Senate Majority Leader John Thune made his position unmistakably clear: the talking filibuster is dead on arrival. After weeks of pressure from President Trump, conservative activists, and a growing chorus of House Republicans demanding action on the SAVE America Act, Thune told reporters that he has “studied it and researched it pretty thoroughly” and simply cannot see a path to success. His conclusion, blunt and final: the strategy “based on actual past experience” has never delivered a legislative outcome, and he will not stake the Senate calendar on it now.
His reasoning is not without merit. A talking filibuster, as currently envisioned without a formal rules change, could consume months of Senate floor time, require every single Republican to vote in lockstep to table every Democratic amendment, and ultimately still fail to produce a bill for the president’s desk. Thune is right that it is complicated. He is right that it is risky. But in refusing to take that risk — and refusing to go further by eliminating the filibuster outright — he and his conference may be making a far more consequential and irreversible error.
“The question Republicans must ask is not whether they are comfortable eliminating the filibuster. The question is whether they can afford what happens when Democrats eliminate it without them.”
At the center of this standoff is the SAVE America Act — the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility Act — a bill requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections and photo ID to cast a ballot. It polls extraordinarily well. President Trump has called it an “88% issue with all voters.”
It passed the House. And yet it sits stranded in the Senate, held hostage by a procedural rule that requires 60 votes to advance most legislation — a threshold Democrats have made clear they will never deliver. The partial government shutdown drags on. The filibuster stands. And Republicans are running out of options.
Let us be direct about what is at stake. Without the SAVE America Act becoming law, the integrity concerns Republicans have raised about federal elections remain unaddressed going into the 2026 midterms. And if Republicans lose the Senate in 2026 — which, given the historical patterns of midterm elections and the current political environment, is not an unrealistic scenario — they will have handed the chamber to a Democrat majority that has no such compunctions about Senate procedure.
Democrats have watched Republicans protect the filibuster for years in the misguided belief that institutional norms are symmetric — that both parties will respect the same rules. That belief is not supported by evidence. In 2013, Senate Democrats under Harry Reid eliminated the filibuster for executive and judicial nominees. In 2020, the only reason they did not eliminate the legislative filibuster was because they lacked the votes. The moment Democrats have 50 reliable votes in the Senate and a sympathetic White House, the legislative filibuster will be gone — not debated, not modified, gone — in a matter of hours.
“When Democrats take the majority and kill the filibuster on their terms, Republicans will have no one to blame but themselves for refusing to act first.”
And what follows from that moment is not difficult to predict. Without the filibuster, a Democratic Senate majority could pass sweeping federal election legislation — bills that nationalize voter rolls, eliminate state-level ID requirements, mandate automatic voter registration, and expand mail-in voting on a permanent, nationwide basis. These are not hypothetical ambitions; they are bills Democrats have already written, named, and championed. H.R. 1, the so-called “For the People Act,” passed the House in 2021. It failed in the Senate only because of the filibuster. Remove that obstacle, and it — or something like it — becomes law.
Once that legislation is enacted, the electoral map shifts. Permanently. Republicans who believe they can simply win back the Senate and undo the damage are operating under a dangerously optimistic set of assumptions about what a restructured electoral system will allow.
Thune and his allies often cite the long-term institutional value of the filibuster as a reason for its preservation. They argue that a Senate without supermajority requirements becomes a more volatile, more partisan, more unstable body. There is something to that argument in the abstract. But it is an argument that applies to a Senate operating in symmetrical good faith — a Senate in which both parties genuinely intend to preserve the same rules when they are in the majority.
That Senate does not exist. It has not existed for more than a decade. Republicans are the only party still playing by the old rules — and they are paying for it.
Senator Rand Paul has argued, thoughtfully, that eliminating the filibuster would lead to “more acrimony, more rapid shifts from right to left.” He is not wrong about the acrimony. But the rapid shift from right to left is coming regardless. The only variable is whether Republicans control the terms under which the shift occurs, or whether they are simply on the receiving end of it.
“The filibuster will be eliminated. The only question is who eliminates it — and what legislation passes in the hours that follow.”
The conservative case for eliminating the filibuster now is not a case for radicalism. It is a case for arithmetic. Republicans currently hold 53 Senate seats — their strongest position in years. They have a president in the White House who supports their agenda. They have a bill, the SAVE America Act, that the overwhelming majority of Americans support and that directly addresses the election integrity concerns Republicans have made central to their political identity. The window to act is open. It will not be open forever.
If Thune will not move the talking filibuster, and the votes for a full filibuster elimination genuinely do not exist today, then Senate leadership has a responsibility to persuade, pressure, and if necessary, shame those holdouts into reconsideration. Not because eliminating the filibuster is an abstract good — it is not — but because the alternative is allowing Democrats to do it unilaterally, on their terms, when they are positioned to exploit it most.
History will not be kind to Republican leaders who, in the spring of 2026, looked at the political landscape, recognized the stakes, and then explained carefully to future generations why they chose institutional caution over decisive action. The filibuster will not save the Republican Senate majority. It will not protect Republican governance. It will simply ensure that when Democrats next hold power, they face no procedural friction whatsoever in remaking American elections.
Senator Thune is a careful man, and careful men often make good politicians. But there are moments in politics when caution is indistinguishable from surrender. This is one of those moments. Republicans should eliminate the filibuster, pass the SAVE America Act, end the government shutdown, and let the American people render judgment in November. The alternative — preserving a procedural norm that their opponents have already decided to discard — is not statesmanship. It is unilateral disarmament.
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.
