Yes, You Must Vote

Any time spent on social media — X in particular — makes it very clear that conservative Americans are utterly fed up with congressional Republicans. And with good reason. The current (119th) Congress has set records for what The Washington Post called "low legislative output" — second only to the 118th.

To be fair, Speaker Mike Johnson and the House of Representatives have been giving it the old college try. But most of the proposed legislation that has passed the House has gone into indefinite limbo in the Senate.

The Senate's most visible failure (and the one that has probably created the greatest fury among voters) is its abject refusal to pass the SAVE Act, which mandates voter ID and proof of U.S. citizenship to vote (and which a majority of Americans, regardless of party affiliation, support and feel is needed to protect the integrity of our elections). That disgrace can be laid squarely at the feet of Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), who has had two years to drum up the votes in the Senate, and who claims that he just can't do it. Meanwhile, he drones on and on in his public speeches about how Republicans in Congress are fulfilling their campaign promises.

Nonsense. Thune spends more time justifying all the vacation the senators take than passing legislation that Americans sent him and the rest of Senate Republicans to Congress to enact.

Frustrated with Congress' inertia and the price of gas — with all the attendant cost increases that it causes — no small number of conservative voters are threatening to stay home.

That would be a mistake of catastrophic proportions.

Yes, Thune needs to be gone. As do a number of other feckless Republicans. But, to borrow Aragorn's famous line from the film "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," it is not this day. Or, more precisely, it is not this election.

The chance to "stick it to the Republicans" who have let us down time and time again will come in the next primary election. These challenges can be successful; just look at the Texas primaries, when voters sent a clear message to Sen. John Cornyn by tossing him out in favor of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

But when elections present a choice between weak Republicans and Democrat candidates whose preferred policies read like prescriptions for economic collapse or the sequel to "1984," staying home is not a viable option.

Democrat candidate Abdul El-Sayed, for example, who is running for a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan, has advocated for defunding the police and abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, wants single-payer (government-provided) healthcare, and has expressed support for Hamas and Hezbollah. He is cozy with America-hating podcast preener Hasan Piker, whose most recent inflammatory headline involved telling Democrat Chuck Schumer, "I will throw you in prison, OK? I want to put you physically behind a prison. I want Chinese-style communism to happen inside of the Democratic Party right now. ... I want to do Cultural Revolution sh*t." (If that's what Piker wants for members of the Democrat Party, one can imagine what he would wish for Republicans.)

Socialist Melat Kiros is running for a congressional seat in Colorado. She, too, wants to abolish ICE and impose "Medicare for all." Darializa Avila Chevalier, running for the seat in New York's 13th congressional district, sounds like a straight-up communist, calling for the abolition of ICE, prisons and borders, as well as nationalizing utilities, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, housing — and, presumably, all manufacturing, since she wrote, "Seize the means of production."

She has socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's backing.

When communists are gunning for government control, you can't just sit on the sidelines. And a lot of American voters already do.

For example, according to studies conducted in the run-up to the 2024 elections, 49 percent of self-identified Christians had no plans to vote. That translates to more than 100 million Americans. The reasons given were things like "One vote cannot make a difference," "I'm not really interested in politics," and "I don't like any of the candidates."

One hundred million people is a staggering number. And that was in a presidential election year; even fewer Americans tend to vote in the midterms. FairVote.org reports that while approximately 60 percent of registered voters turn out in presidential election years, that number drops to around 40 percent in the midterm elections. This isn't to say that all Christians consider themselves politically conservative or vote Republican. Many do not. But a significant number of those voters are more conservative and could change the outcome of elections if they showed up. We need them now more than ever.

Ire at Congress is understandable. But sending Democrats to Congress by staying home will not "teach Republicans a lesson." To the contrary, we the people are the ones who will lose out.

Today's Democrat Party is in the throes of extreme left-wing lunacy — a fact that even public liberals like late-night talk show host Bill Maher are astounded by. The party is running candidates who proudly espouse economically destructive and politically oppressive policies. These candidates cannot be allowed to win.

In addition to the command-and-control economics, if Democrats regain control of Congress, they will federalize abortion on demand throughout all nine months of pregnancy — just as Democrats who control state legislatures have done in states like New York and Massachusetts.

They will also reopen the border and let millions more migrants pour in, just as was done during the Biden administration. Indeed, the migrants themselves are clearly anticipating this possibility, as another "caravan" is presently making its way into Mexico from Honduras with the intention of pushing into the United States.

There has been enormous progress shutting down illegal immigration under President Donald Trump. More than 600,000 illegal aliens have been deported since January of 2025 (some estimates place the number closer to 900,000), and nearly 2 million more have left the country voluntarily ("self-deported"). The number of "encounters" at the southern border — people attempting to cross illegally — is down, on average, 90 percent each month under Trump versus under former President Joe Biden, and for month after month, zero people who were caught were simply "released" and told to show up later for a hearing, as was the common practice under Biden. And the current administration has made locating tens of thousands of unaccompanied children — many of whom end up in forced labor or sex slavery — a huge priority.

Is there more to do? Much. Do we want lower gas prices and an end to the conflict in Iran? Certainly. But those goals can be accomplished in the next two years, as can the objective of getting rid of more squishy Republicans.

A Congress controlled by Democrats will undo what progress has been made — and make things much, much worse.

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