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On Politics

Wed Sep 30 2026

Zachary Schermele | Congressional Correspondent

@zachschermele

Hello, readers. Welcome back to On Politics. Zach Schermele here, USA TODAY's congressional correspondent. It's Wednesday, and the jet fumes are starting to permeate here in the Capitol. Let's get into it.

Data center debate lingers over recess

Four Senate Democrats refused to block a GOP data center bill today, breaking with party leadership on an issue that's significantly shaping the campaign trail ahead of the upcoming midterm elections. In one of their last votes before departing Washington until November, most Democrats opposed the "toothless" (in their words) legislation that Republicans argued would help shield Americans from spiking energy costs due to AI data centers.

The bill, called the Ratepayer Protection Act, previously passed the House of Representatives resoundingly, 417-3. It would require utility regulators at the state level to consider rules for data centers to "recover the full, incremental cost" of the power they need to operate. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said party leadership decided to prevent the bill from advancing because it didn't go nearly far enough. Democrats, he said, want to make it mandatory for data centers to fully financially shoulder their own power upgrades – but by law, "not by suggestion or hope or whim."

Despite those objections, four Democrats – including one in caucus leadership – unsuccessfully tried to move the bill forward. They were:

•	Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota,
•	Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock of Georgia, and
•	Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire.

Ossoff, who's in a competitive Senate race in battleground Georgia, told me afterward he thought the legislation was "worthy of debate."

"Thanks to Donald Trump, it costs more than ever in American history to power your home," he said.

A politics rundown

•	Democrats are running against data centers in key Senate races
•	Trump's new accord on "super intelligence" includes a spelling error
•	Donald Trump's disapproval rating matches Jan. 6 peak in new poll

Daily photo gallery: Trump and tech executives meet to talk AI safety at White House. See photos.

Election officials expect little impact from SAVE database

Election officials in some of the largest counties nationwide say the federal database for checking citizenship won’t have a big impact on the midterm elections, as my colleague Bart Jansen reports. That's because a Supreme Court decision restoring state access to it came too close to Election Day, he writes.

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After two decades, U.S. forces exit Iraq

U.S. military forces departed the Erbil Air Base in northern Iraq today, ending a two-decade American presence at a time when the U.S. war against Iran has created significant regional instability and emboldened the country’s Iran-backed militias. As our Pentagon Correspondent Miles J. Herszenhorn reports today from Europe, the closure of the Erbil Air Base marks the second U.S. withdrawal from Iraq. Read more from Miles here.

That's all from me for today, folks. Questions? Comments? Tips? Reach me, as always, at zschermele@usatoday.com or on Signal @zachschermele.02.