Congress

Warren Davidson is a rare hard-line Republican questioning the Middle East war

Published

7 months ago

March 5, 2026

As most congressional Republicans fall in line behind President Donald Trump’s decision to attack Iran, Rep. Warren Davidson is among the few choosing to speak out.

The six-term Ohio lawmaker — a former Army ranger who won the seat vacated by former Speaker John Boehner in 2015 — defied an intense whipping campaign from White House officials and House GOP leaders and voted Thursday to support a measure calling for the end of hostilities with Iran.

“The moral hazard posed by a government no longer constrained by our Constitution is a grave threat,” he said on the House floor ahead of the vote.

Davidson has only occasionally broken with Trump in the past, but he made clear almost immediately after the initial U.S. and Israeli strikes Saturday that he had concerns about the legal basis for the war.

While some of his fellow Hill Republicans saw Davidson as one of the few in their ranks who might stand publicly against the overseas military operation, others believed he would ultimately fold — particularly after he said he was willing to be convinced of the legality of the strikes.

Ultimately, though, Davidson was not persuaded after an administration briefing Tuesday.

He raised sharp concerns in a closed-door House GOP meeting the next morning, confronting Speaker Mike Johnson in a tense back-and-forth over the need for a vote on the war, according to four people in the room granted anonymity to describe the private meeting.

Davidson took particular issue with Johnson telling reporters the previous night that it was “shameful” that any lawmaker would vote for the war powers resolution. Doing so, the speaker said, would be siding with “the enemy.”

Davidson raised constitutional concerns and pushed back on Johnson’s argument that Congress didn’t need to weigh in at this point. There needed to be an up-or-down vote, he argued.“Warren was not giving in,” said one House Republican granted anonymity to describe the private meeting. According to the people in the room, Johnson tried to smooth over the flareup by telling Davidson they were “simpatico” and “I love you, brother,” at the end. Davidson declined to discuss the altercation.

“I made my thoughts known publicly,” he said leaving the meeting, referencing a social media post in which he criticized the speaker’s comments by name the previous night.

Davidson, 56, is a relatively low-key character among the cadre of hard-right House Republicans, who tends to speak tersely to reporters and pick his spots in fighting for fiscal discipline and civil liberties. But he has a long record of taking on party leaders, dating back to his first House campaign where he ran as a critic of Boehner while seeking to fill his seat.

He quickly joined the hard-line House Freedom Caucus after his election. But he was expelled from the group in 2024 after he endorsed against the group’s chair, then-Rep. Bob Good of Virginia, in a competitive GOP primary that Good later lost.

Davidson also garnered attention last year after joining Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky as the only House Republicans to oppose an initial vote on the GOP’s sprawling domestic policy megabill, citing fiscal concerns.

He later voted for the megabill’s final passage, and he has so far avoided direct criticism from Trump — earning a presidential reelection endorsement in November: “HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!”

If Trump were to now change his mind, he would have little recourse: Davidson has no Republican challenger, and the Ohio candidate filing deadline passed more than a month ago.

Now Davidson is once again allied with Massie on Thursday’s Iran vote, where both have raised constitutional concerns about the administration’s lack of consultation with Congress and its failure to make a public case for military action, as well as more substantive objections to entering a new foreign war.

“The constitutional sequence is you engage the public before you go to war, unless an attack is imminent. And imminent means, like, imminent, not like something that’s been over a 47-year period of time,” Davidson told reporters Tuesday.

That approach stands in stark contrast to the rhetoric from Johnson, who has said checking Trump’s war powers while strikes are underway would be “dangerous” and Trump is “well within his legal authority” to lead an expanding war in the Middle East with no approval from Congress.

Davidson has also singled out administration officials’ public statements on the justification for the war — particularly Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s argument that the U.S. sought to preempt Iranian retaliation on American assets for a strike it knew Israel was planning.

He called those comments “troubling” while also avoiding direct criticism of Trump. Ahead of the Tuesday briefing, Davidson gave the commander-in-chief the benefit of the doubt.

“President Trump has been an Iran war skeptic since before he was even a candidate,” he told reporters. “He found something persuasive. So I go into [the briefing] assuming there’s something that I will find persuasive.”

A day later he announced he was voting to restrain Trump — a case he made in principled, not personal terms.

“For some, this debate will be about whether we should even be fighting in Iran,” he said on the floor Wednesday. “For me, the debate is more fundamental: Is the president of the United States, regardless of the person holding the office, empowered to do whatever he wants? That’s not what our Constitution says.”

Congress

Poll: China fears drive polarization on AI regulations

Published

10 minutes ago

September 17, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Americans are divided on whether it’s acceptable to fall behind other countries in the race to develop advanced artificial intelligence. So is Congress.

A new POLITICO Poll finds that Americans broadly recognize serious risks from frontier AI models, but many — particularly President Donald Trump’s voters — also prioritize maintaining a lead over other countries, including China.

Even as 63% of the poll’s respondents said there’s a real possibility that AI could destroy humanity, they’re split on whether it’s acceptable to slow down and potentially fall behind in order to mitigate that risk.

A plurality, 43%, say it is acceptable for the U.S. to fall behind other countries if that means developing AI more responsibly and securely, while 37% take the opposite view, saying the U.S. should not stand down, even if that requires taking risks. Voters who backed Trump in 2024 favor the competition-first position by 50% to 38%.

That split is already playing out on Capitol Hill as AI safety zooms to the center of congressional conversations. With legislation only slowly taking shape, fear of international competition stands to be a major point of tension during any bipartisan negotiations — with most lawmakers’ views divided closely along party lines.

Many Republican lawmakers said in interviews this week that pausing AI development could give China an opening to overtake U.S. capabilities. Democrats are also looking over their shoulders at Chinese advances, but they are cautioning that competition is not a reason for Congress to avoid instituting AI guardrails.

“The AI race is not an arms race that you win,” Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) said during Wednesday’s Blue Light News Decoded Summit. “It’s an arms race that we need to end, and we need to protect the American people.”

Casar, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, has teamed up with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) in calling for a ban on “superintelligence” to stave off the existential threats to humanity — a concern that bubbled to the fore last week when a former Anthropic researcher warned AI could “kill us all.”

Senior Republicans are denigrating proposals like Casar’s, arguing that the U.S. cannot risk Chinese AI dominance. Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), chair of the powerful House committee overseeing the tech industry, said as much at the summit.

“We absolutely can’t surrender,” he said. “And I think that’s what it would be if we stopped AI development.”

Guthrie further argued AI legislation is too complex to rush and that the Energy and Commerce Committee he leads might not take up AI legislation before next year. That sentiment is in line with Speaker Mike Johnson, who said this week that the U.S. must “maintain our edge over China.” Meanwhile, Trump has called the AI panic a “HOAX” and said that federal regulations would allow China to leapfrog the U.S.

Some Republicans have been almost flippant about the dilemma policymakers face in reconciling a potentially dangerous technology with their fear of Chinese competition.

“If there are going to be killer robots, I’d rather they be American killer robots,” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said in a recent POLITICO interview. Like Guthrie, Cruz chairs a committee overseeing tech matters.

Among the bipartisan group of lawmakers who have locked arms in warning about the Chinese threat on other fronts, the familiar partisan divide is still emerging on AI regulation.

“We can lead in innovation and lead in safety,” said Rep. Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.), who sits on the bipartisan Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. “So if Trump or anyone else comes at it that we can only do one but not the other, he’s not looking at the history of the United States of America.”

Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, a moderate Republican China hawk, said he is “very reluctant to hinder AI” via regulation.

“They’re going to have to make the good case why we need it,” he said. “We don’t want to hinder our AI research. We can’t afford to fall behind China.”

Some, however, are being careful to strike a balanced tone as the AI safety conversation kicks into high gear.

Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), chair of the House China panel, acknowledged lawmakers “do have a responsibility for public safety” while saying it was also important to “beat China when it comes to the AI race.”

“There’s economic benefits to that,” he said. “There’s national security issues, but we want to have common sense and a deliberative process.”

Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.), an Intelligence Committee member and a co-chair of House Democrats’ AI commission, said China is “not waiting for anyone else.”

“So you can’t just leave the race, but you need to make sure you do it in the right way,” he added.

Opinions are sharper when it comes to Trump’s upcoming meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping next week and whether he should even broach some type of cooperation on AI safety.

“I don’t trust him,” Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.), a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said when asked if Trump should engage with Xi on AI. “I trust Trump.”

But many Democrats say it’s a mistake to engage in an AI arms race, with some explicitly reaching for analogies with the nuclear arms race that ended in Cold War treaties with a former global rival — the Soviet Union — limiting bomb tests and missile deployments.

Rep. Ted Lieu of California, another co-chair of the Democratic AI commission, said Trump could start small by asking Xi to “commit that they’re never going to let AI launch a nuclear weapon by itself.”

“There are things that we can do to get other countries to follow the lead the U.S. has taken in AI,” he said.

Congress

Democrats keep pressure on Hakeem Jeffries to punish rogue members

Published

8 hours ago

September 17, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

House Democrats aren’t letting rogue members off the hook for bucking their party. They hope Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries won’t either.

“Obviously, there’s got to be” punishment for the two Democrats who twice this month bucked their party to advance a slate of Republican priorities, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) said in an interview.

“Otherwise, then,” he said, “it’s open season.”

Democrats are watching closely how — and if — Jeffries doles out consequences for Reps. Jared Golden of Maine and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington who have twice provided the decisive votes for GOP procedural measures this month. Jeffries and his leadership team condemned the two members when they first defected two weeks ago, slamming a “breach of trust” warranting a “serious response” but have yet to inflict any public consequences.

On Tuesday, they defied leadership a second time, infuriating House Democrats and resurrecting questions about how leadership plans to keep its caucus in line — especially if they have a slim majority next term.

“We have to all be united, and I think it’s pretty simple,” said one House Democrat who was granted anonymity to speak candidly. “If there’s not [a punishment], I find it hard to see a path forward in the majority, which we’re all pushing for.”

Asked if leadership should punish the two aisle-crossers, Rep. Troy Carter pointed to his time as minority leader of the Louisiana state Senate: “When I had members that did not work within the confines of the philosophical views of our party, I took them off our caucus.”

“I don’t want to second-guess anybody’s timing, but I will tell you that these things cannot allow to fester,” he added. “We have to have a strict message: Either you’re with the team on those fundamental issues of governance or you aren’t.”

Multiple members, including Carter, said that removing Gluesenkamp Perez from the Appropriations Committee should be considered. (While members are just as angry at Golden, they acknowledge he’s beyond punishment given he is retiring at the end of this term.)

“I suspect that there are a number of appropriate consequences that [leaders] could implement,” Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.) said in an interview. “And, ultimately, it’s their decision. I certainly don’t want that to be a caucus decision. That should be a leadership decision.”

One leader, Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, suggested she is open to removing Gluesenkamp Perez from Appropriations, telling reporters Wednesday morning that “team players get to sit on exclusive committees.”

After the first instance where the two Democrats defected on Sept. 1, Jeffries kicked the matter to a caucus rules panel, saying afterward he wanted to pursue action against the two members “sooner rather than later.” The panel continues to deliberate on what should happen if members vote with Republicans on procedural measures.

Jeffries said that week that he’d had a “productive” and “forward-looking” conversation with Gluesenkamp Perez, but he has said much less after Tuesday’s floor drama.

“I’ll have more to say about the issue when I have more to say about the issue,” he told Blue Light News shortly after the vote.

Congress

House passes Russia sanctions bill, handing Trump more leverage against Moscow

Published

10 hours ago

September 16, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

The House passed the sweeping Russia sanctions bill long championed by the late Sen. Lindsey Graham on Wednesday, sending the legislation to the White House for President Donald Trump’s signature after more than a year of congressional maneuvering.

The 262 to 159 vote ends a nearly two-year lull in Ukraine assistance from Congress, which had not passed any major Ukraine efforts since a 2024 emergency aid package. The bill faced a number of obstacles on the path to the Resolute Desk, including significant opposition from some House Democrats who argued that the bill would give the White House too much tariff power.

After weathering a number of storms to make it out of Capitol Hill, the legislation is all but guaranteed to get Trump’s signature.

The long-anticipated legislation issues mandatory sanctions on Russia’s leadership and energy sector — as well as new sanctions on collaborators in Moscow’s defense industry and its so-called shadow fleet. Advocates of the bill, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, have argued it would give the White House necessary tools to squeeze Russia economically, curbing the flow of funds to Moscow’s war machine.

But, to many Democrats’ dismay, the legislation also includes a 100% tariff on top buyers of Russian energy. Opponents of the bill have cautioned that the tariff provision would hand another cudgel for Trump to use against not only U.S. foes but also global allies — an action the White House has repeatedly taken since Trump returned to office.

“We cannot grant more tariff power that we know he will abuse,” Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.) said in comments on the House floor Wednesday.

Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, argued that the tariffs would worsen the economic pain already felt by everyday Americans and that without a security assistance package or more air defense, they would not do enough to concretely help Ukraine.

In comments on the House floor earlier Wednesday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries outlined why he planned to withhold support for the measure.

“The manner in which this bill has been written doesn’t require the president of the United States to impose sanctions on Russia,” Jeffries said. “In fact, there are so many loopholes written into the bill, I believe, that it’s very unlikely that the sanctions relief contemplated in the legislation will ever see the light of day.”

That disagreement has caused a growing rift among Democrats in recent days. Fifty-eight House Democrats broke with Jeffries to vote yes on the measure.

In a letter addressed to House Democrats, Senate Foreign Relations ranking member Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) urged her colleagues to pass the legislation, warning that failing to do so would send a dangerous message to both Russian leader Vladimir Putin and other international foes.

“Congress’s failure to impose additional costs would send a dangerous signal,” Shaheen wrote. “The Kremlin is watching. Kyiv is watching. Our NATO allies are watching. So are Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang.”