WATCH: At Punchbowl News Conference, Sen. Schiff Talks Iran War, Tackling AI in Congress, and Democrats’ 2026 Agenda

Washington, D.C. - In case you missed it, U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) joined Anna Palmer and Jake Sherman for a wide-ranging conversation at Punchbowl News' 2026 Conference.

The discussion included the latest on the war in Iran, including Schiff's call for public hearings on the president's military strategy and goals, as well as threats of election interference. Schiff also laid out his vision for Democrats' message in 2028 - including how it will confront AI issues and running on an agenda that centers on creating an economy that works for everyone.

Watch his fireside chat here.

Key Excerpts:

On Schiff's new War Powers Resolution reasserting Congress' constitutional powers to declare war and his push for public hearings with administration officials under oath:

[…] We're determined to use whatever tools we have in the minority to really compel the administration to come before the American people in a way they have not been willing, to answer questions under oath. And there are a lot of questions the American people have through their representatives. I'd like to know, for example, when the president talks about, "well, maybe the map of Iran won't be the same map after this war is over." What is he saying? What does he mean by that? When the president claimed that on the basis of what he saw, it was Iran, not the United States, that bombed that girls' school, what was he looking at or was this a complete fabrication of his part?

There have been so many endless rationalizations, justifications for why we're at war to begin with. How will we know when it's over if we don't know whether we've accomplished whatever goal we had at the outset? So, we'll use whatever tools, and certainly the War Powers Resolutions are one tool. I wouldn't say, though, that would be the end purpose of the War Powers Resolutions. Ultimately, we want to bring this to an end, and I think depending on how long this drags on, those War Power Resolutions will only gain in support. I hope it will end long before it reaches that threshold.

On the administration potentially requesting a supplemental funding bill for their unwanted and illegal war in Iran instead of prioritizing funding for Americans' needs:

[…] We have been pushing for more than a year to get the kind of assistance that states normally get after disasters, except we're living in this world now where if you're in a state that didn't vote for Donald Trump, then your disasters don't count, don't matter. Farmers need support. All kinds of unmet needs right now that ought to be the focus of a supplemental but the Pentagon has plenty of money. And there are a lot of things that in the aftermath of this we're going to have to come to grips with that. I think we have fallen down, we as a Congress and the Pentagon, and that is even as we have been engaged in this war in Ukraine and understood how the nature of war has changed and the proliferation of these low-cost drones, we really haven't kept pace with the differing economies of scale. So, what we're producing, we're producing way too slowly. It's way too costly for the new kind of warfare that's being fought, and that's certainly something we're going to have to invest in down the road. But I don't think you're going to find much support among Democrats to fund a war that hasn't been authorized and that we don't support.

[…] We're spending about a billion dollars a day in Iran, and that's money that could be used to improve people's quality of life here. I looked up this morning the average cost of building a hospital in America, depending on the size, about 100 million. So, it's the equivalent of dropping 10 hospitals a day on Iran. That's 10 communities that don't have a hospital because we decided that bombing Iran was a better use of our money. I don't think it's a better use of our money.

On the need to regulate AI and calling out the Trump administration's efforts to threaten companies with restrictive safety guardrails:

[…] We shouldn't preempt certain basic protections that states want to put in place for the very reason you mentioned, which is we proved utterly incapable of regulating tech. If we move with the same speed we have moved to deal with Section 230 or all the ills that have come about through social media, then we will never, it feels like, regulate AI. So, before we tell the states back off, we have to show we're capable of doing something, and that hasn't happened.

[…] What the administration is doing right now to Anthropic is so completely self-destructive. It's destructive of the AI in America, because this is one of the preeminent AI companies. It's even more broadly destructive over national security, because they're a leader in this area, so they're going to undermine our own national security. But it is also a just a direct assault on the whole idea of free enterprise. And I don't know why all of corporate America isn't screaming right now, except maybe that they're terrified. But if the President of the United States can pick an AI company and say, we're going to give you the death sentence because you dared insist on something that ought to be common sense anyway, then the administration can kill any company in America, and it can extort any company in America, and it's already extorted a great many.

And the only way we stop this is if there is some collective action among corporate America, among our universities and our law firms and our media organizations that push back and say, no. I admire what Anthropic is doing, because, among other things, it is exceedingly rare how many companies are actually standing up to the president right now as he's trying to tell a company like Microsoft, you got to fire this person, or we won't do business with you, or this person is on your board Netflix, so that we're not going to support a merger. What kind of backward country are we becoming? And if corporate America thinks this is good for business, it may be good for a particular company in the very short term, but it is death to the economy in the longer term. And I wish we had more voices like Anthropic out there.

On what voters should remember about what the country looks like under Trump come November:

[…] The economy is not working for you. Prices of everything are too high. And the reason they remain high, the reason the economy is not working for you is because Donald Trump doesn't give a rat's ass about you. He only cares about his personal economy, and he's made more money in one year than his entire rest of his life put together. Both the positive case that we are going to laser like focus on bringing down the cost of living. And the negative case, which is he hasn't done it, won't do it because he doesn't give a rat's ass. He thinks it's all a hoax, because he can still play golf and he can still make his mega millions with his meme coins and his cryptocurrency. To me, the most powerful campaigns are the ones in which the positive message and the negative message are opposite sides of the same coin.

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