand against war, AIPAC, and the Epstein class, you have no place in the Trump coalition," said Khanna. "But the future of the Democratic Party that is done with the establishment is yours to shape."
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