The Trump administration closed the week with two election-integrity wins heading into November 3.

First, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to temporarily revive the expanded SAVE program, so states can again use federal records to check whether people on the voter rolls are U.S. citizens. A day earlier, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency released its first public election-security plan of this term: treat voting systems as a year-round target, use paper ballots, run post-election manual audits, and lock down the machines.

That is the week the White House wanted heading into the midterms. Two moves, one job: confirm that the people on the list are citizens, and keep the machines on a short leash.

Common sense says checking U.S. citizenship at the point of registration and voting should be the first step, not a lawsuit.

The Court: Congress authorized the data, and the justices respected the 90-day rule

President Trump’s March 2025 order directed Homeland Security to let election officials verify citizenship. DHS rebuilt SAVE around Social Security numbers and other identifiers, adding bulk search and SSN lookup so clerks could flag ineligible names.

The League of Women Voters sued. Judge Sparkle Sooknanan blocked the system in June. An appeals court left the freeze in place.

On Friday the Supreme Court paused that order. The majority said Congress authorized DHS to pull citizenship data from other agencies, including Social Security, and that Washington must answer states that ask whether a voter is a citizen. The injunction, the justices wrote, “prevents the Federal Government from using the program it believes is best suited to the task.”

They also respected existing law. The National Voter Registration Act still bars systematic purges inside 90 days of a federal election. The Court said that moratorium “limits the potential impact” this close to November 3. What is back now: individualized citizenship checks before Election Day, and broader list maintenance after.

The stay is not a final ruling. Before the freeze, the administration told the Court more than 65 million voters across 26 states had already been checked, with about 28,635 flagged as possible noncitizens. The legal point the majority locked in is basic: when a state asks if the person on the list is a citizen, Washington is supposed to answer.

Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., called it a “massive win.” Checking citizenship, she said, “should be the bare minimum.”

CISA: paper, audits, lock the doors

A day earlier CISA issued the 13-page Securing the Next 250 plan, the first public election-security blueprint of the term after last year’s freeze. Secretary Markwayne Mullin ordered it in July.

It is voluntary and no-cost. It tells offices the systems are a year-round target. The recommendations are old-school: paper ballots, post-election manual audits, multi-factor authentication, tighter access, and a year of logs. CISA will offer a no-cost information-sharing platform and assign regional directors as advisers.

What it means before November

SAVE is back for citizenship checks. The Court respected the 90-day bar on systematic purges and still restored individualized verification before November 3. CISA is back on the record for paper and audits. Neither move ends the lawsuits or rewrites state codes. Both put tools back with the people who run elections: a way to ask if a registrant is a citizen, and a federal playbook that keeps the machines on a short leash instead of trusting them on faith.

California built a disclosure system so voters could see who a mayor is leaning on for money. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass filled out the forms. Then she wrote “Anonymous” on them, at least 23 times.

The filings reviewed by The Center Square  cover a 12-day stretch in January 2025. The payments added up to $240,563. They moved through the Pledgeling Foundation, a donor-advised fund that can hide a giver’s name, and landed at the California Community Foundation, tagged as fire relief. The reports exist. The names do not.

DSA-LA endorsed her runoff opponent. Three DSA council members endorsed Bass anyway. None of that changes what the Form 803s leave blank.

That is the trick. A behested payment is a donation an elected official asks someone else to send to a third-party nonprofit. State law requires the official to disclose who got asked, who paid, and where the check went. The point is motive. If a contractor, a lobbyist, or a company with business at City Hall is writing the check, the public is supposed to read that on a form. “Anonymous” is a closed door with a stamp that says transparency.

Officials are supposed to identify the underlying donor as far as they know, or can determine by asking the middleman.

Gregory Yorke, Pledgeling’s CFO, said he is not aware of any request from the mayor’s office, or any other third party, for those names. “They are not anonymous to us,” he wrote, “but they can opt to be shown as anonymous to the organization we regrant to, like CCF.”

Bass’s office has not explained how she solicits money from people she does not name. One answer may be that she is not on the call. Conway Collis, who runs the Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles, has said Bass had “minimal to no involvement” in that group’s fundraising, even as she reports its gifts as behested payments under penalty of perjury. Center Square found no anonymous gifts to the Mayor’s Fund. The anonymous batch went to CCF. Her name is on the form. The public still does not get the donor.

This is not a one-off blank. Earlier this week, Center Square reported that Bass has steered more than $38 million to favored charities, often from companies with business before the city. CCF has taken more than $4.2 million from donors at her request. She does not sit on its board. The foundation still works “alongside” her office on housing projects such as LA4LA. Fire relief is a sympathetic label. Partnership is a political relationship. The disclosure law was written so those two things could not hide behind each other.

The pipeline is larger than 12 days in January. Since taking office, Bass has directed more than $22 million in behested money to the Mayor’s Fund and the Getty House Foundation after announcing “the most strict ethics reforms” those groups had ever adopted. Lobbyist-paying companies kept giving. Charter Communications sent $10,000 to Getty House ten days after a proposed contract extension that raised its city spending cap by $2.75 million reached her office. PepsiCo, AT&T, Amazon, and the Dodgers turn up in the same filings.

A Consumer Watchdog review of more than 560 of her disclosures found she filed late on average, 51 days against a 30-day deadline. An anonymous complaint already went to the state ethics commission over another large behested gift she had not reported on time. The system runs on trust. The people who wrote the rules are the people filing the forms.

Somehow, none of this required a raid, no surprise FBI visit at dawn. The numbers are in the state’s own reports. Twenty-three lines that say “Anonymous.” A quarter of a million dollars in less than two weeks. A mayor whose name is on the ask, and a public that still cannot answer the only question the law was built to answer: Who is the mystery donor, and what did they want at City Hall?

While Havana’s diplomats walked out of the U.N. this week during a speech by President Donald J. Trump, another Cuba conversation has been running for months on Biscayne Bay. Wealthy Cuban-Americans in Miami are sketching a stock market, airport rebuilds, emergency power, and a temporary government for an island that still has the same regime it has had since 1959, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The plans already have names and price tags. Juan Omar Sixto, 82, who chairs the new Cuban-American National Chamber of Commerce, is pulling investors toward a Havana stock and commodities exchange. “We have waited for 67 years,” he told a June gathering. “We need to start.”

Cuba has not had a stock exchange since the revolution shut it down. Organizers want about 100 families. Sixto has said that pool could represent some $200 billion in net worth. No money moves until there is real political change and legal protection for private property.

Infrastructure is the other table. Architect Willy Bermello, 75, has been on biweekly calls for an estimated $8 billion renovation of eight Cuban airports, with José Martí, Varadero, Holguín, and Cayo Coco first. “We have our people on speed dial,” he told the Journal. Separate teams are studying power barges for a grid that keeps going dark, and lawyers for claims on property seized after 1959.

The political track belongs to Jorge Mas, the MasTec chairman, Inter Miami co-owner, and head of the Cuban American National Foundation. Mas says Trump once asked what a rebuild would cost. He answered that raising the $90 billion he estimates for the first three years would be “child’s play” if the legal door is open. Mas and the Cuban American Bar Association of Miami have a 28-page draft for a provisional government of up to two years, then elections.

None of this stands apart from Trump’s Cuba policy. After the United States removed Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro from power earlier this year, Trump said “Cuba is next.” He has talked about a “friendly takeover.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Cuban-American and close to Mas, is running the file.

Wednesday morning in New York, Rubio said no one will invest in Cuba under the current model. Helms-Burton still bars most American companies until Congress’s conditions are met. Foreign firms can already trade with the island. Many will not. “Why would I invest ten million dollars in Cuba if two years later they decide on their own to change the rules, keep the money, and never return it to me?” he said. “No one is going to invest in Cuba under the current governance model.” Certainty is the problem. So is the credibility of a regime that has not met those conditions.

Miami is writing org charts. Havana still runs the island. GAESA still sits on most of the formal economy.

Not everyone is buying the clock. Tony Costa said they have not changed the goal, but they have moved the goalposts. Ric Herrero of the Cuba Study Group was blunter. Anyone hoping for a swing at the Cuban piñata, he said, is retaining lawyers, particularly in Trump’s inner circle. “People are lining up for a transition that is by no means guaranteed, preparing for a friendly takeover or simply wasting their time.”

These plans are being drawn up by men who left Cuba decades ago and still call themselves patriots. Someone has to sketch the airports, the grid, and the capital the day the current system breaks. Otherwise the island gets chaos instead of an economy. Cuba is already the proof: crippled systems, cut off from markets, still waiting on the lights.

Unlike the bloody Bolshevik Revolution that hastily brought Marxism to Moscow and eventually Eastern Europe, American socialists have sought a different path.

In the United States, socialists have pursued revolution through stealthier, softer, and slower means, what many academics refer to as the “long march through the institutions.” 

Whether this strategy should be credited to Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci or German student activist Rudi Dutschke is beside the point. 

Suffice it to say, in America, the socialist long march has triumphed.

As many polls show, socialism is more popular than ever in America, especially among young Americans.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), “the largest socialist organization in the United States,” wields more political power than ever.

The DSA has scores of members in political offices throughout the country, with hundreds more on the ballot in November. It has money. It has momentum. 

But most importantly, it has the hearts and minds of young people.

Long story short: the Left’s long march has already succeeded.

To understand why the long march has been so successful, one must recognize its cornerstone: education indoctrination.

Not that long ago, I was a public high school social studies teacher. 

I want to describe my experience briefly. 

Before entering the classroom, I had to earn a degree from an accredited teacher college. 

I am not exaggerating when I say that my two-year program at a prominent educator college in Chicago did little to prepare me to be an effective teacher. To my frustration, ample time was devoted to long discourses on far-left political and social ideology. 

Social and emotional learning methods were deemed far superior to content mastery. We were told to fixate on academic equity, not academic excellence.

Most of my professors were more concerned with preparing us to become social justice warriors far more than they were concerned that we would be good teachers. 

During my student teaching period at a high school in a Chicago suburb, my mentor teacher reinforced this narrative. The teacher groupthink was startling. Frankly, I was afraid to speak out on the grounds that I would be reprimanded somehow. 

Unsurprisingly, I encountered this same dynamic during my several years as a social studies teacher in Illinois and South Carolina.

Here is one anecdote. The day after President Trump won the 2016 election, nearly every teacher in the social studies department wore all-black clothing because they “were in mourning.” This happened in ruby red South Carolina.

Parents must understand that the level of Marxist indoctrination occurring in public schools has reached a crisis point.

A generation of American students has been intentionally misinformed about the evil nature of socialism. On the contrary, they have been miseducated into believing that socialism is righteous.

Millions of American students have no idea that socialism has been tried and failed time and time again. They are unaware of the mass poverty, misery, and murder that socialist governments have wrought upon their people. 

Even worse, they are being brainwashed into believing that individual liberty and free enterprise are the real enemies. 

As a libertarian, I am generally not for government intervention and mandates. However, in the realm of public education, I think the case is so dire that those heavy-handed solutions might be the only way to force change.

To his credit, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis saw this problem coming years ago.

In 2024, DeSantis signed SB 1264 into law, which “requires instruction in public schools about the history of communism.”

In 2025, the Florida Department of Education approved “new History of Communism standards” to equip “students with a truthful, in-depth understanding of how communist ideologies suppress individual freedoms, abuse power, and inflict widespread suffering.”

Anastasios Kamoutsas, Florida’s Education Commissioner at the time, emphasized that the “standards will ensure that students learn the truth about the brutal realities of life under communism and gain a deeper appreciation for the blessings of liberty that define our nation.”

“With the resurgence of communist ideologies across the United States,” he added, “it is more important than ever for students to understand the catastrophic failures and human suffering caused by communist regimes.”

I could not agree more. 

This fall, Florida public students are learning the truth about socialism. Could this be the beginning of the end of the long march? I sure hope so.

By Red State – https://redstate.com/heartlandinstitute/2026/09/23/the-marxist-long-march-in-america-must-be-stopped-n2207217

On Sept. 14, 2026, at the G20 Energy Abundance Ministerial in Houston, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced the final repeal of nearly all of the Biden-Harris administration’s 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards for coal- and gas-fired power plants.

The EPA estimates this move will save $310 billion through 2047 by ending compliance rules that are legally flawed and technically unworkable.

Officials also frame the repeal as a way to avoid wasted spending on controls that have not proven commercially viable. The follow-on proposal’s goal is to make it much harder for the next administration to put federal power-plant climate rules back in place.

Both Republicans and people with hands-on experience in oil, gas, and coal have made the same case for years. Biden’s climate rules made it harder to keep old coal plants running, build new natural gas plants, and sell U.S. energy overseas, even as America produced record amounts of oil and gas. They call the 2024 rules the newest part of a 15-year “war on coal.” In their view, those rules shut down plants without putting something just as reliable in their place.

Zeldin called it the “largest power-sector deregulatory action in U.S. history” and a step toward affordable, reliable electricity. Officials say the 2024 rules exceeded EPA authority under the Clean Air Act by treating carbon capture as the “best system of emission reduction.”

The Supreme Court struck down the Obama-era Clean Power Plan in West Virginia v. EPA (2022). The plan did more than require plants to cut pollution; it tried to shift the electricity system away from coal toward gas and renewables.

The Court said that kind of “generation shifting” was a major policy choice Congress had not clearly given EPA. Under Section 111, the agency can require plants to run cleaner. It cannot use the statute to redesign the national power mix.

EPA also proposed wiping out the rest of the power-sector greenhouse gas standards. That is the lock if it is finalized and survives court. If it holds, the next EPA cannot just flip the 2024 rule back on. It would have to convince a court that Section 111 still covers climate rules for this sector.

According to EPA, U.S. power plants are only a small, shrinking slice of the greenhouse gases in the air worldwide.

China’s power sector alone emits about four times as much CO2 as America’s. In 2024 it accounted for roughly 39% of global power-plant emissions; the United States was about 12%.

So officials argue the 2024 rules would have done little for the climate while costing Americans billions.

Deputy Administrator David Fotouhi said the Trump EPA has a simple rule. “If Congress hasn’t authorized it, then we’re not doing it. We’re not requiring it.” He has also said the Obama and Biden power plant rules “would have increased the cost of operating power plants by over $1 billion a year, which would have led directly to higher energy bills for consumers and a less stable grid.” The administration says the rollback will keep electricity affordable and reliable as demand grows from data centers, manufacturing, and electrification.

Officials project coal production for power-sector use could rise more than tenfold. They say winter demand is why reliability cannot wait.

Environmental groups have already sued. On Sept. 17, NRDC, EDF, the American Lung Association, and other health groups asked the D.C. Circuit to vacate the repeal. They say more power-plant pollution will mean more deaths and worse climate damage.

How long the rollback lasts will turn on whether Section 111 can be used for climate rules in this sector. The final repeal takes effect Nov. 16 unless a court blocks it. Comments on the leftover-standards proposal are due Nov. 2. The Trump EPA remains committed to common sense cost savings, unleashing American energy, and keeping electricity affordable and reliable.

One is working to end the war. The other is helping reunite the families caught in it.

President Donald Trump has spent his second term pursuing an end to the Russia-Ukraine war through the traditional machinery of presidential diplomacy: meetings with world leaders, direct conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, American envoys traveling between capitals and negotiations over territory, sanctions and security guarantees.

Those negotiations remain extraordinarily difficult, with the diplomatic process repeatedly advancing, stalling and restarting. As recently as September, preparations were underway for another possible round of U.S.-Russia-Ukraine talks.

But alongside the President’s conventional diplomatic effort, First Lady Melania Trump has developed something different: a parallel humanitarian channel between countries at war, centered not on territory or military objectives, but on children and families separated by the conflict.

That distinction may be more significant than Washington realizes.

The effort began with a personal letter the First Lady wrote to Putin in August 2025 raising the plight of children affected by the war. From that outreach grew continuing communications involving her representative and officials from both Russia and Ukraine – and results followed.

The first reunifications came in October 2025. Seven more children were reunited with their families in December, with additional rounds in February, April and July. By August 17, 2026, the White House said the initiative had helped facilitate the reunification of 34 children and families separated during the war.

Thirty-four children represent only a small portion of a much larger crisis. Ukrainian officials have documented approximately 20,000 reported cases involving the deportation or forced transfer of Ukrainian children, while Russia disputes Ukraine’s characterization of those cases.

But the significance of the First Lady’s effort isn’t simply a number – it’s the mechanism she has helped create. Traditional peace negotiations tend to begin with the hardest questions: territory, borders, sanctions, armies and security guarantees. Those are precisely the issues on which neither side believes it can easily compromise.

Child reunification works differently.

A child returning to his or her family does not require either country to surrender territory, abandon a military position or settle the future of disputed land. Instead, it identifies something simpler: an area where two adversaries can still cooperate.

Every successful reunification requires names to be exchanged, identities verified, families located, logistics arranged and commitments honored. Those may be small steps beside negotiations to end a war. But diplomacy is often built from small commitments that are made – and then kept.

The First Lady herself captured the idea in July when she said that the parties should be able to place children “above international disputes.”

That principle has now produced repeated cooperation, and it offers a lesson for Washington: American diplomacy traditionally approaches conflicts from the top down, settling the largest geopolitical disputes first and expecting humanitarian progress to follow.

Melania Trump’s initiative suggests a second path can run alongside it – one that begins where agreement is possible, builds trust through narrow and verifiable commitments, and produces a tangible result before attempting another.

The President and First Lady are, in effect, operating on two different tracks – one from the top down, the other from the bottom up.

They do not have to remain disconnected.

The First Lady’s humanitarian channel cannot by itself resolve territorial disputes or produce a ceasefire, and 34 reunifications should not be confused with a resolution of the enormous suffering the war has caused. But diplomacy depends on channels of communication, particularly ones that have already demonstrated that opposing sides can exchange information, make commitments and carry them out.

That is why what Melania Trump has built deserves attention beyond the humanitarian success of each individual reunion. She has shown that even nations fighting a brutal war can still find a narrow piece of common ground.

And sometimes that is how something much larger begins.

President Trump continues working toward an agreement capable of ending the war. Alongside him, the First Lady has developed a different kind of diplomacy – humanitarian, personal and deliberately focused on the one subject both sides should be able to place above politics and war: children.

After 34 reunifications, her effort is no longer merely symbolic. It is a functioning diplomatic channel – one built on communication, cooperation and commitments kept.

Together, they have created two paths toward the same destination. One is working to end the war. The other is helping reunite the families caught in it.