welcome to kirkistan

“The public’s conception of what has gone wrong goes far deeper than super PACs or White House ballrooms or even slush funds. To them, it is a system that is fundamentally misfiring.”

June 4, 2026, 5:47 PM MST / Updated June 4, 2026, 6:34 PM MST

By Kyle Stewart and Raquel Coronell Uribe

WASHINGTON — The House passed bipartisan legislation Thursday that would provide new aid to Ukraine and impose sanctions against Russia, largely clashing with the Trump administration’s approach to the war.

The 226-195 vote included support for the bill from 18 Republicans, who joined all but one Democrat in approving the measure.

The Ukraine Support Act, sponsored by Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, came to the House floor after enough Republicans crossed the aisle to side with Democrats and circumvent GOP leadership, which had prevented a vote on the legislation.

The bill would authorize $8 billion in Foreign Military Financing loans to Ukraine and NATO allies, as well as more than $1 billion in other funds for Ukraine, Baltic security and Radio Free Europe.

The bill now heads to the Senate, where it faces a steeper uphill climb with Republicans. If passed, it would then need to be signed by President Donald Trump to become law.

The House vote comes a day after four Republicans voted with Democrats to pass a resolution to rebuke the war in Iran. The largely symbolic measure, also introduced by Meeks, directed Trump to remove U.S. forces from Iran unless Congress authorizes it. That came after Republicans rejected three other attempts to pass a war powers resolution this year.

A leading civil rights organization on Wednesday accused the US Postal Service of unlawful complicity in President Donald Trump’s assault on mail-in voting, which he launched in late March with an alarming executive order that is facing its own legal challenges.

With a new legal motion filed in a federal court in Washington, DC, the NAACP is challenging rules the Postal Service unveiled last week that would require states to notify USPS “of the individuals to whom they are mailing a mail-in or absentee ballot.” The rules would also “identify new standards for the envelope design and review for outbound and return ballot envelopes.”

The NAACP’s filing—which reignites a pandemic-era legal fight—warns that under the proposed rule, “USPS would refuse to transmit mail-in ballots in states that did not use specific envelopes with specific codes, and would refuse to deliver ballots for voters not included on a state-specific Mail-In and Absentee Participation List.”

That would violate a previous USPS agreement, reached in 2021, to prioritize “timely delivery of election mail” and run afoul of federal law, the motion argues, calling for a swift injunction to stop the Postal Service from implementing the rules.