Americans appreciate the right to vote, and union members especially recognize the value of a voice – the opportunity to organize, elect officials, ratify proposed contracts, endorse candidates and other actions.
Actions such as voting to authorize strikes.
If only President Trump let Americans’ representative in Congress vote to authorize military strikes before a war is launched, as the U.S. Constitution requires.
Trump attacked with no explanation, even contradicting his and mediators’ claims that negotiations with Iran were progressing. Once hostilities started, the news media predictably have focused on the war. Longtime journalist Margaret Sullivan said, “That means that you’re seeing far less about some of the things Trump wants to blot out from existence.” .
Generally, Americans are against the war. A Washington Post poll found 52% of us oppose it, and 74% are concerned about a full-scale conflict.
Specifically, Americans also are concerned about the war’s effect on the cost of living. It feels wrong to think about money while lives are at risk as the war spreads. However, you can be sad, worried or angry and still be anxious about your bills. After all, shipping is disrupted, Wall Street stocks are falling and gas prices re rising. (AAA on March 5 reported the national average for a gallon of gas was $3.251, up from $2.891 a month earlier.)
Economist Paul Krugman pointed out costly tradeoffs. The price tag for one F-15 fighter jet: $97 million.
“There are many reasons to be disturbed by Operation Epic Fury,” he said. “One of the reasons is the extraordinary amount of money the U.S. government is either laying out now or will have to lay out in the future to replace the spent munitions.
“Just replacing those three jets shot down over Kuwait [March 1] is almost $300 million lost,” he continued. “That will cost about as much as providing 125,000 Americans with crucial food aid or providing health care to 100,000 American children. And the war might very well end up costing 100 times as much as the price of those jets.”
Joining most progressives against the Iran War are some conservatives, including Tucker Carlson, Rand Paul and Max Boot. Boot wrote “There is no reason to think this war with Iran is necessary.”
RATIONALES: WHO KNOWS?
Real reasons could be about oil (either seizing it or choking off oil China needs), helping billionaire buddies in Saudi Arabia and the U.S. arms industry, or benefiting Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. (Ryan Cooper, editor of The American Prospect, wrote, “For a long time the relationship has been entirely one-directional: benefiting Israel and harming America. With Donald Trump starting yet another war in the Middle East—this time explicitly for Israel’s benefit, according to his own cabinet—it is time to reconsider that relationship.”)
Other justifications are so inconsistent as to hint that no one’s sure. (After all, people remember Trump’s 2024 campaign promises: cracking down on “the worst of the worst” immigrants, getting prices down “on Day One,” and avoiding foreign wars.) Supposed reasons: nuclear arms (despite after the June 2025 U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran, Trump saying it had “obliterated Iran’s nuclear weapons program.”); “long-range missiles” or short-range, depending on the day; an unstated “imminent threat”; revenge on supposed assassination attempts; regime change
Of course, the United States HAD a treaty with Iran. The 2015 Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) may not have been perfect, but it provided for the United States and global partners to limit Iran's nuclear capabilities in exchange for lifting economic sanctions. Iran agreed to reduce centrifuges and uranium stockpiles 97% to prevent nuclear weapon development, and to let monitors inspect operations. Trump withdrew from the international agreement soon after his 2016 election.
The real reasons for starting the war may be unknown, but many suspect Trump’s war is his desperate attempt to distract from his problems. Major Gen. (ret.) Randy Manner, who spoke to CNN from the United Arab Emirates (where he was stranded), said, “It seems to me that the purpose and mission have been shifting over the past few days and the past few weeks.”
Consider:
* Homeland Security’s ICE and FEMA have so disappointed Americans that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was demoted
* a public-health crisis (exemplified by measles outbreaks)
* upsetting allies, killing people on small boats without proof they’re drug smugglers, and threatening Panama and Cuba with takeovers
* Trump’s lawsuit vendetta trying to punish political foes failing to exact the revenge he sought
* the Supreme Court ruling that Trump’s tariffs were unconstitutional
* his popular support tanking to 38%, according to The Economist, YouGov and CNN.
* also, obviously, the Epstein files. Indeed, despite the war dominating media, some non-war coverage is too important to be ignored, such as the release this month of “missing” Epstein pages – FBI reports from 2019, when investigators interviewed a woman who claimed when she was about 13 Jeffrey Epstein introduced her to Trump, who assaulted her.
“But hey,” wrote conservative Bill Kristol, “at least economic numbers stink. The United States lost 92,000 jobs in February, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said, while the unemployment rate ticked back up to 4.4%.”
Maybe Trump is less obsessed with hiding from the limelight than demanding the spotlight despite incompetence.
“He has no endgame,” said author Robert Reich, Labor Secretary in the Clinton administration. “He has no f*cking clue what he’s doing in Iran. He loves to create chaos because chaos allows him to improvise — to impose his own narrative on a flood of events, dodge responsibility for failures, take credit for successes, and create illusions of glory and victory.”
A COUP?
Or – back to the idea of free and fair elections and the dangers without them – Trump and election-deniers might declare (another) “national emergency” to control states’ elections, again claiming 2020 election interference that didn’t exist. (Conservative columnist George Will called it “a complex conspiracy for which there is no evidence.”)
The claims have been refuted in 64 lawsuits and were proven false in recounts in states such as Georgia and Arizona, where Republican state officials said the results showed Biden defeated Trump, plus Trump’s first-term Attorney General William Barr saying the rigged election claim was “bullshit,” and GOP Vice President Mike Pence flatly commenting, “The Georgia election was not stolen.”
Pennsylvania Judge Stephanos Bibas, appointed by Trump, said, “Calling an election unfair does not make it so.” (The best debunking was by eight conservative judges and other Republicans, published in 2022 as “Lost, Not Stolen,” examining 187 counts in all those lawsuits.)
The new scheme follows the Supreme Court flirting with gutting the Voting Rights Act, and Trump’s Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would make voting harder for seniors, married women, students, low-income citizens and others. (The House approved it last April, 220-208, with Illinois’ three Republican Representatives, including Darin LaHood, voting for it, but the Senate hasn’t approved it.)
Election deniers are reportedly circulating a 17-page draft of an Executive Order requiring a burdensome proof of citizenship and banning mail-in ballots and even voting machines. Last month, Lt. Gen. (ret.) Michael Flynn – Trump’s former national security adviser who after the 2020 election took part in plans to seize voting machines and advocated military intervention to overturn the results – held a meeting in Washington that brought together co-conspirators and officials tied to the White House, DOJ, and DHS, reported ProPublica, which said the agenda was to advance plans for a federal takeover of the midterm elections.
In Illinois, the legislature is considering a state Voting Rights Act, making the federal law also Illinois’ statute.. If passed, the measure sponsored by Sen. Graciela Guzman (D-Chicago) would be enacted before November’s midterm elections.
“The last year has made one thing remarkably clear,” Guzman said, “— democracy does not run on autopilot. It only survives if people are willing to protect it, and at the center of that responsibility is a fundamental right to vote.”
Meanwhile, on March 8, Trump threatened to not sign any bills into law until the SAVE America Act passes the U.S. Senate.
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