Authored by Frank Miele via RealClearPolitics,
It seems as though only one thing motivates Congress to act - the threat of elections.
That's why both the House and Senate have moved to pass a continuing resolution to keep funding the government until December. Originally funding was going to run out on Oct. 1, the date that was decided during the last shutdown crisis.
But with virtually every member of the House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate up for election in November, almost no one in Congress wanted to call attention to their own inaction by letting a new shutdown occur.
It's the political version of Pavlov's dogs. You know, the famous experiment by the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov who trained canines to salivate at the sound of a bell because they associated the bell with the expectation of food being served.
The same thing happens with members of Congress when they hear that an election is scheduled within the next three months. Suddenly they want to be productive.
A representative can ignore constituents for 22 months and then suddenly rediscover them during the last two. And senators can become unresponsive to their voters for most of their six-year term, enjoying junkets and the other fruits of power while being under no obligation to get anything done.
Makes you almost sympathize with the Democratic Socialists of America, who have made abolition of the Senate one of their top priorities. Six-year terms have their virtues, but they also make senators especially prone to forgetting who they work for.
But maybe we could salvage the Senate if we could adapt Pavlov's experiment in a way that would hopefully train senators to do their job on the regular instead of just once in a blue moon.
Call this my modest proposal. Like Jonathan Swift's famous satirical essay proposing that poor Irish parents sell their infants as food, it isn't intended as a serious legislative recommendation. It's meant to expose an absurdity - in this case, a Congress that suddenly remembers how to govern only when voters are about to fire it.
Sadly, the proposal has little likelihood of being put into effect by those senators whom it would put on notice. Yet if its argument is accurate, then we can at least all agree that senators - and yes, all members of Congress - are little more than trained monkeys. If only we could train them well, perhaps they would do their job more consistently.
No doubt you are wondering how we could possibly accomplish such a remarkable goal. It's a relatively simple mechanism, akin to the bell that Pavlov taught dogs to associate with food.
Namely, the Senate can institute a rule that once a month, the citizen constituents of each state will be able to vote electronically on whether they wish to retain or dismiss their senator.
Now, before you worry about constitutional entanglements and the risk of meddling in the results of such digital ballots, understand that the votes will not be binding. Instead they will simply keep senators on their toes, just as the threat of real elections does today. The results will be widely publicized, and any senator who consistently fails to win majority support from his state's voters will be publicly humiliated.
But if it were taken seriously, it could have a much wider impact. Political parties could guarantee additional campaign support to senators who consistently earned the confidence of their state's voters. And the opposite would be true as well. Suppose a senator has only a 30% retention rate from the citizens of his or her state. Donors would flee. Challengers would emerge. Even the most complacent senators might begin to reconsider their inaction.
The genius of elections is not that they remove bad politicians. It's that the possibility of removal changes behavior long before Election Day. Congress doesn't need more elections. It simply needs to remember every month that one is coming. Perhaps Pavlov's bell could do the trick.
And then, instead of Congress passing a continuing resolution to fund the government for a month or two, we could return to regular order and watch appropriations bills passed for an entire year. What a revolutionary concept!
Frank Miele, retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Mont., is a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His book "The Media Matrix: What If Everything You Know Is Fake" is available from his Amazon author page. Visit him at HeartlandDiaryUSA.com or follow him on Facebook @HeartlandDiaryUSA and on X/Gettr @HeartlandDiary.
Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 09:45Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,
Outrage is boiling in North Texas after the McKinney City Council voted 7-0 to greenlight a major new Islamic center complex, brushing aside hours of public testimony that included a direct warning from an Iranian Christian who fled Sharia law.
Citizens packed City Hall for a marathon session that stretched past midnight. More than 150 people signed up to speak. The approved site plan covers roughly 5.5 acres at Virginia Parkway and Crutcher Crossing. It includes a 15,000-square-foot sanctuary, a 10,000-square-foot classroom building, and a 7,000-square-foot gym for the McKinney Islamic Association, which says its existing facility has been outgrown.
City staff insisted the revised plan met every zoning requirement with no variances, leaving the council little legal room to deny it. Council members framed the vote as purely procedural. Residents who showed up in force saw something far larger at stake.
? NOW: Outrage is ERUPTING after McKinney, Texas council votes to APPROVE a large Islamic Center
Countless citizens stormed the meeting to oppose it, including an Iranian Christian migrant who SURVIVED Sharia Law
"I'm a Sharia law survivor from Iran, an I'm here to tell you,... pic.twitter.com/j8VLFzv8tY
One of the most powerful moments came from an Iranian Christian migrant who identified himself as a Sharia law survivor. "I'm a Sharia law survivor from Iran, an I'm here to tell you, this is a dangerous ideology you're allowing in the country," he told the council.
Other residents voiced similar fears. "They forced their way into countries and forced their religion," one said. Another warned the project "may become a base where young men and women will be taught and trained to overthrow this great nation, a threat for which my forefathers fought with their own blood to build for the liberty of its citizens."
Attention also focused on the association's imam, Sheikh Mohammed Ajabali (also referred to as Mohamed AlGebaly), who holds a leadership role with the Islamic Tribunal of the Dallas area.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's office has examined the tribunal, stating that the group has sought to replace actual courts of law, impose Sharia on disputes among Texas Muslims, and falsely represent its decisions as final judgments with the approval of the Texas judicial system.
State Rep. Keresa Richardson urged the council to pause action pending that investigation. U.S. Rep. Keith Self, who represents the area, told the room: "Child marriage, honor killings, don't tell me that can't happen here. There is no state cavalry coming to save you." He added that the freedom to choose one's faith "does not exist in political Islam."
Supporters of the project stressed religious liberty, the association's long presence in McKinney, and compliance with city rules. Association president Yasser Wardany said the group had redesigned the plan multiple times in response to earlier feedback and remained "committed to being a good neighbor." Some council members pushed back against the intensity of the opposition, calling elements of it election-year rhetoric. The vote still went through unanimously.
This fits a clear and accelerating pattern across North Texas that has already drawn intense scrutiny from state leaders and local residents.
Earlier this year, Congressman Keith Self laid out how Sharia-adherent Muslim-only enclaves have already taken root. He pointed to the East Plano Islamic Center operating for more than a decade as a parallel society immediately adjacent to law enforcement facilities, with a similar pattern emerging in Irving.
"Sharia is alive, well, and operating in Plano, Texas," Self said. "This is not a hypothetical or future threat. It is here, now and operational." He described the placement next to police training facilities as intentional intimidation.
State authorities have also moved against unauthorized institutions. Governor Greg Abbott directed the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to issue an immediate cease-and-desist order against the so-called Texas American Muslim University in Richardson.
The operation had been marketing itself as the first U.S. university offering STEM degrees embedded with mandatory Islamic Studies courses while lacking any state authorization to grant degrees or even use the title "university." Abbott made clear that illegal educational institutions would not be tolerated.
Public facilities have been pulled into the same orbit. A taxpayer-funded waterpark in Grand Prairie, built with tens of millions in public sales-tax money, advertised a "Muslim only" Eid event complete with burkini requirements, lowered-gaze rules, and other Islamic etiquette restrictions. Organizers later softened the public language after backlash, but the exclusionary character of the original promotion was unmistakable.
The same controversy intersects with the far larger "EPIC City" project, later rebranded The Meadow. The 400-acre master-planned development northeast of Dallas is designed to include more than 1,000 homes, a mosque, faith-based schools, commercial space, and related facilities.
Developers scored a legal win when a judge ordered a state agency to comply with prior agreements even as investigations by the Texas Workforce Commission, Attorney General Paxton, and federal partners continued.
NEW: 'Muslim City' in Texas gets legal win after a judge ordered that the state must comply with developers.
The East Plano Islamic Community (EPIC), which has now been rebranded to The Meadow, will feature 1,000 homes, a mosque, schools, and more.
Texas leaders are worried... pic.twitter.com/HoSvNeV307
Governor Abbott has repeatedly stated that Sharia law, Sharia cities, and "no-go zones" have no place in Texas. Residents and elected officials continue to warn that the project risks creating a parallel community structure.
McKinney's approval lands against this backdrop. Local officials repeatedly insisted their hands were tied by zoning compliance and First Amendment considerations.
Residents who lived under actual Sharia systems, along with those watching the steady expansion of parallel institutions next to police facilities, private tribunals under investigation, unauthorized universities, and large-scale residential projects, see a different picture: incremental infrastructure for an ideology that does not accept equal standing under a single constitutional order.
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Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 09:05Former Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) organizer Jake Altman argues that over the past 10-15 years, the organization has transformed from a relatively pragmatic working-class social-democratic group into a much more radical movement driven by younger activists and open to more extreme ideas.
He describes internal pressure against dissenters, increasing openness to communism, and a demographic shift toward younger and more affluent, less experienced, and more radical members during an interview with The Free Press.
"When I joined in 2013, it was much more social democratic. It was very old, very white. In 2015 in Boston, it was a few older men and I who were the core of the old DSA chapter," Altman explained. "It is night and day between DSA in even 2015 and now. It went from this, like you say, pretty moderate social-political group to a cultural juggernaut that it is today."
"By 2014, a group called the Left Caucus was formed that advanced a lot of extreme views."
"There were debates at the time about how much Leninism do we want to let into DSA. And these people, they eroded any resistance and any core of anti-communism that remained within DSA. Anti-communism became forbidden, right? This is a big evil thing, to be an anti-communist."
"And you can't hold this view without running all the old people who experienced the 20th century out of the organization. And I think that had to have been part of the calculus, that they didn't want any internal resistance," he said. "And so there were instances where people were - I think efforts were made to silence people who dissented."
"I can speak from personal experience that if you dissent, there will be efforts to silence you. They use mob tactics, basically," he said. "So if you speak out, they will coordinate and a bunch of people will jump on you and denounce you, smear you behind your back, do whatever it takes to try to discredit you if you speak out against them."
"There was a local union in Ann Arbor who said it's too far to vandalize and intimidate public officials, vandalize their homes and intimidate them. That is too far," Altman said
"Immediately they received a swarm of people online responding to that statement, essentially saying, 'You're supporting genocide. Shame on you.' Trying to turn their members against them and stir up animosity towards them with the effort of silencing them."
"DSA itself makes a distinction - an important distinction - between paper members, who are people who give the organization their credit card and never come to a meeting, and cadre, who are hardcore activist members who show up to all the meetings and do all the work," he said. "The cadre are incredibly radical. The paper members might be, you know, think AOC and Bernie Sanders are great and let's get Medicare for All."
Tyler Durden Tue, 08/11/2026 - 09:00