THE DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told CNN on Sunday that Democrats will fight “tooth and nail” against the House-passed SAVE America Act, an election integrity bill he likened to racial segregation. During an appearance on “State of the Union with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash,” Schumer stressed his caucus will “not let” the legislation reach President Donald Trump’s desk and suggested Republicans only support it because they do not want poor people and minorities to vote. The Trump-backed SAVE America Act would mandate voters to present photo ID at the polls—a requirement surveys show the vast majority of Americans support—as well as proof of U.S. citizenship for voter registration. “About 83% of the American people, including a majority Democrats, support voter ID laws,” host Jake Tapper told Schumer during their exchange. Tapper was referring to an August 2025 Pew Research Center survey which also found that 71% of Democrats and 95% of Republicans support mandating “all voters to show government-issued photo identification to vote.” “Well, yes, the voter ID laws that—first, each state can have its own voter ID laws, and some do and some don’t,” Schumer replied to the CNN host. “But, secondly, what they [Republicans] are proposing in this so-called SAVE Act is like Jim Crow 2.0.” The Jim Crow laws served as the basis of legalized segregation across America’s southern states throughout the late 19th and much of the 20th century. They were finally overturned amid the civil rights movement the 1960s. “They make it so hard to get any kind of voter ID that more than 20 million legitimate people, mainly poorer people and people of color, will not be able to vote under this law,” Schumer continued. “We will not let it pass in the Senate. We are fighting it tooth and nail.” The SAVE Act is an “outrageous proposal that shows the sort of political bias of the MAGA right,” the minority leader added. “They don’t want poor people to vote. They don’t want people of color to vote, because they often don’t vote for them,” the New York Democrat claimed. Seventy-six percent of black respondents, 77% of Asian respondents, and 82% of Hispanic respondents supported requiring all voters to show photo ID to be able to cast a ballot, according to Pew Research Center’s August 2025 survey. The House passed the SAVE America Act Wednesday with only one Democrat, moderate Texas Rep. Henry Cuellar, joining Republicans in support. Cuellar is of Mexican descent and represents a district on the American southern border which is over 70% Hispanic. Schumer also suggested during his CNN appearance the notion of federal agents monitoring the polls to stop suspected illegal immigrants from casting ballots in elections “flies in the face” of democracy. “They show no evidence of voter fraud. They show there’s so little in the country,” he said. “And to have ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents, these thugs, be by the polling places, that just flies in the face of how democracy works, of how we’ve had elections for hundreds of years very successfully.” “Why should you ban ICE from being at polling places? Because illegals aren’t supposed to vote in this America,” Republican Missouri Rep. Jason Smith said Thursday on CNBC. “Apparently Democrats don’t like the rule of law. If they don’t like the rule of law, they need to change it.” Originally published by The Daily Caller News Foundation. The post Schumer Vows to Fight Supposed ‘Jim Crow 2.0’ Bill With Policy 83% of Americans Support appeared first on The Daily Signal.

THE DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—Secretary of State Marco Rubio reassured Europe in his Saturday remarks at a national security conference in Germany that the U.S. cares “deeply” about the continent’s wellbeing despite recent disagreements. Rubio highlighted the U.S. and Europe’s shared history and culture while addressing 62nd Annual Munich Security Conference. He also stated the two allies’ destinies are “intertwined” and that “the fate of Europe will never be irrelevant to” the U.S. The secretary’s apparent olive branch to Europe—which has historically been the region most allied with America’s interests—comes as tensions between the two powers increased amid President Donald Trump’s quest to acquire Greenland, currently a territory of Denmark. It also appears to mark a sharp contrast to a more critical message a newly inaugurated Vice President JD Vance delivered at the annual national security conference in 2025. “For the United States and Europe, we belong together. America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent [Europe] long before,” Rubio said during his speech. “We are part of one civilization—Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.” “And so this is why we Americans may sometimes come off as a little direct and urgent in our counsel. This is why President Trump demands seriousness and reciprocity from our friends here in Europe,” the secretary of state continued. “The reason why, my friends, is because we care deeply. We care deeply about your future and ours.” “And if at times we disagree, our disagreements come from our profound sense of concern about a Europe with which we are connected–not just economically, not just militarily,” he added. “We are connected spiritually and we are connected culturally. We want Europe to be strong. We believe that Europe must survive, because the two great wars of the last century serve for us as history’s constant reminder that ultimately, our destiny is and will always be intertwined with yours, because we know that the fate of Europe will never be irrelevant to our own.” Rubio went on to list various historical and cultural achievements of Europe, including the continent being the birthplace of classical liberalism, “the rule of law, the universities, and the scientific revolution,” as well as its profound contributions to classical art, literature, classical music, and rock music. The secretary also stressed the need for both the U.S. and Europe to “gain control of our national borders,” calling mass migration “a crisis which is transforming and destabilizing societies all across the West.” “Controlling who and how many people enter our countries, this is not an expression of xenophobia. It is not hate. It is a fundamental act of national sovereignty,” he said. “And the failure to do so is not just an abdication of one of our most basic duties owed to our people. It is an urgent threat to the fabric of our societies and the survival of our civilization itself.” He also called to reform “global institutions,” such as the United Nations. “[W]e do not want our allies to be weak, because that makes us weaker. We want allies who can defend themselves so that no adversary will ever be tempted to test our collective strength,” Rubio stated. We do not want allies shackled by guilt and shame.We want allies who are proud of their culture and heritage and are willing to help us defend it. pic.twitter.com/IOKg9n1UNM— Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) February 14, 2026 “This is why we do not want our allies to be shackled by guilt and shame. We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it,” he emphasized. “It will be good. I think it will be well received. We’ll see,” Rubio told reporters Thursday at Maryland’s Joint Base Andrews when asked what his message was going to be at the Munich conference. A reporter then pressed the secretary of state on what he thought Europeans were “hoping to hear” from his Saturday speech, asking whether the continent’s nations were looking for a message which was “more conciliatory” than remarks previously delivered there by Vance. “I think they want—honestly, they want to know where we’re going, where we’d like to go, where we’d like to go with them,” Rubio answered. “So that’s our hope.” “The world is changing very fast right in front of us. The old world is gone—frankly, the world that I grew up in—and we live in a new era in geopolitics, and it’s going to require all of us to sort of reexamine what that looks like and what our role is going to be,” the secretary added in his Thursday remarks to reporters. “And it’s—we’ve had many of these conversations in private with many of our allies, and they are our allies, and we need to continue to have those conversations.” Vice President Vance addressed the 61st Annual Munich Security Conference on Feb. 14, 2025, delivering a blistering rebuke of European government censorship of dissenting political expression. “For years, we’ve been told that everything we fund and support is in the name of our shared democratic values. Everything from Ukraine policy to digital censorship is built as a defense of democracy,” Vance said in his 2025 speech which sent shockwaves throughout the international geopolitical community. “But when we see European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others, we ought to ask ourselves whether we are holding ourselves to an appropriately high standard,” Vance said just over three weeks after he had taken office. “And I say ‘ourselves’ because I fundamentally believe we are on the same team. We must do more than talk about democratic values, we must live them.” Vance is not attending the 2026 Munich Security Conference, leaving Rubio as the primary U.S. representative there. Rubio was also in attendance at the 2025 conference, his first as secretary of state. Originally published by The Daily Caller News Foundation. The post ‘Our Destiny Is and Always Will Be Intertwined With Yours’: Rubio Sets Mood With Allies in Munich appeared first on The Daily Signal.

West Virginia state senators passed a bill to prohibit what it called “news censorship,” as other state legislatures have considered similar speech proposals.   Specifically, the “First Amendment Preservation Act” bans state agencies from entering contracts with companies that use media monitoring or bias-rating organizations. The contracts could be used as guides to direct state agencies to prohibit state advertising dollars from going to news outlets.   The legislation, Senate Bill 531, was sponsored by state Sen. Mike Azinger, a Republican, who has backed other First Amendment measures.   “It was simply brought to my attention that ideologically-based fact checkers and media monitors are a distinct potentiality in West Virginia as it is already occurring in other states; so we set out to catch this proactively,” Azinger told The Daily Signal.   “Also, I had a viscerally positive reaction to the bill when it was offered to me to sponsor it, since I have run and passed many a number of freedom and First Amendment bills; this drew me naturally to SB 531, The First Amendment Preservation Act,” Azinger said.   This could primarily target NewsGuard, a media monitoring site that sued the Trump administration’s Federal Trade Commission for investigating its alleged efforts to blacklist conservative-leaning news outlets. NewsGuard argues the West Virginia proposal could prevent detection of fake news sites by foreign adversaries.   The West Virginia proposal is similar to a provision approved in December in the National Defense Authorization Act. That provision prohibits the War Department from forming contracts for the purpose of advertising for military recruitment with “advertising firms like NewsGuard that blacklist conservative news sources,” according to the House Armed Services Committee.  Among past free speech bills, Azinger sponsored a bill that passed to ensure student journalists in high school and college have greater protections from censorship, and that school administrators could not exert prior review or punish student media advisers for refusing to censor content.  The American Legislative Exchange Commission, a conservative group that recommends state legislative proposals, introduced its “Statement of Principle on News Censorship in 2024. It says that if government agencies rely on “fact-checking” or media monitoring groups based on subjective content judgments, it could chill press freedom.   “Whether in print, over the airwaves or online, government agencies should harness the full potential of today’s media offerings to communicate official notices on the platforms where their constituents actually frequent – not put their thumbs on the scale exclusively in favor of ‘mainstream’ outlets,” the ALEC Statement of Principles on News Censorship says.  “A troubling trend has emerged in which ‘media monitoring organizations’ analyze news outlets for the accuracy of their reporting and then blacklist or otherwise exclude certain publications from advertising,” the statement of principles continues. “This accuracy is often determined by adherence to official government positions.”  ALEC referenced organizations that initially cited accurate reporting on the COVID-19 lab leak theory and the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop as “disinformation.”  NewsGuard disapproves of the West Virginia bill, which still requires passage in the state’s House of Representatives, and the signature of West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey, a Republican.  “The bill pending in the legislature would prevent state government agencies from using a non-partisan service like NewsGuard,” NewsGuard co-CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz told The Daily Signal in a detailed statement.   Brill is founder of Court TV, and Crovitz is a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal.   “NewsGuard’s services include a targeted, non-partisan exclusion list that only excludes websites identified as being Russian, Iranian, or Chinese disinformation outlets,” the co-CEOs added.   “Believe it or not, there are now hundreds of such sites posing as American news sites,” the co-CEOs continued. “And with the typical online advertising campaign advertising on an average of 40,000 websites by using computerized “programmatic” advertising algorithms, an exclusion list like this is the only way to keep West Virginia tax dollars from inadvertently financing the work of these foreign malign actors.”  The post This State Fires a Shot Against ‘Blacklisting’ Conservative Media appeared first on The Daily Signal.

As British Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces calls to resign for his appointment of Epstein-tied Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the United States, one is struck by the sudden instability of British governments. In the 28 years between 1979 and 2007, Britain had only three prime ministers, while in the 19 years since 2007, it has had seven, and may soon have eight. Only one of those, David Cameron, carried his party to a reelection victory, and he resigned a year after being beaten in the Brexit referendum. It’s not just leaders who have stumbled. Even historically long-lasting parties have. Britain’s Conservatives, who, since the party’s founding in 1846, 180 years ago, have been the most electorally successful party anywhere, are polling at 19% today. So is the Labour Party, founded in 1900 and Britain’s second party since 1923, 103 years ago. Similarly, elsewhere in Europe, France’s historic socialist, communist, and Gaullist parties have more or less disappeared, and the National Rally, dismissed as unthinkable, to the point that the judicial establishment disqualified it from the ballot, still leads the polls under its 30-year-old successor. Germany’s Social Democrats, founded in the 1880s, were swept in and promptly swept out of office, while the Christian Democrats, the descendants of the anti-Nazi Catholic Center party, have barely been holding their own against the oft-denounced AfD. Italy’s dominant asymmetric duo, for two generations after World War II, the Christian Democrats and the Communists, fell on bad times in the 1990s, with the fading of belief in their founding faiths, Catholicism and communism. Dominant since then have been media millionaire Silvio Berlusconi, the Five Star Movement party, founded by a comedian, and the current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, whose party’s roots were once dismissed as neo-fascist. The two American political parties, the oldest and third-oldest in the world, have shown more stability. In the first half of the 20th century, Democrats survived the landslide rejection of Woodrow Wilson in 1920, and Republicans survived the landslide rejection of Herbert Hoover in 1932. The two parties’ resilience prevented Americans from succumbing, as many feared they would, to the totalitarian temptations that swept much of continental Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. In the volatile years after what was then called the Great War, communists took over Russia in 1917 through 1920, fascists took over Italy in 1922 through 1924, and Nazis took over Germany in 1933 through 1934. No one could be sure that a similar upheaval would not succeed in France, Britain or America. Before that war, American presidents opposed restrictions on immigration, confident that assimilation efforts, such as big-city public schools and Henry Ford’s English-language classes, would Americanize the Ellis Island generation of 1892-1914. Fears of revolution and the wartime capacity to control people’s movements led to bipartisan majorities for the 1924 law that cut off immigration from eastern and southern Europe. Now, a century later, immigration is the problem that, more than anything else, is threatening the hold of longstanding political parties. Old parties’ leaders in Britain and Europe, nervous that below-replacement birth rates would halt economic growth and endanger their welfare states, encouraged massive immigration of Muslims from North Africa, the Middle East and Pakistan. Prime example: former German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s unilateral decision, without consultation internally or with European Union partners, in 2015 to admit 1 million mostly male Muslims to Germany. Police authorities and established journalists suppressed evidence that many migrants lived off welfare rather than productive labor, and that many such men felt justified in raping headscarf-less young women and beating up gay men. It has come to the point that British authorities are arresting and prosecuting citizens who send private emails that are thought to be unwelcoming to some immigrants. Authorities seemed to regard any qualms about immigrants with unfamiliar customs as equivalent to the bigotry that fed the Holocaust and ignored the obvious moral difference between excluding people from your country and murdering your fellow citizens. Whether Starmer survives politically is unclear, but it is clear that the Labour Party, like the Conservatives before it, is in perhaps terminal trouble. Conservatives won 44% of the popular vote in 2019, and 365 seats (out of 650) in the House of Commons in December 2019; Labour, with only 33% of the popular vote, won 411 seats in July 2024. Despite some campaign rhetoric, neither party staunched the flow of immigrants, and neither has visibly changed government bureaucracies’ bias against those who protest it. Unsurprisingly, both are now polling below 20%, well behind Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, founded in 2018. The situation in America, and concerning its parties, is less drastic. The nation has a much stronger tradition of assimilation of immigrants, although many American liberals regard that as something like persecution. And our great immigration surge between 1982 and 2007 came primarily from Latin America and Asia. The Christian and European cultures of Latins, and the test-driven literacy and numeracy of Asians, have made them more assimilable than the Muslims thronging Britain and Europe. Nonetheless, immigration has affected our politics, and the Clinton Democrats’ and Bush Republicans’ implicit acquiescence in the 1982-2007 surge are things of the past. Even though immigration was reduced sharply by the 2007-08 financial crisis and the illegal immigrant population plateaued thereafter, President Donald Trump’s border-strengthening efforts in his first and second terms have made the Republicans a skeptical-of-immigration party. Trump has demonstrated that under current legislation, border enforcement, which most Americans support, can work, and his second-term use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has shown that hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants can be deported, and that even more may be incentivized to self-deport. But the harsh footage and the two protesters’ deaths in Minnesota suggest that the immigration problem could become a liability for Trump and his party. Democrats have also changed in response to Trump. Former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama proclaimed that they were enforcing immigration laws. Former President Joe Biden scarcely bothered, even as his appointees put in place an open-borders policy. Today, most Democratic officeholders are intent on obstructing and, in the tradition of Democrats John C. Calhoun and George C. Wallace, nullifying federal law enforcement. Few Democratic voters seem to mind, but that could become a political liability too. On both sides of the Atlantic, we are seeing in the 2020s something like reenactments of the 1920s–the overthrowing of political establishments in Britain and Europe, and the sometimes awkward and painful reshaping, but not overthrowing, of the political parties of the U.S. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.  The post Immigration Is Shaking Up Political Parties in Britain, Europe, and the US appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Grace Jin Drexel says she just wants her father back and is hopeful President Donald Trump might be able to help. “We believe that it will take a miracle, but we also believe that, as a Christian, crazier things have happened,” Drexel, 31, says. Pastor Ezra Jin was one of 27 leaders of Zion Church who were arrested by Chinese authorities during a crackdown on the Christian church last year. Several of the church leaders have been released, but 18 remain in Chinese prisons. Drexel last spoke to her father about a week before his arrest at his home in Beihai, a city in southeast China, last October. Drexel has two children of her own and a third on the way, and recalls her kids “jumping around” during that final call with their grandfather. “We don’t even know how he’s doing physically. We hear that his health is deteriorating,” Drexel says of her 56-year-old father. Pastor Ezra Jin (Courtesy of Drexel) Trump is scheduled to meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in April, and Drexel says she is “really hoping that he will mention some of these cases to Xi Jinping directly, because I think that would make a difference in how he is treated, and whether or not my father would be able to be released.” China’s Independent Church Jin founded Zion Church, one of China’s largest church networks, in 2007. He had served in China’s state-run church for a decade, ultimately becoming a pastor, but began to see the state-sanctioned institution as “a church in captivity, and … not a church that is glorifying to God.” Jin moved his family to the United States for a time to earn his doctorate from Fuller Seminary before returning to China and founding Zion Church. In 2018, the Chinese Communist Party officially shut down Zion Church, which was based in Beijing at the time, during what Jin describes as a “crackdown on Christians and religious freedom in general.” Despite the CCP formally closing the church, the congregation continued to meet and “instead of it dying, it grew,” Jin says. Zion Church became a form of a megachurch in China, the daughter explains, with 100 church plants across the nation and meetings taking place in person and online, but the Chinese government prohibited the pastor from leaving China. The church, which reaches about 10,000 people weekly according to Drexel, continues to meet even with its leaders in prison. While Zion Church was never approved by the government and has always been independent of the state, it has operated in the open. “They were not against the government,” Drexel says of Zion Church. “We didn’t have a political agenda. We just said we want the sacred to stay sacred, and we want the political to stay political.” Pastor Ezra Jin The daughter describes her father as “very warm” and “not a confrontational person at all, and that really showed in his church leadership as well.” “We were not confrontational with the government. He just wanted to spread the gospel to as many people as possible and did not want politics to be in the way of faith.” Pastor Ezra Jin (Courtesy of Drexel) Growing up, Drexel spent about half her childhood in China and half in the U.S., and now lives in Maryland. She has not visited her father since 2020 for fear she would be detained in China. Drexel has been talking to lawmakers in D.C. about her father’s imprisonment in advocacy of his release. Her goal is to see her father released and permitted to move to the U.S. “to join us as a family,” Drexel says, adding, “I just want my dad out.” The post Daughter Pleads for Father’s Release From Chinese Prison  appeared first on The Daily Signal.