Senior Democratic senators told The Daily Signal that voter citizenship and identification legislation backed by President Donald Trump—the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act—has stalled amid unified Democratic opposition. “I haven’t heard officially that it is dead, but it shows no signs of life,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D‑Conn., told The Daily Signal. Democrats have repeatedly likened the measure to “Jim Crow 2.0” and argued it would disenfranchise voters. Asked whether Trump and hard‑line conservatives could revive the bill ahead of the midterms, Blumenthal predicted it would remain dormant. “It seems to be lacking any kind of momentum,” he said. Sen. Tim Kaine, D‑Va., said Democrats must stay vigilant despite the bill’s failure to advance. “Even if it hasn’t passed, there are members here and the president who still really want to do it,” Kaine told The Daily Signal, adding that an attempt could still be made to pass the measure by unanimous consent on the Senate floor. Kaine also declined to speculate on whether Senate Republican Leader John Thune would pursue changes to chamber rules, such as abolishing the filibuster, but signaled confidence that Thune would not. Republicans on Capitol Hill have previously categorized Thune’s previous efforts to allegedly bring the bill to a vote as theatrics. Sen. Ben Ray Luján, D‑N.M., echoed Kaine’s assessment, saying the legislation appears driven more by only some members who want to push politics. “I don’t know if President Trump has given up on passing the SAVE America Act. We’ll see what happens legislatively between now and the midterms,” Luján said. “This feels like it’s more about the midterms than anything else.” Luján added that he and other senators have highlighted concerns about the bill’s impact nationwide. “I was one of the colleagues on the floor who shed light on how this would hurt all states, not just some,” he said. Republican House lawmakers have said Thune has urged colleagues to avoid publicly discussing abolishing the filibuster. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R‑Fla., also wrote on social media that Thune told lawmakers there would be “no SAVE America Act.” I was there I heard it. https://t.co/gCsTNqQvUs— Tim Burchett (@timburchett) April 29, 2026 When asked by The Daily Signal to respond to the claims directed at him by his congressional colleagues, Thune said he “will look for a window” to bring the bill to the floor for a vote. “We didn’t have a vote on it last week because of the budget resolution and the Kennedy amendment,” Thune added.

New York City’s democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani has already run out of other people’s money, and he’s only been in office for four months. Color me shocked. Mamdani announced in a press conference Wednesday that New York City faces a financial “crisis of historic magnitude” and asked the city council for extended time to submit his budget. What a surprise that the young mayor is late to turn in his first big homework assignment. Mamdani is correct that he faces a huge problem though. The city’s budget deficit over the next few years is projected to rise to about $12 billion. To put that number into perspective, New York City’s deficit is bigger than the entire budget of about a dozen states. Mamdani blamed this financial calamity on his predecessor, Mayor Eric Adams, of course. You can be sure that New York Democrats will return to the “blame Adams” well for some time given that they practically threw him out of the party for opposing President Joe Biden’s open border policies. Adams does deserve some of the blame. So does the entire New York City political apparatus—which is notably bereft of Republicans. But this reality is hardly an endorsement of Mamdani’s platform, at least for those not totally bought into the socialist flim-flam sauce he’s selling. Mamdani never said he’d reduce his predecessor’s spending, far from it. Instead, his entire campaign was built on giving new, “free” things away. Free childcare, free buses, and government-run grocery stores were all at the top of Mamdani’s agenda. All that free stuff doesn’t come cheap. Mamdani’s excuse for why he can’t afford to fund all these programs is that the city doesn’t collect enough money. Keep in mind, the New York City budget is larger than that of nearly every state in the union, despite having a much lower population than many. That’s still not enough to fund Mamdani’s grandiose proposals. “Years of mismanagement and chronic under budgeting, alongside a structural imbalance between what New York City sends to the state and what we receive in return, have taken a toll,” he said, insisting that the problem was one of “revenue.” In a sense this was all part of the plan. Mamdani spent his first months messaging about how he was frantically searching for money to give to you, the people. Finding nothing, he’ll now seek to do more of what he spoke about gleefully on Tax Day: tax the rich. Or at least say he’s taxing the rich while actually squeezing money out of everyone. He’s also clearly angling to get a bailout from New York State. New York City is nearly tapped out, but surely there are more people to soak elsewhere. Unfortunately, the state is running on fumes. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has been reduced to begging rich former New Yorkers living in Florida to please come back to pay for all the fraud, er, I mean wonderful government programs. This has created an interesting dynamic where Gov. Hochul is forced to play a push and pull game over money with a mayor who is quite popular with the Democratic base. But even in a scenario in which Mamdani gets some kind of bailout from Albany, the future of what was once the financial capital of the U.S. is looking murky. Mamdani is refusing to take his foot off the spending gas. His further plans put even the previous high revenue in jeopardy. And people are leaving. The “rich” certainly have been, but recent trends show that pretty much every demographic has been fleeing the state as of late (besides the hordes of Biden’s immigrant “asylum” seekers). The Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit think tank, did a study on New York City and found that after the post-COVID-19 influx of immigrants the Big Apple continued its trend of population decline. This reality is even more dire when one considers that the people leaving typically have more taxable wealth than those arriving. “Net domestic outmigration not only affects population, but also the taxable income that stays in New York,” the Citizens Budget Commission study read. “Not all income earned by NYC residents moves when they move, but some does. Furthermore, per capita income indicates that in-movers typically earn less than out-movers.  Between 2019 and 2023, New Yorkers who moved out made $68 billion more than those who moved to New York City. This includes a shift of $14 billion to Florida, $2 billion to Texas, and $23 billion to other parts of New York State.” That leaves Mamdani and his fellow Democrats trapped in an ongoing turf war over who they are allowed to pillage. As New York City Councilwoman Vickie Paladino—one of the few Republican officials left in the city—said in an interview with talk show host Glenn Beck, Mamdani’s ideas to get more money are “insane.” New York City is about to see a mass exodus of GIANT corporations (read: major taxpayers and employers) if Mamdani has his way. Which is a really stupid "solution" to a budget crisis. NYC Councilwoman @VickieforNYC explains:“Word came down yesterday, something about Charles… pic.twitter.com/3rLDG1oceH— Glenn Beck (@glennbeck) April 30, 2026 The reality for Mamdani and his friends in the city council is that their larger budget problem can’t be solved with a short- or long-term bailout or tax gimmicks to milk every last dollar out of businesses that may not be around much longer. The problem is baked into their governing model that’s long on promises, short on examples of success. The New Era of socialism is already looking so much like the old ones. Oh well, you get what you vote for.

The federal indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, which accuses the SPLC of wire fraud and bank fraud for funding members of the very white supremacist groups it claims to dismantle, has led some financial institutions to block grants to the group. After Fidelity Investments and Vanguard Financial announced they would stop issuing grants to the SPLC due to the indictment, The Daily Signal reached out to 15 companies on the Fortune 1000 whose foundations sent the SPLC more than $10,000 since 2020. Some of these companies have followed Fidelity’s lead in stating that the SPLC will not be eligible to receive grants through donor-advised funds due to the federal indictment. “Corporate donations to the Southern Poverty Law Center underscore the need for companies to ensure they are not inadvertently supporting extremism,” Dustin DeVito, director of research at 1792 Exchange, told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday. “Companies that outsource charitable giving programs to providers like Benevity should also verify that those platforms are not relying on defamatory SPLC smears to exclude eligible charities,” he added. SPLC Scandals Last week, a federal grand jury indicted the SPLC on wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy charges for sending money to members of the very white supremacist groups the center claims it exists to dismantle. The SPLC did not deny funding members of the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Nations, but insisted the funds were part of an informant program that it used to prevent violent attacks. The indictment, however, suggests that the SPLC didn’t just pay these field agents—it actually supervised “racist postings” for an organizer of the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally. The claim that the SPLC might be propping up hate in order to raise money aligns with long-term criticism of the group. Critics have long said the SPLC puts mainstream conservative and Christian groups on a “hate map” with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan in order to exaggerate the threat of “hate” and raise money by presenting itself as the key opponent of “hate.” The group has even put groups of medical professionals on the “hate map” for disagreeing with the SPLC’s outspoken support for transgender medical interventions. Major Companies Funding SPLC At least 15 major companies have given the SPLC at least $10,000 since 2020, according to an analysis from 1792 Exchange confirmed by The Daily Signal’s own research. Of these, only Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Thrivent Financial, and T. Rowe Price responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by publication time. 1. Gilead Sciences: $750,000 The foundation of the biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences gave the SPLC $500,000 in 2022 “to promote student health & wellbeing by advancing education equity,” and another $250,000 in 2023 for the same purpose. 2. Raymond James Financial: $689,079 The investment bank Raymond James Financial gave the SPLC $78,505 in the year ending March 2021, $96,360 in the year ending March 2023, $105,375 the following year, and $408,839 the year after. 3. BNY Charitable: $428,500 BNY, formerly the Bank of New York, gave $428,500 to the SPLC since 2020. The BNY Mellon Charitable Gift Fund gave the SPLC: $115,000 in 2020, $174,000 in 2021, $35,000 in 2022, $51,250 in 2023, and $53,250 in 2024. 4. PayPal: $310,435 PayPal Charitable Giving Fund gave the SPLC: $158,936 in 2020, $68,166 in 2021, $44,007 in 2022, and $39,326 in 2023. 5. T. Rowe Price: $235,425 The investment management firm T. Rowe Price gave the SPLC: $7,150 in the year ending March 2021, $45,650 the following year, $51,225 the next year, $50,500 ahead of March 2024, and $80,900 in the most recent available filing. “T. Rowe Price Charitable is aware of the federal indictment involving the SPLC,” the company told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday. “We are closely monitoring the legal process and will continue to observe the situation, taking action as necessary to ensure compliance with applicable regulatory and oversight standards.” 6. Allstate: $125,000 The foundation for the insurance company Allstate gave the SPLC: $100,000 in 2023 for “defending and expanding the rights of low-income black and brown workers in the Deep South,” and $25,000 in 2024 for a “racial equity go grant.” 7. TIAA: $101,575 The foundation for the Fortune 500 financial services company TIAA gave the SPLC: $78,745 in 2020, and $22,830 for the year ending in May 2021. The foundation closed in 2021, transferring the accounts to Renaissance Charitable Foundation. 8. Goldman Sachs: $90,500 The Goldman Sachs Charitable Gift Fund gave the SPLC: $47,000 in the year ending June 2020, $10,000 in the following year, $13,000 the year after, $10,000 the next year, and $10,500 ahead of June 2024. “We would not allow donations from our donor advised funds to be directed to an organization under federal criminal indictment,” Tony Fratto, global head of communications for Goldman Sachs, told The Daily Signal in a statement Wednesday. 9. Thrivent Financial: $52,237 The Fortune 500 nonprofit financial services company Thrivent Financial for Lutherans gave the SPLC: $6,239 in 2020, $10,424 in 2021, $12,150 in 2022, $10,336 in 2023, and $13,088 in 2024. “Thrivent’s generosity programs help clients direct charitable donations to more than 60,000 eligible nonprofits,” Justin Herndon, the nonprofit’s director of public relations, told The Daily Signal in a statement Thursday. “While client-directed gifts to the SPLC were previously allowed, we recently reviewed the organization against our program criteria and suspended them from our list of eligible organizations pending further review,” he announced. 10. JPMorgan Chase: $46,373 The JPMorgan Chase Foundation gave the SPLC: $14,519 in 2020, $10,846 in 2021, $7,534 in 2022, $7,405 in 2023, and $6,069 in 2024. Of note: JPMorgan Chase also contributed $500,000 to the SPLC after the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. The company would not comment when asked about Charlottesville, and did not respond to a request for comment for this story. 11. Northrop Grumman: $31,093 The foundation for the defense technology company Northrop Grumman gave the SPLC $31,093 in 2020. 12. Pfizer: $29,955 The foundation for the pharmaceutical company Pfizer gave the SPLC: $11,528 in 2021, $6,678 in 2022, $7,224 in 2023, and $4,525 in 2024. 13. GE Aerospace: $23,241 The foundation for the jet engine maker GE Aerospace gave the SPLC: $17,649 in 2020, $2,557 in 2021, $2,125 in 2022, and $910 in 2023. 14. Bank of America: $40,586 The Bank of America Charitable Foundation matches the grants employees give to various entities, including the SPLC. Bank of America Charitable gave the SPLC: $18,681 in 2021, $10,190 in 2021, $6,466 in 2022, and $5,249 in 2023. A Bank of America spokesperson clarified that those contributions came from an employee matching grant program, for which all IRS-designated 501(c)(3) nonprofits are eligible. 15. Liberty Mutual: $10,000 The foundation for the insurance company Liberty Mutual gave the SPLC $10,000 in 2022.

The new guard of conservatives are putting family policy first and have an understanding that pro-family policy has a direct correlation to strengthening the economy. “We have a ripe moment in this new era to advance causes that are really good for families,” Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., said at an event celebrating The Heritage Foundation’s newest policy paper, Saving America by Saving the Family. “The federal government has a real role to play here,” he continued. According to the paper, America is facing a crisis. Fewer than half of U.S. households are headed by a married couple, 40% of children are born outside of marriage, and the fertility rate dropped to a record low in 2024—1.59 births per woman, well below the 2.1 births per woman needed to meet population replacement. LIVE | Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years https://t.co/p6vUSRFxzy— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) April 30, 2026 All of these factors have a serious and direct impact on the economy. The more people there are to contribute to the economy and the country, the stronger the nation becomes. Banks shared that he was always a social conservative, “first concerned about our culture.” But now, he said he knows that these pro-family causes directly impact economic issues. President Donald Trump has begun to champion these ideas brought forward by The Heritage Foundation, which is asking whether America can be saved by first saving the family. Some of the main concepts in the policy paper have already been put into motion by the federal government, whether through the Trump administration or Congress. Our new report, Saving America by Saving the American Family, lays out a clear path to rebuild marriage rates, low fertility rates, and the epidemic of broken homes. Read it at https://t.co/ymWB8oT7QJ! pic.twitter.com/ZKt7R2oEKQ— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) January 8, 2026 Banks highlighted ideas such as school choice, choice in child care, reforming the inheritance tax, and creating tax-exempt savings accounts for newlyweds. These are ideas that will “encourage younger couples to get married younger, have kids younger, and preserve this spring country as our founders imagine,” he said. “What is … more important than conserving the family? Child tax credits, I think, kind of opened the door to an understanding that pro-family tax policy and economic policy are critical to protecting and conserving the family. And the family is fundamental to the survival of our country and our American culture,” Banks continued. “My mom and dad saw the American dream, and I’ve lived the American dream. I’ve seen it. … Marriage is the silver bullet to avoid poverty.” Great to celebrate all of the work that @sbaprolife does to advance and defend pro-life values across America.Honored to join my Senate colleagues in speaking at their annual gala last night in our nation’s capital pic.twitter.com/7s4nFbszeD— Senator Jim Banks (@SenatorBanks) April 30, 2026

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.    We’re approaching 60 days of the so-called Iran war, and we’re still getting these loud voices that Donald Trump has failed, that the war’s not going well. It’s completely nonempirical. It’s antithetical to the evidence.  Here we are at 60 days, and Iran is losing about $500 million in input per day. It’s running out of storage space in a week or two for its daily output of oil, at which point they either have to stop pumping or they’re going to have—if they don’t stop pumping—their wells will collapse.  They either have to stop pumping, or they have to build, as fast as they can, storage facilities, which will be known to us and we can take out.  So they’re at the brink economically. They have no military ability. The course of the war, how it ends, is entirely in the hands of the United States. It depends on whether you want an unconditional surrender and you want to pay an extra price—maybe another month or two—with economic strangulation, or you want to use air power to take out bridges, and you can do that.  What I’m getting at is it’s not a military problem like Afghanistan and Helmand Province, or the Marines having to go into Fallujah in Iraq. It’s entirely a political problem. It’s not a military problem. The military problem has been solved. It’s just a question of how much political price does Donald Trump—or risk, I should say—want to take to get an unconditional surrender and the removal of the regime.  He doesn’t need to do that. That was not one of his prewar agendas. The prewar agenda was to neutralize the nuclear proliferation of Iran, the missile and drone force, to attrite its military so it was not capable of conducting war, to stop the subsidies to its terrorist proxies, and to make sure it no longer attacked Americans and our allies as it has for 47 years. These have mostly been met—not quite, but mostly.  So what are the ripples strategically? Well, just recently, OPEC has announced—I should say the United Arab Emirates and perhaps Oman as well—that they don’t want to be in OPEC. Remember about OPEC: It was formed in 1973, and the whole purpose was to drive up the price of oil, and they did that by not pumping what they could pump.  So right now, they have each individual country has a quota, and that’s only about 70% or 80% of what they could pump if they were not in the cartel. That is what the United States is pumping right now—maximum. Russia will probably be pumping at maximum very soon. Venezuela will be pumping at maximum very soon.  But what you’re talking about is 2 million barrels, maybe, from the UAE alone. Maybe if Saudi Arabia gets out, they can pump another 20%. What I’m getting at is the long-range strategic value of the Straits of Hormuz are going to decline because all of these countries, once they see one person getting out and taking advantage of these high prices, they will swarm to get out.  But once they get out and pump more oil—and they’re immediately capable of pumping more oil—the price will drop, and the Straits of Hormuz will not be so important. And that will not be good for Iran if it has oil wells at all in two or three weeks.  The other thing to remember is China. Everybody talks about, “Well, China, China, China.” China hasn’t come out well. It had threatened to go into Taiwan all of the Biden administration. Year after year, it issued videos of bombing Japan, threatening to take out Taiwan, lecturing people: “Don’t tell us that we can’t take it.”  Pundits saying that they were emboldened by the Russians. I never understood that—Russia is in a Stalingrad-like quagmire. But once they looked at this type of war—an air war in a gulf—and they were thinking, we have to transmit, what, 300,000 troops or so across 110 miles of open sea. And from what we can see from the Americans, the Israelis, these Western powers have enormous ability to flood the zone with drones, with missiles, sophisticated air defenses, submarine drones, surface drones. It could be a nightmare.  And that’s not talking about the Taiwanese ability to defend themselves as well. So in a cost-benefit analysis, I think the message is the United States can pretty much do what it wants militarily, and China will be somewhat deterred.  Remember that it has lost its hold in Venezuela and in Iran. It was basically, along with Russia, controlling the Maduro regime, buying their sanctioned oil for a discount, selling them arms, trying to spread their influence in Latin America—the Panama Canal was a good example.  And the same was true of Iran. They were buying sanctioned oil at a discount and then flooding Iran with sophisticated weapons and hoping Iran would use those weapons to hamper or neuter Israel and attack United States installations, as they did in Syria and Iraq. And then China wanted Iran—which they did—to supply Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.  That’s going to be over with. Iran is broke. The people will not stand for—or the government won’t be so stupid when they’re impoverished—to start giving, what, $50 – $60 million a month to Arab terrorists just so they can cause havoc when the people are starving.  And they’ve lost probably a half a trillion dollars of a 50-year investment in their military, industrial, and nuclear industries.  So China’s on the losing end. Russia had lost the Assad regime. They were kicked out of the Middle East. They have a temporary little blip because the price of oil is going up. But as I said, with the breakup of OPEC and the increased production in Venezuela and the United States, as soon as this thing calms down, the price of oil is going to crash, and Russia will be a big loser in this.  More importantly, they saw, again, a demonstration of U.S. air power, and maybe by extension, they correlated it with NATO proficiency. So I think they will try to get out of the war and get as much territory as they can along the existing battlefield today—maybe call it a DMZ. But they’re running out of people and money. They’ve lost a million and a half soldiers.  And so this war probably reminded them that they don’t have very many strategic options elsewhere, and they can’t develop them as long as they’re tied down in Ukraine.  Europe was a big, big, big loser. They had forged a relationship with Donald Trump. They had agreed for a 2% and had met that 2% investment of GDP in defense, but they were talking about 5%. NATO had called Trump “Daddy,” and then all of a sudden Trump assumed they were normal allies.  So when he went in there, he didn’t want to disclose what he was going to do because he felt the U.S. Left and the Congress, or the Europeans would tell—and they would have revealed any type of surprise.  But more importantly, he felt that the Spanish, the Italians, the British, the French—all of them—would just say, “No comment,” or “This is a United States effort. We support our NATO ally,” and then call him up and say “Donald, were not going to talk about it but use our airspace, use out NATO bases you pay for most of them. And this is what were gonna do but were gonna do it under the radar.” No. Instead, they pandered to their Islamic constituencies, their left-wing constituencies. In Spain, even in Italy with Meloni, they said: No bombers in Sicily. No planes in Spain. Can’t fly over France. Can’t use Diego Garcia unless it’s for defensive purposes.  What is a defensive strike? What does that mean? We’ll let you have a missile battery if somebody tries to destroy our base—we’ll allow you to defend our base—but don’t take off anywhere and attack anybody.  It was absolutely ridiculous. Europe came off really badly—really badly.  And then they made it worse when they said they were going to patrol the Strait and then they realized the Strait might be kinetic, and they would have to use some force if we were to turn it over to them and they don’t have that force. So it’s all talk, talk, talk, and its based on envy and anger at the United States.  And it’s a very dangerous game they’re playing because at some point the United States says: We love you. Europe’s a great place. You’ve got problems—just settle them yourself. Maybe we’ll have a coalition of the willing, just like you did in Serbia.  You went into Serbia—that wasn’t a NATO country. Kosovo—you weren’t protecting a NATO country. You went into Libya—those people weren’t in NATO. But you freelance all the time—in Chad, in the Falklands you people—and we always help you. And then when we want to freelance, you’re reluctant.  So go ahead, do what you want, but count us out.  And finally, the American Left kept saying the war was lost—the war was lost—the war was lost. Donald Trump blew it.  Don’t count him out. We have six months before the midterms. The price of oil could crash. A lot of the things Donald Trump put into practice—with the big, beautiful bill, deregulation, tax cuts, enormous amount of foreign investment—all of that has plenty of time to kick in in August or July and have a stronger economy than we do now, with cheap oil.  More importantly, he can say that in his regime, his realm, his tenure, he neutralized the threat from Venezuela. It’s not spreading communism throughout South America—Latin America, and he neutralized the Middle East in a way that all seven prior presidents had dreamed and had never done. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.