In the U.S. Senate, a 99-1 vote is a very odd duck. For all of the polarization in American politics, the reality is that most Senate business is conducted through unanimous agreement. That’s pretty much the same with the Supreme Court and other government institutions, too. Most legislative and judicial work is technical and procedural, unable to sustain the flame of culture-war passion that can ignite trends on social media. Yet this particular vote, on a topic of immense strategic importance, somehow brought together the progressives and the MAGA right, the centrists and the Midwesterners and the Southerners and the Coastal Elites all voting as one — well, minus one.
That vote was on the subject of artificial intelligence, a part of last week’s “vote-a-rama” to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (I swear we are a serious nation). The bill initially included a provision for a ten-year federal preemption of state laws regulating artificial intelligence. That has now been thrown out entirely. The sole holdout — Republican Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina — announced contemporaneously that he was not going to seek reelection before ultimately voting against the reconciliation budget in its entirety. Appreciate you Thom.
The preemption’s early inclusion was surprising but reassuring. States, most notably California, had begun legislating how to regulate AI with a heavy hand, threatening a nationwide patchwork of rules that would constrain leading model developers, harm open-source projects without the funds to follow the new regulations, and reduce America’s global competitiveness most notably with China. We were saved thanks only to a last-minute veto by California Governor Gavin Newsom from this unmitigated disaster. Federal legislators took note and started working to constrain such activities...
