“Crisis is when brittleness meets shock.“ - Yuri Bezmenov’s Ghost on X

By James Howard Kunstler - February 13, 2026

By shutting down the government for a minimum of ten days supposedly over funding for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Wile E. Coyote Democratic Party is about to blow up another Acme bomb in its mangy muzzle. I will tell you why. First, this DHS business is just a stupid prank to bamboozle the public. It will not shut down ICE operations, as Chuck Schumer pretends. ICE was already funded with $75-billion in last year’s Big Beautiful Bill. The shutdown will only defund the Coast Guard and airport security. (Does that sound smart?)

Second, senators will be leaving the DC swamp and going home to their states where, it turns out, polls show that voters of both parties combined overwhelmingly favor election reform by 84-percent. The House has passed the SAVE Act onto the Senate for action, up or down. For at least ten days of the shutdown, the senators will have to explain why proving that you are a citizen to vote is a bad idea — or conversely, why allowing non-citizens to vote is a good idea. So, thanks, Democrats, for sending the senators home to face their voters.

Eventually, senators will have to return to the US Capitol and take up the SAVE Act. The act will require proof of citizenship to register, photo ID to vote in person and for requesting an absentee ballot. The bill would prohibit universal mail-in voting, require absentee ballots be received by election day, impose a five-year prison sentence for helping anyone to register without correct documents, and provisions to clean up the states’ voter rolls.

Additional legislation still in the House, introduced by Rep. Bryan Steil (R-WI), would provide for Election Day only in-person voting by paper ballots, and yet other bills awaiting action would eliminate electronic vote-tallying machines. All the provisions above are common in most other civilized nations (and even a few that are not, such as Afghanistan). The Democratic Party is against all of it because they can only win national elections by deceit and chicanery.

When Senators return to DC, they will have to overcome the filibuster in its current mode, which is the silent or so-called “zombie” filibuster. You see, in the old days, before 1972, if senators wanted to filibuster, they had to actually hold the Senate floor and keep talking — bringing all Senate business to a complete halt until either they gave up or the majority could gather enough votes for cloture (ending debate). It was physically very hard on the senators, an ordeal, and to get through the hours of mindless blather, they would read the phone book, or the World Almanac, or a Sunday newspaper from page one to the obituaries, which subjected them to ridicule.

After 1972, the Senate introduced what they called “the two-track” system, which allowed the body to move on to other business under a filibuster, without requiring a member to stand and speak. All that was needed was for a senator to inform the leadership that he intended to block a vote, with the backing of 40 other senators. This led to a dramatic increase in the use of filibusters — transforming them from a rare, physically demanding gambit into a routine procedural threat.

Now, the catch is that this change in procedure was never formally voted on. Going from “talking” filibusters to “silent” filibusters didn’t happen through a deliberate decision by the full Senate to change the rules — it emerged in 1972 from a procedural workaround that then Majority Leader Mike Mansfield introduced. It’s just a custom masquerading as a rule, and one that now Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) could declare null and void.

Doing so would bring back the old talking filibuster. Opponents of a given bill, such as the SAVE Act, would have to step into the well of Senate and offer arguments against election reform, or they could read through the Chicago phone book. In either case, they’d expose themselves to ridicule. Perhaps those ten days at home during the present government shutdown will lead to an attitude change.

If that doesn’t do it, consider that sometime in the weeks and months ahead, you will be seeing some results from the seizure of the Fulton County, GA, 2020 voting records that took place in January. Since the FBI went in there on a warrant — meaning a judge saw probable cause of voter fraud — the country will likely be exposed to real evidence, for the first time, that one crucial swing state ran a corrupt election operation, and it will no longer be possible for the Democrats to yell that such claims are “baseless” or “debunked.”

It’s an astonishing sign of cultural decay that we are even . . .

[SNIP]