I’ve gotten a number of helpful responses to my post from earlier today about the necessity of escalating the question of whether the White House will try to deploy ICE agents to interfere with the 2026 midterm elections. In the course of following up on a few points readers had made, I found a piece of model legislation published on March 9th by the Brennan Center. (If you don’t know about the Brennan Center, they operate at the pinnacle level in terms of competence, expertise, reliability. They are perhaps a bit more conventional in their thinking — in terms of the law — than I am. But that’s not a criticism. You need people working in many different lanes to save a country.) Model legislation is a generic piece of legislation that state legislatures can pass whole or pass with their own fine-tuning. A lot of the drafting legwork is done by the creator of the model. So it can then be implemented quickly and well, so long as the model legislation is good.

This seems very good to me. Let me explain.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio today made some extraordinary comments after briefing G7 leaders about the progress — albeit difficult to call it that — in the U.S.’s Iran War. He seemed to say that the U.S. won’t be able to reestablish freedom of transit through the Strait of Hormuz even as a final war objective, let along doing so in the short term by force or threat. He said he told the G7ers that one of the post-war challenges will be Iran setting up a tolling system for passage through the Strait. In other words, Iran will be so empowered after the war that it will be able to assert or seriously contest sovereignty over the Strait.

This is such a remarkable statement that I want to quote it at length. I had seen more garbled and clipped versions of it. These are from a report in The Hill.

Emine Yücel has those details, and others, as the Senate attempt to pay TSA falls apart in the House, and Trump (seemingly extralegally) orders that the officers be paid.

In recent weeks there’s been a recurring story, albeit with different players. This or that DHS or White House official gets asked about sending ICE to the polls in November. Will they disavow it, promise it won’t happen? The general answer has been no comment, no answer. It’s Tom Homan, or Kristi Noem or Stephen Miller. Yesterday, it was Todd Blanche at DOJ. There’s a general mood of a drip, drip, drip story, with all the vibes of looming danger and the hammer-fall of that danger being in the other guy’s hands. This is all a mistake. It’s a Trumpian sort of conditioning that is being perpetuated even though Trump himself, as far as I can tell, hasn’t addressed this particular question in some time. It’s a kind of watchful waiting in which all the power is being ceded to the hands of the White House when that is not necessary at all.

Being in a reactive mode, having the other guy holding the cards and waiting to know what they’re going to do and reacting when they do it is enervating, demoralizing, even paralyzing. And that’s always Trump’s personal angle: ‘I 100% can do it. Everyone agrees I can do it. But we’ll see what I decide,’ is more or less what he’s said about countless future crimes he’s dangled in front of an often-cowering opposition over the last decade.