Our closing argument: The midterms are a referendum on who runs your life
The coming midterms lay bare a divide that runs deeper than policy and older than any party platform. Beneath every debate sits a single question, and it is the question on which this election turns: Who do you trust to run your life, you or the government? House Republicans' answer is our closing argument.
The current Republican majority arrived in Congress in January 2025 and spent the next 20 months answering that question. After record highs of hundreds of thousands of illegals streaming over the southwest border into the country under President Joe Biden, we’ve slammed the door shut. We now have the most secure border in modern American history.
Families in El Paso, Texas, no longer worry about migrants roaming the streets at night. We’ve funded and empowered law enforcement for the first time since 2020, resulting in the largest recorded drop in violent crime in FBI history. Now a mother in Chicago can let her son play outside after school without worry.
The Working Families Tax Cuts delivered the largest tax cut for the middle class in American history, putting money where it belongs: back in the pockets of those who earned it. By delivering "No Tax on Tips," "No Tax on Overtime" and a tax break for seniors, Republicans put real money back into the hands of the waitress closing out a double shift, the lineman working and the retiree who spent a lifetime building this country.
We lifted Washington's weight off your backs, shrinking the federal government to its smallest level since 1966. We rolled back red tape that drove up the price of a car and many appliances and stood between ambitious Americans and the businesses they dreamed of starting. 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 build something worth keeping.
The other side makes its convictions just as plain. Prominent Democrats demand that we defund the police. Democrats speak openly of abolishing the Senate, packing the Supreme Court and stripping away Second Amendment rights. When the Working Families Tax Cuts came to a vote, every Democrat in Congress opposed them, voting to take more money out of your pocket. That’s not government serving its people; that’s Washington grabbing your wallet with both hands and calling it help.
The Democrats’ ideas grow from the belief that government belongs above the individual, an idea that found fertile soil in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The DSA calls for collective ownership of major parts of the economy and works to elect more socialists. Its goal is the end of capitalism.
You might think the DSA is some marginal group in this country. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong. This 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 is fully locked in with the radical group. We should be 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 is 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. And history offers many warnings about what happens after that transition.
In Havana, Cuba, the pastel mansions of a once-glittering city have spent six decades dissolving into the salt air. Seen from orbit at night, North Korea is a vast patch of darkness where a nation of millions ought to be glowing. In the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, people stood for hours in the winter dark outside shops whose shelves had been stripped long before they reached the door.
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Each time the promise was paradise, financial equality for all working men and women, an escape from capitalism’s worst impulses. Each time the ending arrived in the same form. It came in neighborhoods where people had learned to lower their voices to avoid punishment for criticizing the all-powerful government. It came in cities where no one expected the lights to come back on. It came in lines formed where families waited for 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. And on the other is a group of individuals prepared to ignore the whole of history to embrace a politics that sets aside the element that has always underpinned the American experiment: human agency.
We’ve clung tight to that beautiful individualism through 250 years. That’s the vision behind the Revolution that birthed this country. We’ve 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 country apart, a stunning and catastrophic 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 the darkest nights.
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Any party that has room for communism is not a party that serves the dream this country was founded on, the dream of a citizenry guided by self-rule. And that is where the contrast becomes unmistakable.
America was built on the radical idea of trust in the individual. That’s 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, and 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 that history, the thing itself, has come for us at long last.