Wellness check: How are you all doing?
I told Karoli and Aliza during this week’s podcast that the last six months has felt like six years.
I’m not alone.
“Autocracies, by their nature, flood the zone with so many outrages, abuses, and affronts to democratic norms that they can destabilize and discombobulate the opposition. As we struggle to identify new offenses and scrutinize which matters are relevant and which are not, democracy defenders occasionally must step back to see how they are advancing the larger cause of democracy.”
— Jen Rubin, The Contrarian
Jen continued on to talk about the need for a “Democracy Revival 2028.”
Among the many offenses of this regime is its tendency to do take its most outrageous actions overnight and on weekends, so that we never get a chance to relax. I’m afraid that was my first thought on Saturday night, when the president announced that we had officially joined Israel in bombing Iran. While there are still troops occupying my city and masked ICE thugs terrorizing neighborhoods throughout the country, and an unrelenting push to pass a terrible budget bill that will rob everyone in order to give even more tax breaks to billionaires.
It’s a lot. We touched on it all.
Another Unconstitutional, Undeclared War
Here are some bullet points shared by Senator Chris Murphy in his new Substack newsletter:
1. There is an industry in Washington that profits from war, and so it’s no surprise that the merits of conflict are dangerously overhyped and the risks are regularly underestimated.
2. Almost every war plan our military has devised for the Middle East and North Africa in the last two decades has been a failure.
3. The strikes are illegal, and a major setback for the international rule of law that has undergirded American security for 75 years.
4. You cannot bomb knowledge out of existence.
If Iran makes the decision to build a weapon, and they have a country like Russia helping them, they could easily get a weapon in a dangerously short amount of time. That risk is why many of us believed that a negotiated agreement that put in place verifiable limits on Iran’s nuclear program was a safer bet than military action.
5. We didn’t need to start a war with Iran because we know – for sure – that diplomacy can work.
6. Even opponents of this strike need to admit Iran is weak, and we cannot know for sure what the future holds.
7. There are many very, very bad potential consequences of Trump’s attack.
8. Israel is our ally and Iran IS a threat to their people, but we should never allow Israeli domestic politics to draw us into a war.
One Last Thing
