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Democrats in Congress aren’t happy that President Trump has restarted the Iran war. Trump formally notified lawmakers last week that the war in Iran has resumed, attempting to legally claim that a new 60-day period has started that gives him the power to use military action in Iran without congressional approval. Democrats called out the Trump administration for going back on its promises that the war was over.“We were promised the war would be over for months. And now in a matter of days, we’ve gone from a bad U.S.-Iran deal to more strikes, another blockade, and added turmoil that will only drive prices higher,” Senator Adam Schiff said on X Monday. The California senator filed a new war powers resolution on Monday, co-sponsored by colleagues Tim Kaine, Andy Kim, Jeff Merkley, and Chris Van Hollen, in an attempt to rein in the president.“Any assertion by the Trump Administration that he gets 60 more days to act without Congress has no foundation in law,” Schiff said in a statement, asking for a “new vote to end this war.”Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the Senate floor Monday that “Trump’s rinse and repeat approach to the Iran war isn’t a strategy, it’s a recipe for utter disaster.“We keep moving backward. Gas prices stay high, casualties increase, costs increase. It’s incredible what a fiasco this war is,” Schumer added.Senator Chris Murphy pointed out that the war’s resumption hurts the economy, saying, “Gas prices are spiking again.”“The bottom line? Trump has no moves to make. His spiraling incompetence has boxed America in. It’s only going to get worse,” Murphy said in an X post.Last month, Iran and the U.S. signed a memorandum of understanding, seemingly ending the conflict while long-term negotiations continued. Those negotiations have collapsed, and Iran has resumed attacking American and oil industry targets in the Persian Gulf, while the U.S. military is once again bombing targets within Iran. Iran has resumed its tolls in the Strait of Hormuz, while Trump claims that the U.S. naval blockade of Iran is back on. By trying to reset the clock, Trump is acknowledging, consciously or not, that he’s also resetting a quagmire.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is notorious for professing ignorance when asked potentially difficult questions about the news of the day. He fell back on this strategy in a Tuesday morning press conference, this time in response to the fatal ICE shooting in Biddeford, Maine, the day prior.On Monday, Joan Sebastian Guerrero, a 26-year-old father, was killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, marking the eleventh fatal ICE shooting of Donald Trump’s current term. Sebastian Guerrero was reportedly authorized to work in the U.S. and had not been the target of an immigration operation.The agents involved in the high-profile incident were reportedly not wearing body cameras, which, as Benjamin Weiss of Courthouse News pointed out to Johnson, cuts against assurances that Department of Homeland Security officials have made to Congress about expanding agents’ use of body cameras.“Does there need to be accountability on DHS from Congress here?” Weiss asked.“Uh,” Johnson replied, “I don’t know anything about this event, OK? I was a little busy yesterday, so I’m going to reserve judgment. I know that there was a tragic shooting, and I’m not going to comment because I don’t know.” (Notably, Weiss had prefaced his question with relevant facts, but anyway … )Preemptively defending himself against accusations of, yet again, turning a blind eye to an inconvenient news item, Johnson told reporters, “You guys can mock me for not knowing that. I worked about 22 hours the last few days, and I did not get the briefing on that. I will this morning.”Q: The ICE agents who killed a person in Maine yesterday were reportedly not using body cameras. That's despite DHS officials coming to Congress and repeatedly saying they want to expand body cam usage. Does there need to be accountability?MIKE JOHNSON: Uh, I don't know… pic.twitter.com/pGL2340Sru— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 14, 2026

No two years are ever the same. 2026 is certainly not 2024. Two years ago, the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate in Michigan was a bore. Then-Congresswoman (and ex-CIA agent) Elissa Slotkin was widely expected to triumph over little-known challenger Hill Harper, and so she did. The only excitement in the affair came when Harper—and withdrawn candidate Nasser Beydoun—claimed to have been offered $20 million in campaign contributions from a pro-Israel group to drop out of the race and primary Palestinian-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib.

Much of the time, it seems as if the war machine runs on auto-pilot. Indeed, the United States has been engaged in warfare for almost the entirety of our 250 year history. It feels overwhelming to most people to attempt to intervene, yet we are all involved, as our tax dollars feed endless wars, interventions, [...]

“If there is a return to the talks — which would make us all very lucky if there is — I suspect the Iranians will wait even longer this time around. Rania Khalek , July 14, 2026

On July 15, the two national teams will face off in Atlanta, reviving one of the most important classics in world soccer – not necessarily because of their sporting rivalry, but rather because of the history of military dominance that surrounds it all. Amanda Getty , July 14, 2026

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s Tuesday moratorium on data centers follows a growing campaign on the left to harness grassroots opposition to the projects.

Last year, the Trump administration publicly lied about the content and status of a multimillion-dollar stockpile of contraceptives that was allocated for foreign aid but slated to be destroyed amid Elon Musk’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development.Newly disclosed records show that the government’s internal discussions about the stockpile were as chaotic as its external statements were dishonest.Last summer, the administration announced plans to destroy about $10 million worth of contraceptives stored in a Belgian warehouse. The products, already paid for by U.S. taxpayers, were allocated toward women and girls in Africa. By the fall, the administration falsely told the press that the contraceptives were abortifacients, or substances used to induce an abortion—and that they had been destroyed. In reality, they were largely ruined due to being stored improperly (despite their storage costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, according to the USAID Office of Inspector General).New reporting published Tuesday by The Washington Post shows that falsehoods surrounding the stockpile were pervading internally as well as externally—adding to a mountain of evidence of the incompetence, willful or not, of Musk’s so-called “Department of Government Efficiency.”In one email, an official at the U.S. Embassy to Belgium informed someone at the State Department that “there is no one here that knows definitively what is in the warehouse.” In an August 8 email, a State Department official emailed a colleague a list of purported “Current Viable Abortifacients” at the warehouse, but nothing he listed is considered an abortifacient by the Food and Drug Administration. “Everything else has practically been destroyed,” the official wrote—and by “has practically been destroyed,” he apparently meant “had spoiled due to improper storage.”After The New York Times reported that none of the products in the stockpile were abortifacients—in fact, USAID could not legally purchase such substances—State Department official Brendan Hanrahan sent out an email asking if anything in the stockpile could be used to “induce an abortion if taken by a woman once she is already pregnant.” This prompted a “series of emails among diplomats” seeking more information, including one in which the aforementioned embassy official revealed the staff’s complete ignorance of the stockpile’s contents.These revelations had to be wrenched from the government by the Center for Reproductive Rights, which sued the government over its failure to respond to a Freedom of Information Act Request about the wasted contraceptives.

Drop Site Daily: July 14, 2026