“We can either unilaterally disarm, or we can stand and fight.”
If a man takes a swing at you and barely misses, that doesn’t make him a pacifist — it just means he has bad aim.
Standing still and giving him a second free swing wouldn’t be wise or honorable; it would be foolish.
In 2022, Chuck Schumer and 47 other Senate Democrats tried to change the rules of the US Senate and “nuke” the filibuster to ram through a left-wing takeover of election laws.
They were just barely stopped by two holdout Democrats who were promptly driven out of their party and into retirement.
In 2024, Schumer confirmed to reporters that Democrats mean to finish the job and kill the filibuster’s 60-vote threshold the next time they take the majority.
For many years, I believed that if the US Senate scrapped the filibuster, Texas and our nation would stand to lose more than we would gain.
My fellow conservatives and I have proudly used the 60-vote threshold to protect the country from all sorts of bad ideas and dangerous policies.
But when the reality on the ground changes, leaders must take stock and adapt.
Today, Democrats are weaponizing the Senate’s rules to block the SAVE America Act, defund the Department of Homeland Security and hurt the American people — all to spite President Donald Trump.
But they say openly that if these same rules ever get in Democrats’ way, they won’t hesitate to rip them up.
A rule is only a rule if both sides follow it.
I believe that Democrats, with their votes and statements, have already dealt the filibuster a fatal blow: The Senate rules will change eventually, whether Republicans like it or not.
This leaves conservatives with two options.
We can either unilaterally disarm, or we can stand and fight.
We can let the Democrats keep obstructing today and then smash the rules the first chance they get, or we can act now and use the mandate the American people gave this president and this Congress to secure our elections, protect our homeland and bring back common sense.
The answer is clear: We need to stand, fight and win.
Democrats started this fight. Now Republicans should finish it.
When 48 Democrats nearly killed the filibuster, it was to pass radical legislation designed to increase election fraud.
They tried to ban voter ID requirements, to decriminalize ballot harvesting, and even to send taxpayer dollars into Democrats’ own campaign funds.
The SAVE America Act, which I’ve cosponsored, would do the opposite.
It would make it easy to vote but harder to cheat, by requiring proof of citizenship and voter ID.
These basic, commonsense protections are massively popular with the American people — and the fact that the radical left apparently sees them as such a threat to their chances in November truly gives their game away.
The president has made the SAVE America Act his “number one priority,” and he is right.
But it’s also urgent to overcome other aspects of the far left’s obstruction.
Americans are being forced to wait in line for three hours at airport security checkpoints because the Democrats are blocking funding for homeland security and immigration law enforcement.
Bad enough that Democrats’ political tantrum is ruining travelers’ days — but at this time of hostilities with Iran, their financial siege of DHS is not just inconvenient, it’s dangerous.
Texans don’t need more endless discussions over Washington rules that Democrats have already promised to break. Talk is cheap.
They need leaders who get results.
And results are exactly what I have been proud to help President Trump deliver during both of his terms.
I’ve partnered with the president to cut taxes for working families, rebuild our military, stop inflation, transform the courts and secure our border.
Now this success story needs its next chapter.
After careful consideration, I support whatever changes to Senate rules that may prove necessary for us to get the SAVE America Act and homeland security funding past the Democrats’ obstruction, through the Senate, and on the president’s desk for his signature.
This could be a “talking filibuster” that removes the obstructionists’ free pass and makes them defend their indefensible views on the Senate floor, or it could be a different reform.
Process matters, but outcomes matter more: The Democrats’ assault on election integrity and national security must be stopped.
Leadership means upholding core principles and applying them thoughtfully as circumstances change.
I spent years defending the filibuster because the 60-vote threshold was a net benefit to Texas and our nation.
Before moderate Democrats went extinct, the rules worked.
But as President Abraham Lincoln once warned Congress, “the dogmas of the quiet past” can become “inadequate to the stormy present.”
The Democrats’ recklessness and radicalism have changed the landscape.
On these critical issues, at this critical hour, the old procedures no longer align with the core American principles we must defend.
It is time for our Senate Republican Conference, led by our strong and strategic Majority Leader John Thune, to retake the initiative, rebuild momentum and get results.
I respectfully urge the remaining handful of my Republican colleagues still holding on to the old position that I used to share to reassess the new reality and update their thinking.
We should use the authority the voters have entrusted in us to pass the SAVE America Act, fund homeland security, and bring the far left’s obstruction to an end.
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Cornyn says ditch the filibuster, pass the SAVE Act
Senator John Cornyn, who’s been forced to dance for the coveted Trump endorsement in the Texas Senate race, has come out with a new op-ed in the New York Post saying that if the Senate has to ditch the filibuster to get the SAVE Act passed, then so be it. This is likely the only way he can keep his seat.
Cornyn was first elected by the people of Texas to serve them in the Senate in 2002 and now his constituents, along with a majority of Americans (some 83%, with 71% of Democrats), want to see the voter ID requirements in the SAVE Act become law. The only problem is that despite co-sponsoring it, he hasn’t been able to get it done. The reason is that there’s the assumption that the Democrats will block it with the filibuster, but no one’s made them actually block it by standing on the Senate floor and talking the whole time to try to prevent a vote; the threat has been enough.
In his new column, Cornyn says it’s time to get rid of it, and that if Republicans don’t ditch it and use that opportunity to get the SAVE Act passed, Democrats will do it if and when they take back the House and Senate. If they do that, he says they will pass a radical agenda—something they’ve threatened to do anyway. Trump said he won’t sign any bills until the SAVE Act is passed.
“A rule is only a rule if both sides follow it,” Cornyn wrote. “I believe that Democrats, with their votes and statements, have already dealt the filibuster a fatal blow: The Senate rules will change eventually, whether Republicans like it or not. This leaves conservatives with two options. We can either unilaterally disarm, or we can stand and fight.
“We can let the Democrats keep obstructing today and then smash the rules the first chance they get, or we can act now and use the mandate the American people gave this president and this Congress to secure our elections, protect our homeland and bring back common sense. The answer is clear: We need to stand, fight and win. Democrats started this fight. Now Republicans should finish it.”
He says that if the Republicans don’t this now, the Democrats will do it later. And he’s probably right, Democrats in the Senate have been saying that they would use the eradication of the filibuster to get all manner of radical legislation passed. The Senate could push through not only the SAVE Act, but other aspects of the Trump agenda that are not codified into law but merely executive orders that can be reversed as soon as a Democrat takes the White House.
“After careful consideration,” he writes, “I support whatever changes to Senate rules that may prove necessary for us to get the SAVE America Act and homeland security funding past the Democrats’ obstruction, through the Senate, and on the president’s desk for his signature.
“This could be a ‘talking filibuster’ that removes the obstructionists’ free pass and makes them defend their indefensible views on the Senate floor, or it could be a different reform. Process matters, but outcomes matter more: The Democrats’ assault on election integrity and national security must be stopped. Leadership means upholding core principles and applying them thoughtfully as circumstances change.”
Trump has said that he’d endorse Cornyn in the tight, run-off race between him and popular Texas AG Ken Paxton, if he can get the SAVE Act passed. Paxton has said he’ll drop out of the race if that happens, too. So now it’s up to Cornyn, and Senate Republicans, to decide if they can get this done or potentially face the Democrats doing it, for their own purposes, if they retake Congress in November.
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The Case Against Public-Sector Unions
If you have to pass a law to stop people from finding out they can leave, you’ve already lost the argument.
Ask a public employee when they joined their union and most couldn’t tell you. Because they didn’t join. The dues just started coming out of their check.
That’s not a membership, and for decades nobody told workers they could opt out.
That changed in 2018, when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in Janus v. AFSCME that no government employee can be forced to join or pay dues to a labor union.
Hundreds of thousands opted out the moment they found out— the Freedom Foundation alone has helped more than 265,000 workers exercise their First Amendment rights since the ruling was issued.
Union leaders don’t talk about that number.
For decades, public-sector unions ran on automatic – automatic dues collection, automatic membership, automatic political spending – whether the worker wanted it or not.
The National Education Association confiscated $390 million in dues revenue during the most recent fiscal year from nearly 2.9 million members – most of it seized directly from taxpayer-funded paychecks before the workers could even see it.
In California alone, public education unions are estimated to collect more than $800 million per year. That money doesn’t come from convincing workers the union is worth it. It comes from a system designed so workers never had to be asked.
When the Supreme Court exposed their scheme in Janus, unions had to find other ways to keep the cash spigot open — including literally criminalizing their opposition.
Oregon, for example, effectively passed a law last year making it illegal to send public employees a mailer explaining their right to opt out. In theory, the law only bans marketing materials whose sender attempts to deceive the recipient into believing it was sent by their union. But in practice, the legislation is written so broadly that a left-leaning judge could easily construe nearly any outreach to union members as such an impersonation, subjecting the sender to potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.
To be clear, the law is specifically intended to thwart the Freedom Foundation, which has helped thousands of public-sector union members in Oregon opt out of their union. And other blue states are following suit.
New York lawmakers are currently considering an identical bill. In Hawaii, a similar measure has already cleared its second legislative committee.
The bills use the same language because the same people are writing them. Union-backed legislators, coordinating across state lines, are abusing their power to impose laws designed to prevent workers from understanding their First Amendment rights.
If you have to pass a law to stop people from finding out they can leave, you’ve already lost the argument.
This is Big Labor’s playbook. Unions are forging worker signatures on membership applications, signing people up without asking them, then taking dues from their paychecks. When workers try to resign, the union hands them documents they’d never seen, let alone signed.
Chaquan May, a California caregiver and mother, described what happened when she first encountered SEIU 2015 representatives at an orientation for newly hired in-home healthcare providers. “They locked us in a room,” she said. “One of the head union workers hovered over me at the table and stood there and told me, ‘What are you waiting for? Just sign it.’ I honestly felt scared and just went ahead and signed it out of fear.”
The Freedom Foundation has filed a class-action lawsuit against SEIU 2015 on behalf of May and a dozen other workers like her.
Meanwhile, the NEA’s president pulled in more than $514,000 in salary last year — a pay raise of $80,000 since she took office.
The union reported more than $51 million in disbursements for political activities and lobbying in the same period. The NEA and the American Federation of Teachers have together put $43.5 million into political organizations since 2022.
This is what the dues are for. Not the worker, the machine.
The reforms are commonsense:
- make re-enrollment annual and affirmative — if a worker wants to belong, they sign up every year
- end automatic payroll deductions so dues are a visible, conscious transaction
- require unions to disclose political spending the same way corporations have to
These are exactly the kinds of reforms Oregon, New York and Hawaii are working to prevent — not by defeating them in debate, but by making it illegal to tell workers such options exist.
Unions that fight every one of those reforms are telling you the membership numbers don’t hold up if workers get a real vote. The hundreds of thousands of workers who left after Janus proved it.
The fight now is making sure that choice stays real, and that the people trying to take it away don’t succeed one forged signature, one locked room and one state legislature at a time.
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