Turn on Fox News, scroll social media, or listen to talk radio, and one message comes through loud and clear: Many Republicans think the SAVE America Act is the key to saving the GOP in the November midterms.

It is not.

The SAVE America Act is not a magic wand. It will not erase 14 months of drift, dysfunction, and broken promises.

Yes, requiring proof of citizenship to register and identification to vote is necessary. Yes, most Americans, regardless of party, support the idea. But Republicans are kidding themselves if they think that alone will persuade voters to reward them in November.

The rot runs much deeper, and no “one simple trick” will fix it.

Trump surged to victory in 2024 on promises to change the country’s direction in dramatic ways. Fourteen months later, too many of those promises remain unfulfilled. Some died at the hands of weak and ineffective congressional leadership. Others were thwarted by feckless Cabinet officials, such as the new czarina of the Shield of the Americas, Kristi Noem. Others fell victim to Trump’s own choices.

The core promises were clear: mass deportations, a stronger economy, lower inflation, and no new long-term foreign entanglements. Those themes helped Trump assemble a broad coalition, including a majority of young men, and deliver the biggest Republican Electoral College victory since George H.W. Bush in 1988.

Now, with just over seven months until the midterms, nearly all of those promises remain unmet or badly compromised. Facts aren’t partisan — they are just facts.

Start with immigration. For all the left’s hysteria over ICE raids, Trump has deported fewer people than Barack Obama did in the first year of his second term. That came after four years of unprecedented illegal immigration under Biden. The promise of mass deportation remains unfulfilled.

Congress hasn’t helped. Ineffective Republican leadership has let the Department of Homeland Security go without funding for over a month, slowing deportation efforts while creating chaos at airports as TSA employees go unpaid. The public sees dysfunction, not competence.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Then comes the economy.

The cost of living has not gone down. Signs point the other way. Inflation could surge past 4% as energy prices rise because of the war with Iran. Food prices remain high and may climb higher as petroleum-based fertilizer gets more expensive just before planting season. Homes remain unaffordable to most Americans. The job market sits on the edge of an AI-fueled bust. The promised relief in the form of larger tax refund checks has not materialized.

The labor market struggles as rampant H-1B visa abuse keeps importing cheaper foreign labor into high-paying STEM jobs that Americans want and are trained to do. Trump and Republican leaders still talk about H-1B as though it were a strategic advantage rather than a direct threat to their own voters.

Guess what? Voters have noticed.

Recent polling shows Democrat James Talarico leading both Ken Paxton and Sen. John Cornyn in Texas. Former Democrat Gov. Roy Cooper holds a commanding lead in the race to replace Sen. Thom Tillis in North Carolina. Even in Maine, the Democrat challenger accused of sporting a Nazi tattoo leads Sen. Susan Collins.

Bob Daemmrich/Texas Tribune/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The bad numbers do not stop there. A glance at RealClearPolitics tells the terrifying tale.

Special elections are just as ugly. In those races, including the district that encompasses Mar-a-Lago, Democrats have run strongly among independent voters, the very bloc that helped solidify Trump’s 2024 coalition.

That is the problem Republicans refuse to face. The SAVE America Act is a common-sense bill, and Congress should pass it. Elections should be protected from ineligible voters. But the bill is not a magic wand. It will not erase 14 months of drift, dysfunction, and broken promises. It will not lower prices, deport illegal aliens, fix the job market, or persuade disillusioned independents to come back home.

Republicans do not face a midterm problem because they have failed to pass one bill. They face a midterm problem because they have failed to deliver on the reasons voters put them back in power.

This scandal-ridden Democrat just got one step closer to being expelled from Congress

Democratic Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick of Florida just got one step closer to being expelled from the House of Representatives.

The House Ethics investigative subcommittee effectively found Cherfilus-McCormick guilty of nearly every campaign finance violation levied against her earlier this year. The bipartisan panel voted to start the process that could lead to Cherfilus-McCormick's expulsion after she was accused of laundering millions of dollars worth of Federal Emergency Management Agency funds related to a COVID-era contract into her campaign account.

'That raises serious concerns about due process.'

"After careful deliberation that lasted until well past midnight, the adjudicatory subcommittee found that Counts 1-15 and 17-26 of the [Statement of Alleged Violations] have been proven," the committee said in a statement.

"Shortly after the House returns from April recess, the full Committee will hold a hearing to determine what, if any, sanction would be appropriate for the Committee to recommend."

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

This verdict came after the committee's six-hour hearing Thursday, which was the first public ethics hearing since 2010.

Cherfilus-McCormick is facing several accusations in addition to a federal criminal indictment ranging from filing false financial disclosures, seeking "special favors" with earmark funding requests, and improperly using funds to finance her campaign.

Ahead of the hearing, Cherfilus-McCormick criticized the committee, saying her legal team was denied "reasonable time to prepare" for the trial.

"That raises serious concerns about due process and the fundamental rights every American is entitled to under our Constitution," Cherfilus-McCormick said in a statement. "While I am limited in what I can address due to an ongoing federal matter, I have cooperated fully within those constraints."

Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

"I urge the Committee to follow its own precedents and uphold fairness and not allow this process to be driven by politics or numbers," Cherfilus-McCormick added. "I welcome the opportunity to set the record straight and challenge these inaccuracies, when I am legally able to do so. Make no mistake: I am innocent and I am a fighter. My district is made up of fighters. I will continue to fight for the people I was elected to serve.”

In order for Cherfilus-McCormick to be expelled, two-thirds of representatives would have to vote in favor of expulsion, requiring some Democrats to agree to vote with Republicans.

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America has a spending problem Congress refuses to fix

Washington Democrats just voted against the one rule every American family already lives by: balancing the budget. Last week, I brought my Balanced Budget Amendment to the House floor. It failed. Meanwhile the national debt has reached $39 trillion and counting.

My amendment would have required Washington to phase in a simple rule: Congress cannot spend more than it takes in.

Democrats would rather keep the autopilot running and the national credit card maxed out than make the tough decisions to bring spending in line with what Americans want and need.

Democrats once claimed to support that principle. Last week, only one voted yes. Let that sink in.

Opposing a balanced budget is not some noble policy disagreement. It is a refusal to confront a crisis. Interest on the national debt already costs more than national defense. By midcentury, interest payments are projected to double our defense spending.

This debate is not about making a spreadsheet look tidy. Revenues are not the problem. Overspending is. American families already understand the difference. They pay the mortgage and buy groceries first. They skip the extras. They live on what they earn.

That is far from radical. It’s common sense.

The debt passed $39 trillion on March 17, up $4.5 trillion in just two years. That works out to $289,000 per household. Interest payments alone are projected to hit $1.04 trillion this year, or about $7,700 per household, just to service Washington’s tab. By the time you finish reading this, the number will be higher.

And that is before you factor in the waste, fraud, and outright abuse.

Since 2003, the federal government has made nearly $3 trillion in improper payments. The states are hardly better. In Minnesota, a federal prosecutor said half or more of the roughly $18 billion in federal funds sent to 14 state-run programs since 2018 may have been stolen. Half or more. Billions of taxpayer dollars disappeared through fake autism centers, phony housing providers, and shell companies.

The federal government and the states are ripping you off.

We have known for years that government spending was out of control. But at this scale, waste no longer looks like a bug in the system. It looks like a feature.

Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images

Democrats’ refusal even to vote for a Balanced Budget Amendment shows they have no interest in fixing it. They would rather keep the autopilot running and the national credit card maxed out than make the tough decisions to bring spending in line with what American families want and need.

That refusal was on full display last week. Democrats chose more debt, more inflationary pressure, and more fiscal chaos. They are not worried about bankrupting the country.

But their "no" votes were not the only warning sign. Congress has already seen the consequences of fiscal irresponsibility and still refuses to change course.

The Biden-Harris years added trillions in new debt and helped deliver the worst inflation in 40 years. Prices surged while paychecks lagged. Working mothers stretching every grocery dollar felt it. Seniors on fixed incomes felt it. Families living paycheck to paycheck felt it.

That is the real-world price of refusing to balance the books.

I offered a real fix. My Balanced Budget Amendment would force Washington to do what every family already does: live on what comes in, pay the important bills first, cut the extras, and stop borrowing from the next generation to finance today’s spending.

This is not complicated. It is basic math. It is common sense. It is America First.

As we approach America’s 250th birthday, the best gift we can give the next generation is a government that finally lives by the same rule every family does and stops pretending this mountain of debt does not matter.

The federal machine-gun ban rests on a dangerous constitutional theory

Think back to fourth-grade American history. We learned why the Articles of Confederation failed and why the Constitution replaced them. One major problem was that states struggled to trade with one another and often tried to protect local interests by taxing or restricting goods from other states.

That helps explain why the Constitutional Convention gave Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce in Article I.

The challenge to the machine-gun ban asks more than whether one statute survives. It asks whether the Constitution’s architecture still restrains power at all.

In grade school, the principle sounded straightforward enough. Two centuries of litigation have made it anything but. A basic question still hangs over the Commerce Clause: How much power does it actually give Congress?

Can Congress force you to buy health insurance? Can it stop you from growing wheat in your own garden to bake your own bread? Can it ban you from possessing a firearm?

Not buying a firearm, which plainly involves commerce. Not using one. Just possessing one.

And does the answer change if that firearm happens to be a machine gun?

In 1986, Congress made it illegal “for any person to transfer or possess a machine gun,” with narrow exceptions for military use and for machine guns lawfully possessed before the statute took effect. For everyone else, the ban is absolute.

One might expect Congress to have debated whether the Commerce Clause, or any other constitutional provision, gave legislators the power to ban mere possession of a machine gun. It did not. The only real justification for banning post-1986 machine guns came in a single House floor statement from Rep. William J. Hughes (D-N.J.), the amendment’s sponsor: “I do not know why anyone would object to the banning of machine guns.”

Hughes did not offer a constitutional justification. He simply assumed Congress had the power and never bothered to prove it.

In reality, Congress does not possess a general police power. It cannot create a comprehensive national criminal code simply because it wants to. That authority belongs chiefly to the states. Congress may enact criminal laws only when they rest on one of its few enumerated powers.

That’s the essence of federalism.

JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP/Getty Images

So the real question remains: Does Congress have the power to prohibit mere possession of a machine gun, or does that authority remain with the states and the people?

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has confronted the question before, but it has never answered it.

In 1997, the full court, sitting en banc, split evenly in United States v. Kirk. Sixteen of the 17 judges participated, and the court divided straight down the middle. Half concluded that the machine-gun ban exceeded Congress’ Commerce Clause authority. Half disagreed. Because no majority emerged, the district court’s judgment was affirmed by default, and the written opinions carried no precedential force.

Three months later, the court faced the issue again in United States v. Knutson. This time, the panel included three judges who believed Congress did have the power to ban machine guns. They upheld the law. The full court stayed silent, and Knutson remains binding precedent.

Two months ago, Judge Don Willett raised the issue again in a nonbinding concurrence in United States v. Wilson. Willett expressed serious doubt that Congress has constitutional authority to prohibit mere possession of a firearm. He walked through the Supreme Court’s three recognized categories of Commerce Clause authority: the channels of interstate commerce, the instrumentalities of interstate commerce, and activities that substantially affect interstate commerce. Mere possession of a firearm, he concluded, “fits uneasily within any of these categories.”

Willett’s observation gets to the heart of the problem.

If mere possession counts as interstate commerce, or as something Congress may regulate under the Commerce Clause, then federal power no longer has a meaningful limiting principle. Congress can regulate nearly anything, so long as some lawyer can imagine a downstream economic effect.

That is not constitutional government. It is federal power without a boundary.

Now, nearly three decades after Knutson, the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Temple Gun Club are prepared to press the issue again. Temple Gun Club is made up of law-abiding citizens who want machine-gun ownership made lawful for their members. The organization is not talking about weapons bought on some national market. It is talking about firearms the members would build themselves by converting guns they already lawfully own, firearms that never entered the stream of interstate commerce.

This case is about more than just machine guns. It is about whether the Commerce Clause still has limits. If Congress may ban possession of an item that was never bought, never sold, never exchanged across state lines, and has no substantial effect on interstate commerce, then Congress can regulate virtually every aspect of human life.

Helen H. Richardson/MediaNews Group/Denver Post/Getty Images

Willett made the point well in Wilson:

Far from viewing this sort of incremental, frog-boiling expansion of federal power as legitimate, the Founding generation saw it as the more insidious threat — a quiet, gradual erosion of liberty rather than a sudden seizure of it.

That’s right. The courts should return to first principles. They should revisit the machine-gun ban and ask the question Congress ducked in 1986: Does “regulate commerce” still mean something limited and intelligible, or has the phrase become a blank check for federal control?

The challenge to the machine-gun ban asks more than whether one statute survives. It asks whether the Constitution’s architecture still restrains power at all — or whether the 10th Amendment has been reduced to a historical footnote.

The TSA showdown reveals a brutal truth about our politics

America’s newest political battlefield runs through one of the most miserable places in the country: the airport.

Democrats have held up funding for the Department of Homeland Security amid their ongoing war over ICE, and after a month without pay, TSA employees have started refusing to come to work. The result has been crippling delays at major airports, with waits stretching four hours or more and turning an already degraded flying experience into something closer to a public humiliation ritual.

The GOP theoretically holds the levers of power, but in practice it remains terrified of disturbing the status quo.

The brutal truth is that one political party is willing to disrupt travel across the country to protect illegal immigrants and preserve a future voter pipeline. Even after assassination attempts, lawfare against political opponents, and an open push for demographic replacement, conservatives still hesitate to admit that our political battles have become existential.

In theory, the United States remains the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth. In practice, basic air travel now is a dysfunctional disaster. Seats are cramped, service is miserable, fellow passengers are often feral, and airlines charge extra for every scrap of convenience in the hope of squeezing one last dollar from exhausted travelers.

For a while, the indignity at least purchased speed. Flying still got you from one place to another faster than anything else. But incompetence, cost-cutting, and crumbling infrastructure have made significant delays routine. Travelers now regularly build an extra day into both ends of a trip because same-day arrival has become an increasingly reckless assumption.

Adding four-hour TSA lines to that ordeal is more than just another inconvenience. It’s simply insulting.

To his credit, President Trump has moved ICE officers into airports to assist with screening. It is less satisfying than watching those officers execute deportation raids, but early signs suggest the move has worked. Atlanta reportedly went from nearly five hours of screening delays to roughly five minutes. ICE officers appear to be in good spirits, and the agency itself seems to be recovering some badly needed public goodwill. Tom Homan has even said ICE agents will continue deportation operations while helping with TSA duties. It is not an ideal arrangement, but Trump has once again found a way to turn executive action into a political win.

Blaze Media Illustration

Still, the TSA mess raises a larger strategic question, one that extends well beyond airports.

During the COVID lockdowns, public schools across the country shut their doors. Conservatives had spent years correctly describing government education as a progressive propaganda machine and a patronage network for Democratic clients. Yet when the system buckled, the right did not use the opening to challenge the legitimacy of the whole structure. Republicans begged for schools to reopen as quickly as possible. Faced with a rare chance to dismantle an atrocious institution, conservatives instead demanded a “return to normal.” But normal was already a disaster.

The same pattern now applies to the TSA.

The agency did not even exist before 2001, and it has performed badly almost from the start. Most contraband still gets through screening. The TSA has not stopped a single terrorist attack. Like the public school system, it functions largely as a jobs program for Democrat clients while draining billions from taxpayers and making ordinary life demonstrably worse.

Republicans still act as though enduring a few nasty New York Times editorials is too high a price to pay to save the country.

Rather than using this crisis to argue for dismantling the TSA, Republicans have rushed to prove that it is indispensable. The short-term political benefit is obvious enough. No administration wants to own airport chaos. But every such rescue reinforces a deeper assumption shared by both parties: Any government program, once created, becomes permanent. No one is going to vote himself into a smaller state. The incentives do not allow it. America is far more likely to watch the regime collapse than to see it willingly scale itself back.

That failure of imagination points to a larger problem.

Republicans control both chambers of Congress and the presidency while holding a friendly Supreme Court, yet they still appear terrified to govern. Only Trump, in his early burst of executive orders, showed much appetite for using the moment. Even that momentum slowed once the administration ran into the courts and Congress refused to codify any serious part of the MAGA agenda. The GOP theoretically holds the levers of power, but in practice it remains terrified of disturbing the status quo.

Blaze Media Illustration

Democrats behave very differently. Even from a minority position, they are willing to shut down travel across the country for the explicit purpose of keeping illegal immigrants here. Members of the Democratic Party understand that their coalition depends on dissolving the old American nation and distributing its assets to clients in exchange for votes. That agenda is not particularly popular with the historic American population, but it is attractive to new arrivals who did not build the country and feel no inherited obligation toward it.

To remain electorally viable, Democrats need an ever-expanding pool of imported voters dependent on public wealth transfers to cancel out the votes of the native population. If they can replace enough of the country, they can govern it indefinitely. Progressives celebrate that possibility whenever they are not dismissing it as a conspiracy theory.

If one party is willing to grind national air travel to a halt to preserve its electoral advantage while the other will not pass basic legislation for fear of offending someone, the country has a big problem. Trump has pressed Congress to pass the SAVE America Act to strengthen election integrity and give Republicans a tactical advantage, yet the GOP continues to drag its feet. One party behaves as if politics actually matters. The other behaves as if politics is an embarrassing chore.

Democrats are willing to hold the nation hostage in airport security lines to secure victory. Republicans still act as though enduring a few nasty New York Times editorials is too high a price to pay to save the country. A movement that fears bad press more than national dispossession has surrendered the habits of self-government and forgotten what political power is for.

Trump threatens Democrats that he'll fix TSA himself — and it involves ICE

President Donald Trump has his own solution to solve the stalemate in Congress that is causing a partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security.

Democrats sparked the partial shutdown on February 14, refusing to pass the FY2026 DHS appropriations bill while calling for reform at Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

'They will do Security like no one has ever seen before.'

The reform demands are a protest of the deaths of anti-ICE activists Alex Pretti and Renee Good, but they ignore the fact that ICE is already funded through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed in 2025.

Still, Democrats have rejected a DHS funding bill (for the fifth time on Friday), withholding funds from TSA and FEMA.

With many TSA workers not being paid during the partial shutdown, the lack of staffing has had a trickle-down effect to travelers. For example, at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, passengers faced screening wait times of up to two hours this week, according to CNN.

All the turmoil has President Trump brainstorming possible solutions, and on Saturday afternoon he suggested throwing ICE into the mix.

"If the Radical Left Democrats don't immediately sign an agreement to let our Country, in particular, our Airports, be FREE and SAFE again, I will move our brilliant and patriotic ICE Agents to the Airports where they will do Security like no one has ever seen before," Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Trump said placing ICE agents at airports will also mean that they will conduct "the immediate arrest of all Illegal Immigrants who have come into our Country," pinpointing one nationality in particular.

There would be "heavy emphasis on those from Somalia," the president wrote. He added that Somalians have "totally destroyed, with the approval of a corrupt Governor, Attorney General, and Congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, the once Great State of Minnesota."

"I look forward to seeing ICE in action at our Airports," Trump concluded.

Photo by Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg via Getty Images

According to Politico, lawmakers will remain in D.C. with a district work week looming from March 30 until April 10. This means DHS personnel could go unpaid for another three weeks if Congress does not quickly come to an agreement.

With over 61,000 TSA employees affected by the partial shutdown, at least 366 officers have quit, with many working unpaid. This has led to a record high 10.22% absentee rate set on Monday, according to CNN.

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'Moral failure': Pressure mounts as Congress prepares to leave town despite urgent DHS stalemate

The Department of Homeland Security has been shut down for over a month, and Congress has made no progress toward reopening it.

Democrats partially shut down DHS on February 14 by refusing to pass the appropriations bill in protest of the deaths of anti-ICE agitators Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Although Democrats took aim at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE is already funded through President Donald Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act that was passed last summer.

'They have barely been in the same building.'

Instead of crippling our country's immigration-focused agencies, Democrats are withholding funds from TSA and FEMA, sparking delays and frustration across the country.

Even still, Congress — which will break for a district work week from March 30 until April 10 — has shown no urgency to address the issue.

Elijah Nouvelage/Bloomberg via Getty Images

"The House and the Senate have had weeks to fix this, and they have barely been in the same building," American Federation of Government Employees President Everett Kelley said in a statement obtained by Blaze News. "Members of Congress have walked past our TSA members at airport security checkpoints more often than they've met to negotiate an end to this stalemate."

"Those officers deserve to be paid for the work they do to keep those members safe," Kelley added. "The least Congress can do for these patriotic American workers is act before legislators leave town for the weekend, or, worse, head off on a weeks-long recess."

Photo by Aaron Schwartz / AFP via Getty Images

Kelley called the partial shutdown a "moral failure," noting that families are unable to put food on the table simply because Congress can't put in the work.

"A TSO selling plasma to keep the lights on is unconscionable,” Kelley said. “Tens of thousands of families turning to food banks because Congress refuses to do its job is a national disgrace. This is a profound moral failure, and the American people should know who’s responsible for it."

“The time for excuses is over,” Kelley added. “Pass a measure to reopen DHS, pay these workers, and don’t go home until you do.”

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The SAVE America Act won’t be enough to save the GOP from a midterm bloodbath

This scandal-ridden Democrat just got one step closer to being expelled from Congress

America has a spending problem Congress refuses to fix

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The federal machine-gun ban rests on a dangerous constitutional theory

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The TSA showdown reveals a brutal truth about our politics

Trump threatens Democrats that he'll fix TSA himself — and it involves ICE

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We’ll keep you informed with top stories for conservatives who want to become informed decision makers.