Congress Faces Mountain Of Unfinished Business After Christmas Break
'my Democrat colleagues are not there yet'
The country that mocks America’s ‘culture of death’ has embraced one of its own
Canada loves to lecture America about compassion. Every time a shooting makes the headlines, Canadian commentators cannot wait to discuss how the United States has a “culture of death” because we refuse to regulate guns the way enlightened nations supposedly do.
But north of our border, a very different crisis is unfolding — one that is harder to moralize because it exposes a deeper cultural failure.
A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order.
The Canadian government is not only permitting death, but it’s also administering, expanding, and redefining it as “medical care.” Medical assistance in dying is no longer a rare, tragic exception. It has become one of the country’s leading causes of death, offered to people whose problems are treatable, whose conditions are survivable, and whose value should never have been in question.
In Canada, MAID is now responsible for nearly 5% of all deaths — 1 out of every 20 citizens. And this is happening in a country that claims the moral high ground over American gun violence. Canada now records more deaths per capita from doctors administering lethal drugs than America records from firearms. Their number is 37.9 deaths per 100,000 people. Ours is 13.7. Yet we are the country supposedly drowning in a “culture of death.”
No lecture from abroad can paper over this fact: Canada has built a system where eliminating suffering increasingly means eliminating the sufferer.
Choosing death over care
One example of what Canada now calls “compassion” is the case of Jolene Bond, a woman suffering from a painful but treatable thyroid condition that causes dangerously high calcium levels, bone deterioration, soft-tissue damage, nausea, and unrelenting pain. Her condition is severe, but it is not terminal. Surgery could help her. And in a functioning medical system, she would have it.
But Jolene lives under socialized medicine. The specialists she needs are either unavailable, overrun with patients, or blocked behind bureaucratic requirements she cannot meet. She cannot get a referral. She cannot get an appointment. She cannot reach the doctor in another province who is qualified to perform the operation. Every pathway to treatment is jammed by paperwork, shortages, and waitlists that stretch into the horizon and beyond.
Yet the Canadian government had something else ready for her — something immediate.
They offered her MAID.
Not help, not relief, not a doctor willing to drive across a provincial line and simply examine her. Instead, Canada offered Jolene a state-approved death. A lethal injection is easier to obtain than a medical referral. Killing her would be easier than treating her. And the system calls that compassion.
Bureaucracy replaces medicine
Jolene’s story is not an outlier. It is the logical outcome of a system that cannot keep its promises. When the machinery of socialized medicine breaks down, the state simply replaces care with a final, irreversible “solution.” A bureaucratic checkbox becomes the last decision of a person’s life.
Canada insists its process is rigorous, humane, and safeguarded. Yet the bureaucracy now reviewing Jolene’s case is not asking how she can receive treatment; it is asking whether she has enough signatures to qualify for a lethal injection. And the debate among Canadian officials is not how to preserve life, but whether she has met the paperwork threshold to end it.
This is the dark inversion that always emerges when the state claims the power to decide when life is no longer worth living. Bureaucracy replaces conscience. Eligibility criteria replace compassion. A panel of physicians replaces the family gathered at a bedside. And eventually, the “right” to die becomes an expectation — especially for those who are poor, elderly, or alone.
The logical end of a broken system
We ignore this lesson at our own peril. Canada’s health care system is collapsing under demographic pressure, uncontrolled migration, and the unavoidable math of government-run medicine.
When the system breaks, someone must bear the cost. MAID has become the release valve.
The ideology behind this system is already drifting south. In American medical journals and bioethics conferences, you will hear this same rhetoric. The argument is always dressed in compassion. But underneath, it reduces the value of human life to a calculation: Are you useful? Are you affordable? Are you too much of a burden?
The West was built on a conviction that every human life has inherent value. That truth gave us hospitals before it gave us universities. It gave us charity before it gave us science. It is written into the Declaration of Independence.
Canada’s MAID program reveals what happens when a country lets that foundation erode. Life becomes negotiable, and suffering becomes a justification for elimination.
A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order. If compassion becomes indistinguishable from convenience, and if medicine becomes indistinguishable from euthanasia, the West will have abandoned the very principles that built it. That is the lesson from our northern neighbor — a warning, not a blueprint.
Senate tanks GOP solution to Obamacare subsidy problems
The Senate failed to pass the Republican-led health care bill as the deadline to extend Obamacare subsidies fast approaches.
The Health Care Freedom for Patients Act failed to pass in a 51-48 vote after one Republican, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, joined 47 Democrats to vote against it. 51 Republicans voted in favor of the legislation, but the bill ultimately failed due to the 60-vote threshold. Notably, Republican Sen. Steve Daines of Montana was not present for the vote.
The bill would also foster competition and broaden health care.
Certain subsidies from former President Barack Obama's landmark health care bill, known as the Affordable Care Act, are set to expire at the end of the year. Notably, these ACA subsidies are the reason Senate Democrats decided to shut down the government in October.
Despite facilitating the longest government shutdown in history, Senate Democrats have not struck a deal with Republicans to address health care.
RELATED: Democrat senator makes stunning admission about Obamacare failures
The Health Care Freedom for Patients Act, authored by Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Mike Crapo of Idaho, would have allowed these Obamacare subsidies to lapse, instead directing funds to individual health savings accounts.
While this bill ultimately failed, other Republican lawmakers have drafted their own legislation to address the impending problem.
Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida introduced the More Affordable Care Act, which would also redirect federal subsidies to HSA-style accounts called Trump Health Freedom Accounts. The bill would additionally foster competition and broaden health care options for states by establishing the Health Freedom Waiver Program.
RELATED: Republicans race to pass competing health care bill as clock ticks on Obamacare subsidies
The companion bill to Scott's legislation was also introduced in the House by Republican Study Committee Chairman August Pfluger. At this time, no vote has been scheduled on the bill in either the House or the Senate.
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Republicans race to pass competing health care bill as clock ticks on Obamacare subsidies
With the deadline to extend Obamacare subsidies fast approaching, Republican lawmakers are leading the charge.
Former President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act has been the focal point of health care discussions on Capitol Hill as ACA subsidies are expected to expire at the end of the year. These are the same subsidies Senate Democrats cited as the basis of their record-breaking shutdown.
The Republicans' legislation blocks funds for 'gender transition procedures' and abortions.
In response, several Republicans introduced their own legislation, including the Health Care Freedom for Patients Act penned by Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Mike Crapo of Idaho.
With just weeks until these subsidies lapse, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (S.D.) will hold a vote on that key legislation on Thursday.
The Crapo-Cassidy bill would allow the Obama-era subsidies to lapse, instead boosting funds for health savings accounts. Eligible adults under the age of 50 would receive $1,000 deposited into their HSA while those between the ages 50 and 64 would get $1,500.
It would also fund cost-sharing reduction payments and provide eligible Americans the option to purchase "bronze" or "catastrophic" health care plans. Notably the Republicans' legislation blocks funds for "gender transition procedures" and abortions.
Although Republicans are expected to vote for the legislation, it is unlikely to pass due to the 60-vote filibuster threshold. Assuming all 53 Republicans vote in favor of the bill, at least seven Democrats would have to cross the aisle for the legislation to pass the Senate.
RELATED: Democrat senator makes stunning admission about Obamacare failures
Other Republicans, like Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, are also introducing alternative health care bills. Scott introduced his More Affordable Care Act alongside Republican Study Committee Chairman August Pfluger (Texas), who spearheaded the companion bill in the House.
Scott and Pfluger's bill would create Trump Health Freedom Accounts, redirecting federal subsidies traditionally sent to insurance companies to these HSA-style accounts held by individual Americans. The bill would also establish a Health Freedom Waiver Program, allowing states to broaden their health plans and expand competition to offer fairer prices.
At this time, there is no vote scheduled for Scott's legislation.
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Why the kids are not all right — and Boomers still pretend nothing’s wrong
Here’s a message Baby Boomers need to hear: The America you were born into no longer exists.
A rising tide of young Americans are embracing socialism at a pace this country has never seen. Boomers often assume that it's about handouts. It isn't. Beneath the surface is a decades-long campaign so destructive to middle-class mobility that it threatens to push the nation toward civil conflict. The more you study it, the more coordinated it looks.
A people dependent upon ‘gimme gimme’ socialism is an easily managed population. A demoralized middle class keeps the ruling class secure.
In a way, it was.
Short-term profit-maximizing globalists on Wall Street teamed up with the K Street lobbying blob to drown Americans in cheap Chinese goods while saddling them with student debt, consumer debt, and medical debt.
Young people are being priced out of the American dream.
My urgent message to Boomers — especially those who want to keep influence: The kids are not all right.
The America your kids and grandkids know is not the America you knew. Most Boomers were born in the 1950s, when the country was booming — united by postwar optimism, American industrial strength, shared national institutions, Walter Cronkite on one television in every home, full-fat milkshakes, and Elvis shaking up the culture.
Today, we live in a golden age of technological revolution. We are making remarkable advances in space travel, tech, and medicine — increasingly led by the private sector and unapologetic capitalists. But on the basics — housing, health, education — we’re failing the next generation.
In 1955, the median homebuyer was in his late 20s. In 2025, it’s 56. A minimum-wage worker in the 1950s needed roughly seven years of pay to buy a modest home without a mortgage. Today, it’s around 27.
In 1955, a student could pay college tuition by working a few hours a day at minimum wage. Today, that same student would need to work about six hours a day. If a kid wants Yale or any Ivy League school, he would have to work 26.4 hours a day — an impossible figure that illustrates how detached elite education has become from reality.
Here’s a frightening divide: 93% of Boomers say political violence is never justified; 44% of Gen Z say it “sometimes” is.
Ninety-nine percent of kids are not out for blood, but 100% of them face a massive relative disadvantage. The upward mobility Boomers took for granted has been hollowed out by globalist and left-wing policies sold as progress but experienced as decline.
We spent trillions of American dollars on foreign wars, foreign infrastructure, and foreign elections. We borrowed recklessly. Now the dollar is frail. We allowed millions of illegal migrants to enter the country, fueling crime and pushing Americans out of jobs. Young households are buried in debt — not mortgage debt that builds equity, but consumer debt used to numb the anxiety left by a collapse in community and faith.
Here’s the truth: The populist right and the socialist left agree on the diagnosis. Listen to the first half of Bernie Sanders’ interview with Joe Rogan in June. For an hour, Bernie describes America’s economic troubles. Most people, right or left, would nod along.
Then comes the pivot: Socialism is the cure.
This is the left’s great deceit. Progressives' proposed “solutions” hurt the very people they claim to help.
RELATED: We built abundance and lost the thing that matters
Take restrictive zoning and rent regulations — blue-state staples designed to “create” affordable housing. In reality, they choke supply and drive rents higher. Or look at no-cash bail. The neighborhoods hit hardest by serially released offenders are the same minority communities progressives claim to champion. The examples pile up.
So why do left-wing billionaires back these ideas? Simple: Socialism, communism, and their logical end point — fascism — are excellent for entrenched oligarchs. A people dependent upon “gimme gimme” socialism is an easily managed population. A demoralized middle class keeps the ruling class secure.
There is another path.
We must reverse the policies that got us here. Strengthen education outcomes, lower health care costs, rebuild domestic supply chains, expand American energy generation, and restore competence to the workforce.
Boomers, if you don’t lead this shift, your influence will vanish before your next Social Security check arrives. Moderate Democrats already know the socialist tide is rising. They’re afraid to say it out loud.
The Gen Z and Millennial voting bloc will dominate the 2028 election. They are demanding change. Moderates — in both parties — are being replaced by extremists.
You have a choice: Allow yourselves to be absorbed into the socialist machine, or correct the mistakes of the last two decades, return power to citizens, and rebuild access to the American dream.
Glenn Beck loses it over new GAO report exposing ANOTHER multibillion-dollar Obamacare heist
Remember when Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency started combing through federal spending with a fine-tooth comb and making commonsense cuts, and the Democrats had a tantrum of epic proportions?
That’s because they didn’t want the American people to know about all their little NGOs that intentionally “fund our destruction.” They didn’t want us to find out about the billions of dollars in Obamacare fraud, Glenn Beck says.
On Wednesday, the Government Accountability Office published a report addressing fraud in the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare.
Titled “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act: Preliminary Results from Ongoing Review Suggest Fraud Risks in the Advance Premium Tax Credit Persist,” the report reveals the following key findings:
- GAO ran fake applicants through the system, and almost all of them still got approved for subsidized coverage, even when identity proofing failed up front and they submitted bogus documents.
- In 2023, there were over $21 billion in premium tax credits that the IRS couldn’t match to filed tax returns — meaning that money was likely issued to ineligible people or in the wrong amounts.
- In 2023, about 58,000 people listed were flagged as deceased who still appeared to have subsidies paid on their behalf, roughly $94 million in total.
- There were 29,000 instances of the same Social Security number used across multiple plans, including one extreme case where a single SSN was tied to more than 125 policies.
- From January to August 2024, CMS logged about 275,000 complaints from people saying they were enrolled or switched into plans without their consent.
- In 2018, CMS tested the system’s susceptibility to fraud and found numerous high-risk issues, yet has failed to make any changes or reassess since.
But don’t get upset yet, because the worst part comes next.
“These are the exact same findings the GAO had in 2015/2016. ... It is literally word for word almost the same findings,” says Glenn’s chief researcher, Jason Buttrill.
Glenn is deeply disturbed by the GAO’s report.
“When a government becomes this incompetent and unaccountable, your country starts to completely fall apart,” he sighs.
“We see Democrats now rushing to the microphone to defend the perpetrators, the judges that are reversing verdicts to protect the people who stole from you. I contend that the people that are rushing to the microphones to defend it are the people who have been covering this up,” he speculates.
The people behind this fraud — whether they committed or overlooked it — should go to jail, he says, and anyone who disagrees is just “brainwashed.”
Although the country is suffering from “foreign invasion,” “internal strife,” and “financial collapse,” it is “internal corruption” that will be our ultimate downfall, he warns.
“Stop the fraud,” he pleads.
“Our country will not survive if we continue to normalize this stuff,” he adds.
To hear more of Glenn’s response to the GAO’s disturbing report, watch the video above.
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Free markets don’t need federal babysitters
At a recent competition law symposium in Washington, the Trump administration’s antitrust chief, Gail Slater, made a welcome promise to keep markets open to new competitors and innovation.
That pledge comes at a critical moment. Too many politicians in both parties still believe government’s job is to engineer economic outcomes rather than let consumers decide. That mindset misunderstands what makes markets dynamic — and often locks in the very problems regulators claim they want to fix.
Republicans and Democrats alike have embraced ‘industrial policy’ when it serves their political interests. They call it leadership, but it’s just another form of central planning.
Cronyism takes many forms: subsidies for favored industries, tax breaks for politically connected firms, or lawsuits targeting companies for being too successful.
Take the Biden Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Visa. The administration said it “feared” Visa’s market share, even though the payments space is crowded with competitors — Mastercard, PayPal, Square, Apple Pay, and a swarm of fintech startups. Instead of protecting consumers, the Justice Department tried to punish one company for competing well and dictate the terms of an already vibrant market.
That’s not protecting competition — it’s manipulating it. When government intervenes this way, it distorts incentives, weakens confidence, and replaces consumer choice with bureaucratic preference.
Consumers always lose
When regulators overreach, consumers pay the price. Every dollar a company spends fending off groundless lawsuits is a dollar not spent on innovation. Every subsidy handed to a politically favored firm skews the playing field against smaller rivals. And every new dictate slows the experimentation that keeps markets alive.
Officials who justify these intrusions claim they’re “protecting competition.” But true competition doesn’t need Washington’s help. It needs Washington to step aside. Entrepreneurs, not regulators, create rivals. Consumers, not bureaucrats, decide who wins. The invisible hand disciplines firms far more effectively than any government lawyer.
Free markets need fewer meddlers
Government’s legitimate role is narrow: preventing fraud, enforcing contracts, and protecting property. That’s a far cry from deciding which companies are “too profitable,” which mergers are “too large,” or which industries deserve “strategic” subsidies. When officials cross that line, they stop refereeing and start playing the game themselves — badly.
This temptation spans parties. Republicans and Democrats alike have embraced “industrial policy” when it serves their political interests. They call it leadership, but it’s just another form of central planning that shackles consumers and businesses alike.
RELATED: Smash the health care cartel, free the market
The cure is restraint
The best way forward is simple. Washington should stop punishing success and stop handing out favors to friends. It should let consumers and entrepreneurs, not bureaucrats and lobbyists, determine winners and losers.
America’s prosperity was built on open competition and voluntary exchange — not government micromanagement. Crony capitalism is just socialism by another name, and it breeds the same stagnation and corruption.
President Trump’s team understands that prosperity comes from freedom, not favoritism. If policymakers truly care about fairness, they should start by doing the hardest thing in politics: stepping aside.
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