Two and a half weeks after the Iran ceasefire took hold and eleven days after the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez AI moratorium died in a House committee, lawmakers spent Sunday morning relitigating both fights on the network political shows, with both parties testing language they expect to carry into the 2026 midterms.

The morning’s most-watched exchange came on “Meet the Press,” where Sen. Marsha Whitfield, R-Ohio, defended the administration’s handling of the six-week war with Iran and rejected what she called “selective accounting” from Democrats now seeking a formal audit of supplemental spending. Whitfield was followed by Sen. Daniel Ortiz, D-N.M., who chairs the Senate Armed Services subcommittee on readiness and has been pushing for a Government Accountability Office review of the roughly $74 billion in emergency authorizations Congress approved between March and mid-April.

“The American people deserve a line-item explanation of how that money moved, not a victory lap,” Ortiz said. “We lost more than 350 service members. We owe their families the truth about munitions stocks, about basing decisions, about why a Patriot battery in Bahrain was understaffed for the first ten days.”

Whitfield countered that a GAO review was “duplicative” of an ongoing Pentagon inspector general inquiry and accused Democrats of trying to “relitigate a war we won.” Pressed by host Kristen Welker on the U.S. death toll and the cost of replenishing Tomahawk and SM-6 inventories, Whitfield said the administration would submit a formal reconstitution request “within the next several weeks.”

On ABC’s “This Week,” White House chief of staff Marcus Heller previewed what he described as a narrower successor to the Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez bill, which failed in the House Ways and Means Committee on April 22 by a 24-21 vote. Heller declined to commit the president to any specific text but said the White House was “actively conversing” with Sens. Joe Manchin III (I-W.Va.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and a small bloc of moderate Democrats on a framework focused on data-center power consumption, not a broad pause on training runs.

“The president has been clear that he doesn’t want to slam the brakes on American AI leadership,” Heller said. “But he also doesn’t want a data center pulling 800 megawatts off a grid that’s straining to keep an aluminum smelter and a hospital online. There’s a sensible middle here, and we intend to find it.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., appearing later on the same program, did not commit to backing a narrower bill and warned that any compromise that “abandons the moratorium principle” would face progressive resistance in both chambers. Sanders pointed to bills now moving in Albany and Sacramento — New York’s version cleared an Assembly committee on April 30, and a California Senate floor vote is expected the week of May 11 — as evidence that “the states will not wait while Washington dithers.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., interviewed on CNN’s “State of the Union,” made a similar case but signaled openness to a compute-threshold approach if it included binding emissions reporting. “If the alternative is nothing, I will look at it,” she said. “I will not pretend I am happy about it.”

The Sunday programming also reflected the parties’ first sustained attempts to frame the war and its aftermath as a 2026 electoral issue. Republican strategist Lara Mendenhall, in a roundtable on “Fox News Sunday,” argued that the ceasefire and the prisoner exchange in Doha on April 18 had given the administration a “resilience narrative” heading into the spring fundraising quarter. Democratic pollster Andre Whitlock, on the same panel, pointed to private surveying showing that voters in suburban House districts were more focused on grocery prices, gasoline — which has eased to a national average near $3.18 a gallon as Brent crude settled around $93 — and the loss of pension-plan value during the March-April equity drawdown.

“The war is going to recede faster than people in this town expect,” Whitlock said. “What sticks is the bill.”

Two House Republicans facing competitive reelections — Rep. Caleb Hartley of Pennsylvania’s 7th and Rep. Mariana Olvera of Arizona’s 6th — used separate appearances to distance themselves from the more aggressive interpretations of the war effort and to call for a bipartisan supplemental on grid hardening and veterans’ mental-health funding. Both districts swung narrowly in 2024 and are expected to be among the most heavily contested seats in November.

Immigration policy surfaced briefly on “Face the Nation,” where Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Elena Park defended the administration’s recent rule changes on humanitarian parole and was pressed on the status of roughly 1,200 Iranian-national visa holders whose adjustments-of-status were paused during the conflict. Park said the agency would “begin clearing that backlog this month” and that no broader rollbacks were contemplated.

The Senate returns Monday from a one-week district work period, with floor votes expected on a stand-alone supplemental for Iraq and Yemen reconstruction support and on the confirmation of a new under secretary of defense for policy. The House Energy and Commerce Committee is scheduled to hold its first hearing on the data-center power framework Thursday, with testimony from utility executives and the chief executives of two hyperscale operators.

Aides on both sides of the aisle said they expected formal text on a compromise AI bill within two to three weeks, though several cautioned that the timeline could slip if appropriations talks consume floor time. Heller, asked whether the president would sign a bill that retained any form of training-run cap, said only that the administration would “evaluate what arrives on his desk.”