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Adam Gabbatt
New Yorkers were voting on Tuesday in a slate of Democratic primaries poised to reveal the strength of the party’s left flank and shape the battle for control of the US House of Representatives in November.
Voters in Maryland and Utah will also nominate congressional candidates on Tuesday, while South Carolina holds a series of runoff elections for candidates who did not receive a majority of the vote earlier this month.
But the New York contests, unfolding in a state expected to play a decisive role in determining the congressional majority, have attracted significant national attention as Democrats weigh competing visions for their party’s future in the Trump era.
With Republicanz holding a narrow House majority, Democrats hope to flip a crucial battleground district in the Hudson Valley, while defending three seats heavily targeted by the GOP.
In an ideological battle being closely watched by the party leadership, several self-identified democratic socialists are taking on more centrist Democrats in safe-blue seats, in an early test of mayor Zohran Mamdani’s political clout. Elsewhere, voters in New York’s wealthiest congressional district are weighing candidates in a race that has become a test of both the Kennedy name and the growing influence of the AI industry.
In New York City, the democratic socialist mayor, who was elected last year, has attempted to put a stamp on the state’s congressional delegation by backing a trio of leftwing congressional candidates, much to the chagrin of some in his party.
Two Mamdani-endorsed candidates – former New York City comptroller Brad Lander and public defense investigator Darializa Avila Chevalier – are running to unseat Democratic incumbents in safely Democratic districts, part of a coast-to-coast wave of ideological and generational challenges being waged against sitting members of Congress.
We’ll bring you the latest results, updates and reaction as we get it.
Key events
DC video editor arrested for berating officers guarding reflecting pool says he will contest charge
Since Donald Trump claimed on Tuesday that six people have been arrested “for the damage they did to” the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, it seems worth keeping tabs on who, exactly, has been arrested, and what crimes they have been charged with.
One DC resident seen on video being dragged away from the reflecting pool in handcuffs on Monday is Christian Miles, a freelance video editor who told the Guardian on Tuesday that he was charged with violating a federal obscenity law for berating a group of Oklahoma state troopers guarding the reflecting pool.
Miles, a former US Navy submariner, has made it a personal project in recent months to “document the creeping police state” since Donald Trump’s federal takeover of policing in Washington DC by filming himself confronting, and often berating, federal troops and officer around the city.
He told the Guardian that he plans to contest the administrative law charge that he violated section 2.34 (a) (2) of the Code of Federal Regulations, which prohibits disorderly conduct by someone who uses “language, an utterance, or gesture, or engages in a display or act that is obscene, physically threatening or menacing, or done in a manner that is likely to inflict injury or incite an immediate breach of the peace.”
Miles posted an edited video of his encounter with the Oklahoma troopers on YouTube, which seems to be similar in nature to his previous encounters over the past 10 months with other officers and troops. The only difference, it seems, is that this run-in took place after the president started to claim that vandals, not shoddy work by his hand-picked contractors, was to blame for the rapidly deteriorating condition of the renovated reflecting pool.
In an email to the Guardian, Miles noted the irony that one of the Oklahoma state troopers he argued with before his arrest told him that the US was obviously a free society “because you can be out here and you can video all you want to … Go to China, they’d run over you in a tank in Red Square.”
According to Miles, he was arrested seven minutes later for using obscene language as he protested against the security crackdown at the reflecting pool.
Schumer suggests war powers resolution is binding on Trump and requires him to remove forces from Iran war
As we explained earlier, when Congress created the war powers resolution mechanism in 1973, lawmakers intended such resolutions to be binding orders to presidents, enabling Congress to end hostilities.
A decade later, a supreme court decision in an unrelated case on a technical matter cast into doubt the power of Congress to compel US presidents to withdraw forces from active combat.
After the Senate passed a war powers resolution on Iran on Tuesday, directing Donald Trump to withdraw US forces, the senior Democrat in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, seemed to suggest that the supreme court ruling should be challenged, by writing on social media that the measure is binding on the president.
“Today, Congress stood up to Donald Trump and voted to end his costly, unnecessary, and devastating war with Iran”, Schumer wrote. “Let me be clear: for the first time, this resolution has passed both chambers of Congress and does not require the President’s signature. The message from the only branch of government with the power to declare war is unmistakable: the Trump administration must withdraw U.S. forces from hostilities in Iran.”
When Congress created the war powers resolution in 1973, it was supposed to tie a president’s hands; then the supreme court gutted it
As our colleague Chris Stein explains, the war powers resolution passed by the US Senate on Tuesday, which first passed the House on June 3, says that Congress “directs the President to remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities against the Islamic Republic of Iran”, but is more of a rebuke than an order, since such resolutions have not carried the force of law since a 1983 supreme court case, on an unrelated technical matter, said that the president has to agree.
When the mechanism was created by Congress in 1973, however, such resolutions were intended to be binding on presidents, having the full force of law, to allow Congress to assert its role, enshrined in the US constitution, to declare war.
Michael J. Glennon, a professor of international law at Tufts University, and a former legal counsel to the Senate foreign relations committee argued in March that the 1983 supreme court ruling that made such resolutions symbolic rather than binding, was wrongly decided and should be overturned.
“On a humid afternoon in the summer of 1973, a conference committee of House and Senate negotiators agreed, behind the closed doors of S-116 of the Capitol, to include a provision in the War Powers Resolution that, more than anything else within it, would have restored Congress’s constitutional war powers”, Glennon wrote for the law and policy journal Just Security.
He added:
The provision in question is Section 5(c) of the Resolution, the so-called legislative veto. A legislative veto is a statutory mechanism that gives legal effect to a measure adopted by Congress without submitting it to the President for signature or veto. Section 5(c) provides that the President shall remove American armed forces from “hostilities” upon the adoption of a concurrent resolution directing him to do so. A concurrent resolution takes effect immediately upon adoption by both Houses without presentation to the President.
That provision could be used today by Congress to halt an unauthorized war … It could be, that is, had the Supreme Court not cast its validity into doubt ten years after the Resolution’s enactment. The case that did so, INS v. Chadha, decided in 1983, has itself since fallen into legal difficulty… The case should now be overruled, or at minimum, held inapplicable to the legislative veto embedded in Section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution.
Glennon, who was present in the Senate chamber in 1973 when Congress overrode Richard Nixon’s veto of the War Powers Resolution bill and it became law, went on to argue that vice-president JD Vance was simply wrong when he said in January that “every president, Democrat or Republican, believes that the war powers act is fundamentally a fake and unconstitutional law”. The act, Glennon noted, “is the duly enacted law of the United States, sustained over presidential objection by a constitutionally prescribed supermajority”.
The claim that the war powers resolution mechanism is not binding on the president was central to the objections raised to it during the Senate debate on Tuesday over the war powers resolution on Iran.
Senator Jim Risch, an Idaho Republican, explained that he was voting no in part because “a concurrent resolution process… has been held unconstitutional by the United States supreme court, so whatever happens with this, its going to have no effect, the president isn’t going to pay any attention to it.”
Chris Stein
The US Senate on Tuesday approved a war powers resolution preventing Donald Trump from continuing the conflict with Iran, delivering the president a significant but symbolic rebuke over a conflict that has proven unpopular with the US public.
The resolution passed by a 50-48 vote, with four Republicans – Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Rand Paul of Kentucky – breaking with their party to vote in favor. John Fetterman, of Pennsylvania, was the sole Democrat to vote against it.
The measure, which passed the House of Representatives earlier this month, would require the president to seek Congress’s authorization to use military force against Iran. It comes after Trump dispatched JD Vance to Switzerland to negotiate a settlement that would resolve the conflict the US began alongside Israel in February.
Though the resolution does not carry the force of law, or require the president’s signature, its passage underscores the discontent among Republicans over a conflict that has grown deeply unpopular with voters ahead of the November midterm elections, in which Republicans will be defending their control of Congress.
Senate for first time approves a war powers resolution in a rebuke to Trump over Iran conflict
The Senate has for the first time approved a war powers resolution seeking to curb US military action against Iran, as lawmakers warily watch Donald Trump’s efforts to resolve a conflict that the administration launched on its own and now needs Congress to fund.
This was the 10th time the Senate had tried to stop the war, and the outcome, on a vote of 50-48, was a stunning turnaround from past efforts. While the resolution is largely symbolic, and does not fully carry the force of law, it reflects the growing concerns from a number of GOP lawmakers in both the House and Senate over both the war and the deal Trump has struck with Iran to end it. The House approved the resolution earlier this month.
“Time after time, the vast majority of Senate Republicans sided with Trump and his war instead of the American people,” said Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer.
Schumer said Americans have paid the price for “Trump’s historic blunder in Iran”. He added: “It’ll go down in the history books as one of the worst foreign policy forays America has ever made.”
In the past, as many as four GOP senators have voted for the war powers resolutions, and they did so today — Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana .
One Democrat, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, voted against.
On this vote, the absence of two Republicans, including Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who was admitted to the hospital recently for an undisclosed matter, left the GOP without a full majority to halt the effort.
Several times throughout this, erm, wide-ranging speech, Trump has urged voters to re-elect Republican representative Ryan Mackenzie — but each time has failed to mention his name.
“We’ve got to get a certain very talented congressman re-elected. You know that. We have to get him — where are you, where are you, Mr. Congressman? We got to get you back in,” Trump said.
He proceeded to call him “Mr. Congressman” several more times in various comments about how he wants people to vote for him. Has Trump forgotten his name? It wouldn’t be a total surprise …
“And we’re getting along quite well,” the president claims, attacking media coverage of the negotiations.
“Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, and they’ve agreed to that,” Trump adds, citing this as “the reason why I did it [went to war].”
Trump claims that yesterday 19m barrels of oil flowed out of the strait of Hormuz, which he calls “the most oil in the history of the strait”.
Touting his leadership and how he “stood up” to other countries with his tariff policies, Trump adds: “And now I’m standing up again, because Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, if that’s okay. And we’re doing quite well.”
And back in PA, Donald Trump has finally appeared on-stage, almost an hour behind schedule. I’ll bring you all the key lines as he finally gets to delivering his speech.
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