Republican Randy Fine emerged triumphant Tuesday in a special election in Florida’s 6th Congressional District, The Associated Press projects, putting an end to speculation that the district could flip and hand Democrats a seat in Congress. The race received national attention and millions from Democrat donors who sought to send a message about their party’s continued relevance with a victory in the ruby-red district between Jacksonville and Orlando. Falling on the same day as Wisconsin’s high-profile state Supreme Court election, the Florida elections received a high level of attention. Democrats had hoped to flip two ruby-red districts to send a message of their continued relevance and to weaken Republican legislative power. Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin even traveled to Florida to promote both of the party’s candidates and continuously framed both races as referendums on the Trump administration. He described both Valimont and Weil as “proven leaders who will fight for Social Security, veterans, and public schools—while keeping [President Donald] Trump and [Elon] Musk in check.” Republicans, on the other hand, were keen to maintain their current margins in the House of Representatives, as they have their sights on passing a budget reconciliation bill, which requires only a simple majority in the House. Trump had both Republicans’ backs as well, delivering enthusiastic endorsements on social media. He described Fine as an “America First Patriot” and Patronis as “a wonderful friend to me, and to MAGA.” Despite both Gaetz and Waltz winning two-thirds of the vote in both districts in November, both of their would-be Republican successors faced fierce opposition.  In the 6th Congressional District, for example, Democrats outraised Republicans nearly 10-to-1, raising around $10 million. In the 1st Congressional District, Valimont raised about $6.5 million against Patronis’ $2.1 million. The post Republicans Fend Off Democrat Bid to Seize Florida House Seat appeared first on 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. There’s two things that ring true about Europeans and their relationship to us Americans. No. 1, they never feel or they never admit that they’re emulated. They admit they’re affected by the ill effects they think of America, but they’re not influenced by us. And No. 2, they’re the stalwarts of democracy. We have these pathologies of swinging hard to the right, or we’re yokels, or we’re anti-democratic, or we’re MAGA fanatics. But the Europeans are pristine Democrats, we’re told. And they’re independent of America. But something’s happened that belies those two allegations or assumptions. No. 1, suddenly, Europe is copying the lawfare of the United States. Remember that Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, Jack Smith, and E. Jean Carroll, in civil and criminal suits, for four years tried to destroy President Donald Trump. And they had over $400 million in fines that were leveled at one point. And there were 91 felony indictments. I think Alvin Bragg actually convicted him of 32. This was in addition to trying to remove him off the ballot in 20 states and raiding his home. So, the Europeans wouldn’t do that, would they? The second thing is that this was a destruction or an attempt to warp democracy, not to let Donald Trump be on the ballot, to put him behind jail bars. So, let me just tell you what’s going on in Europe. In February, this conservative, which is usually in the media termed a hard-right, far-right group, in Germany, the Alternative for Deutschland, the Alternative for Germany—it won 21% of the vote. It skyrocketed. In some areas of East Germany it won 40%. Whether you like it or not, it represents democracy. A lot of people are fed up with German energy policy, German immigration policy, German social policy, radical environmentalism. And what did the Germans do? They immediately said, even though they have 152 seats in their parliament, the second-largest, no party—no left-wing, right-wing, centrist party—will make an alliance with them to get a majority of seats under parliamentarian democracy to run the government. In other words, even though they had the greatest increase in their popularity, they were ostracized because somebody declared them unfit, even though they had a mandate of the people to be the second-most representative party of Germany. In March, in Romania, a kind of an obscure conservative, right-wing candidate came out of nowhere, Calin Georgescu. And he, in the first round, he came in at the top. And he was predicted, this May, that he might be the elected prime minister of Romania. And what happened? They declared him unfit. They said that he was—does this sound familiar—colluding with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin’s puppet. And therefore, they removed him from further consideration. They took him off the ballot. There was no supreme court above that court, as there was in the United States, that said, “You can’t do that.” So, he’s off the ballot. He can’t be even considered, even though he was the largest vote-getter. And then we come to this week’s news that Marine Le Pen, the head of the most conservative party in France, who has got enormous momentum—enormous momentum because of the violence of radical Islamic groups inside France, the open borders, the dissatisfaction with the blank check given Ukraine, etc. I could go on and on. Many of the same problems that we’re dealing with here—the far-left agenda. It was probably scheduled to get more votes than anybody. And she had a pretty good chance, in three or four years, to replace French President Emmanuel Macron. And the high court did what? They said that she had expropriated funds, campaign funds. In other words, that she was blending—does this sound familiar—blending her own campaign with funds allotted from the European Union for other purposes. In other words, there was a distinction without a difference. In other words, they only applied this law to her because they were terrified she was going to win in the next presidential election. But that wasn’t the end. Does this sound familiar? Then they—the court, without a jury—sentenced her to four years in prison, two years under house arrest, maybe two years suspended. So, they’re going to take her out of the political atmosphere. Does that sound familiar? What am I getting at? Given all these lectures we’re getting from Europeans about the pristine nature of democracy there and our bastardized form here, they have, essentially, in three major countries in Europe, eliminated any alternative to the orthodox, left-wing, socialist norm because they feared it was going to win. They always thought they were a fringe group, but now they think they’re gonna win. So, they’re de facto gone, the candidates. And second, they’re copying the left wing, chapter and verse, of the United States. They saw what they did to Donald Trump and they said, “That is a good thing to do. We can do better.” And they have done better. Where they were unable to destroy Trump and only made him stronger, the more they tried to destroy him, the Europeans succeeded. So, how ironic that we are the bastions of democracy, at least we ward off threats to it in a way that’s far more effective than the so-called guardians of democracy in Europe. 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. The post The Left Couldn’t Throw Trump in Jail. Marine Le Pen Wasn’t So Lucky. appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Do states have the right to refuse to give taxpayer dollars to Planned Parenthood and other abortion facilities within their borders? As someone who worked at Planned Parenthood for more than 15 years and who knows what they do with that money, I can say unequivocally that they should have that right. One of the legal points being addressed on Wednesday at the U.S. Supreme Court as it hears arguments in Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic is whether South Carolina officials have a right to refuse Medicaid funding—that is, taxpayer dollars—to the two Planned Parenthood centers and other abortion facilities in their state.Underlying that legal concern, being presented to the court by Christian legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, which is representing the state, is a more basic question: What is Planned Parenthood really about, and what are taxpayers really funding?If you want a short, simple, and accurate answer to that question, ask someone who saw firsthand how Planned Parenthood functions and who understands its priorities. From 2000 to 2017, I worked at every level of Planned Parenthood, from the front desk to the labs, doing everything from showing videos to managing up to three centers at a time across Arizona. What started out for me as a job with good benefits that would let me help my people (I was born in Mexico) and serve women in need ended up as something altogether different—a front-row seat for the big business of killing babies.That’s really the first and most important thing to remember about Planned Parenthood: It is a corporation, not a health clinic. Its first priority is to make money. And you make a lot more money aborting babies than you do providing prenatal care, cancer screening, and ultrasounds. You make no money at all referring pregnant women to have their babies and give them up for adoption.That also explains why, in recent years, for every unborn child Planned Parenthood has referred for adoption, it has aborted more than 200 others.I was personally opposed to abortion when I started at Planned Parenthood. But I figured what other women did was up to them, and my new employers said I’d find plenty else to do. I assured my devout Catholic mother that I was working on “the other side” of the business.But as the years went by and I took on more and more responsibility, I saw so many things that made me wonder if there really was a good side to what we were doing.We assured clients all the time that our services were free—but they weren’t. We were able to mark down some costs for clients, thanks to federal Title X funding available to us for “family planning” services other than abortion. But we still found ways to charge for our services—and I was instructed to ask every client for money.Under federal law, we were under a strict directive to use federal funding, like Medicaid dollars and Title X funding, only for non-abortion services: contraceptives, breast and cervical cancer screening, infertility services, prenatal ultrasounds, and checks for miscarriages. But Planned Parenthood kept finding ways around that.In some centers, we only offered abortions one day a week. The Title X money, I was told, only went to fund what we did on other days. But how do you factor utilities into that? Or the time spent with women who come in with questions about abortion any day of the week? Or the pelvic exams, blood work, and ultrasounds done in preparation for abortions done on those other days? Or those who call in agony on those other four days because their abortion drugs aren’t working the way our medical team said they would?I took a lot of those calls. Almost every day, we heard from women who were experiencing incredibly more pain than the medical staff had promised … who were bleeding out over a bathroom floor … who were horrified to find themselves trying to flush a baby’s corpse down the toilet.“Just go to the ER,” we were instructed to tell them. “And make sure you say it’s a miscarriage.”Nothing was allowed to stop the push for abortions. If a woman’s blood pressure was too high or her iron count too low for the procedure, nurses kept rechecking the numbers until they found what they wanted to see. If a woman in the surgical room had serious second thoughts about killing her baby, a doctor would go in and talk to her until she agreed to go through with it.We paid the staff who did abortions more than we paid other workers. We gave them bigger Christmas bonuses. When I presented ways of expanding or converting our facilities to accommodate a wider array of non-abortion services, I was reminded—again and again—that that’s not where the money was.And when I kept expressing my concerns about all of this, I was fired.So, when South Carolina’s governor says the people of his state want their hard-earned tax dollars to support the 140 federally qualified women’s health care clinics and pregnancy centers that provide a broad range of high-quality, life-affirming health care services—rather than the two Planned Parenthood centers that offer mostly abortions and dangerous “gender-transition” drugs—I’m with the people of South Carolina.I’d like to see states have the freedom to use their limited resources to provide safer health care options for women—not line the pockets of a corporation in the killing business. I hope the Supreme Court sees it that way, too.We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post I’m a Former Planned Parenthood Employee. Here’s Why It Shouldn’t Get Taxpayer Funding. appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Roger Severino sued then-President Joe Biden in 2021 for dismissing him before the end of his term on an independent agency called the Administrative Conference of the United States. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s decision against Severino laid the groundwork for the court’s decision on Friday that President Donald Trump can fire holdover Biden appointees at “independent agencies.” The appeals court paused a U.S. District Court’s orders restoring fired members of the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board to their jobs. ?? HUGE. DC Circuit holds @POTUS can fire holdover Biden appointees at “independent agencies.” Cites Severino v. Biden after DOJ worked itself in knots defending Biden’s firing of me before my Trump-appointed position at ACUS expired. Turnabout is fair play. pic.twitter.com/5oG8b4fvKe— Roger Severino (@RogerSeverino_) March 31, 2025 The White House celebrated the ruling, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt saying Cabinet secretaries reserve the right to hire and fire at their agencies. “As for agencies within the president’s executive authority, the president retains that right,” Leavitt told The Daily Signal. “And we’ve seen there have been bureaucrats at some of these agencies that have been trying to act independent. They need to remember who they work for. It’s the executive of the executive branch.” The DC Circuit decided the President can fire Biden-holdover employees at independent agencies. "As for agencies within the president's executive authority, the president retains that right," @PressSec told @DailySignal. "There have been bureaucrats at some of these agencies… pic.twitter.com/o5SCOnxYjX— Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell (@TheElizMitchell) April 1, 2025 Severino is pleased that the ground rules for executive firings are now clear for all presidents, even if it took his dismissal to accomplish. “This decision is the latest domino to fall in restoring the sovereignty of the people over the bureaucrats,” he told The Daily Signal. Trump appointed Severino to the Administrative Conference of the United States, an independent advisory board with three-year terms, on July 24, 2020. Severino resigned from his position as director of the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Health and Human Services to serve on the council. After Biden took office, he purged the executive branch of Trump appointees who might thwart his agenda and fired members of the Administrative Conference of the United States, including Severino. That marked the first time a president had fired members of the independent agency before the end of their terms since Congress created it in 1964. Severino became the first person to sue the Biden administration, filing a lawsuit within 28 hours of his firing. Severino’s motivation was to clarify the rules of firing so everyone could play by them. “The Founders were right in separating powers and balancing them very carefully against each other,” Severino said, “yet the administrative state has grown into something that is unrecognizable to the Founders, and that includes this notion that there can be bureaucrats with tremendous executive power not accountable to the political branches that could act independently and don’t have to stand for election—which is a state of affairs that has gone on way too long, to the detriment of the American people.” Mark Joseph Stern, a reporter for far-left media outlet Slate, predicted at the time that Severino’s intention was “to destroy the very foundation of agency independence, giving the president power to fire any member of any agency—even those that Congress tried to shield from his control—permitting a future president to stack the entire executive branch with his own lackeys.” “That outcome would constitute a major blow to the modern administrative state,” Stern wrote on May 28, 2021. “And bizarrely, Biden’s Department of Justice may be walking straight into the trap that Severino set for it.” If Stern’s hypothesis was correct, Severino’s goal of strengthening the unitary executive was realized in the appeals court’s ruling last week. The theory of the unitary executive holds that the president has sole authority over the executive branch. “I’m smiling at the end result of all of this, because it’s good to finally have clarity about the ground rules, and turnabout is fair play,” he told The Daily Signal. “So, I was dismissed, and now we know that President Trump can do the exact same thing on a much greater scale.” The appeals court cited Severino v. Biden to demonstrate that the president should be allowed at-will removal of members of the Merit Systems Protection Board. In Severino v. Biden, the court held that the president’s unrestricted removal power did not extend to the Administrative Conference of the United States because the Conference “does not resolve or commence matters for the Executive Branch or determine anyone’s rights or obligations.” But the D.C. Circuit ruled in Harris v Bessent that the Merit Systems Protection Board, from which the plaintiff was fired, does “‘resolve … matters for the Executive Branch’—sometimes several thousands of them in one day. So, even according to the understanding of presidential removal power asserted by DOJ in Severino, the removal protections for MSPB members are unconstitutional.” Severino said last week’s ruling chips away at Humphrey’s Executor, the unanimous 1935 Supreme Court ruling that established that presidents cannot fire the appointed leaders of federal agencies without cause. The issue is on its way to the Supreme Court, according to Severino, who now serves as vice president for domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation. “My sense is, it’s been eroded so badly on so many fronts that this decision is effectively acknowledging the reality that Humphrey’s Executor is due to be overturned,” he said. The president needs the power to ensure members of the executive branch are aligned with his agenda, Severino explained. “It’s really important to have appointees there in alignment with the president’s policies on those questions, especially now that [the Department of Government Efficiency] is restoring accountability to the federal workforce and having the right people, who respect the law on that, and that issue is crucial, because you don’t want to have Biden appointees there, undermining everything DOGE and President Trump are trying to accomplish.” The post KARMA: By Firing This Conservative, Biden Set a Precedent That Lets Trump Clean House appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If we all had a dollar for every time we’ve been told, “This is the most important election of our lifetime,” we could afford to get the graffiti cleaned off our Telsas. However, before you tune out the election noise this year, consider the impact of one horrific constitutional amendment in Virginia that will be decided in the next General Assembly session. Conservatives want to block House Joint Resolution 1, or as they call it, “the abortion amendment.” HJ 1 would enshrine in the Virginia Constitution the “right” to abort a baby right up until it is about to be born. One delegate was heard saying that “it used to be the second trimester, now it’s the second contraction.” Given the unanimity that supporters of the amendment in the Democratic Party have, the GOP needs to take the majority in the House of Delegates in this fall’s Virginia General Assembly elections to have any hope of blocking it, so they are looking past the gubernatorial race to races for House seats they feel are “flippable.”  Those districts are: 97th District: Part of Virginia Beach, where the Democrat that represents the seat won in 2023 by 1,179 votes in a district of 63,000 registered voters. 84th District: Suffolk City and surrounding areas, where the Democrat incumbent won the seat in 2023 by 1,853 votes in a district of 66,666 registered voters. 65th District, Stafford County and Fredericksburg, where the Democrat won in 2023 by a margin of 1,750 votes out of 62,274 registered voters. And the 21st District, Prince William County, where the Democrat won in 2023 by a margin of 975 votes out of 58,142 registered voters. The game plan is simple: turnout. Only one of these races saw a turnout higher than 46.6% (the 97th District saw 54.4%), so the idea is to motivate a percentage or two of the GOP voters who didn’t turn out in 2023 and flip the seat in each district. Only two seats would be needed to take the House majority and block the amendment. Warning to anyone counting chickens before you’ve finished paying off the eggs: While those plans are being worked on, the Democratic Party is targeting eight House districts held by Republicans that Kamala Harris carried in 2024. The GOP will have to spend resources to hold those seats this fall, as well. Of course, the fallback position is that if the bill is not stopped in the 2026 legislative session in January, it will be on the ballot later that year during the 2026 midterm congressional elections for Virginia voters to have the final say on. While polling says that 65% of Virginians oppose abortion that late into a pregnancy, conservatives and the GOP leadership are worried that an aggressive advertising strategy by the amendment’s advocates could sufficiently cause voters to misjudge what the amendment would allow. That, coupled with the inertia of the midterm congressional races stealing the focus away from the amendment, you could see Virginia end up enacting one of the most liberal abortion laws in the United States. The post Can Virginia GOP Flip Legislature to Block Abortion-Until-Birth Amendment? appeared first on The Daily Signal.