(Daily Signal)—In a major rebuke to measures passed by the District of Columbia city government under home rule, the House of Representatives will consider three bills this week that would repeal local laws passed by the D.C. Council.
One of the bills seeks to repeal a local law that gave illegal aliens and other noncitizen D.C. residents the right to vote in local elections in the District of Columbia. HR 884 would repeal the Local Resident Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2022, which enabled noncitizens to vote in D.C. elections.
The local law, which went into effect on Feb. 23, 2023, formally amended the definition of eligible electors to include noncitizens living in the District of Columbia. That means noncitizen D.C. residents became eligible to vote for the mayor, chairman or member of the D.C. Council, attorney general, members of the D.C. State Board of Education, members of Advisory Neighborhood Commissions, and D.C. ballot measures. It also allowed noncitizens to run for elected office in the D.C. government, including for the top job, mayor.
Congressional Republicans have attempted to undo the D.C. Council’s laws in the past, and were joined by as many as 42 of their Democrat colleagues in the effort. However, their effort did not pass muster in the Senate. (D.C. laws are subject to an initial review by both chambers of Congress). A legal challenge was also not able to undo the D.C. law. U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an appointee of President Barack Obama, dismissed a lawsuit in 2024 that had attempted to challenge the law, saying the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue.
“Free and fair elections are a prerequisite for a healthy republic. The radical D.C. Council’s decision to allow noncitizens—including illegal aliens and foreign agents—to vote in local elections dilutes the voting power of the citizen voter,” Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas, the sponsor of the legislation in the House, told The Daily Signal.
“That power must be defended and anyone against H.R. 884 is for the transfer of political power away from legal voters. Congress has the authority to overrule this in Washington, and 25% of
the Democratic caucus agreed and voted for this bill—a strong bipartisan vote,” the Texas congressman continued.
“My legislation restores the sanctity of the voting process and ensures that only American citizens are voting in our nation’s capital, and I urge all my colleagues to support this legislation,” Pfluger said.
Rep. William Timmons, R-S.C., explained how enabling noncitizens to vote dilutes the voice of the American citizen.
“I co-sponsored HR 884 because only American citizens should decide American elections—period. The D.C. Council’s reckless decision to allow noncitizens, including illegal aliens and even foreign agents, to vote in local elections is a direct assault on the integrity of our democratic process,” Timmons told The Daily Signal.
“This bill restores common sense, protects the sanctity of the vote, and sends a clear message: citizenship matters. Anyone against HR 884 is for watering down the voice of the American voter. My constituents overwhelmingly support this bill, and so do I,” the South Carolina lawmaker said.
Two other pieces of legislation pertaining to the District are set to be debated and voted on in the House this week as well.
HR 2056 is a bill that would undo local law by barring the D.C. government from prohibiting or restricting its officials from “sending, receiving, maintaining, or exchanging with any Federal, State, or local government entity information regarding the citizenship or immigration status (lawful or unlawful) of any individual.” The bill also would prevent the District from banning compliance with a request from the Department of Homeland Security for “a detainer for, or notify about the release of, an individual.” The legislation has a policy carve-out for illegal aliens who are victims of, or witnesses to, crimes.
HR 2096 is a bill being considered that deals with policing in the District. The Protecting Our Nation’s Capital Emergency Act would restore the ability of D.C. police officers to negotiate matters related to discipline through collective bargaining. It would also restore the statute of limitations for claims against the D.C. police or civilian employees of the Metropolitan Police Department. Both of these actions would amend a D.C. law, the Comprehensive Policing and Justice Reform Amendment Act of 2022.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
