FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL— Even while polling has showed increased union member support for President Donald Trump, United Steelworkers spent millions funding liberal political candidates and left-leaning causes that have little to do with organized labor. The organization has also funded LGBTQ and racial equality groups, while heavily backing Democrat political candidates and political action committees, according to a report by the American Accountability Foundation, a watchdog group. Last August, United Steelworkers criticized raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a social media post that said, “we look to a powerful legacy of resistance.” The following month, the union held a two-day workshop titled “Anti-Immigrant Policies” that it said would “help members facing anti-immigrant policies & workplace challenges.” This included “loss of work authorization,” “ICE detentions,” and “how to plan for & respond to ICE raids.” This came roughly a year after Reuters reported in September 2024 that at a United Steelworkers conference about six weeks before the 2024 election, leadership did not promote the officially endorsed candidacy of Kamala Harris. The story also noted that at past gatherings of the union, dozens of members wore red “MAGA” baseball caps. The American Accountability Foundation report, first shared with the Daily Signal, is titled, “MAGA Membership & Woke Leadership – United Steelworkers.” “The United Steelworkers (USW) is the largest steel union in North America, representing over 850,000 members and retirees across the continent,” the report says. United Steelworkers (USW) – AAF – MAGA Membership – Union Leadership Misalignment ReportDownload United Steelworkers has contributed $33,000 to Pride at Work, an LGBTQ group within the larger AFL-CIO, which has helped sponsor “No Kings Rallies” in March of this year and has “decried MAGA Republicans,” according to the report, citing social media posts. “USW had made no secret of their allegiance, working against the Trump-Vance agenda, constantly critiquing the administration for any action, endorsing Democratic politicians, and instructing members on how to ‘plan for ICE raids,’” the report adds. “These actions cast aside the members of the union who support the Trump administration, instead choosing to use the union’s funding and media to push their own agenda.” The union spent more than $40 million on politics from 2017-2024, according to the report. United Steelworkers gave more than $800,000 to the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-union-aligned think tank, and more than $300,000 to the Blue Green Alliance, a labor-aligned environmental group. “The United Steelworkers Political Action Fund directs the overwhelming majority of its political resources to Democratic candidates and Democratic Party infrastructure,” the report says. “The committee sent $1,162,893.12 to Democratic Party committees compared to $0.00 to Republican committees.” “The federal candidate breakdown is just as lopsided. The fund contributed $440,000.00 to Democratic federal candidates and only $35,000.00 to Republican candidates,” the report continues. “That means 92.63% of federal candidate dollars flowed to Democrats and just 7.37% to Republicans.” The political fund sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrat-aligned and liberal groups, including $385,000 to former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf’s campaign; another $345,000 to the Democratic Governors Association; $340,000 to the A. Philip Randolph Institute, a union-aligned racial and economic justice organization, and $250,000 went to the House Majority PAC, a Democratic group. In 2024, the USW PAC contributed $590,622, or 97.49%, to Democrats and $5,000, or 0.82%, to Republicans, according to OpenSecrets, which tracks money in politics. Trump’s 2024 performance among overall union members was the strongest of any Republican since Ronald Reagan carried 49 states in 1984, according to U.S. Polling Data, a website that tracks various polls. Trump, who shed some Republican orthodoxy on trade and other economic issues, made an appeal to working-class voters in 2016, when he got the support of 37% of union members and 43% of the vote from union households, according to data from the Roper Center. Also, weeks before the 2024 election, a poll found that 59.6% of Teamsters union members wanted the union to endorse Trump, compared with 34% responding in favor of Harris. The United Steelworkers did not respond to inquiries for this story by publication time.

After nearly a year, House Republicans are finally gaining momentum on Reconciliation 3.0, an affordability, anti-fraud bill that has the potential to save the party in the midterms. With their self-imposed deadline of “before the end of summer”—meaning before campaign season ramps up in August—the window isn’t open long. Republican Study Committee Chairman Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas, has been working on the framework since the One Big Beautiful Bill passed last July. With a “limited scope,” he believes they can “successfully” pass the “two-minute drill.” IT’S HERE: Heritage’s plan to save $1.5 TRILLION and END abortion funding through a third reconcicliation bill. “The Heritage plan can be drafted quickly and by a limited number of committees.”There’s no time to waste! @virginiagmck https://t.co/YEdNkoGQoJ— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) June 3, 2026 “We are working very hard to further the agenda that I think Donald Trump was elected on, and I’ll tell you, it’s a tough environment,” he said on the Tuesday morning episode of the Ruthless Podcast. Pfluger describes the politically divided Congress as a “soap opera.” “It is a sad state of affairs when you have to do partisan-only bills like reconciliation,” he said, referencing how the House is set to vote on Reconciliation 2.0, a bill to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection—something Pfluger says had to happen because of the “lack of bipartisanship.” However, he said 3.0 is different. “3.0 is us going into our districts, listening to our constituents who are saying, hey, things are pretty expensive. We know it’s not your fault. We know it’s Biden and the inflation that he created, but what can we do for housing, energy, and health care?”—questions he says Republicans have really great answers to. A great story from the Congressional Baseball Game from @RepPfluger which sheds light on who Jon Ossoff really is. New pod with @HolmesJosh, @MichaelDuncan and @JohnAshbrook is streaming now – link in replies. pic.twitter.com/aMWFTBZW5t— Ruthless Podcast (@RuthlessPodcast) June 9, 2026 “Number one, because our constituents are asking us to unify, to come together, to get something done,” Pfluger said. “Number two, President Trump, thankfully, is standing up for our military, and we need to recapitalize, which means we need more money—and the Democrats are never going to do that. They’re not going to spend another dime on the military, which is sad. So, for all those reasons—on affordability, on fraud, and on defense.” While he admits it’s not going to be as big or as beautiful as the OBBB, he believes once they pass it, it will be a quick vote in the upper chamber—“damn, like that’s what we’ve been asking for.” As chairman of the Republican Study Committee, the largest Republican caucus on Capitol Hill, he said their job is to work on “offense.” “We heard you in Minnesota, we hear you in California, we know there’s fraud in many states, and we’re going after it, and we’re taking it seriously. We’re not going to be able to uncover every bit of it. We’re going to do as much as we can. We need some more time,” he said, emphasizing the need for another year holding the majority. Pfluger says Rec. 3.0 will come after the fraud that has been taking headlines across the country, especially in Minnesota and California. There were “over 400 businesses that popped up in LA County alone, and 99% of those were not valid companies. They’re stealing hundreds of billions of dollars, and that’s the surface that has got to stop … the daycare stuff in Minnesota has got to stop, and there’s so much more of that,” Pfluger continued. “This is not a partisan issue; it’s just there’s only one party who do it.” He says the goal is to make the American dream affordable again. Last week, the Heritage Foundation came out with a plan of its own for Congress to use. Much of it was similar to what the Republican Study Committee and Pfluger have put together, adding one key conservative provision previously left out: extending the ban on federal funding for abortion.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes. Jack Fowler:  So, Victor, let’s start out local. California election. This thing—no, there’s no state in America, and in fact, I’ve read there’s no country, non-first-world or first-world country, that counts votes like California does.  And we saw the other day there was a dump of votes that came in one tranche, 10,000 votes exactly, for the mayoral race, and not a single one of those 10,000 votes went to Spencer Pratt. They were divided amongst the two Democrats, Karen Bass and, I’m sorry, I can’t remember the lady who’s probably gonna prevail. [Nithya Raman]  And then, as the votes keep getting counted, [Spencer] Pratt’s second-place status keeps diminishing. We’re watching thievery live. Victor, your thoughts?  Victor Davis Hanson: Well, the betting platforms have all said that Raman is gonna win, not because they had any great insight from polling. They just assumed that left-wing Los Angeles would not allow him to win.  The theft or the alleged theft or the irregularities are not actually in the counting. They’re in the mail-in ballots. And in California, almost any time you come in contact with a state agency, you’re going to… And all you have to do is say yes, and you will get an automatic mail-in ballot, and there is no ID.  There’s no way to determine whether you’re… You can use different names, and that happens all the time. So when you start to see things, that these ballots are coming in and not just he’s getting less than half what she is or a quarter what she is.   But what’s even more interesting is Bass was way ahead of her. Of course, she was in third.  And yet, in some of these tranches that come in, she’s ahead of Bass. And that, I know they say they’re younger voters, but what it suggests to me is if people thought that they needed ballots for her because Bass had already clinched it, then maybe people were “voting” en masse for her, voting in quotes.  But the other thing about it is it’s only going to cement the reputation of California that it’s a third-world dysfunctional state, even if it was not crooked, that you take this long.   And here in the Central Valley, I can think of three races, and it’s kind of so cynical of Republicans in purple districts.  And they have won on Election Day, clearly. And then they’ve even had victory celebrations. And then it starts just like this. You start to see the mail-in ballots and then trickle, trickle, trickle, trickle, trickle, trickle. And the portions have nothing to do with the proportions that were counted before.  So if a Republican is 52-48 across mail-in early that have all been counted on Election Day, it doesn’t matter. The asymmetries will grow. And the suspicion is always, with Democratic candidates, wait till the California Teachers Association and the SEIU votes come in and all of the dubious votes from people who may not be legal residents but got mail ballots at their residencies.  And the Democratic Party then calls it racism if you want a voter ID or anything like that. No one in Europe does this. No one in the United States does this, allows the mail-in ballots to come in way after Election Day.   And what can you say? It’s designed for fraud. It’s designed for the Democratic Party.  It’s designed for mass registration-voting by people who otherwise would have no intention of voting and may not exist because… As I said before, when my son was living here while he was finishing his college at a local college, then he moved out and bought a home. But for three years, I kept getting his ballot.  Maybe it was four years. Even though he was registered, and he didn’t know it, I didn’t know it. It just kept coming, and I just threw it away every year. And I left a message at the registrar’s once. I phoned in. It was like, “Put you on hold.” I just left a message. They don’t care.  But it would have been very evil for me to sign his name and maybe say, instead of William Hanson, say something like his middle name, Frank Hanson, W.  Frank Hanson or something. So it’s really discouraging and just says that, in addition to the wildfires, in addition to the high-speed rail, which, by the way, now they’re talking another 81 billion just to get the first phase done. And in addition to—  Jack Fowler: Excuse me, an additional 81 billion?  Victor Davis Hanson: Well, that’s the cost of it to get the whole thing up and running. That’s with the cars and the tracks.  Jack Fowler: Right.  Victor Davis Hanson:  And then… and I don’t even know if that includes the Merced over to Palo Alto. I don’t think it does. That’s gonna be a horrendous cost going through the Pacheco Pass, and it’s not gonna happen.  Anyway, in addition to the water that… I mean, here we had a pretty good water year and the reservoirs are not full because [Gov. Gavin] Newsom released water out to the Gulf.   We’ve talked about the indigenous takeover of water supplies up in Northern California in the wine country. We’ve talked about Newsom blowing up four dams on the Klamath River while using money from a fund that was earmarked by the voters to create them and build them, which we never did.  We never built three great reservoirs that the voters voted for, Temperance Flat, Los Banos Grandes, and the Sites Reservoir.   And then you have… In addition to that, we have the worst infrastructure. Reason Magazine, Jack, has a great survey that’s out of all the transportation systems, but mostly highways in the United States by state.  And they rank them according to not just fatalities, but miles driven, accidents, polls of what people think, maintenance, whether they have guard… And guess what state is 49th? California. Forty-ninth.  And that’s with the highest gas taxes, the highest income taxes, and among the highest property taxes because of our assessed evaluation, actual taxes, and again, sales tax because of the add-ons on the counties.  And so you get almost nothing with 21% below the poverty line, and then all this legislation that’s coming down the line about a billionaire tax, which will morph very quickly into a millionaire’s tax, I think.  So there… It’s a dysfunctional state, and then you hear about the election, and everybody you talked to said, “Pratt and Hilton can’t win.”  And you’d say, “Why? Why? Why? Why? Everybody’s sick of what’s going on.”  Yes, but they won’t let it happen. The balloting is just so corrupt, and they’re not gonna fix it. There’s a proposition coming up in November, I think, to have voter ID, and I think it’ll pass, but it’ll be thrown out by a federal—California federal judge.  I bet you five bucks it will. Just like rejecting gay marriage, and two days later, a gay judge, a federal judge, ruled that unconstitutional.  And so it just depresses people, and it’s already… What I don’t understand about the exodus is that after you’ve drained the state of 12 million middle-class and professional classes, you would think that the yearly exodus would go down, but it’s not.  It’s going up. It’s up to 300,000 to 400,000 expected this year, 50,000 to 60,000 from L.A. city itself. That’s gonna really balloon.  I don’t know. I just had a friend that called me. I do business with him. He’s been a longtime California native, and he said, “I’m leaving.”  I said, “What do you mean you’re leaving?”  He said, “I’m leaving.”  I said, “Well, where are you gonna buy a house?”  “I bought a house. I’ve already bought. It’s just a matter of selling my house. And believe me, my house has much more than my California house, and it’s cheaper, and the taxes and gas and everything is just incredible where I’m…” The state that he’s going to.  And so it’s sad because this state was not only—with its thousand-mile coastline and Sierra Nevada and Mojave Desert—everything is here, and it’s the most naturally abundant state.  It’s number five with gas and oil reserves. It’s got precious rare earth minerals in the desert.  It was the third-largest timber state. It has huge timber potential. Of course, we shut that down, and then we let 60 million trees burn in the last three fires. Sixty million trees that could have been harvested.  We had a big mining, as I said, mining industry.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

California held its statewide primary on June 2. It’s now June 9, and votes are still being counted. That’s not a glitch in the system. That’s by design—and it’s fueling questions about the integrity of the election and renewed efforts to pass the SAVE America Act. Six years ago, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Gov. Gavin Newsom joined other Democrats to make radical changes to the state’s elections. Then, in 2021, he made those temporary changes permanent. It’s a complete and total mess in California—just like everything @GavinNewsom touches.He signed the law making vote-by-mail permanent for all 23 million registered voters even though the safest and most secure way to vote is to show up at your local polling place. https://t.co/NzEyn70RbM pic.twitter.com/AyJza2T2aT— Rob Bluey (@RobertBluey) June 8, 2026 “Last year we took unprecedented steps to ensure all voters had the opportunity to cast a ballot during the pandemic and today we are making those measures permanent,” Newsom boasted in a Sept. 27, 2021, statement that all registered voters in California would receive a vote-by-mail ballot. For the June 2 primary election, California mailed 23 million ballots to registered voters. What could possibly go wrong? Crying Foul As election officials continue to count, a growing chorus of Republicans are crying foul over reality TV star Spencer Pratt’s precipitous drop from second place in the Los Angeles mayoral contest to third beyond Councilwoman Nithya Raman, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. Last week, Pratt appeared poised to make the runoff against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass. But mail-in votes for Raman kept her in contention until she overtook him for second. Vice President JD Vance, during a Fox News interview Monday with Jesse Watters, explained why so many Americans are skeptical of the situation. “Karen Bass was in first place, Spencer Pratt was in second place, and then this other woman was in third place,” Vance said. “You would expect these mail-in ballots to kind of meet that same basic pattern, where number one would get the most votes, and number two would get the second most votes, and so on.” Instead, the late-arriving ballots are flipping that order, pushing Pratt out of the top two and setting up a Bass vs. Raman runoff. “That seems pretty shady to me,” Vance added. JUST IN: VP JD Vance CALLS OUT California's rampant fraud and cheating after Spencer Pratt gets thrust behind Nithya Raman due to "late mail-in ballots""You would expect these mail-in ballots to kind of meet that same basic pattern where, number one would get the most votes,… pic.twitter.com/krBqlI77VX— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) June 9, 2026 Counting Ballots He also flagged something that should alarm everyone: California is not just still counting ballots—it’s still receiving them. Under the law Newsom signed, mail ballots postmarked by Election Day can legally arrive as late as June 9—a full week after polls closed—and still count. Defenders of the vote-by-mail system will tell you that Democrats are more likely to utilize mail-in ballots than Republicans, and that’s why Pratt’s lead evaporated. Even if that’s true, the lengthy delay has led to growing erosion of public confidence in our elections. It’s also not just mail-in ballots that contribute to California’s problems. The state already scores worst in America on The Heritage Foundation’s Election Integrity Scorecard. Heritage analysts cite the state’s lack of voter ID requirements and minimal efforts to ensure the accuracy of voter rolls or the custody and security of mail-in ballots. Fortunately, there’s a plan to help fix this problem. California leftists codified poor election integrity standards into law, which makes fraud easy to get away with. An audit of its voter rolls would destroy the narrative that its elections are above board. They have a lot to hide. https://t.co/5E4heiaq5r— Kevin Roberts (@KevinRobertsTX) June 8, 2026 SAVE America Act Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, introduced the SAVE America Act this year in response to exactly the kind of vulnerabilities reflected in California’s system. The bill does three things: It requires voters to present a photo ID before casting a ballot in federal elections, requires states to obtain proof of citizenship in person when registering voters, and mandates that states remove noncitizens from existing voter rolls. Each of those three provisions is a direct remedy for a specific flaw in California’s system. The state requires no voter ID—and, as Vance noted, actually threatens election officials with jail time for asking. California automatically registers voters through the DMV, a process that opens the door to noncitizens. And its voter rolls are notoriously unclean, with outdated and inaccurate registrations that create opportunities for abuse. “By requiring voter ID and proof of citizenship, the SAVE America Act will ensure that our federal elections are decided by U.S. citizens—and U.S. citizens alone,” Lee and Roy said in a joint statement. California Chaos California’s ballot harvesting laws compound the problem further. Any person is allowed to collect and return a completed ballot on behalf of a voter. The state calls it “third-party ballot collection,” and it is one of the most permissive such laws in the nation. The SAVE America Act also addresses another problem prevalent in California: millions of illegal aliens who entered our country during President Joe Biden’s open-borders era. Those illegal aliens now hold state-issued driver’s licenses, a pathway to illegally register to vote in elections. The SAVE America Act would close that door. In light of the stunningly improbable LA mayoral election results, the Senate should turn immediately to the SAVE America ActAnd keep debating it until it passesLiterally nothing is more important https://t.co/LbrrjNlvPw— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) June 9, 2026 In the wake of the California chaos, Lee called on the Senate to debate the bill “until it passes,” saying “literally nothing is more important.” “In light of the stunningly improbable LA mayoral election results, the Senate should turn immediately to the SAVE America Act,” Lee posted X. “Name a democratic country with less-secure elections than the U.S. We need voter ID. We need the SAVE America Act.” Lee is right. California is making a compelling case for the SAVE America Act.

Editor’s note: The following commentary is an excerpt from remarks presented before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on June 9, 2026, with minor edits made only for readability.  Over 50 years ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center was founded to fight the scourge of racism. But the SPLC has drifted from that founding purpose.  The recent indictment from the U.S. Department of Justice alleges that the SPLC deceived donors into funding the racist groups it claimed to fight. But beyond these shocking allegations of hypocrisy lies a broader story: how the SPLC tarred mainstream conservative organizations as “hate groups” and then relentlessly sought to silence those groups by persuading America’s leading financial and technology firms to exclude those groups from the marketplace of ideas.  My employer, Alliance Defending Freedom, is one of those organizations. We’ve been on the SPLC’s Hate Map since 2016, which is odd, given that we wholeheartedly oppose racism in all its forms. Our Christian faith teaches that all are created equal because all are made in the image of God.  But it makes sense when you understand today’s SPLC as a political hit operation. The SPLC has branded ADF and others like us as hate groups solely because it disagrees with our work—grounded in our religious convictions—on behalf of children told by the medical establishment to permanently mutilate their bodies and on behalf of the most vulnerable among us at the beginning and end of life.  Our advocacy for these mainstream positions has repeatedly led us to the Supreme Court, where ADF has won 18 cases since 2011, with two more under submission. In fact, the SPLC even quietly filed an amicus brief supporting one of ADF’s Supreme Court wins on behalf of freedom of association and donor privacy.  But the SPLC cannot abide our work on behalf of the vulnerable: parents, children, the elderly, and the unborn. So, it has slandered ADF and other groups like us as “hate groups” and sought to lock us and our views out of the public square.  The SPLC began targeting mainstream Christian and conservative organizations by first adding them to its Hate Map in 2010. Seven years later, the SPLC’s fundraising skyrocketed in response to the notorious “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. But this wasn’t a stroke of good luck: The DOJ indictment alleges that the SPLC funded and supported one of its ringleaders.   In the immediate aftermath of Charlottesville, the SPLC received large donations or commitments from leading firms and personalities, including JPMorgan Chase, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and even Tim Cook at Apple.  In 2018, it helped launch a coalition of left-wing organizations called Change the Terms. They understood that you don’t have to win a debate with your opponents if they’re invisible, so the coalition targeted critical banking, payment processing, donor-advisory, technology, and digital communication firms. It embedded the SPLC within the infrastructure of corporate decision-making, allowing it to influence terms of engagement, flag business partners, and bully corporations into compliance.  In short, the SPLC mobilized corporate America to crush mainstream conservative viewpoints and organizations.  The Biden years saw the SPLC deepen its presence in America’s political and corporate infrastructure. The Biden DOJ and White House met regularly with SPLC officials. Amazon used the SPLC to blackball groups from its AmazonSmile giving program. So did the employee charitable giving platform Benevity, which serves nearly a quarter of the Fortune 1000. The list goes on.  ADF saw tangible impacts. We lost access to the AmazonSmile program; nonprofit pricing from large technology providers like Microsoft, Adobe, and Intuit; web hosting on the Pantheon platform; and donor-advised funds at Fidelity.  A partisan political organization like the SPLC should never have been allowed to function as an unaccountable private gatekeeper to critical financial, technology, and communication services. And corporations should never have accepted the word of an organization that itself is severely compromised.  The SPLC has paid millions in settlements for defamation. Its co-founder and president left in 2019 amid staff reports of a “systemic culture of racism and sexism” that employees have since confirmed did not improve; it received an “F” from Charity Navigator for hoarding donor money to the tune of more than $820 million, much of it offshore; former employees have said that the SPLC is little more than a “highly profitable scam.”  The time has come to uproot the SPLC from America’s financial and technology infrastructure. Congress can help. Investigations of the SPLC can reach beyond the indictment to examine the SPLC’s relationships with financial institutions, technology companies, and digital communications platforms. Moreover, Congress can pass legislation barring federally insured financial institutions from delegating decision-making to private entities that discriminate based on First Amendment-protected activities.  These would be critical steps toward dismantling the SPLC’s shadow censorship regime.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.