The senators who exposed the Biden administration’s snooping on Republicans and conservative groups have differing views on extending a surveillance provision for foreign intelligence gathering. The two matters are distinct, to be sure, as the latter involves intelligence, while the former was primarily a criminal investigation targeting President Donald Trump, expanded to include supporters. Still, both involve surveillance, and critics of the foreign surveillance provision argue that it can allow for incidental collection of American citizens’ data. Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, championed extending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the U.S. to spy on foreigners abroad without a warrant. He has defended it as a vital national security tool. Grassley, along with Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., helped expose the Biden Justice Department’s “Arctic Frost” probe that involved issuing subpoenas to phone companies for data on eight Republican senators and a total of about 400 individuals involved in supporting President Donald Trump; the probe was later part of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation. “Section 702 [of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] is an essential national security tool. That law is responsible for over 60% of the intelligence in the president’s daily brief. Section 702 enables our intelligence and law enforcement communities to thwart attacks before they occur,” Grassley said in a Senate floor speech last week. “It’s, as I see it, a preventative national defense and national security issue. Section 702 has saved countless lives in the United States and even abroad,” Grassley added. “It gives our military a strategic edge, allows us to hunt down foreign terrorists and rescue hostages, and helps us defend critical infrastructure from cyberattacks. More recently, Section 702 has enabled more than 90% of CIA-driven synthetic drug disruptions abroad and prevented a mass casualty terrorist attack at a Taylor Swift concert overseas.” On Bloomberg News, Johnson said he wanted to renew it but desired reforms.  “I wish that those who wanted to renew it would want to protect civil liberties to a greater extent, but the bottom line, if you’ve got bad actors, no matter how many controls you put in place, they will probably violate them,” Johnson said. “I think we will probably reauthorize this. I will be generally supportive.” Members of the House Freedom Caucus have insisted on a warrant for all spying. In April, Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., posted on X: “The current FISA ‘reforms’ are being championed by the same people who did Arctic Frost. Not to mention Joe Biden signed those ‘reforms’ last year. I will not yield to big brother on this. GET A WARRANT.” The current FISA “reforms” are being championed by the same people who did Arctic Frost. Not to mention Joe Biden signed those “reforms” last year. I will not yield to big brother on this. GET A WARRANT. https://t.co/wproAAchk0— Rep. Andy Ogles (@RepOgles) April 21, 2026 A leading Senate critic of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, made the comparison during a Senate hearing investigating the Arctic Frost probe in February. “As with what we’re covering here—these requests from telecommunications companies backed by a nondisclosure order—so too with FISA 702, somebody can, metaphorically speaking, be run over without ever knowing what happened,” Lee said during the hearing. “That’s why Congress has no business reauthorizing FISA 702 … without a warrant requirement … and political warfare, lawfare is bad, we shouldn’t weaponize these things.” The nature of the Arctic Frost probe was to review Trump’s challenge of the 2020 election outcome. While a federal grand jury subpoenaed the phone data of members of Congress, none of the senators nor other targets were notified. The nature of the FISA data gathering is about foreign intelligence collection authority, not a criminal investigation. Section 702 permits the government to compel electronic communication service providers to assist in the collection of intelligence on non-U.S. citizens located abroad, including phone records, emails, or texts. That can conceivably include information to or from an American in the United States, or “incidental” collection of information on Americans. In a statement of administration policy earlier this month, the Trump administration supported passage in the Senate before the lapse of the surveillance program. “As detailed in the 2026 Annual Threat Assessment, our nation faces multiple immediate threats to the homeland and to our national interests. Given the threats posed by nonstate actors—including drug cartels, which poison Americans, and cyber actors who target our critical infrastructure—as well as state adversaries engaging in espionage and illicit proliferation of destructive weapons, we must remain vigilant to keep the American people safe. This cannot be accomplished without the reauthorization of Section 702,” the June 4 statement of administration policy says.

As a former Army Ranger, I understand that no plan survives first contact. When conditions change, missions evolve. Veterans deserve a benefits system that operates with that same mindset.  But that’s not what’s happening when our country’s heroes return home injured.  A recent federal court ruling makes clear the failings of our current benefits system. Instead of adapting strategies to shifting realities, it’s entrenching itself in positions that are clearly detrimental to veterans’ well-being.  In that case, a federal court ruled against Veterans Guardian, a fee-based veteran service organization that helps veterans navigate the claims process. Ultimately, lawyers and courts will decide the legal questions surrounding this case. My concern is not whether Veterans Guardian wins or loses; it is why so many veterans feel they need outside help in the first place.  This case does not change the fact that the benefits system veterans are forced to navigate is unnecessarily complex and inefficient. The objective here should be easy to agree on and simple to achieve: Help our veterans access the benefits they’re entitled to as easily as possible. But achieving this straightforward goal is more like a bitter war of attrition than the straightforward mission we know it should be.  For more than a decade, veterans, lawmakers, advocacy groups, and multiple administrations have pushed the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to modernize its systems and put service members first.  There has been progress. We’ve seen improvements in processing times, which means shorter wait times for veterans and their families to learn what benefits they will receive. That’s a welcome improvement, because that period can be extremely stressful, piling psychological burdens on top of physical ones.  The VA has also upgraded its digital tools, helping veterans access services more easily. Yet despite this, the system moves far more slowly than our veterans deserve. Secretary Doug Collins inherited these challenges, and he has said his leadership team is cutting bloat and using AI to speed up approvals. But I haven’t seen those alleged improvements trickle down to me, nor have many veterans I’ve spoken to. Until those of us who have waited years in line can actually move forward, we will wonder if there is any leadership ready to put us first.   Thousands of veterans still face claims backlogs. Scheduling an appointment is often unnecessarily complicated and cannot always be accomplished online. Even basic digital functions sometimes feel outdated. If you’ve spent an afternoon at the DMV, you know the outdated government bureaucracy I’m talking about.   My own experience navigating the system has often involved unnecessary friction. Whether filing claims, managing appointments, or trying to understand administrative requirements, I have repeatedly found myself dealing with processes that left me feeling hopeless.   Claims can be delayed or denied because of procedural nuances. Appointments can be difficult to schedule or manage, relying on outdated methods like mailers and phone calls to reschedule. Over time, veterans are forced to learn a system that should have been designed around them in the first place.  Veterans encounter battles on many fronts as they navigate disability claims, healthcare needs, mental health treatment, family obligations, and civilian careers simultaneously. Every unnecessary step, confusing process, and avoidable delay creates friction for those who deserve the highest level of support.  The level of friction these wounded heroes face would never be tolerated on the battlefield. If leaders saw that sluggish processes and clumsy bureaucracy were slowing down their troops, they would fix those problems immediately. They wouldn’t waste time defending the process and making excuses. The bottleneck would be found by talking to soldiers directly, understanding the problem, and removing it.   To make the VA efficient, leaders need to listen to those “on the ground”—we know intimately what needs to be fixed.   That mindset is what’s missing from this debate, and it is exactly the mindset Secretary Doug Collins should be bringing to the Department of Veterans Affairs.   Too much attention is focused on who is allowed to help veterans navigate the system, and not enough attention is paid to why so many veterans feel they need outside help in the first place. If people are looking for alternative avenues to access their benefits, it is a sign that something is wrong.  When veterans believe they need consultants, advocates, nonprofits, attorneys, AI assistants, and third-party services to understand a benefits process, it should prompt policymakers to consider why the process is so difficult.  Secretary Collins and the VA need to admit that the old processes and infrastructure no longer meet the needs of today’s veterans. The VA’s mission should be to make the system so intuitive and efficient that veterans rarely need outside assistance at all.   Military leaders are judged by results, not intentions. Public officials responsible for serving veterans should be held to the same standard. That includes Secretary Collins and future VA leaders. That means giving veterans a benefits system that holds itself to the same standards that we upheld in uniform. A system that gives them the freedom to seek the help they need to accomplish the mission of securing the benefits they’ve earned.   We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

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.  I think after 60 years of affirmative action, DEI, racial essentialism, and racial fixation—especially in the United States, but also throughout the Western world, in Europe, Australia, and the former British Commonwealth—we are seeing the consequences.  Let me point out that our adversaries, China, Russia, and other places around the globe, don’t have this racial essentialism because they believe it is innate to human nature. And when you encourage it, you get something like Rwanda, what’s going on now in Nigeria, or what happened in the Balkans.  The natural order of men and animals is that birds of a feather flock together. So why would you encourage that instead of having assimilation, acculturation, and integration?  We’re suffering from tribal fatigue in the Western world.  All of a sudden, the straws are starting to break the camel’s back. We saw the attempted beheading in Belfast by an immigrant from Somalia. We saw Henry Nowak bleed to death while police watched him bleed and put handcuffs on him because his Sikh immigrant assailant lied and said he was a victim of Henry’s racism, which didn’t happen.  Here in the United States, we saw Iryna Zarutska, who was murdered on a subway. It was a very eerie video to see her assailant kill her and then see five people, who were also African American, walk right by her corpse. One of them muttered something to the effect that he had killed the white woman.  In addition to this, we’ve seen an emphasis on race. It seems that every time some of our politicians talk about it, they talk about white, white, white, white, white—always in a pejorative context.  Jasmine Crockett can’t finish a sentence without screaming and yelling. There’s a whole internet phenomenon now of AI-generated images of people urinating on the grave of Austin Metcalf. Karmelo Anthony has become a folk hero among parts of the Black community, it seems, and his victim, who was murdered, is somehow portrayed as the villain.  Then we see in the university this idea that we’re going to shift from affirmative action to DEI. What I mean is that the old Black-white binary would serve a larger purpose by saying that, for the first time in our history, everybody who is nonwhite has some claim against the majority because of their skin color.  You can be an Indian aristocrat, and Indians are, as I keep saying, the wealthiest ethnic group in the United States. You can be a Brazilian aristocrat. You can be anybody who has a claim—whether it’s linguistic, religious, racial, or ethnic—that you’re not part of the white establishment. Therefore, you expect, even if you’re an immigrant, and especially if you’re an immigrant, to come to the United States with certain advantages.  But the problem with all this is that the data doesn’t support it.  If you look at crimes between nonwhite and white people, depending on the type—whether it’s assault, rape, murder, or theft—it can be six, 10, 20, 30, or even 50 times asymmetrical, with nonwhite offenders committing crimes against white victims.  You know that’s true because the pool of victimizers is not large enough for the pool of would-be victims.  So then you get these surreal Orwellian events like Jussie Smollett suggesting that two imaginary MAGA supporters beat him up in the middle of the night. Or Michael Brown, where people around him claimed he was shot in the back and had his hands up saying, “Hands up, don’t shoot”—a complete lie. Or the Duke lacrosse case. Or Al Sharpton and Tawana Brawley.  These stories keep coming.  Why do they keep coming? Because we’re no longer a systemically racist country. We’re not.  People have learned that if you appeal to the empathy of others and say, “I am a victim,” then you can gain preferences in admissions, hiring, retention, and other areas.  The problem with this is twofold.  First, class is completely divorced from race. We are in a global environment, and we’re now 60 to 70 years beyond the civil rights era.  What you’re seeing are young people, middle-aged people, and people in their 60s who have grown up only with racial preferences working against them because they are told they have privilege.  But the white population, if you can even call it that, doesn’t rank at the top of income. Many Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Arab Americans, and Indian Americans have higher incomes than whites do.  In actual numbers, the largest number of Americans receiving poverty assistance are white people. Think of the people we saw in East Palestine, Ohio, who were largely neglected by the Biden administration when toxic fumes engulfed their community.  The premise of DEI and affirmative action was that if we acknowledged past discrimination and tried to repair it by giving special preferences, avoiding meritocracy, or bringing in people from the so-called Third World, then people in the Western world who identified as white could seek atonement.  The expectation was that this generosity would be reciprocated and would lead to an acculturated, integrated, and assimilated society.  But human nature doesn’t work that way.  Whether you’re white, Black, or brown, it doesn’t matter.  If somebody gives you a privilege and removes deterrents from your behavior by saying, “If you do something wrong, we’re going to calculate your childhood or the sins of society and exempt you from the full force of the law,” then two things happen.  First, people naturally feel contempt rather than gratitude toward those extending the privilege. They think, “These people have no confidence in their civilization. They have no confidence in themselves.”  That’s one reason the word “white” is so often used in a negative context. People assume there must be guilt behind DEI, racial preferences, quotas, and endless apologies.  Second, when people are given preferences, their own behavior is no longer scrutinized to the same degree. If you believe there will be no consequences for bad behavior, you’re more likely to engage in it.  So the West embraced this idea that we would bring in millions of people. By the way, we now have 53 million people who were not born in the United States—16% of the population. Both are all-time highs. Some countries in Europe are even higher.  Republicans and conservatives thought they would gain inexpensive labor and that immigrants would work their way up to the middle class. That does happen often, but not necessarily when you bring in 10 to 12 million people in just four years, mostly from poor countries.  The left, meanwhile, believed nobody really agreed with its agenda. Who would? Men competing in women’s sports, open borders, 10,000 illegal immigrants a day, eliminating fossil fuels, and so on.  So they thought they could import new constituencies. Their counterparts in Europe thought the same thing.  Where are we now?  We’re in tribal fatigue.  People have reached the point where, if you say your racial identity—whether you’re white, Black, brown, or anything else—is essential to who you are rather than incidental, then you’ve got the ingredients for tribal warfare.  Unfortunately, the history of mankind is often the history of tribes killing each other.  Let’s hope we stop it in time in the United States because tensions are rising, and people are very tired of tribalism—a pre-civilizational concept. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

At least four Muslim members of the Texas Republican Party shared their experience at the state’s Republican convention over remarks they described as Islamophobic. “When they say Sharia-free, that means Muslim-free, no practices of Islam,” Mohamed Hussein, an attendee, told The Texas Tribune. “No one is calling for the state to implement Sharia laws.” Hussein said he was in disbelief that he was told to convert or leave—for the first time in his life. “Unity Drives Victory,” a slogan touted by the governor on press releases, placards, lanyards, and even the elephant he procured to march through the convention hall, became a rallying cry for the state’s leaders and party nominees. If the party becomes fractured, Republicans could lose to the Democrats and their U.S. Senate nominee, state Rep. James Talarico. On Saturday, the last day of the convention, outgoing GOP Chair Abraham George addressed two Muslim delegates from the stage, whom members tried to expel from the convention because of their ties to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a group the GOP and Gov. Greg Abbott have deemed a terrorist threat. “I would strongly advise you to leave our caucus,” George said, the Texas Tribune reported. “There is a Democrat convention happening in a couple weeks. Join them. There’s no place in America for you.” Also on Saturday, Hussein attended a panel from the Judeo-Christian Caucus moderated by Dr. Rick Scarborough, a former Southern Baptist pastor and the president of Recover America, an organization that engages ministers and pastors in politics. Speakers told the audience that immigrants who don’t believe in Judeo-Christian values will erode those values and create problems for America. Scarborough accused Muslims of lying to win political power. According to the Texas Tribune report, State Sen. Bob Hall also said Muslims are “required by Sharia to lie” to “stay below the radar of being aggressive.” Hussein replied that the attendees were told lies about Sharia throughout the convention, and that he was practicing Sharia peacefully at that very moment, Texas Tribune reported. “When they tell you that we’re compelled to lie, they are putting your Texan neighbors in an impossible position where nothing that we can say or do can absolve us from the crimes that they are accusing us of,” Hussein told the crowd. “That is not just. The Bible commands you to be just, and that is not American.” Sharia is generally interpreted as the framework, or laws, for how Muslims should live their lives. The code calls for fasting, daily prayer, modest dress, and charity. Sharia law, however, has attracted controversy over its perceived ties to strict enforcement of religion, female genital mutilation, hatred toward non-Muslims, and more. In an interview with The Texas Tribune, Scarborough clarified, saying that “if you’re going to embrace the values and the teachings that you’re advocating for, there’s no place in America for you. That’s not assimilation. That’s taking over.” A CAIR Chapter Founder Hussein, who moved to Houston in 1992 with his family from Egypt, was in attendance at the convention with Tarek Hussein, his father, the founder of CAIR’s Texas-Houston chapter. Tarek Hussein attended as a registered delegate. Part of the scrutiny from Republicans toward the Muslim community, particularly the segment affiliated with CAIR, comes after the organization has faced criticism over its funding ties, mission statement, and recent actions. Recently, CAIR has been accused of using its tax-exempt status to infiltrate American institutions with Sharia values and officials. The organization has also faced scrutiny for allegedly having direct ties to unidicted co-conspirators of Islamic terror attacks. CAIR, which has been designated as a terrorist organization by the governors of Texas and Florida, has also been the subject of congressional hearings this year. The Department of Health and Human Services opened an investigation into the organization’s use of federal funds tied to Afghan refugee resettlement programs and alleged associations, examining millions of dollars in grants. CAIR did not return the Daily Signal’s request for comment.

What makes an American an American? Hillsdale College Professor Matthew Spalding joined the Heritage Foundation’s Executive Vice President Derrick Morgan on Monday to answer this question and to discuss Spalding’s new book, The Making of the American Mind. The Declaration of Independence offers a unique answer to this question, Spalding told Morgan. He laid out certain principles that undergird the document and ought to unite Americans. How The Declaration Defines The American Mind Spalding mentioned the most famous line in the Declaration: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Spalding claimed Americans often do not appreciate the depth behind these lines. “It doesn’t say ‘We have some personal, subjective values we would like to share with you for your affirmation,’” Spalding said. The Founders declared their belief in stringent, objective truths that are evident or not. There is no “my truth” or “your truth”; rather, there is only “the truth”—a truth that guarantees the rights of man and later proved necessary to abolish slavery in the states. Second, “Prudence, indeed, will dictate.” In the modern age, Spalding claimed, people tend to think in binaries: “It’s all good or it’s all bad. It’s one thing or the other. We can’t think in nuance. We can’t make prudential judgments.” This was not the thought process of the Founders. The virtue of prudence was to guide the unfolding American project. Third is the very last line of the Declaration: “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” This Spalding called a “perfect sentence…an oath to each other.” But there is also the word “sacred,” which indicates a theology that underwrites the Declaration. Spalding claimed that there are five references to God in the Declaration. By the time the reader reaches the fifth, he is left with a certain understanding of the Founders’ God. “The [Founders’] God is the God of divine providence that intervenes in the lives of men…more than the deistic second version of the modern world,” Spalding told Morgan. What Unites Us to This Founding? According to Spalding, the Declaration is what binds Americans today to their founding. “That is what unites us. That’s what makes us a country,” Spalding said. “We are dedicated to universal truths about human liberty. That’s what makes America exceptional. It’s what makes America great and worthy of our affection.” When we lose the principle of liberty as an objective and divine truth guided by virtue, we lose our nation. “If you lose on that, you’re going to lose everything anyway.” According to Spalding, John C. Calhoun had to first attack the Declaration to defend the institution of slavery. Likewise, the Progressive movement beginning in 1912 also sought to eradicate the Declaration and its underwritten principles. Whoever wins the battle over these principles “is going to win America.” As we approach the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration and beyond, there will be many birthdays to celebrate. “The 250th anniversary of the Constitution is 11 years from now. So, between now and then, there are constant 250th anniversaries of all the steps to get there.” Spalding said each of these birthdays presents an opportunity to learn about our country and “think of the patriotic moments” that bind us to our Founding. “That’s how you make people love their country,” Spalding said.