Behind the Headlines Week of September 25, 2026

By Rob C.

The Intercept

Congress Failed Again to Stop Trump’s Iran War. This Group Is Trying Through the Courts.

Let’s talk about what’s happening here: the United States Congress — the body constitutionally required to declare war, the last institutional firewall between a unilateral executive and a full-blown presidential monarchy — has once again looked at Donny Draft Dodger’s illegal war in Iran, shrugged, and gone back to cashing their defense contractor checks. The War Powers Act isn’t complicated. It’s not ambiguous. It says Congress holds the power to authorize military force. But when the defense contractors, oil companies and their MAGA enablers are writing the rules, the Constitution is just a decorative plaque in a hallway nobody uses.

So now it falls to a coalition of lawyers and advocacy groups to do what 535 elected officials refuse to: sue the bastards. Through the courts. Because that’s where American democracy goes to die slowly with dignity when the legislature has been fully hollowed out by dark money, oil and defense industry PACs, and the collective moral cowardice of people who would rather keep their committee seats than stop a war. Raytheon doesn’t fund your campaign so you can vote against a conflict that moves missiles off the shelf at $2 million a pop.

Every day Congress fails to act is a day this becomes normalized. If Trump can wage open war on Iran without so much as a floor vote, the next president — Democrat or Republican — inherits that same blank check. The Epstein Class doesn’t care which party holds the White House as long as the bombs keep dropping and the stock portfolios keep climbing. Act up. Call your representatives. And if they won’t act, make sure everyone in their district knows they chose Lockheed Martin over the Constitution.

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ScheerPost

‘Never Fails to Disappoint’: Fetterman Joins GOP to Keep Trump’s Iran War Going

John Fetterman’s political journey is now complete. He has traveled the full arc — from progressive folk hero, stroke survivor, working-class champion — to the guy who crosses the aisle to help Donald Trump bomb a sovereign nation without congressional authorization. Bravo, John. Truly a glow-up for the ages. Fetterman didn’t just vote with the GOP; he handed them the bipartisan cover they desperately needed to frame an illegal war as a reasonable, consensus position. That’s not moderation. That’s being a human rubber stamp in a hoodie.

And don’t let anyone sell you the ‘he’s complicated’ defense. This is a pattern, not an anomaly. Fetterman has been drifting toward the warm, donor-friendly waters of the Republican establishment for months, cheerleading for military escalation while his constituents in Pennsylvania watch their public services get gutted by the same administration he’s now running interference for. The revolving door doesn’t always spin between government and K Street — sometimes it just spins inside a single politician’s brain until they’ve rationalized their way into complicity.

This matters because the war machine needs Democrats. It always has. One party provides the bombs; the other provides the absolution. Every Fetterman vote normalizes the abnormal and makes it harder for the antiwar left to hold the line. If you’re a Pennsylvania voter who knocked doors for this man, you deserve an explanation — not a press release, not a staffer’s tweet, a real explanation. And if he can’t give you one, remember that in November.

The Guardian

US Supreme Court lifts restrictions on controversial voter database

The Supreme Court — the same six-justice majority installed through a dark money laundering operation so sophisticated it would make a Cayman Islands banker blush — has just greenlit a voter database so controversial that lower courts slapped restrictions on it the first time they smelled it. We’re talking about a system designed to cross-reference voter rolls with citizenship records in ways that are incredibly error-prone, racially disparate, and purpose-built to make voting harder for the people least likely to vote Republican. This isn’t voter integrity. This is voter subtraction, and the math is deliberate.

Follow the money and the machinery. The push for these citizenship databases flows directly from the same network of dark money groups — Heritage Foundation, ALEC, and their billionaire backers — who have spent decades engineering an electorate small enough to be controlled. When you can’t win a fair fight, you shrink the ring and pay off the refs. And now they have six Supreme Court justices, three of whom were essentially gift-wrapped by the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo and his constellation of anonymous donors, to bless the whole operation as constitutional.

This should worry you because this is how you lose democracy without a single shot being fired — just a thousand bureaucratic paper cuts, each one ‘legal,’ each one blessed by a court that was bought before the case was ever filed. If your name is on a list — and it might be — check your registration today. Help your neighbors check theirs. And remember: the point of flooding a database with errors isn’t to fix mistakes. It’s to create enough chaos that legitimate voters give up. Don’t.

The Guardian

Trump’s executive order on recreational fishing is a ‘giveaway of fish and ocean ecosystem’, advocates warn

When Nostra-dumbass signs an executive order about recreational fishing, your first instinct might be to file it under ‘weird but harmless pandering to the bass boat demographic.’ Resist that instinct. What this order actually does is gut the marine conservation frameworks that limit commercial exploitation of shared ocean ecosystems — frameworks that exist because, left to their own devices, extractive industries will strip-mine the ocean the same way they strip-mine everything else. Framing it as a ‘recreational fishing’ win is just the label on the can. The can is full of corporate chum.

The commercial fishing industry — particularly the massive conglomerates that have spent years trying to elbow out sustainable catch limits — has been lobbying for exactly this kind of regulatory rollback. These aren’t weekend anglers with a cooler of beer. These are industrial operations with fleets, lobbyists, and PAC money. And Trump just handed them the keys to ecosystems that took decades to partially recover, dressed up in a press release about Freedom and Fish.

Here’s the cold, depressing reality: once you collapse a fishery, you don’t get it back on a human timescale. Ask the Grand Banks cod fishermen — except you can’t, because that industry is functionally gone. The ocean is not infinite, the Epstein Class does not care, and executive orders don’t come with environmental impact statements when the goal is to sign fast and profit faster. If you eat fish, drink water, or live on a coastline, this is your problem. The ecosystems being liquidated today are the food security crises of tomorrow.

The Guardian

EU says Trump’s plan to ban US diesel exports would ‘negatively impact both sides’

Donald Trump threatening to ban diesel exports to Europe is the geopolitical equivalent of a man sawing off the branch he’s sitting on — loudly, proudly, while telling everyone else they’re going to fall. Europe gets hurt, obviously. They depend on US diesel supply chains that took years to build after Ukraine war disruptions. But American refiners, who have structured their entire business model around the export premium that European demand provides, get absolutely kneecapped too. This isn’t energy independence. This is energy self-sabotage dressed up in a ‘America First’ bumper sticker.

Now ask yourself: who benefits from market chaos in the energy sector? Not the consumers, who will pay more at the pump on both continents. Not the small refinery operators who lack the capital cushion to absorb a sudden export shutdown. The winners are the massive, vertically integrated energy conglomerates with diversified revenue streams, the financial speculators who profit from price volatility, and — conveniently — the fossil fuel billionaires who helped fund Trump’s return to power and are now watching the regulatory landscape get reshaped in real time in their favor. Market chaos, for the right players, is just opportunity in wolf’s clothing.

The EU’s diplomatic language — ‘negatively impact both sides’ — is Brussels-speak for ‘what the hell are you doing?’ But here’s what nobody’s saying loudly enough: this isn’t just about diesel. It’s about Trump using America’s economic leverage as a weapon against democratic allies while cozying up to authoritarian ones. Every time he does this, NATO frays a little more, the rules-based international order erodes a little more, and the Techno-Fascist vision of a world governed by strongmen and bilateral deals — rather than alliances and institutions — gets a little closer to reality. The stakes are not just about gas prices. The stakes are about who runs the world next.

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