Republicans have come to a critical juncture, with less than a year to go before their control of Congress is at stake, but they say the way to hold on to power is more legislative aggression, not less. “We have a short time to fix a very large problem that the Biden administration left us, and we did that. Look at how quickly that we secured the border,” House Republican conference chair Lisa McClain, R-Mich., told The Daily Signal on Tuesday at the Republican Study Committee’s media row event. “My view is we need to continue those bold, aggressive actions for the American people because we don’t have a lot of time to do it.” In just 11 months, Republicans will attempt to hold on to their narrow majorities in the House and Senate. A consensus has emerged that Republicans will have to counter Democrats’ narratives on affordability and offer their own vision. “I think we need to do a better job of messaging,” Rep. Buddy Carter, R-Ga., told The Daily Signal. “Republicans are going to be fine in the midterm. We just need to make sure that we get the message out there that we are correcting the after effect, if you will, of the policies of the Biden-Harris administration.” “I think that we need to be more aggressive in terms of talking about what the real issues are,” Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., told The Daily Signal. “We saw the [losses in] … elections in New Jersey and Virginia, and I actually think that we need to be holding the Democrats accountable for the crises that they created and also describing the things that we are doing to attempt to resolve them.” A big part of Hageman’s vision for a Republican affordability plan is health care—ambitiously restructuring the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare. Obamacare “has exacerbated every single problem in the industry, and the Republicans do need to seize this moment and actually come up with a better plan of how to provide health insurance and medical care to the American people,” Hageman said. Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images) President Donald Trump and Republican leadership in both chambers have been attempting to attack this issue. Throughout the shutdown, Democrats emphasized the issue of expiring enhanced premium tax credits.  The White House has floated proposals of a temporary, reformed extension of the tax credits.  In the Senate—where this issue came to prominence amid Democrats’ shutdown of the government—Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., have proposed setting up flexible health care savings accounts as an alternative to the tax credits, which they view as inflationary and prone to fraud. In the House, Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., has introduced a similar proposal of “MAHA accounts.” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., is currently working on finalizing a health care package. The stakes of the moment are high. If President Donald Trump were to lose his trifecta, it would likely hamstring attempts to pass ambitious, conservative legislation. With a majority, House Democrats would also be able to impeach and stymie the administration. Claiming ‘Affordability’ for MAGA The president appears to understand the importance of winning the narrative and has worked in recent days to counter Democrats’ attempts to frame themselves as the party of affordability. “They just say the word,” Trump told reporters in a cabinet meeting Tuesday of Democrats’ affordability narrative. “It doesn’t mean anything to anybody. They just say it—‘affordability.’ I inherited the worst inflation in history. There was no affordability. Nobody could afford anything.” Trump on affordability: It doesn't mean anything to anybody… The word is a con job by the Democrats pic.twitter.com/pRgh3ZAHa4— Acyn (@Acyn) December 2, 2025 Trump would continue to call the affordability narrative a “con job” at an oval office press event on auto industry deregulation and blame Democrats for the country’s lingering inflation. House Republicans now have a precious eleven month span to try to show the American public that they are the party of affordability.  Republicans had previously hoped to protect their majority with redistricting across the country. But with retaliatory redistricting coming in California, it is unclear how many seats Republicans will be able to net through this strategy. Some Republicans say they need to focus on passing popular legislation which yields tangible benefits for Americans. “Joe Biden put us into a massive hole to take time to dig out of. Some people want to fix affordability by just shoveling more government money out the door. That will only make things worse. More money in the economy will be inflationary,” Rep. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., told The Daily Signal.  “Instead, we need to do things like reduce regulations, make it easier for people to go out and build projects in this country, Start businesses, do energy exploration,” Johnson continued. “Those chickens take time to come home to roost, but that needs to be the agenda of this Republican majority.” The Speaker’s Future In recent days, Speaker Johnson has faced criticisms from House GOP members, and outlets such as The New York Times have speculated on how long he will retain the gavel. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., recently told The Wall Street Journal that “the majority of Republicans would vote for new leadership” if Johnson were up for election tomorrow. But the speaker says he is in it for the long haul. Speaker Johnson downplays House GOP dissent. I asked him if he plans to run for speaker/leader next Congress.“Absolutely,” he said, touting their recordAlso said Trump pardoning Cuellar has “no effect on us at all” in flipping seatTold me he hadn’t yet seen Signalgate report pic.twitter.com/F9AcgMzVxW— Manu Raju (@mkraju) December 4, 2025 “Absolutely,” he said Wednesday when asked if he would be running for to lead the Republican conference again next Congress. “We’re going to continue this agenda. We have had one of the most successful, productive congresses in the history of this institution. We’ll put it up against any in history and we did that because we were able to keep everybody together even with the smallest margins in history.” The post Stakes High for House Republicans With Midterms Approaching appeared first on The Daily Signal.

MS Now host Jonathan Capehart joined Friday’s PBS News Hour to discuss the fallout from the September 2 second strike on a drug boat. Showing a lack of understanding of how such operations work and counterexamples, Capehart demanded to know why the administration did not arrest the surviving crew members and falsely claimed there is no evidence that the boats are carrying drugs. Host Geoff Bennett began by wondering, “So, Washington has been consumed this past week with a debate over a series of strikes that killed two survivors of an initial attack on a suspected Venezuelan drug boat back in September. And, Jonathan, the administration says that strike and others like it are necessary to protect U.S. interests. When you look at all that exists in the public realm right now, does that rationale withstand scrutiny?”     Capehart began by wondering if there was even any evidence for the strikes, “No, it doesn't. It would help if the president and the Defense Secretary, this administration, would show us the evidence. You keep saying that these people are drug runners. So — and you know who they are. So tell us. You keep saying that they are shipping these drugs, that's what's in those boats. Well, show us. Show us the evidence. But we don't have the evidence.” Additionally, Capehart claimed, “The other thing is, those two people who were killed in that second strike, since then, there have been others and there have been survivors. If this is such a war on drugs to protect the American people, why aren't those survivors in U.S. federal custody and not repatriated to their countries? There are so many questions here that go well beyond what we have been talking about this week. And that's not to diminish the importance of why we're talking about this.” On this specific strike, the survivors were killed because, according to Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, they climbed back aboard a vessel that was still floating to continue their drug run and therefore a legitimate target. Second, on Capehart’s larger concern about repatriation, there have been instances where survivors of an attack on a submersible have been sent back to their countries. In one instance, Ecuador said it would not be prosecuting one of the survivors—Ecuadorian authorities claimed the crime did not take place in their territory—while Colombia announced it would prosecute the other. If the far-left president of Colombia thinks they are drug runners, that should be good enough for Capehart.

I have a longtime friend — I’ll omit his name because he is somewhat politically prominent — who has been very involved in the extraction of Afghans who allegedly helped us from Afghanistan and resettlement of them in the United States. My friend already has a demanding job, but he has often worked through the night, forgoing sleep to help with this task.I have several strong political disagreements with him, but I would never question his patriotism. He voluntarily served as a soldier in Afghanistan after overcoming great obstacles to be accepted into the military. But I would strongly question his political judgment and the judgment of anyone who thinks we should be settling Afghan refugees in America.'The second the US military backed out, their men folded and refused to fight for what we gave them. We don’t owe them, they owe us.'Unfortunately, a number of our former soldiers, no matter how sincere their beliefs, seem to sympathize more with people in a foreign country whom they believed, rightly or wrongly, to be allies rather than with the interests of the only country to which they owe their allegiance.Joe Kent, an Afghanistan combat veteran and director of the National Counterterrorism Center, argued on social media for the deportation of all of our “Afghan allies.”“Vetting a foreigner in a war zone to determine if he will fight a common enemy is vastly different than vetting a foreigner to see if he is suitable to live in our country,” Kent wrote.As journalist Daniel Greenfield notes, the targeted attack on two National Guardsmen by an Afghan national in Washington, D.C., the day before Thanksgiving was not a one-off. It’s part of an extensive series of assaults by Afghans whom we have foolishly allowed to resettle in the United States.Unbridgeable inequalitiesHaving lived briefly in a third-world country and having traveled for many years in various countries of that description, I have quickly learned to be wary of “friendships.” It is not that people in these countries are inherently bad or incapable of genuine friendship in principle. It is that the gap between you (a well-off American) and them (a third-world citizen who, even if relatively affluent, is often at a huge disadvantage versus an American) is astronomical.And that gap is not just financial and legal, but also based on traditions and customs. Relationships that may feel like genuine friendship for a time usually come with future requests or pleas for assistance. Again, I don’t necessarily blame these people — I might do the same in their shoes — and of course genuine friendships in such situations are possible, but they are far rarer than idealists might wish them to be.What applies in basically peaceful third-world countries applies a thousandfold in an impoverished, war-torn, and primitive country like Afghanistan. It is monstrously arrogant to think the American political class understands deeply the inner workings of these countries and the motivations of the people there, given that we spent almost $1 trillion to occupy Afghanistan, only to see all of our efforts collapse within a week after we removed our military as a threat of force.Wade Miller, the executive director of Citizens for Renewing America and a U.S. Marine combat veteran, responded to the claim that resettling Afghans was the moral thing to do since they “fought alongside our own” soldiers, rightly calling it a “BS metric.” As he noted, “1. Many played both sides. 2. Many only did it to make money. 3. Many were plants. 4. Many had long-standing tribal grudges against the Taliban.”And none of them necessarily has a long-term loyalty to America, which is the first step to assess before even beginning to consider a claim of residency.All of this would be obvious to anyone who does not let suicidal empathy overwhelm good sense. But unfortunately, we have lost that common sense, even among many of our supposedly hardened fighting forces.‘We don’t owe them’Miller punctures the lie that we owe these Afghans for “doing America a favor,” pointing out that we did them a favor by expending American lives and treasure to help them govern themselves without the Taliban. But “the second the U.S. military backed out, their men folded and refused to fight for what we gave them. We don’t owe them, they owe us.”This is a harsh assessment, but in the aggregate, it is not unfair.Or consider what Mark Lucas, an Afghanistan veteran and founder of the Article III Project, has written: “Afghans were untrustworthy allies who sold their children to pedophiles, ritually raped little boys, and beat their women.” He notes that without male soldiers guarding them, countless local Afghans made clear that they would have raped the women who were attached to their detachment.RELATED: Trump makes America dangerous again — to our enemies Jim Watson/Getty ImagesLucas points out that even asking simple questions of potential Afghan asylum-seekers, such as whether they support putting apostates to death, child marriage, Sharia for non-Muslims, defense of suicide bombings, polygamy, and honor killings, would quickly disqualify them. The vast majority of Afghans, he says, support one or more of these views — none of which are compatible with the American way of life.One of the few Afghan refugees who resettled in my own state of Montana promptly raped a Montanan shortly after his arrival. Unsurprisingly, the crime and its implications were shamefully underreported by local media.Toward a more sober policyEven assuming we have an obligation to those we believed helped us in Afghanistan, it would mean we were obligated to get them to safety — not get them to America. If we had made it clear at the outset that relocating to America was not on offer, we would have see a drastic reduction in the number of “refugees.” We can and should resettle them in other countries. Making arrangements to do that is a worthy use of American soft power.The notion that resettling Afghans in America is a moral duty reflects Joe Biden’s poor political leadership. His administration and previous ones before it had become arrogant about their ability to control events and remake complex societies and peoples far different from our own. In reality, their policies promoted cultural arrogance under the guise of friendship. They abandoned our own in favor of those from distant cultures and lands.Let us hope that President Trump’s promise to refuse all new Afghan visas and to remove postwar arrivals and resettle them elsewhere is the start of a more sober, realistic, and serious refugee policy that will put the interests of America and its citizens first.Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally at the American Mind.

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