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, weve 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. Weve 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.

SHOCKING PERCENTAGE OF DEMOCRATS IDENTIFY AS 'DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS' ACCORDING TO NEW POLL: 'TOXIC POLICIES'

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. 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. Thats not government serving its people; thats 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, youd 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 DSAs 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 Marxs 1875 "Critique of the Gotha Programme" and Vladimir Lenins 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 tra