Finally — yes, finally. On Christmas night, the U.S. delivered a long-called for and long-hoped for present to Nigeria’s Christians. More than a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles, fired from a U.S. Navy destroyer off the coast of Nigeria in the Gulf of Guinea, struck ISIS terrorist bases in the Sokoto state in northern Nigeria, a region increasingly dominated by ISIS. According to U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), a significant number of terrorists were killed, and operational support facilities destroyed. Nigerian authorities confirmed that the strikes were coordinated with the Nigerian government. Yet ignoring the Fulani militias means ignoring the true source of the current problem. There’s a great deal to unpack here, but before delving into the details or considering what this means for the future of Nigeria’s Christian communities, here is the bottom line up front: Donald Trump told Nigeria’s terrorists over a month ago to “stop killing Christians” or there would be “hell to pay.” They ignored his warning and, according to intelligence reports, were even planning to carry out multiple and massive attacks on or around Christmas. Lest they ignore the message, the President’s announcement carried the warning that there would be many more dead terrorists if “their slaughter of Christians continues.” On behalf of those who’ve watched the deteriorating situation of Nigeria’s Christian communities with ever-increasing alarm over the last few years, I can only say, emphatically, “it’s about time.” The slaughter has been going on for over a decade, becoming more brutal and widespread with each passing year. The numbers have been appalling, tens of thousands killed, hundreds of thousands forced from their homes into refugee camps, a litany of brutal murder of the innocent, accompanied all too frequently by rape, torture, and the widespread destruction of Christian churches and Christian livelihoods.  One may quibble over definitions, over the distinction between “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” but the horror defies every lawyerly diplomatic response. The situation in Nigeria has long passed the point where pious words suffice. I’ve applauded this administration’s renewed designation of Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” with respect to religious freedom — “redesignation” since the Biden regime lifted Trump’s original 2019 designation. This has opened the door to various types of pressure, not just upon the Nigerian government, but also upon those countries inclined to make excuses for Nigeria’s failure to effectively protect its Christian communities. Sadly, this has never been enough, nor was it ever likely to be. The Islamist terrorists — Boko Haram, ISIS, and the Fulani militants — were never likely to respond to mere words, nor were their friends in the Nigerian government. The great benefit of the administration’s missile strikes is that it shows to all concerned that the U.S. now means business — deadly kinetic business — when it comes to stopping the genocide.  So where do we go from here? It’s significant that the Christmas strikes were conducted with the approval of the Nigeria government. On the one hand, this is a positive development, after years of denial and inaction on its part — one suspect’s that this only happened as a result of some very heavy pressure from Washington. On the other hand, the very nature of the strikes indicates the limits of trying to work with the Nigerian authorities. Although weak-willed and sporadic, the Nigerians have made some effort to deal with Boko Haram and ISIS, particularly in the aftermath of various high profile events that gained international attention. The notorious kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls, mostly Christian and a handful Muslim, back in 2024 provoked sufficient international outrage to compel the Nigerian government to act, albeit feebly.  It has always been easier for the central government to view Boko Haram and ISIS as hostile elements, since they pose a direct threat to the government’s authority, and it has been easier to invoke outside support, since these are transnational entities with ties across Africa and the Middle East. But the Islamist Fulani tribes pose a different and much more insidious threat. The Fulani militias are loosely networked, offering fewer obvious targets for a cruise missile strike. They operate with AK-47s and RPGs, using motorcycles and pickup trucks for mobility. This suffices to slaughter unarmed Christians, but is operationally concealable. They only become tactically visible when they assemble to carry out an attack. Yet ignoring the Fulani militias means ignoring the true source of the current problem. As my friend Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute observes, the Fulani are the deadliest force against the Christians, and have been for some time. While they are very loosely aligned with the larger community of jihadists, this very looseness also makes them easier to ignore, or minimize.  Thus, the insistence by the Nigerian government, by the U.S. State Department during the Biden regime, and by the various European countries that this is not religiously-motivated genocide, but simply a conflict between Fulani herders and Christian farmers, no different that the “range wars” of the 19th Century American West. This, of course, is nonsense. It’s utterly removed from The Virginian or Shane, or any of a dozen other cowboy movies — no one was shouting “Allahu Akbar” as they raped women or murdered children, no one was engaged in wholesale slaughter with automatic weapons. It’s also nonsensical that this is somehow a conflict over scarce resources driven by climate change, a convenient fiction that, regrettably, has even found favor with the Vatican. Why, then, has this become the default position? The simple answer is that no one seems willing to grasp the nettle and seek solutions that would punish the Fulanis and protect the Christians, probably because it just seems too hard. Trying to target the Fulanis from long range with Tomahawks expends valuable military resources for minimal gain — they simply don’t offer the right kind of targets. A middle ground might come with deploying armed drones on an “around the clock” basis, positioned overhead to strike whenever a marauding band assembles its pickup trucks and motorcycles for yet another raid. There’s something compelling about subjecting these monsters to “death from above.” Still, achieving this would require something more than the occasional overflight from a distant base. It would require the sustained cooperation of the Nigerian government, something far different than the permission afforded to the Christmas strike. More, in order to maintain “round-the-clock” coverage,” it would likely require an operational base within Nigeria. This, in turn, would require ground security, since, frankly, while the Nigerian authorities might be forced to accept such a base, they simply cannot be trusted to provide it with effective perimeter protection. Thus, the perennial nightmare — U.S. “boots on the ground.” An American base, with American troops guarding the perimeter becomes an attractive terrorist target. A truck bomb at the gate, mortars fired from a distance, in the end an American soldier, or several soldiers, dead in a far away country. We’ve seen this movie before — quite literally for those who’ve watched Black Hawk Down. The Mogadishu deployment began as another humanitarian mission, arising from the recognition that starving Somalis would only receive the food being shipped in from abroad if the shipments and their distribution could be protected from armed gangs. In the end, the Clinton administration refused to resource the mission properly and, when disaster struck, the rescue operation lacked the armored heft necessary to push through rapidly to the trapped aviators, Rangers, and Delta Force operators. What is true of trying to maintain a forward base for drone operations is even more true for the other necessary solution, namely providing direct protection to the Christian communities while training and arming them to defend themselves. I shudder at the thought of relying on UN peacekeepers, which raises the specter of yet another Srebrenica massacre. It’s the most classic of classical special forces missions, but such missions inevitably expose our troops to attack. So while I applaud the Trump administration’s Christmas missile strike, and while I would applaud inflicting more similar punishment on the Muslim terrorists in Nigeria, I struggle with a solution that cuts to the heart of the problem. I’ve been thinking about this and writing about it for two and a half years, and, in the end, I come back to the same regretful conclusion. If the Fulani are going to continue massacring Christians on an industrial scale, and if the Nigerian government continues to do nothing meaningful to stop it, then the genocide will continue. No pious pronouncements from Pope Leo or Cardinal Parolin, no UN resolutions, no designation of Nigeria as a “country of particular concern,” none of these things will stop the slaughter. Only brute force, resolutely and decisively delivered, will save Nigeria’s Christian farmers. The lucky ones will become refugees, the unlucky yet another death statistic. Ironically, these black lives have been totally ignored by those who’ve wrapped themselves in the “black lives matter” mantra. Indeed, some silly commentary has condemned Trump’s Christmas strike as “racially-motivated violence,” calling it “another opportunity for this administration to engage in violence in a Brown country in order to flex their power.” The fundamental fact that these strikes were meant to inhibit and deter violence against a suffering black community renders such comments nothing less than idiotic. Still, this speaks to the larger problem. If Trump does it, half the U.S. and likely more than half of our trans-Atlantic so-called “partners” will condemn it. If taking the next step results in even one American casualty, then the Democrats will immediately trumpet a false equation with Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal. And many people of good will, ordinary Americans, will quite reasonably wonder why our sons and daughters must pay the price to stop this horror — why is it always us, why can’t someone else take up the task? There’s a genuine national, nay international, conversation that needs to take place going forward. The starting point might simply be consideration of the meaning of “never again” in the context of 21st century geopolitical realities. The larger conversation is the one just begun regarding the civilizational conflict between radical Islam and our own Western, once Judeo-Christian, now feebly secular societies. Are we prepared to do what it takes to defend ourselves, whether at Bataclan, or Bondi Beach, or any of dozens of other names now written in infamy? It’s a question that needs answering, and ending the ongoing wholesale slaughter of Nigeria’s Christians represents an important part — but only a part — of the discussion that needs to take place and the actions that should follow from that discussion. “Actions” is the necessarily operative word, and Trump’s actions on Christmas night, at the very least, have opened that part of the discussion. For now, let us give President Trump his due. After years in which the murderers have been allowed to act with impunity, now, at the very least, some of them have received their just punishment. If they refuse to draw the proper lesson, then let there be, in the president’s words,  “hell to pay.” They’ve richly earned their place in hell. READ MORE from James H. McGee: It’s Not About the Guns: The Wrong Lesson From the Bondi Beach Attack Donald Trump’s Civilizational Defense Strategy   The Burning of Bethany Magee James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. He’s just published his new novel, The Zebras from Minsk, the sequel to his well-received 2022 thriller, Letter of Reprisal. The Zebras from Minsk finds the Reprisal Team fighting against an alliance of Chinese and Russian backed terrorists, brutal child traffickers, and a corrupt anti-American billionaire, racing against time to take down a conspiracy that ranges from the hills of West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find The Zebras from Minsk (and Letter of Reprisal) on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions.

Funerals, like awards shows and sporting events, become excuses for the left to force their opinions on a captive audience. This tasteless trend finds expression with the death of Brigitte Bardot, sex symbol extraordinaire, at 91. Rather than condemn laws that penalize mere speech, leftists damn Bardot for speaking her mind. “Rest in peace Ms. Bardot,” pop songstress Chappell Roan shared on Instagram. “She was my inspiration for red wine supernova.” Then the internet mob showed up with their digital pitchforks and torches. “Holy $#!+ I did not know all that insane $#!+ Ms. Bardot stood for,” Roan explained in an attempted redo. “Obvs I do not condone this. Very disappointing to learn.” Bardot, like Sophia Loren and Ursula Andress, stood for beauty in those beautiful years that followed the Second World War but came before bell-bottoms, sideburns, and polyester uglied everything up. The perverse left does not see visions of her dancing barefoot in And God Created Woman when Bardot comes up, but instead reads her criticism of Muslim immigration to France as racism and support for Marine Le Pen as anathema to decency. “Many actresses flirt with producers to get a role,” Bardot reflected during #MeToo. “Then when they tell the story afterwards, they say they have been harassed.” Would she know any of this from her years in show business or should we dismiss her observation because it rubs raw the preconceptions of a faddish movement? Funerals may be for the living, but for the left every death is about them. How do her loved ones feel? Who cares? The people who hated her really need comfort and attention. NPR’s All Things Considered explored Bardot’s “complicated legacy” (strangely, left-wingers in the film industry never bequeath a “complicated legacy”). A Vogue headline hubristically reads: “Mourning Brigitte Bardot Doesn’t Mean Absolving Her.” A Le Monde article claimed in its first line that Bardot, who embodied physical beauty, “embodied racial hatred.” Was Brigitte Bardot really a human Rorschach test? Bardot may have spent the last half-century of her life dedicated to animal rights, ridiculed Sarah Palin as a “disgrace to women” for promoting oil exploration, and personified the sexual revolution through her adultery, divorces, troubled relationship with motherhood, and sex-kitten vibe more than anyone who lived during it. All of this means nothing to political totalitarians who demand an embrace of everything they deem righteous. A CNN article eulogizes Bardot as “an early prototype for the Trump-era pin-up.” Cannot her epitaph read that she was hot (chaude, even) and just omit the politics, which seem convoluted rather than consistent, anyhow? “Her politics leaned heavily towards the right,” Fiona Sinclair Scott and Leah Dolan falsely insist in the CNN article titled, “French Girl Chic or right-wing pin-up? The complicated style legacy of Brigitte Bardot.” “In 1992, she married Bernard d’Ormale, a former advisor to Jean-Marie Le Pen — founder of France’s far-right National Front party,” they write. “She was convicted five times for inciting racial hatred, oftentimes directed at the Muslim community, and was publicly dismissive of the #MeToo movement and feminism, preferring to focus her philanthropic efforts on the rights of animals over women.” The authors write of hyper-feminine, possibly right-wing-coded beauty ideals blah, blah, blah, trad wife, blah, blah, blah, Sydney Sweeney, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Rather than condemn laws that penalize mere speech, leftists damn Bardot for speaking her mind. They cite her flouting of draconian French edicts against expression as not a badge of honor but a mark of shame. And it is — theirs, not hers. Who looks at this woman and has politics on the brain? READ MORE from Daniel J. Flynn: Stranger Things Season 5: Rooting for the Villain Norman Podhoretz, RIP Party Cannibals

Britain has been experiencing a cost-of-living crisis since the Brexit in 2020. Today, the situation is no different with persistent inflation, low growth, and debt now revealing signs of economic stagnation. A stark contrast emerges between the UK and the U.S. in post-pandemic productivity performance. The UK’s growth in GDP-per capita (often used as a proxy indicator of a country’s standard of living) continues to lag that of almost all G7 nations. The response two years ago from the British government to this malaise (termed the “British disease” in the ‘70s) was  — just accept it — apparently, they have. Bank of England chief economist Huw Pill seems to have adopted the “Marie Antoinette” approach in his advice to the people of Britain: they must “accept that they are poorer”; otherwise, inflation will stay persistent.  The chief economist, who earns £180,000 ($225,000) per year by the way, complained that people and businesses have responded to higher bills and costs by asking for higher wages or charging their customers more money. How dare they! Speaking at an event at Columbia Law School, Mr. Pill said at the time: “The UK, which is a big net importer of natural gas, is facing a situation where the price of what you’re buying from the rest of the world has gone up a lot, relative to the price of what you’re selling to the rest of the world, which is mainly services in the case of the UK.” “So, somehow in the UK, someone needs to accept that they’re worse off, and stop trying to maintain their real spending power by bidding up prices whether through higher wages or passing energy costs on to customers.” Fast forward to today: Over just this past month, food prices have risen by 5.2 percent compared to last year and will likely accelerate to 6.0 percent by year’s end. On average, UK households spend around £5,283 ($7,135) a year on groceries, and this will likely increase by £275 ($371) unless people change what they buy. The U.S. consumer spends roughly $6,224 per year on food — almost $1,000 less. A pattern seems to have developed: back in 2022, Bank of England governor, Andrew Bailey, faced severe criticism after urging workers not to seek a significant pay increase because it fuels inflation — which was running at over 10 percent at the time. At 3.2 percent currently, it is below the 11.1 percent figure reached in October 2022 — a 40 year high — but continues well above the Bank of England’s target of 2.0 percent. The Trump administration just reported a CPI figure of 2.7 percent. Britain’s long-running cost-of-living crisis is no longer viewed as a temporary shock but rather a structural decline, according to a stark new forecast from the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR). The UK-based think tank warns that high inflation, weak growth, and mounting debt are steadily eroding living standards, leaving British households poorer than before the Covid-19 pandemic and pushing the country down the global economic rankings. Far from regaining lost ground, the UK is now expected to fall further behind most of its G7 peers over the coming decade.  CEBR’s World Economic League Table, released on December 26, paints a sobering picture. The report projects that the UK will slip from 19th to 22nd place in global GDP per capita rankings by 2030, overtaken by economies such as Hong Kong, Finland, and the United Arab Emirates. Even more striking is the longer-term outlook: by 2035, British living standards are forecast to fall behind those of Malta, a former colony with a fraction of the UK’s population and economic heft.  In dollar terms, GDP per capita is expected to reach just $58,775 next year, a figure that underlines how limited growth in income has become for the average Briton. The figure for the U.S. is $89,599 – a 4.0 percent increase from last year. What makes the forecast particularly troubling is Britain’s weak performance relative to its closest competitors. According to CEBR, the UK’s GDP per capita growth over the next five years will be the second weakest in the G7, ahead of only Japan. This is not a case of global stagnation dragging Britain down; rather, it reflects domestic vulnerabilities that other advanced economies have been more successful at managing. While countries such as the United States and parts of Europe have seen stronger productivity rebounds and wage growth, the UK remains ensconced in a low-growth cycle.  CEBR economist Pushpin Singh describes Britain’s predicament as high inflation, high debt, and low growth — with each element reinforcing the others. Persistent inflation has eroded purchasing power, especially for lower- and middle-income households, while high public debt constrains the government’s ability to stimulate the economy without resorting to tax increases.  Singh notes that the UK’s economic performance increasingly resembles France rather than the United States, particularly in productivity and public spending. “UK welfare spending is still not as bad as France. But are we on the road there? I think so in terms of elevated welfare spending, tax receipts not being enough [to compensate], and … the NHS and other civil service sector spending.” The report noted that the UK economy grew by just 1.4 percent in 2025 and projected an average annual growth rate next year of around 1.5 percent — well below what would be needed to meaningfully raise living standards or close the gap with peer economies. Singh warned the outlook remains “very much skewed to the downside,” adding that Britain was in some ways “still very much living off its past glories.”  A stark contrast emerges between the UK and the U.S. in post-pandemic productivity performance. While American productivity has been “off the charts” since COVID-19 according to Singh, Britain continues to struggle with productivity growth. The report suggests an emerging divergence between UK and American economic models, with Britain’s trajectory more closely aligning with European welfare-state approaches despite historical ties to U.S.-style capitalism. The risk for Britain is not just falling further in the global rankings, but settling into a new normal of diminished economic ambition and reduced prosperity for its people — an outcome that would have seemed unthinkable for one of the world’s richest nations only a generation ago. READ MORE from F. Andrew Wolf Jr.: Trump’s Economy Grows 4.3 Percent, Dashing Economists’ Lower Expectations Economists Complain About Trump’s New Inflation Figures The Netflix-Warner Bros. Merger — Is ‘Going to the Movies’ Over?

Redfield’s Warning: What I Learned (But Couldn’t Tell You) Might Save Your Life By Dr. Robert R. Redfield (Skyhorse, 256 pages, $31) Dr. Robert Redfield looked concerned. It was September 2020, and the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had just poked me in the neck and found my lymph node swollen like a rock.  We made mistakes in our COVID response, he writes, and we must begin by admitting it. “Michael, I don’t want to alarm you, but you need to be examined right away,” Redfield warned me. “That could indicate cancer.” Serving as an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) during COVID, I spent a lot of time with Redfield and other public health leaders on the pandemic response. At times, Redfield and I disagreed; always, we were mutually respectful. I learned to listen to him closely.  That day, I was rushed off to the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center where the chief surgeon removed my lymph node and confirmed it was head and neck cancer. My life quickly spiraled into treatment and recovery, and Redfield was along for the ride.  I am alive because I listened to Dr. Redfield then, which is why I’m writing today. If our nation reads and heeds his new book (Redfield’s Warning: What I Learned [But Couldn’t Tell You] Might Save Your Life), millions of lives may be saved in the next pandemic.  The good doctor’s warning: if our nation does not acknowledge what we did both right and wrong in the COVID response, we will make the same mistakes and more. And, according to Redfield, the next pandemic is coming, it will make COVID look like a head cold, and that means millions more dead Americans. Redfield recites chapter and verse through the rights and wrongs of the U.S. pandemic response. His recitation is unvarnished, as he warns the reader in the opening pages. He is forthright in his critique of the Trump Administration’s initial response, but he holds his strongest criticism for the Biden team’s vaccine safety and efficacy claims and their controversial mandate. His examples make his biggest concern clear as a bell: pandemic response leaders destroyed the reputation of our public health system, and Americans may ever trust that system again.  In March 2020, President Donald Trump appointed me to straighten out what Redfield identifies as a vexing problem as COVID-19 kidnapped our country: public health communications. The federal government created confusion by first saying masks were useless (because we needed to preserve masks for healthcare workers) and then reversing the message weeks later to declare masks essential for all. Similarly, Redfield is convincing when he details the feds’ demand for six-foot social distancing as not based on science at all.  Redfield strongly advocated three-foot distancing, which would have made it easier to keep schools open. But by March 2020, when I joined the COVID response team, more than a million American students were already banned from attending school. As Redfield predicted then and discusses in his book, the school closures caused immeasurable social and economic costs.  The communications problem was made septic by rivalries among our top health leaders. Redfield reminds us more than once that HHS leaders were deeply divided. They sat together in COVID Task Force and Operation Warp Speed meetings, but there were strong disagreements. This sometimes complicated the crisis. I got along well with all the players. They were my peers, by the deception of rank, but they were all giants in their fields. I learned to trust the deeply experienced and highly ethical Redfield more than any other scientist in the COVID response — especially as I watched him nearly burn his career down in defense of the truth.  We know now that COVID originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a Chinese research laboratory located near the first human cases of the virus. Americans were later astonished to learn that taxpayers provided HHS gain-of-function research grants that helped develop the human-to-human spread of the virus in the lab. “There are men and women actually trying to teach these viruses how to infect human tissue because they believe that will allow them to find a vaccine,” Redfield writes. “That is just not smart.” This is research that will change the world “much more than the atom bomb.” The first time I saw Redfield advocate the “lab leak theory,” shortly after I joined, the COVID Task Force meeting nearly erupted. Faces turned lava red; opponents of the theory loudly disagreed. The CDC director, a deeply respected, lifelong government scientist, had just told them to look in the mirror for the blame. And they weren’t having it.  As a result, Redfield still suffers a quiet campaign to destroy his career today. And it’s this “scientific arrogance” that Redfield cautions us about the most. This woeful overconfidence led to COVID communications mistakes, damaging rivalries, and federal grants for prohibited research in Wuhan. But arrogance is also the new villain in Redfield’s Warning. In a particularly disturbing passage of his book, the doctor who helped solve our nation’s AIDS crisis details how his global public health colleagues decided to publish results of 2010 US-funded gain-of-function research in the Netherlands on H5N1 bird flu, known to kill 60 percent of the people infected. What resulted was a public guide on how to make the deadly bird flu jump from human-to-human.  Redfield loudly opposed that publication. With this data, he wrote, he could change the virus into a human scourge in a week.  Basic public information proves Redfield is right. Bird flu is here, today it is much more deadly than COVID in humans, and arrogant scientists or bad actors will weaponize it soon. It’s only a matter of time.  But we appear to have learned little from the last pandemic, he writes, so the next one may be unimaginably worse.  Redfield’s advice: prepare. As our government provides the financial support for defense contractors to build planes and ammunition in peacetime, he advises the feds must fund biosecurity countermeasures more aggressively. Don’t just make one or two bird flu antivirals — make 10 or 20. Get the diagnostics, drugs, and medical devices ready now. It’s coming. Like my cancer warning in 2020, Redfield is not trying to alarm us, but we must act now. We made mistakes in our COVID response, he writes, and we must begin by admitting it. Only then will our public health system begin to earn back trust and save lives.  Mr. Caputo served as Assistant Secretary for Public affairs at HHS 2020-2021. A 40-year global political adviser, he has served Presidents Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush.

Over recent years, trust in elections among the American electorate has been in decline. The Trump Administration has expressed a commitment to better secure the vote, and has taken an initial step in this direction with moves to prevent non-citizens from voting in federal elections. In a time when the legitimacy of America’s elections has come under question for various reasons, citizenship verification is a crucial first step. The President asked Congress earlier this year to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which passed the house back in April. The SAVE Act would enshrine strict verification of voters’ citizenship into federal law. However, it still sits awaiting consideration by the Senate. With some 70 percent of Americans supporting such a measure, this should not be a hard decision. While election legislation primarily rests with the states, there has long been a role for the federal government in protecting the rights of voters and ensuring trustworthy elections, including around who can vote. In the absence of the SAVE Act, the states will be left with a patchwork of procedures, some less effective than others, to keep non-citizens from voting. Thus, the time has come for the Senate to get in gear and pass the SAVE Act. The SAVE Act if signed into law would require states to collect and document proof of citizenship from each voter, in the form of a birth certificate, passport, naturalization documentation, or other proof. In the case of a name change not reflected on these documents, such as due to marriage, the voter would have to document the name change. These requirements would not apply to voters who are already registered at their current place of residence. They would not have to present proof of citizenship unless and until their current registration expires (such as through inactivity or because they move out-of-state.) The SAVE Act would provide for criminal penalties on election officials who allow illegal voting. It also stipulates that states must conduct voter list maintenance activities to identify potential non-citizen voters and remove them from the voter rolls. Critics of the bill, mostly on the Democrat side of the aisle, argue in unison that such a law is unnecessary because existing law prohibits non-citizens from voting. However, enforcement, unsurprisingly, occasionally falls short. There have been multiple observed instances of non-citizen voting. Many more cases may have gone undetected. The risk of a close election being determined by some non-citizens slipping through the cracks is not something the American people should be expected to bear. A compelling case in point is a 2014 article published in the academic journal Electoral Studies. The study found evidence that “some non-citizens participate in U.S. elections, and that this participation has been large enough to change meaningful election outcomes.” Prior to the 2014 election, North Carolina identified 1,454 registrants on the voter roll who were not citizens, as reported by the Public Interest Legal Foundation. A particularly notorious recent case is that of Ian Andre Roberts, an immigrant illegally in the U.S. with an extensive criminal background, who became an Iowa school superintendent and was discovered this year to have been registered to vote in Maryland. The effectiveness of current verification efforts vary by state and with the channel or procedure used to register. With registrations that rely on an affidavit connected to citizenship attestation without any checking against DMV data, the risk that a noncitizen might slip through the cracks increases. During a third-party voter registration drive, for instance, a noncitizen could be given a registration form and then proceed to check the citizenship box and sign the affidavit, whether knowingly or not. Some states allow same-day registration and voting at the polls, which arguably entails the greatest level of risk. Registration forms submitted in advance of casting a ballot allow time for verification using the SAVE system and other systems. But same-day registration, hypothetically at least, could open the flood gates to bad-faith actors falsifying their eligibility right at the time of the election. For their part, opponents to the law have also expressed the view that the SAVE Act would pointlessly complicate registration for all citizens. As aforementioned name changes, such as for new spouses, can add yet more inconvenience to the process. The requirements of the SAVE Act, however, are no more burdensome than what takes place in other important contexts requiring a similar degree of verification, such as obtaining a bank account or a passport. Furthermore, no action would be required from currently registered voters unless and until their current registration lapses or they relocate. Admittedly, it is а grey area for implementation of the SAVE act whether voters would need to verify citizenship records again when relocating to another state. It should suffice to verify citizenship records only once provided these records are transferable across states. Thus, a modest caveat is that steps should be taken to remove this potential additional burden by establishing a process through which the initial citizenship verification can become a permanent record, transferable across states. Another modest caveat that voters who had been registered without proving citizenship and who have recently relocated may find themselves under a tight deadline for collecting the required documents prior to getting registered again. But this burden could be mitigated by allowing for a grace period for such voters, granting them some leeway past the deadline. To conclude, there are sufficient reasons for documenting proof of citizenship to justify adding any modest “complication” to the registration process. That is why the Senate must follow through and do what is right by passing the SAVE Act. In a time when the legitimacy of America’s elections has come under question for various reasons, citizenship verification is a crucial first step. READ MORE: The Filibuster Must Be Euthanized Now SCOTUS Must Stop Mail-In Voting Madness Iowa Does Not Need ‘Revolutionary’ Election Changes That Violate Voters’ Associational Rights Andrew Calem-Mandujano, is co-founder and managing director of UnrivaledPolitics.com, which specializes in data analytics and commentary related to elections and political issues.  He is a graduate of Penn State University and a Python programmer and foreign languages afficionado.