The Strait of Hormuz is straight out of a storybook. Named for an ancient Persian god, the 24-mile-wide waterway flows between jagged cliffs, inlets that look like a desert version of Scandinavian fjords, and multicolored salt formations. Centuries-old Portuguese castles dot both sides of the straits, and traditional sailboats called dhows still ply the waters, carrying tourists and small wares.

Hormuz, the only connection between the oil-rich Persian Gulf and the wider ocean, is also the artery of the modern industrial economy that is most vulnerable to war. On February 28, 2026, shortly after Israel and the United States attacked Iran, the Iranian military broadcast on the radio that the strait was closed for shipping. Two days later, a (presumably Iranian) weapon smashed into an oil tanker, killing two crew members. Iran began charging multimillion-dollar ransoms for the few ships that continue to pass.

Global crude oil prices nearly doubled in the first few weeks of war—and oil isn't the whole story. Many critical manufacturing processes around the world rely on inputs from the gulf's petrochemical industry, which Iran has also bombed directly and which will take months to restart once the coast is clear. Electronics manufacturers in South Korea and Taiwan are suddenly short on helium, which they need to produce semiconductors. So ends the age of uninterrupted artificial intelligence growth. The plastic, metal, and pharmaceutical industries are running into similar shortages of raw materials. And the world is staring down a food crisis next year as farmers struggle to find fertilizer for the current planting season.

President Donald Trump has made reopening the strait a major goal of the war and the negotiations to end it during the mid-April 2026 ceasefire. In other words, Trump's struggle is now to reverse the consequences of choosing to start the war.

Starting this war was indeed a choice. The Trump administration spent months building up military forces in the Middle East while issuing constantly shifting demands. Iran had agreed to negotiate; the U.S. attacked on a weekend between two scheduled rounds of talks.

Although the war came out of the blue for most Americans, the Iran hawks spent decades working to put the United States in this position. They made it politically easier to go to war than not go to war. Politicians took it for granted that Israel and the Arab monarchies' problems with Iran were also America's problems. But hawkish factions from both parties also shot down any attempt to solve those problems through compromise or even containment of Iran. They pushed the U.S. to take greater and greater risks while avoiding a public debate on war.

"If Iran presents a quasi-existential menace, diplomacy is a political liability and sanctions don't work, what is left besides military force?" Robert Malley, the Biden administration's envoy to Iran, wrote in a recent New York Times essay criticizing his former boss for helping create the conditions for war. "If the United States wants to stop plunging into Middle East wars, it needs to value its own interests more than it hates its old enemies."

The hawkish coalition's shifting goalposts, designed to make avoiding war impossible, haunted the execution of the war itself. Since the conflict began, the Trump administration has thrown out many different, contradictory victory conditions: overthrowing the Iranian government, making a deal with the Iranian government, destroying Iran's nuclear program, sending Iran's entire industrial base "back to the Stone Age," unleashing a "prosperous and glorious future" for Iran, taking control of the Strait of Hormuz, or letting the strait "open itself."

For many hawks, the specific rationales for fighting Iran don't seem to matter. What they want is someone to pay for the past decades of U.S. failures in the Middle East. The Trump administration and its allies have tried to hold Iran responsible for attacks by Al Qaeda, Tehran's sworn enemy. More accurately, politicians from both parties have blamed Iran for stirring up violent resistance to U.S. troops during the Iraq War, the last big regime change war of choice. At the same time, hawks insist that this regime change war will be different.

"Iran is not Iraq. Anyone saying otherwise doesn't understand Middle East geopolitics, the Iranian people, their neighbors, or the diaspora. The Iranian people hate this regime," Rep. Nancy Mace (R–S.C.) argued in March 2026. But that's a lot like how the Bush administration sold the Iraq War in 2002: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz claimed that Iraqis were "the most educated people in the Arab world, who are going to welcome us as liberators."

Of course, it takes two to tango. The Islamic Republic of Iran was founded in a 1979 revolution that intentionally antagonized America, including by taking U.S. diplomats hostage, and that announced its intention to spread that revolution by sending guns to rebels around the region, including to the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, which attacked U.S. troops sent to end Lebanon's civil war in 1983. Over the years, Iranian leaders have made threats (including the destruction of Israel) that were both aggressive enough to provoke a response and empty enough to make Iran look weak.

But a majority of Americans and Iranians weren't even born yet when most of these grievances happened—and the world has changed a lot since then. Iran, exhausted by the consequences of its revolution, has been looking for a way out.

The Grand Bargain

After Al Qaeda attacked America on September 11, 2001, the Iranian intelligence services actually participated in the U.S. retaliation campaign in Afghanistan. Two years later, Iran quietly shut down its nuclear weapons research, and a Swiss diplomat presented the U.S. government with a letter from Iran proposing a "grand bargain." Iran would open up its nuclear facilities for inspection, cooperate in stabilizing Iraq, support Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, and even pressure Hamas and Hezbollah to lay down their arms. In exchange, Iran asked for normalized relations and an end to U.S. regime change threats.

The Bush administration disagreed internally on whether the offer was serious and how to respond. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice argued that the seriousness of the Iranian offer was actually proof of Iran's weakness, so the U.S. should turn it down and push for more. Her view carried the day.

That became the pattern of U.S.-Iranian diplomacy for the next two decades. Every time Iran offered compromise, American hawks used that offer to argue that more pressure would lead to more Iranian concessions. This circular logic—the U.S. demand should always be something more than Iran is offering—made diplomacy almost impossible. Yet there would never be another Iranian offer as good as the grand bargain.

The next big diplomatic moment came under President Barack Obama. Though Iran had stopped its secret nuclear weapons program, it was now openly enriching uranium, ostensibly as fuel for nuclear power plants. In response, Israel threatened war and assassinated Iranian scientists while the U.S. imposed economic sanctions to cut off Iran's access to foreign trade and carried out covert sabotage against Iranian enrichment plants. But then, in agreements signed in 2013 and 2015, Iran accepted a set of temporary and permanent restrictions on its nuclear industry in exchange for the U.S. and five other world powers lifting economic sanctions.

Hawks hated the deal, insisting that they could have secured a better bargain with just a little more pressure—or that any deal with Iran was cowardly "appeasement." The debate had a bizarre quality to it: Sens. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) and John McCain (R–Ariz.), both of whom had publicly called for bombing Iran, feigned outrage when Obama said that the alternative to a deal was war.

Iran's regional rivals also lobbied against the agreement. They were particularly alarmed by Obama's comments that Saudi Arabia would have to learn to "share the neighborhood" with Iran while the U.S. military made a "pivot to Asia." (East Asia, that is.) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech to the U.S. Congress in 2015 attacking Obama's "very bad deal" with what he described as a Nazi-like regime. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman denounced "the new Hitler in Iran" to The New York Times in 2017.

The United Arab Emirates, meanwhile, played the classic game of "bootleggers and Baptists," working with the pro-sanctions lobby in Washington while continuing to profit from Iranian sanctions busting in Dubai.

Opponents of the deal often said that it failed to address two nonnuclear issues: Iran's conventional missile arsenal and its proxy wars in the region. (In addition to arming Lebanese, Palestinian, and Iraqi paramilitaries, the Islamic Republic had by now intervened in the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.) Asking Iran to leave its neighbors alone was one thing. But demanding its conventional weapons was another. Even an ability to hit back against foreign attacks was now deemed an unacceptable threat.

The hawks got what they wanted from the first Trump administration, which tore up the nuclear agreements in 2018 and began a policy of "super maximum economic pressure." The regime-change maximalists took the initial results as a vindication. In November 2019, a fuel price hike in Iran led to the deadliest civil unrest there since the 1979 revolution. Two months later, Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, and Iran retaliated with a one-off military operation that did not kill any Americans (though it accidentally blew up an airliner full of Iranian civilians).

Although President Joe Biden promised to return to diplomacy on the 2020 campaign trail, his advisers were convinced that pressure was working better than expected. Ariane Tabatabai, who later worked on Biden's negotiating team, warned in an essay before Biden took office that the next U.S. president should not "rush" back to a deal, because continued pressure over time would only degrade Iran's position. Ilan Goldenberg, another future Biden official, wrote a paper suggesting "calculated risks" against Iran, modeled on Israeli raids into Syria that Israel dubbed the "campaign between wars."

And the hawkish Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Bob Menendez (D–N.J.)—later convicted of selling information to Egyptian spies—threatened to block any return to Obama's deal. Biden's negotiators thus spent fruitless years pressuring Iran to give the U.S. a "longer and stronger" deal than before. Meanwhile, Biden offered the Arab monarchies defense pacts that would guarantee permanent U.S. military protection, even as Saudi Arabia was quietly negotiating with Iran for a separate peace.

Iranian protests against hijab laws in September 2022 and the Hamas attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023, both made further negotiations with Iran politically toxic in America. The surprise violence of October 7 also seemed to vindicate Israeli factions who believed that enemies could not be deterred, only destroyed. In response to Hezbollah's cross-border shelling, Israel launched an all-out invasion of Lebanon in the autumn of 2024. Contrary to the Biden administration's worries—and my own—this campaign did not escalate into an international war. Immediately after the Israeli-Lebanese ceasefire in November 2024, a revolution in Syria ejected Iranian forces, another sign of Iran's weakness. By the end of his term, members of Biden's camp were publicly and privately endorsing an attack on Iran itself.

After returning to office, Trump embraced that feeling that taking risks against Iran pays off. He reopened and then reclosed conflicts in Gaza and Yemen, seemingly at his leisure. In June 2025, he took the greatest gamble so far, supporting an Israeli attack on Iran in the middle of U.S.-Iranian negotiations, joining in with an air raid on the 12th day of the war, and offering a ceasefire immediately after. Iran launched a token retaliation on U.S. forces and then accepted.

The Green and the Dry

The decisive moment for Trump was probably an incident halfway around the world from the Middle Eastern desert, on the lush Caribbean coast. On January 3, 2026, a detachment of U.S. special operators swooped into Caracas by night and arrested Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on drug trafficking charges. Vice President Delcy Rodríguez immediately began kowtowing to U.S. demands. Overthrowing foreign leaders had never looked so easy.

The same week as the raid on Caracas, inflation protests in Iran escalated to a nationwide uprising against the Islamic Republic. (U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent bragged that the unrest was the "grand culmination" of U.S. sanctions.) Much of the Iranian opposition was now explicitly asking for foreign military support. One Iranian told the Financial Times that Venezuela had given her hope for a "clean, bloodless regime change."

On January 8, the Iranian government shut down the internet and began clearing the streets with gunfire, killing thousands of people. Four days later, Trump posted on social media, "Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING—TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!! Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price. I have cancelled all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY."

The unrest died down as the government imposed martial law. Iranians within the country told me at the time that everyone, whether opposition or loyalists or bystanders, was waiting to see what the U.S. would do.

Then Trump uncanceled the meetings, sending Special Envoy Steve Witkoff to negotiate on the future of Iran's nuclear program, which had been badly damaged during the June 2025 war. Witkoff's team was openly contemptuous of spending time discussing or even understanding the details of the nuclear issue, refusing to bring technical experts to the final round of negotiations. What Trump really wanted, Witkoff told Fox News on February 22, was for Iranian leaders to explain "why they haven't capitulated" in the face of an ongoing U.S. military buildup.

Trump still expected a quick and unambiguous surrender when he and Netanyahu launched the war a few days later. Israel assassinated Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in a first strike, and Trump said that he was anticipating a situation "like with Delcy in Venezuela."

A month into the war, Trump admitted at an Easter dinner that he had told the British prime minister the war would last only three days. He gave a similar timeline to "skeptical" Middle Eastern leaders before the war began, telling them it would "only take 100 hours," according to Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a pro-diplomacy nonprofit, who also broke the news of Iran's 2003 offer.

At the same time that the Trump administration was looking for a Delcy figure, Israel's intelligence services were promising that they could spark another uprising in Iran. That didn't materialize, either. Even Kurdish rebels directly armed by the CIA were reluctant to rush into what they feared would end with "a massacre of our own people," as one Kurdish commander told New Lines Magazine.

Instead of falling, Iran fought back and escalated. The U.S. military is stuck playing Whac-A-Mole with Iranian missiles and drones, burning through valuable munitions that are also supposed to be on hand to defend Ukraine and Taiwan. Bessent even lifted sanctions on Iranian oil exports in hopes of relieving some of the shortages caused by the fighting in Hormuz. Iranian civilians have paid the highest price, with between 1,700 and 2,400 killed in the bombing by mid-April. And the war spread beyond Hormuz, reigniting fighting in Lebanon and Iraq.

In mid-April 2026, the United States and Iran agreed to a "fragile ceasefire," as U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance put it. Immediately, both sides tried to change the terms. Despite Pakistani mediators announcing that the ceasefire would cover "everywhere including Lebanon"—and Trump agreeing privately, according to CBS News—the Israeli government escalated its bombing in Lebanon, and the Trump administration rushed to justify it. Despite promising "safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz" during the ceasefire, Iranian authorities continued to limit shipping and demand ransoms.

Whether or not the truce holds past April, Trump has lost control over the conflict he has entangled the U.S. in. With its back to the wall, Iran discovered that it holds a lot of leverage over the world economy. Israel and the Arab states, meanwhile, found that they can push the U.S. to adopt maximalist goals.

The war has led to an outcome that neither Iranians nor Americans wanted. But it has fulfilled the vision of Netanyahu, who declared from the rooftop of the military headquarters in Tel Aviv that bringing the U.S. directly into the war "allows us to do what I have been hoping to do for 40 years."

Ironically, it has also fulfilled the vision of the late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who foreshadowed his plans in a 2022 speech: "By God, I see it with my own eyes, a war that will change the face of the globe, a regional religious war that will burn both the green and the dry." The American political class helped pile a lot of the kindling, and it doesn't know how to put the fire out.

The post A Pointless War: How Iran Hawks Finally Got Their Way appeared first on Reason.com.

To put American traffic deaths in perspective, consider the Miami Marlins. Since 2012, the baseball team has played its home games at the stadium now called LoanDepot Park. The field's official capacity is 36,742, roughly the number of Americans who die in traffic crashes every year. America loses a baseball stadium's worth of lives to vehicular accidents every 12 months.

For the first time, there's a way to prevent many, and perhaps most, of those deaths: self-driving cars. 

But self-driving cars are controversial. Some worry about safety. Others worry about jobs. Opposition from unions and local political figures has slowed their rollout in cities like Washington, D.C., and Boston. And Congress has now taken up the task of writing a law that would govern how self-driving cars operate and what safety measures they must meet. The bulk of current efforts has produced not one bill but two, which pull in opposite directions.

On one side is the SELF DRIVE Act, which would create the first federal statute on automated vehicle (A.V.) safety. 

Along with companion legislation, the bill would require manufacturers to self-certify their systems against a "safety case" standard, i.e., a structured and evidence-based argument that their system won't pose an unreasonable risk of accidents. It would permit companies to deploy as many as 90,000 vehicles on public streets, up from the current cap of 2,500. The bill passed a House subcommittee in February on a 12–11 vote and now awaits a full committee markup (that has not yet been scheduled). 

On the other side is the Stay in Your Lane Act, introduced in the Senate by Sens. Ed Markey (D–Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.). It would require manufacturers to define an "operational design domain" (ODD), i.e., the specific conditions under which their system is designed to operate safely, and prohibit operation outside it. 

The driving forces behind the bills and their different emphases will be familiar to anyone who has studied how high-stakes regulation often works. And it all goes back to Prohibition.

A century ago, both church folk and gangsters advocated for alcohol restrictions. The former backed Prohibition out of sincere moral conviction, the latter out of a desire to seize a market for themselves. To describe such unlikely alignments, economist Bruce Yandle coined the term "bootleggers and Baptists." The Baptists act as high-minded advocates who provide public legitimacy for a rule; the bootleggers serve as commercial interests who stand to benefit and provide political muscle. 

The same sort of high-low coalition is present in the push for self-driving car laws. Though both bills are framed by their proponents as safety measures, each has its own mix of Baptists and bootleggers in support. Yet despite their safety-focused arguments, neither side is engaging with the actual safety data that would settle the debate. 

The Bill Incumbents Wrote for Themselves

The "Baptist" case for the SELF DRIVE Act is simple enough: more self-driving cars, deployed more quickly, would save more lives. There's something to this idea. Most of the 40,000 road deaths annually are caused by human error; the deployment of driving automation at scale nationally could prevent many of them.

The current patchwork of 34 different state laws—some permissive, some restrictive, and often incompatible—makes that difficult. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has argued that Chinese firms now lead in cumulative miles without a human driver, total deployments, and fleet size: a claim the industry deploys freely, and one that points to real competitive anxiety. The SELF DRIVE Act addresses both concerns by allowing American firms to deploy more automated vehicles faster.

Behind the Baptists are the bootleggers. The SELF DRIVE Act would require manufacturers to develop a "safety case" for each version of their automated driving system, meaning a structured argument, backed by evidence, that their system doesn't pose an unreasonable risk of accidents. This sounds more rigorous than it is: The framework rests on subjective language—systems must be "sufficient," behave "appropriately," be "likely" to meet standards—a low bar in any product-safety context.

The bill also relies on manufacturer self-certification, meaning manufacturers grade their own homework. There is no requirement that the safety case be reviewed by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) or a third party before deployment; a manufacturer submits it and begins operating unless the agency objects. (The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, which represents small commercial carriers who would share roads with these vehicles, has raised the same objection to self-certification in formal opposition to the bill.)

The bill bends the regulatory regime in other ways. The current cap on the number of vehicles a manufacturer may deploy under a testing permit, which exempts them from the federal safety standards written for human-driven vehicles, is 2,500 per year. Companion legislation traveling with the bill would raise that cap to 90,000, a 36-fold increase. More striking still, the bill allows manufacturers to earn revenue from freight and passengers during the testing phase. If self-driving vehicles are in commercial service while being "tested," what one has is not a development stage but a business model.

Who benefits from self-certification, a 90,000-vehicle exemption cap, and revenue during testing? The answer is the incumbents, firms like Waymo, Tesla, Aurora, and Uber: companies large enough to deploy at these levels, sophisticated enough to comply with the bill's requirements, and established enough to have the regulatory teams to navigate subjective standards. The subcommittee vote was 12–11, near the party line, with Democrats criticizing the bill's divergence from an earlier bipartisan draft they'd helped write. What emerged has the unanimous backing of the industry: Waymo, Tesla, Aurora, Uber, the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce all support it.

With every incumbent in the sector aligning behind a bill for which the vote breaks almost entirely along party lines, it's clear that the Baptist framing is doing a great deal of work here. Specifically, it's providing insulation for a bill that raises the deployment ceiling, lowers the compliance bar, and lets the largest players earn revenue before the rules are finalized.

The Bill That Costs Waymo Nothing and Tesla a Lot

The Baptist case for the Stay in Your Lane Act treats the problem differently. Instead of speeding up the deployment process, it focuses on defining specific safe use cases so that self-driving technology isn't used in a way likely to cause accidents.

To be fair to this approach, the bulk of serious A.V.-related incidents have all been caused by Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems (ADAS), most notably Tesla's Supervised Full Self-Driving (an oxymoron). 

Self-driving cars are judged on the SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) taxonomy, which provides a five-level designation for each type of self-driving vehicle. Lower-level systems are less than fully autonomous. Higher-level systems have more ability to operate without human assistance. 

ADAS is what engineers refer to as a Level 2 system, one that can assist a human driver by undertaking simple operations like maintaining the vehicle's speed and position, changing lanes, and so forth, but requires a human driver present and ready to intervene in situations the system can't handle. Today, ADAS is permitted to operate on any road in the country, without limits on where or under what conditions it may engage.

Incidents involving ADAS dominate NHTSA's crash-reporting data, in part because Tesla alone operates millions of Level-2-equipped vehicles, dwarfing the entire Level-4 fleet in scale. The act correctly treats ADAS incidents as a problem, and requires that manufacturers define an ODD and prohibit operation outside it. The act's advocates, Consumer Reports and Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, are arguing for what they think is a reasonable safety requirement.

The bootleggers here are harder to spot. The bill does have a clear competitive effect: its functional definition of driving automation covers any system performing simultaneous lateral and longitudinal vehicle control, which would include both Tesla's ADAS and Waymo's SAE Level 4 ADS. 

But Waymo already operates within a defined geofenced operational design domain as a matter of practice: its robotaxis carry no human driver, operate only on premapped urban roads, and follow a policy of reporting every minor contact event, regardless of severity.

In other words, the bill codifies as a requirement what Waymo already does voluntarily. Conversely, Tesla operates without such restrictions, on any road, under any conditions. The Stay in Your Lane Act is therefore largely costless to Waymo and constraining to Tesla.

That asymmetry is founded on the fact that Waymo has built a system disciplined enough to operate safely within defined limits, while Tesla hasn't. ODD-bounded operation is how Level 4 systems actually function: They handle specific conditions well, not every condition adequately, and require manufacturers to define and enforce those conditions in line with the technology's actual architecture.

The argument that the ODD standard might appear meritorious but is just being pushed to give Waymo a competitive advantage would require evidence that the standard's architects shaped it around what Waymo already does. There is no such evidence in the public record; Waymo has simply built a system disciplined enough to pass a test that Tesla currently cannot.

You would expect the bootleggers here to be the unions, but they have been curiously silent. In 2017, when the SELF DRIVE Act was first introduced, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters successfully fought to exclude heavy commercial vehicles from its scope. The 2026 version removes that exclusion; automated trucks are explicitly covered. The Teamsters' standing federal policy demands a human operator in every vehicle regardless of automation level. Yet no public, bill-specific statement on the SELF DRIVE Act has been issued, despite active campaigning on autonomous vehicle legislation in several states. Whatever the Teamsters are doing, they're not doing it in public.

The Evidence Nobody Wants To Cite

Given that both sides are making the case that their preferred bill makes the public safer, it's striking how little either engages with the evidence that we have. 

Start with the official data: NHTSA's crash-reporting framework requires manufacturers to report incidents but does not require disclosure of fleet size or distances traveled. Without a mileage denominator, no per-mile crash rate can be calculated; we know how many crashes occurred but can't say whether that number is high or low. Congress knew this before it began drafting legislation, and drafted anyway.

Consumer Reports and Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety are the two most prominent consumer-safety organizations in the federal AV debate: They submitted formal opposition letters to the House subcommittee, testified before the Senate, and have staked out the position that the SELF DRIVE Act "lacks requirements for independent verification or certification" of manufacturer safety claims. This would be a reasonable demand, except that none of them have acknowledged, disputed, or engaged with the peer-reviewed evidence that already exists. 

Waymo's crash rate study, published in Traffic Injury Prevention by Kusano et al. in 2024, found an 80 percent reduction in any-injury crashes and a 55 percent reduction in police-reported crashes against comparable human benchmarks across 7.1 million rider-only miles. A joint study by Swiss Re and Waymo, published in Heliyon, found a 76 percent reduction in property damage liability claims and zero bodily injury claims over 3.8 million miles, against a Swiss Re baseline of more than 600,000 claims. 

It's true that all authors on the crash-rate study are Waymo employees, and the methodology has not been independently replicated. But no public document from Consumer Reports or Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety cites, disputes, or engages with any of it. They are demanding to be shown exactly the kind of evidence that already exists, which is a strange posture for organizations that describe themselves as evidence-driven.

The opposition from these safety advocates appears to be procedural and institutional, not empirical: They object to self-certification, broad preemption, and the absence of independent verification. Engaging with the Waymo data on its own terms would require them to distinguish between the reckless use of Level 2 systems and the demonstrated safety of mature Level 4 technology. Making that distinction would complicate their opposition to the SELF DRIVE Act, and so they have not made it.

Choosing Our Lane

Thinking about the bills this way leads to a sour conclusion. The best possible federal A.V. framework—one that would prevent state patchwork, mandate independent verification of safety cases, and write the Level 2/Level 4 distinction into statute—has no bootleggers behind it. 

No major industry player wants genuine independent verification when self-certification is available; no safety advocacy coalition wants to make the Level 2/Level 4 distinction when blurring the two makes restriction easier to argue for; and no union wants to appear in public opposing a safety bill. Yandle's framework predicts why the solution isn't on offer: Every actor with legislative capacity has chosen their own side, none of which maps perfectly onto the public interest. 

The ODD framework from the Stay in Your Lane Act, folded into the preemptive structure that only the SELF DRIVE Act provides, and stripped of self-certification, would be a bill worth supporting. It is not on offer. The question to consider is, given two imperfect bills, which one leaves more room for correction, and which coalition, if it wins, will be more receptive to the amendments the evidence demands.

The SELF DRIVE Act is the better bet. Structurally, it alone establishes a comprehensive preemptive federal framework for self-driving regulation, and without one there is nothing to improve: 34 state regimes calcifying in place are harder to fix than a weak federal standard, which can be amended by rulemaking. Analytically, the coalition behind the Stay in Your Lane Act has spent its credibility demanding empirical verification of A.V. safety claims while declining to engage with the peer-reviewed evidence that already supplies it. If a coalition that refuses to read the evidence gets its way, there's no reason to think it is going to do better on amending it. 

The SELF DRIVE Act's bootleggers are getting more than they deserve. But a bill animated by Baptists who won't engage with the evidence is a poor instrument for a problem that evidence should decide. There's a baseball stadium's worth of Americans every year whose lives depend on getting this right.

The post The Self-Driving Car Fight in Congress Isn't Really About Safety at All appeared first on Reason.com.

High prices. Oil prices briefly hit a wartime high of over $120 a barrel, before falling slightly, reports The New York Times. The paper attributes the spike to President Donald Trump's comments yesterday that the U.S. would continue its blockade of Iranian ports until the country completely abandoned its nuclear program.

Higher global oil prices are being felt by everyday gas buyers.

Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis for the gas price tracker GasBuddy, said on X that prices in some states are returning to levels not seen since summer 2022, when energy disruptions caused by the Ukraine-Russia war and high inflation sent prices to all-time highs.

Gas prices in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin are now at their highest levels since summer 2022, and are approaching new all-time records

— Patrick De Haan (@GasBuddyGuy) April 30, 2026

Average national gas prices sit at $4.30 per gallon, according to AAA. The all-time average national average was $5.01 per gallon in the summer of 2022; that amounts to a 30-cent increase in the past week. Gas prices were below $3 per gallon before the war started.

Despite high energy costs, other measures of the economy appear strong. The jobless rate is at its lowest level since 1969, says Bloomberg.

Even so, if there's one thing one can say for sure about American politics, it is that the average person does not like to pay higher gas prices in the service of any cause, whether we're fighting climate change or the Islamic Republic.

Should the war continue to push up energy prices, one can expect it to get less and less popular. Consumer dissatisfaction is still probably our best hope for peace. That's certainly a more powerful political force these days than Congress.

FISA reauthorization passes. After much intra-partisan drama yesterday, the Republican-controlled House has passed a three-year extension of the controversial Section 702 program of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is set to expire today.

Some 22 Republicans ended up opposing reauthorization of the spying program. These defectors were outweighed by the 42 Democrats who voted with the vast majority of Republicans to renew FISA. The reauthorization passed with a 235–191 vote.

42 Democrats just joined 192 Republicans to reauthorize FISA Section 702 – a warrantless surveillance law that's been used to access Americans' data.

Democratic leadership did not whip their members, enabling them to vote with Republicans and give Trump the surveillance powers. pic.twitter.com/dHS4hKtGrh

— Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) April 29, 2026

The Section 702 program allows the federal government to surveil the communications of foreigners located outside the United States without first getting a warrant. Critics charge that it gives the intelligence community a backdoor to typical Fourth Amendment privacy protections, because the feds can use FISA to snoop on those foreigners' communications with Americans as well.

The House passed FISA Section 702 renewal yesterday. I voted NO.

This was a Uni-Party vote in favor of unchecked government surveillance without adequate warrants or accountability. pic.twitter.com/kjFRIZpAXk

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) April 30, 2026

Most Democrats and a minority of privacy-minded Republicans wanted to add warrant requirements to the law. The bill, without those warrant protections, goes to the Senate, which now has one day to pass the bill, or some other stopgap measure, before the program expires.

Scenes from Washington, D.C.: Together with some family visiting from out of town, I went to the Mansion on O Street in D.C.'s Dupont Circle neighborhood. Technically a museum, it's really more of a labyrinthine memorabilia shop. A series of rooms connected by "secret doors" display everything from old T.V. guides to guitars signed by Crosby, Stills, and Nash. As an added capitalist twist, everything you see is for sale.

QUICK HITS

• The redistricting wars continue following the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in a landmark Voting Rights Act case. After the high court struck down racial gerrymandering, Louisiana and Alabama, two states with purposeful majority-minority districts, are moving to redraw their congressional maps.
• Bad news for Venezuelan rock fans.

Los Mesoneros, a rock band from Venezuela, announces cancellation of U.S. dates, including next week in Miami Beach, due to unresolved immigration issues pic.twitter.com/IzHpgQMpGM

— David Smiley (@NewsbySmiley) April 29, 2026

• The Trump administration is suing New Jersey over its law banning most law enforcement, including federal law enforcement, from wearing masks. If rulings out of the 9th Circuit are any guide, the Garden State's mask ban is doomed.
• Polo officials ban genetically modified ponies. What's next, a license to make toast in your own damn toaster?
• We've created a new subtype of ADHD.

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