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May 2026	0	none collected
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September 2026	1	598

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AOC's World

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Sep 22, 202612 votes

Pete Hegseth's Pulp Fiction Prayer Isn't the First Time He's Used Religion To Justify Illegal War in Iran

During a worship service at the Pentagon on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth read a prayer to bless the government's war efforts in Iran, which "was shared to him by the lead planner" of the Combat Search and Rescue operation (CSAR) that "rescued two Air Force crew members shot down over Iran," reports USA Today. "The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men," Hegseth read. "Blessed is he who, in the name of camaraderie and duty, shepherd the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother. And you will know my call sign is Sandy One when I lay my vengeance upon thee, and amen." The prayer, known as CSAR 25:17, is "meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17," according to Hegseth. This passage foretells a "great vengeance" against ancient Israel's enemies for taking "revenge with malice in their hearts" against the nation. While CSAR 25:17 is supposedly meant to "reflect" scripture, it reads closer to Samuel L. Jackson's monologic prayer from Pulp Fiction. In it, Jackson's hitman character declares that "the path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men" and "you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you," before killing a guy who had been stealing from his boss. Hegseth's Wednesday prayer was not the first time he has used scripture or the Christian faith out of context to support the administration's illegal war. Last month, in the first Pentagon worship service since the war started, Hegseth used a mix of Bible verses and metaphors to ask God to "break the teeth" of the Iranian oppressors and give the United States success in its efforts. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has said that God supports the U.S.-Israeli campaign against Iran because "God wants to see people taken care of." Comments like these led Pope Leo XIV on Thursday to condemn "a handful of tyrants" who "manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military…and political gain." Indeed, the Trump world has time and again exploited the faith of the president's supporters to further a political agenda that expands the state's power and perpetuates civil liberties violations. In February 2025, the president signed an executive order that established a federal task force to "eradicate anti-Christian bias" in the U.S., which the Interfaith Alliance recently warned will "weaponize a narrow understanding of religious freedom to legitimize discrimination against marginalized groups," including the LGBT community. After the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents earlier this year, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R–La.) defended the administration's deportation campaign on Facebook by citing Romans 13, where apostle Paul directs Christians to submit to "governing authorities." The post received backlash from the faith community, including from Benjamin Cremer, a pastor who writes about the intersection of politics and Christianity, who called Johnson's interpretation of the scripture "to sanctify a vision of government authority that demands submission while refusing accountability….not a faithful reading of the text." In Oklahoma, Christian nationalist politicians have tried to force their beliefs by proposing strict penalties on pornography and mandating Bibles—notably, Trump-endorsed Bibles—in classrooms. Louisiana, meanwhile, recently saw its law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in classrooms struck down in court and later allowed to temporarily proceed in some districts while the legal battle continues. Hegseth may very well believe that the U.S. is fighting a holy war in Iran and that God is on his side. But as the Trump administration has repeatedly shown, when politicians use faith to justify expansions of the state and illiberal policies, Americans ought to be skeptical of their motivations and the movement that brought them into power. The post Pete Hegseth's <i>Pulp Fiction</i> Prayer Isn't the First Time He's Used Religion To Justify Illegal War in Iran appeared first on Reason.com.

Apr 16, 202626 votes

Pete Hegseth's Pulp Fiction Prayer Isn't the First Time He's Used Religion To Justify Illegal War in Iran

Apr 16, 202619 votes

Congress Declines Again To Rein in Trump's Iran War

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Jim Risch (R–Idaho) has never believed that now is the right time to vote on war with Iran. "There is no clear line of delineation between actual war and the use of kinetic force," he said during a war powers debate in 2020, adding that President Donald Trump has used force "very sparingly" against Iran. "This is not the start of a forever war," Risch said after Trump launched a one-off air raid against Iran in June 2025. Now that Trump has started an undeniable, no-kidding war with no clear ending, Risch believes that a war powers resolution would unfairly tell the President to "put your tail between your legs and run." Risch got what he wanted on Wednesday night when the Senate voted 47–52 against a war powers resolution, which would have forced the president to either get congressional approval for the war or end it. It was the fourth attempt to pass a war powers resolution in the Senate since the war began. Every single one went exactly the same way: All Republicans except libertarian-adjacent Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) voted for the war, and all Democrats except the pro-Israel heavyweight Sen. John Fetterman (D–Pa.) voted against the war. On Thursday morning, the same resolution failed in the House of Representatives in the same way, with every Democrat except Rep. Jared Golden (D–Maine) voting to end the war, and every Republican except for the libertarian-adjacent Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) voting to continue it. The U.S. and Iran have agreed to a temporary ceasefire to allow for peace talks. After walking out of negotiations last weekend, the Trump administration declared it was enforcing a blockade on Iranian ports. Trump and his advisers insist that they are ready to resume fighting once the ceasefire expires next week. "We are reloading with more power than ever before. We are locked and loaded," Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told reporters on Thursday morning. Members of Congress are more supportive of the war than the people who elected them. On average, polls at the beginning of the war showed that 43 percent of Americans disapproved of it, compared to only 35 percent who approved. When the U.S. and Iran agreed to a temporary ceasefire on April 8, disapproval stood at 53–38. A poll released by Reuters and Ipsos on Tuesday shows that only 24 percent of Americans think the war has been worth it, and 54 percent think that the war has made their personal financial situation worse. That may be why the war's supporters in Congress want to avoid voting on it—and why the opposition insists on doing so. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) has promised weekly war powers votes to force senators to go on the record. Democrats have signaled that they are going to make the cost of the war a major issue in the midterm congressional elections. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D–Ill.), sponsor of Tuesday's resolution, said that it would force Republicans to "prove that they're actually putting America first." One cop-out by the administration and its supporters has been to simply deny that a war ever took place. On March 6, after voting down a war powers resolution, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R–La.) insisted that "we are not at war." Three days later, Trump himself called it a "war." A few days later, Trump insisted that the "military operation" should not be called a "war" because "as a military operation, I don't need any approvals. As a war, you're supposed to get approval from Congress. Something like that." Another cop-out has been insisting that Congress has 60 days before it can weigh in on war under the War Powers Act. That's not quite true. While the War Powers Act sets a 60 day deadline for the president to "terminate" an undeclared war, it also states that the president can only "introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities" under an authorization from Congress or "a national emergency created by attack upon the United States," and has to "consult regularly with the Congress until United States Armed Forces are no longer engaged in hostilities." Still, Sens. Susan Collins (R–Maine), James Lankford (R–Okla.), and John Curtis (R–Utah) used the 60-day deadline as an excuse to vote against the war powers resolution on Tuesday while insisting that they support some limits on war powers, at some point in time. "I support the president's actions [in Iran] taken in defense of American lives and interests. However, I will not support ongoing military action beyond a 60-day window without congressional approval," Curtis wrote in an article for Deseret News. During the debate on Tuesday's resolution, Sen. John Kennedy (R–La.) proverbially rolled his eyes at the idea that his colleagues would actually "jump up and say that's it, it's one second past 60 days, everybody come home." After all, Collins has already backed down on her previous war powers position; she supported war powers resolutions in February 2020 and January 2026 to restrain actions far short of Trump's all-out attack on Iran. The same day that the Senate voted on the war powers resolution, it also voted on two bills by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) to block weapons shipments to the Israeli military, which attacked Iran alongside U.S. forces. Both of them failed, but gained much more support than Sanders' last attempt. On Wednesday night, 36 senators voted against a shipment of bombs and 40 voted against a shipment of armored bulldozers. All Republicans—along with Schumer, Fetterman, and four other Democrats—voted for both shipments. Although bombs may seem more controversial than bulldozers, Sen. Mark Warner (D–Va.) explained to the Jewish Insider that the split voters considered the bulldozers to be a referendum on Israel's rule over the Palestinian territories and the bombs to be a referendum on its war with Iran. "The United States should ensure that Israel has the tools it needs to protect its people and deter its adversaries while opposing transfers of equipment that are used to demolish homes, expand settlements, and further entrench a reality that weakens the already fragile prospects for a durable peace" with Palestinians, he said. The two may not be so easy to separate in reality. In Lebanon, where Israel is fighting the pro-Iran militia Hezbollah, the Israeli army is "behaving just like we did in Gaza. There's a list of homes to be demolished, and we measure success based on the number of buildings destroyed in a day," an army source told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Nonetheless, the Senate vote is an indicator of falling American public support for the Israeli government. A recent Pew Research Center poll shows that 60 percent of American adults have an unfavorable view of Israel, including 80 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of Republicans under the age of 50. Similar numbers do not trust Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to "do the right thing," according to the poll. Overconfident in the level of pro-Israel public sentiment, the Trump administration first justified the war with Iran in terms of protecting Israel. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on March 2 that the U.S. joined the war because "we knew that there was going to be an Israeli action," and Trump said the next day that he had to fight Iran because "they were getting ready to attack Israel." Faced with unexpected backlash, the administration scrambled to backtrack. Clock Tower X, a firm run by former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, released a pro-war YouTube ad a few days before the ceasefire. "This decision wasn't about Israel. It was about our safety," the ad states. "This material is distributed by Clock Tower X LLC on behalf of the State of Israel," it concludes. The post Congress Declines Again To Rein in Trump's Iran War appeared first on Reason.com.

Apr 16, 202610 votes

In Poisoned Ivies, Stefanik Sees Censorship as a Cure for 'Anti-Americanism'

Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America's Elite Universities, by Elise Stefanik, Threshold Editions, 256 pages, $29. Elise Stefanik seems to be stepping away from politics, having suspended her gubernatorial campaign and announced that she will not seek re-election to Congress. The New York Republican's new book, Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America's Elite Universities, was presumably intended to advance her political career. It may instead serve as a coda to it. Central to Poisoned Ivies is a congressional hearing held December 5, 2023, when three Ivy league presidents went viral—and not in the good way—for their response to Stefanik's question: "Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university's code of conduct on bullying or harassment?" Stefanik excoriates the presidents for the "deadpan" and "nearly verbatim" answers they all gave: "It depends on the context." Two presidents, Harvard's Claudine Gay and Penn's Liz Magill, were out of the job soon after the hearing, and Stefanik laments that MIT President Sally Kornbluth managed to escape the fallout with her title intact. Stefanik suggests that the "hearing heard around the world," as she repeatedly calls it, is the zenith of her political accomplishments. As Stefanik emphasizes throughout the book, this was intended as a simple test of good or evil, one that requires only one word: "Yes." But Stefanik asked these presidents a question about law and policy, then faulted them for not instead answering the unasked moral question about whether they personally condemn pro-genocidal speech. Conservatives have long objected when university bureaucrats blur their personal convictions with their institutional policies to the detriment of neutral speech principles. But here, Stefanik directly demands it. Despite Stefanik's claims, the context of speech does actually matter. Without more, a comment perceived as "calling for genocide" is indeed unlikely to meet either the Supreme Court's standard for peer-on-peer harassment or the limits of First Amendment protection. Later in the book, Stefanik shows her hand and demonstrates why it's necessary for university leaders to approach such questions with caution: She says the phrase "from the river to the sea" is a "genocidal chant"—presumably one she expects universities to ban. Readers can draw their own conclusions about the meaning and impact of this and similar phrases. But under the First Amendment, their legal status is not a hard call: This is protected speech. Separating how you feel about speech from your analysis of whether it's protected is a First Amendment fundamental that we should expect elected officials to understand. Poisoned Ivies does highlight some genuinely disturbing incidents that took place on campus in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. A Cornell student threatened to commit a mass shooting at a kosher dining hall, for example, and there were times when students or workers were trapped inside buildings during occupations. As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, where I work, noted, it does not violate the First Amendment for universities to protect students against actual threats or physical harm. But Stefanik does a real disservice to that cause by conflating unlawful conduct, which universities have a responsibility to address, with what she perceives as offensive speech about October 7 and the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which she expects the universities she herself derides as censorial to censor. There is a difference between what morality may require of us and what limits the law can place upon us. And that chasm exists for good reason: The beauty and promise of living in a free country is our right to pursue our own version of the good without being forced to live by the values embraced by our politicians. One legislator's "moral rot" is another American's core beliefs and values. Stefanik also keeps pairing antisemitism with the hazy concept of "anti-Americanism." She never bothers to define the second concept, nor does she address the obvious First Amendment questions raised by an elected official's endeavours to crack down on such an amorphous, subjective concept. But those distinctions require context and nuance, which Stefanik treats as impediments to the moral clarity demanded by these threats. At one point, the list even balloons to include a murky "anti-West" hate. In these repeated dismissals of "anti-Americanism," Stefanik derides student bodies who she suggests reject America, its freedom, and its founding ideals. But what is a greater rejection of the founding ideals of the United States than an overreaching federal government trampling the First Amendment? That overreach is exactly what this book celebrates. Stefanik calls the Trump administration's funding freezes to universities like Columbia and Harvard a correct use of "the federal government's considerable power." Whether that power is employed lawfully is, once again, a pesky nuance that this book is uninterested in addressing. Nitpicky questions of constitutionality are not welcome distractions in a battle cast in these dire moral terms. Harvard's reaction to the administration's strongarming—a lawsuit defending itself—is, she complains, a "vicious[] attack." She calls President Alan Garber's assertion of the university's constitutional rights a result of "radicalized Trump-deranged faculty." Stefanik rightly notes the broad challenges posed by academic ties with countries like China and Qatar and the associated risk that foreign governments will instill their censorship preferences onto our universities. There is a serious threat that foreign censorship will diminish our universities in both blunt and subtle ways, and I document how vast the problem is in my book Authoritarians in the Academy. Fears of political retaliation in the form of revoked funding can and have pressured universities to contort themselves to please the governments who are proffering those funds, to the detriment of free expression. But for a critic so concerned with the threat of censorship levied by foreign governments, Stefanik is curiously eager to see it imposed domestically. Perhaps most disturbing of all is Stefanik's celebration of this administration's crackdown on international students. This includes the newly instituted requirement that their social media accounts be made public so officials can spot "any indications of hostility" to U.S. institutions. ("Rightly so," she writes.) Poisoned Ivies expresses some valid concerns about some students' inability to express views unpopular with their peers or administrators, but the book valorizes something far, far worse: an inability to express views unpopular with elected officials, with arrest and deportation as punishment. In the land of the free, international students are forced to swallow their criticisms of the very government threatening to deport them for wrongthink. Universities are "no longer educating international students, as they once did, into core American principles and values," Stefanik complains, "because the universities themselves no longer believe in American principles and values." Unfortunately, some of our elected officials aren't interested in educating international students in American values such as freedom of speech either. Poisoned Ivies is a book heavy on rhetoric and light on substance. Stefanik diagnoses universities as partisan, censorial institutions, but her plan for reform is more partisanship and more censorship. Whatever reasonable criticisms Stefanik raises about higher education are drowned out by her advocacy not for institutions that do not censor, but for ones that censor more to her liking. Stefanik never quite explains what she means by "anti-Americanism." But readers searching for a definition can find displays of it littered throughout Poisoned Ivies' pages. The post In <i>Poisoned Ivies</i>, Stefanik Sees Censorship as a Cure for 'Anti-Americanism' appeared first on Reason.com.

Apr 16, 202617 votes

Trump Says He's Willing To 'Risk' Your Rights for His Surveillance Powers

As he was running for another term in the White House in 2024, President Donald Trump made it clear that he was not a fan of the government's electronic spying powers contained within the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). "KILL FISA," he wrote in an all-caps message on Truth Social. "IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS." It's been two years and five days since Trump wrote that, but it might as well have been another lifetime. On Wednesday, Trump again took to Truth Social as Congress was debating a possible extension to Section 702 of FISA, which allows intelligence services to scoop up electronic communications between Americans and individuals overseas. Now, Trump says he's willing to "risk" the rights of Americans in order to keep those spying powers intact. "I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country!" he wrote. "We need to stick together when this Bill comes before the House Rules Committee today to keep it CLEAN!" The context here is the April 20 deadline for reauthorizing Section 702. As Reason's Joe Lancaster detailed a few weeks ago, that deadline provides opportunities for members of Congress to demand changes to how FISA works. Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), for example, tried to offer amendments that would, among other things, require law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant before trolling through communication records that end up in the FISA database. On the other side of the aisle, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has vowed to vote against a "clean" reauthorization. But Trump no longer wants to "KILL FISA." In fact, he doesn't even want to see any basic reforms that might better protect Americans from unlawful surveillance. That happens a lot, as I've written before. In 2021, for example, the FBI used its FISA powers to run more than 3.3 million queries through the Section 702 database. A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court report unsealed in 2023 showed that the FBI improperly used its warrantless search powers more than 278,000 times during 2021—targeting "crime victims, January 6th riot suspects, people arrested at a protest in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in 2020," and donors to congressional candidates. The 2024 reauthorization implemented some reforms that limit how broadly the FBI and other law enforcement agencies can use the records in the FISA database. Despite that, The New York Times reported this month that federal law enforcement agencies have been using a new "filtering" process to search records without properly logging those queries. That's proof that more guardrails are needed, civil liberties groups say. "This warrantless surveillance system is broken, and extending it absent reforms would be an abdication of the fundamental responsibility to protect Americans' privacy," Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the security and surveillance project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said in a statement to Reason. "The answer for fixing the problems and endless abuse of queries is simple: If you want to query an American's private messages, get a warrant. It's time Congress enacted a warrant rule and closed this backdoor search loophole." It sure would be nice if Trump, who was once a prominent target of these surveillance powers, were willing to advocate for changes. Alas, now that those powers are ones he gets to wield, there is no need for consistency or principles. The post Trump Says He's Willing To 'Risk' Your Rights for His Surveillance Powers appeared first on Reason.com.

Apr 15, 202620 votes

Sen. Mike Lee Says Federal Prison Hung Up on Him When He Tried To Check on Inmate

Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) wrote in a social media post Wednesday that an employee at a federal prison hung up on him when he called to check on the health of an incarcerated man. Lee's experience is a particularly pointed example of an issue that families and criminal justice advocacy groups have complained about for years: It's next to impossible to get information about inmates' health from the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), and the agency frequently fails to notify families when their incarcerated loved ones are sick or even dying. This cruelty led lawmakers in Congress to introduce legislation last year that would have required the Justice Department to issue guidance to the BOP for promptly notifying families in such cases. Lee wrote in the post that he called the prison on behalf of a constituent whose son was incarcerated. The constituent was worried because they hadn't heard from their son in several days, and he suffered from "multiple, potentially life-threatening health conditions that are going untreated in prison," Lee wrote. Medical neglect in state and federal prisons is widespread, despite the Eighth Amendment guaranteeing prisoners access to basic health care. But when Lee called the prison's main switchboard, he said a BOP employee scolded him for calling "too fucking late," and refused to provide any information, beyond claiming that the inmate was alive and receiving appropriate medical care. When Lee persisted in asking for the employee's name, Lee said the staffer hung up. "Sadly, this is not the first time I've had this experience when talking to people from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons on behalf of constituents with an incarcerated family member suffering from a severe medical condition," Lee wrote. "And each occasion, I've been treated at best with dismissiveness and at worst with contempt and profanity." I got a call tonight from a constituent whose son is in federal prison He explained that he hasn't heard from his son in several days (which is unusual for him), that his son suffers from multiple, potentially life-threatening health conditions that are going untreated in… — Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) April 15, 2026 In interviews with Reason in 2024, family members described delays in being notified that their incarcerated loved one had been hospitalized, or even died; having their phone calls ignored; not being allowed to see their loved one in their final moments; delays in being sent the body and death certificate; being given inaccurate or incomplete information about the manner of death; or waiting months and years for the BOP to fulfill their public records requests for more information about how their loved one died. For example, Kesha Jackson's husband, John Jackson, died at a low-security federal prison in Arkansas in 2019. On that day, Kesha Jackson received a call from John's sister, who said she needed to call the prison right away; something had happened and staff wouldn't tell the sister anything. "I did not get through," Jackson said in a video produced by FAMM. "The phone just rang and rang." "John's other cellmate, who had gone home, called and said, 'Kesh, look at the federal inmate locator,'" Jackson recalled, "and they had updated it to say 'deceased.'" A chaplain would call her several hours later to break the news she'd already learned. In 2020, the daughters of a woman who died at a federal women's prison in Alabama told Reason they had been calling for weeks to try and get help for their mother's deteriorating health, but the prison staffers "were hanging up in our faces." "They laughed at her," one of the daughters said. "They said she was faking. They told us she was too young to be having a heart attack." The father of one incarcerated woman told Reason that the BOP never informed him that his daughter had been in a coma for more than a week. "We were emailing every day, and all of a sudden the emails stopped," the father wrote. "I didn't know what was going on for about a week. Ten days later I got a letter from one of the people she was incarcerated with that told me what happened." Sens. Jon Ossoff (D–Ga.) and John Kennedy (R–La.) introduced legislation last year—the Family Notification of Death, Injury, or Illness in Custody Act—that would require the Justice Department to issue guidance to the BOP for promptly notifying families of individuals in custody who become seriously ill, suffer life-threatening injuries, or die. "Too often, the families of those incarcerated never find out about a serious illness, a life-threatening injury, or even the death of a loved one behind bars," Ossoff said in a press release. However, the bill failed to go anywhere, and if BOP employees feel free to hang up on U.S. senators, they probably aren't treating the families of incarcerated people with any more courtesy. The BOP did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The post Sen. Mike Lee Says Federal Prison Hung Up on Him When He Tried To Check on Inmate appeared first on Reason.com.

Apr 15, 202615 votes

Sen. Mike Lee Says Federal Prison Hung Up on Him When He Tried To Check on Inmate

Apr 15, 20267 votes

Sen. Mike Lee Says Federal Prison Hung Up on Him When He Tried To Check on Inmate

Apr 15, 20266 votes

House Readies Spy Powers Vote

House readies for a vote on warrantless spy powers. Last night, GOP leaders in the House cleared the way for a floor vote on an 18-month clean extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) without additional privacy protections some Republicans had wanted. Section 702 of FISA allows the government to obtain the communications of foreign surveillance targets without needing to go to a judge to get a traditional warrant. This section of the law has long been controversial, as the government has wide discretion to decide which foreigners it wants to put under surveillance, and Americans' communications are collected as part of this surveillance. The government "routinely searches through [Section 702] data to find Americans' phone calls, text messages, and emails," notes the Brennan Center for Justice in a recent explainer. "This practice is a bait and switch that drives a gaping hole through the protections of the Fourth Amendment and FISA." Section 702 of FISA will expire this coming Monday if Congress does not renew it. President Donald Trump and Republican leaders in Congress, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.), support a "clean" Section 702 extension, with no changes to the program. But some Republican members of Congress are demanding additional privacy protections, including a requirement that the government obtain a warrant before accessing Americans' data, before reauthorizing the program. Even so, two Republican Section 702 critics, Reps. Ralph Norman (R–S.C.) and Chip Roy (R–Texas), allowed a clean extension to pass through the House Rules Committee, of which they are both members, last night, reports Politico. As The Hill notes this morning, lots of Republicans have flip-flopped on FISA reform. That includes President Trump, who urged lawmakers to "KILL FISA" in 2024. Now he wants an extension of the law without any changes. On the other hand, Democrats who voted to extend Section 702 in 2024, and helped kill amendments that added a warrant requirement to the law, are now opposing reauthorization. They say the law is much too dangerous in the hands of Donald Trump. With Republicans' razor-thin margins in the House, Democratic opposition and a few GOP defectors could kill a Section 702 extension. A more principled commitment to civil liberties among lawmakers, regardless of who the president is, would relieve Americans of having to depend on that razor-thin majority collapsing in order to reclaim their Fourth Amendment rights. Hochul hoses holiday house havers. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has floated the idea of an additional tax on second homes worth over $5 million to help plug New York City's budget gap, reports The New York Times. New York City is currently facing a $5.4 billion budget gap, which its new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, wants to close with additional taxes on wealthy individuals and large corporations. Those taxes, however, require approval from the state. Some state lawmakers, and Hochul herself, oppose Mamdani's largest revenue-raising ideas, like a proposed income tax hike. Mamdani, for his part, has threatened a massive property tax hike if the state doesn't authorize more local taxes or release more financial aid to the city. Hochul's proposed second home tax can be seen as a compromise measure that gives the city some of the revenue it wants via a very narrow tax on a group of wealthy property owners who may well live in New York part time. Politically, such a tax is likely a lot more viable than a massive, broadband property tax hike. Even so, the Times notes that similar proposals have been floated and defeated in recent years. Same time next year. If you think taxes are theft, it doesn't matter if New York is hiking taxes on second homes or sixth homes. It's all unjustified. From a more practical perspective, a narrow tax on high-value second homes is not going to solve New York City's budget problems. Taxes with such narrow bases often pull in a lot less revenue than policymakers imagine. Even under Hochul's estimated revenue haul, a second home tax would close only about 10 percent of New York City's budget gap. The question then becomes what happens next year. New York City's spending continues to grow year over year. As federal pandemic aid ends and tax revenues from New York's already steeply progressive tax system fall, the city's budget gap has grown larger and larger each year. It's projected to continue to grow. Mamdani also wants a rash of new spending programs. The upshot is the state can tax second homes this year, bring in the whole $500 million it's hoping for, and then have to find another group of wealthy people to soak next year, and the year after that. Scenes from Washington, D.C.: In a very rare occurrence indeed, the fountain at Dupont Circle, just a few blocks from the Reason office, actually has water in it. In Other Miracles: "Fountain Back On!" https://t.co/xGM7UwT3b0 — PoPville (@PoPville) April 14, 2026 QUICK HITS First the robots came for the wild boars, and I did not speak out, because I was not a wild boar. A video of a humanoid Polish robot named Edward Warchocki chasing wild boars through the streets of Warsaw has gone viral on social media pic.twitter.com/KSPWMC8TDQ — Reuters (@Reuters) April 14, 2026 Federal prosecutors make a surprise visit to the Federal Reserve building. Additional accusations against Eric Swalwell. Reuters reports that shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is mostly unaffected by the U.S. blockade thus far. The post House Readies Spy Powers Vote appeared first on Reason.com.

Apr 15, 202619 votes

House Readies Spy Powers Vote

Apr 15, 202614 votes

Democrats and Republicans Both Want To Regulate AI. They Just Can't Agree on How.

At the federal level, Republican-written AI bills tend to be less concerned with policing how individuals use the technology than with regulating the development and deployment of the underlying technology—large language models (LLMs). Democrat-written bills tend to focus on individual malfeasance rather than the tech itself. Accordingly, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) was so outraged last year by a (hilarious) deepfake of herself that she called on Congress to affirm "the right to demand that social media companies remove deepfakes of their voice and likeness." In California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed three bills in 2024 that restricted the use of AI to create political content deemed deceptive in advance of elections. On the other side of the aisle, Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) doesn't just want to ban driverless cars to protect unionized truck drivers from automation or ban minors from accessing AI companion chatbots; he wants frontier AI developers to submit their models to the Energy Department for potential nationalization before they're granted permission to deploy their models commercially. But it's not like there's no overlap. Each of these bills is co-sponsored by at least one senator from the other party. Let's start with the Republicans. Hawley's AI Accountability and Personal Data Protection Act, which outlaws the use of legally acquired copyrighted materials for AI training without the copyright holder's permission, is co-sponsored by Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Peter Welch of Vermont. The bill is perhaps a response to Bartz v. Anthropic, which found Anthropic did not violate the Copyright Act by training its LLM on legally acquired copyrighted works. (Anthropic was found guilty of copyright infringement for using over 7 million copies of copyrighted books illegally acquired from pirate sites.) If enacted, the bill would cripple AI developers, which depend on public and legally purchased private data to train their increasingly sophisticated models. Hawley's Artificial Intelligence Risk Evaluation Act, co-sponsored again by Blumenthal, would require AI developers to turn over detailed information about their frontier LLMs to the Energy Department before their deployment, letting the department mull whether various "adverse scenarios" are likely. If the department decides such events are probable enough, it would be allowed to nationalize the technology. Talk about discouraging innovation: Fewer people will want to advance the technological frontier if the government has the right to take any company whose product is toogood. Of the current crop of AI bills, Hawley's GUARD Act is the one that's most likely to become law. It's co-sponsored by 12 senators: Blumenthal, Welch, Katie Britt (R–Ala.), Tom Cotton (R–Ark.), Ruben Gallego (D–Ariz.), Maggie Hassan (D–N.H.), Mark Kelly (D–Ariz.), James Lankford (R–Okla.), Mike Lee (R–Utah), Chris Murphy (D–Conn.), Mark Warner (D–Va.), and Catherine Cortez Masto (D–Nev.). The legislation would not only ban chatbots that produce sexually explicit content for minors; it would outlaw the provision of any AI companion to minors whatsoever. To comply with this wide-reaching regulation, chatbot companies would be required to freeze every user account, which they could unfreeze only after users provide "age data that is verifiable using a reasonable age verification process." Such processes include providing government-issued ID or biometric data to AI companies, which "means every chatbot interaction could feasibly be linked to your verified identity," warns the Electronic Frontier Foundation. That isn't a risk too small to worry about. AU10TIX, a third-party identity verification software used by TikTok, Uber, and X, recently left such personal identifiable information exposed for over a year. Hawley's AI-Related Job Impacts Clarity Act, co-sponsored by Warner and Sen. Tim Kaine (D–Va.), is superficially innocuous: It would require all publicly traded companies to submit quarterly reports to the Labor Department on the number of employees fired, hired, and retraining "substantially due to the replacement or automation by artificial intelligence." That phrase is ambiguous, but the senators' motive is not: They want to render AI's labor market effects legible so that the government can more easily interfere with private business decisions. On the Democratic side, Sen. Dick Durbin (D–Ill.) has given us the DEFIANCE Act, which passed the Senate by unanimous consent in January and is being championed in the House by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.). The bill would make it a civil offense to create digital forgeries "depicting intimate activity or nudity." While this legislation does not impose liability on AI companies for individuals' odious misuse thereof, another Durbin bill would do that: The AI LEAD Act, introduced in September and co-sponsored solely by Hawley, would make deployers and developers liable when a user's application of an AI system "causes harm." Hawley frames the AI LEAD Act as empowering parents to bring suits against Big Tech when "AI products harm…their children," but virtually any product imaginable can be used maliciously. Surely, Hawley would balk at holding firearm manufacturers liable when their products are used to murder innocents instead of protecting them. The principle that people are responsible for malign misuses of tools applies to AI just as strongly as it does to firearms or any other thing that can be used to injure a person. Unlike the AI LEAD Act, the NO FAKES Act is actually viable. Introduced by Sen. Chris Coons (D–Del.), it has 11 co-sponsors, six of them Republicans. The bill is intended to protect "the voice and visual likeness of all individuals from unauthorized computer-generated recreations [using] generative artificial intelligence," according to Coons. It's safe to say that nobody wants others creating and sharing photorealistic depictions of them doing disreputable things that they didn't actually do. But the NO FAKES Act goes beyond that, holding platforms "liable for hosting unauthorized digital replicas" and excluding digital replicas from protection under the First Amendment. Sarah Montalbano, policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment, has explained how the NO FAKES Act would jeopardize creativity in the gaming industry. Penalties of up to $25,000, she wrote last year at Reason, "would fall hardest on small developers, hobbyists, and fan communities making non-commercial games or mods" and encourage developers to preemptively "restrict the range of faces, voices, and customizable features." As lawmakers of both major parties hustle to name, shame, and regulate their preferred villains, they're losing sight of the big picture. The possible gains to humanity from AI are enormous. The AlphaFold AI system uses primary amino acid sequences to predict the 3D structure of proteins, cutting prediction times from years to hours and reducing the cost of early-stage drug discovery by anywhere from 30 percent to 70 percent. And it exists—in the words of Taylor Barkley, director of federal government affairs at the Abundance Institute—"because researchers were free to release and iterate on imperfect models in the open." The AI LEAD Act would impose strict liability on developers of "unreasonably dangerous" AIs. This would have discouraged the kind of experimentation that produced AlphaFold, leaving "today's researchers without a tool that has accelerated drug discovery, structural biology, and our basic understanding of life," says Barkley. Meanwhile, R-Super—a novel algorithm developed by Johns Hopkins University researchers—trains AI models to segment a tumor, a crucial step in cancer diagnosis and treatment, in one to two minutes instead of 30 minutes to an hour required by unassisted radiologists. The Energy Department has deployed AI to reduce the risk of outages by anticipating grid disruptions and improving load forecasting. Similarly, improved demand forecasting can reduce inventory and logistics costs by double-digit percentages. It has eased the stress on public defenders by reducing document review time by 63 percent. It helps researchers by translating papers from any language to any other language in mere minutes or even seconds, depending on the amount of data it has to sift through. It increased the speed of software development in one experiment by over 55 percent, and Anthropic's Claude Cowork assistant is so good at coding that its release and updates have triggered multiple stock market sell-offs since its January debut. AI has also been used to save taxpayers billions of dollars through enhanced fraud detection. Not everything AI touches has been so positive, of course. People using it carelessly have made embarrassing mistakes in law, journalism, and other fields. There have been AI-related tragedies too. In February 2024, 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III shot himself after allegedly becoming obsessed with an AI companion chatbot designed by the service character.ai. Fourteen months later, 16-year-old Adam Raine took his own life after ChatGPT allegedly provided him a "step-by-step playbook for ending his life 'in 5-10 minutes,'" according to the lawsuit his parents filed against OpenAI. AI has been used to commit fraud as well as detect it. But no technology should be evaluated exclusively by its harms. Over 40,000 Americans die in car crashes every year. Yet no sensible official would want to ban motor vehicles, and not just because AI will likely decrease that death toll soon by automating cars and trucks. This is because cars' benefits—including rushing people to the hospital—outweigh their costs. Talk is cheap; hundreds of billions of dollars of investment is not. Venture capital firms invested $259 billion in AI firms in 2025 alone, and half a trillion in AI capital expenditure is projected for 2026. The magnitude of AI investments indicates that its benefits are expected to be even greater. But AI is under threat from lawmakers at all levels. Not only do some congressmen want to pass the aforementioned national laws, but Congress has been unable and unwilling to preempt the proliferating patchwork of state laws that threatens to hinder the technology's growth. To be sure, not everyone in government wants to hamstring artificial intelligence. Sen. Ted Budd (R–N.C.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Science, Manufacturing, and Competitiveness, said in anticipation of a September subcommittee hearing that "prioritizing AI advancement without subjecting this technology to overregulation is critical to maintaining America's competitive edge." Likewise, Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas), chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, has called AI a "new global industrial revolution that could unlock opportunities for improving quality of life, creating jobs, and stimulating economic growth." During the hearing, Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, called for the application of "interstate commerce principles to prevent balkanized rulemaking." Half a year later, it remains unclear whether the administration will succeed in preempting state-level AI regulation. Then there is the president himself, who has called AI "an industrial revolution, an information revolution, and a renaissance—all at once." One of the first actions President Donald Trump took in his second term was rescinding his predecessor's precautionary AI framework. Trump has also appointed AI proponents such as Kratsios and David Sacks to federal posts. Leading up to the July passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), congressional Republicans seemed united in wanting to protect AI from state-level strangulation. House Republicans included an outright 10-year moratorium on states and localities "limiting, restricting, or otherwise regulating artificial intelligence" in their May 22 version of the OBBBA. In the Senate version, Cruz proposed language to withhold access to $42 billion in broadband deployment funds from states that passed AI laws. (The move to de facto instead of de jure preemption was required by the "Byrd Rule," which excludes nonbudgetary items from reconciliation bills.) Then several congressional Republicans defected from the pro-AI side to join their Democratic colleagues in regulating the technology. Sen Marsha Blackburn (R–Tenn.) joined forces with Sen. Maria Cantwell (D–Wash.) to remove AI conditions on broadband funding from the final version of the reconciliation bill, denouncing Cruz's provision as a way for "Big Tech" to "exploit kids, creators, and conservatives." Trump kept pushing for a light-touch approach to AI regulation, insisting that "We MUST have one Federal Standard instead of a patchwork of 50 State Regulatory Regimes" in a November 18 Truth Social post. In the same post, Trump called on Congress to put a federal preemption provision "in the NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act]." Some Republicans tried to do that, and they failed. Then Trump tried another approach: a December 11 executive order that conditioned disbursement of certain broadband funds on whether a state has laws that conflict with the White House's AI Action Plan. There was an explicit carve-out for state laws that govern child safety, data center infrastructure, and local government procurement and use—regulations that neither implicate interstate commerce nor the development of underlying AI models. The order acknowledged the need for a "carefully crafted national framework" on AI. The president cannot create such a framework single-handedly; Congress must. But legislators are unlikely to pass a stand-alone bill for or against AI, as they remain divided on the issue. The good news is that most of these federal bills will probably fail—only the DEFIANCE Act, the NO FAKES Act, and the GUARD Act stand a strong chance of being enacted. While the first two pose serious First Amendment concerns and the last one gravely threatens AI users' privacy, none is likely to seriously hinder the development and deployment of the LLMs undergirding the myriad productive applications of AI. The bad news is that the Trump administration flip-flopped on its relatively laissez faire approach to AI at the end of February. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused to update the terms of service for the Pentagon's use of its AI model to permit all lawful military applications, insisting on maintaining its explicit prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems. In retaliation, Trump banned all federal agencies from contracting with Anthropic, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth directed the Pentagon to label the AI company a supply chain risk. Accordingly, Anthropic's $200 million Pentagon contract was terminated and "anyone seeking to do business with the U.S. military [must] cut ties with the AI firm," explains Axios. This designation places Anthropic in the same category as Chinese telecommunications company Huawei and drone manufacturer DJI. That is no minor footnote on AI. According to Dean Ball, who was previously a senior technology adviser for the Trump administration, "The United States federal government is now, by an extremely wide margin, the most aggressive regulator of artificial intelligence in the world." The post Democrats and Republicans Both Want To Regulate AI. They Just Can't Agree on How. appeared first on Reason.com.

Apr 11, 202611 votes

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Democrats and Republicans Both Want To Regulate AI. They Just Can't Agree on How.