(DCNF)—House Republican leaders haven’t enforced the party’s America First agenda the same way House Democratic leaders dropped the hammer to pass their caucus’ priorities.
Republicans frequently broke with their caucus on rules votes and legislation without the threat of serious punishments, such as losing their committee assignments, while Democratic leadership threatened to punish Democratic Reps. Jared Golden of Maine and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington for voting with Republicans to pass a rule on Tuesday. Nine rules votes have failed under House Speaker Mike Johnson’s watch, while no rules votes failed to pass under former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s leadership.
House GOP leaders have not used their powers to cut spending, ban Flock Safety cameras and other automated surveillance technologies, fight against President Donald Trump’s war against Iran or codify his immigration executive orders. Several Republican members introduced legislation to restrict Flock cameras, such as withholding funding to local municipalities that use these cameras, but not a single member introduced a bill to outright ban those technologies.
The chamber passed a $95 billion reconciliation package without including spending cuts. The national debt surpassed $40 trillion in August after members spent years passing large spending bills that contributed to the debt.
House leadership has not codified Trump’s immigration executive actions into permanent law, despite being in the majority. Republican Texas Rep. Chip Roy pushed his colleagues to codify the executive orders.
Johnson’s and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ offices did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy made several concessions in January 2023 to become speaker after House Freedom Caucus members caused delays in electing a speaker, which weakened House leadership’s power. While in talks with Freedom Caucus members, McCarthy lowered the threshold required to oust a speaker to one member.
McCarthy’s concessions gave former Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz the power to file a motion to vacate the chair to oust McCarthy in October 2023.
The House voted to remove McCarthy as speaker in a 216 to 210 vote, including eight Republicans.
Golden of Maine and Perez of Washington broke with their party Tuesday by voting for a rule. Jeffries called their votes a “significant breach of trust” and said their actions warranted a “serious response.”
Democratic leadership released a joint statement accusing Golden and Perez of blindsiding their caucus.
“The decision by two of our colleagues to blindside the entire House Democratic Caucus and join with the Republican majority to pass a procedural rule on the brink of failing represents a significant breach of trust. It is an action that necessitates a serious response, and we have asked the Committee on Caucus Rules to take this up in short order.”
Golden said he voted for the rule to advance critical legislation for his state’s lobster industry.
Pelosi said she was “disappointed” in Golden and Perez, arguing she never had this issue as speaker.You may have noticed some conservative sites and shows have dropped MyPillow as a sponsor. They’re getting more money from others so they cast Mike Lindell aside. We will NOT stop supporting MyPillow or MyStore. Please use promo code “JDR” to support them AND us.
“I, as speaker, never — we didn’t even consider that anybody would do that,” Pelosi said. “We never had that problem, so I’m disappointed that they did that.”
Under Pelosi’s leadership, members who voted down a rule or broke with leadership’s agenda faced strict consequences. She enforced tighter floor discipline using committee assignments and procedural control against members who broke from the party.
Pelosi denied former Democratic New York Rep. Kathleen Rice a seat on the House Judiciary Committee after she voted against Pelosi for speaker. Pelosi awarded members who endorsed her leadership after previously opposing her in a November 2018 letter.
Under Pelosi’s leadership, the Affordable Care Act, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 and the American Rescue Plan passed.
Democratic Texas Rep. Filemon Vela initially led the effort to oppose Pelosi and signed the letter, though he flipped his position once Pelosi became speaker and got a seat on the Armed Services Committee, which was seen as an explicit reward.
Pelosi faced opposition from further left members of the caucus, known as “The Squad,” by minimizing their political influence and criticizing their focus on social media presence. She warned all House Democrats to stop publicly attacking each other on social media and held private meetings with Squad members to handle disputes.
Past House leaders were open to imposing consequences on members who voted against rules, according to Politico.
“When I came in, [Republican Texas Rep.] Pete Sessions was the chairman of Rules. He says: ‘Vote against the rules, I’ll kick your ass.’ And that’s the way it should be. If you don’t like the bill, vote no on the actual bill,” Republican Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon said. “I wish there were consequences for that kind of behavior.”
Nineteen Republicans voted with Democrats against reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), including Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Lauren Boebert of Colorado.
“That is what the current Democrat party stands for,” Johnson said on June 11. “They are willing to jeopardize the safety and the security of the American people to make a cheap political point … Their excuse is that they’re upset about a very temporary appointment that the President of the United States has already said will be very temporary, while he searches for and selects a new director of national intelligence, that is an important process, it takes some time, thought, and deliberation.”
Democrats voted against the extension over Trump’s nomination of former acting Director of National Intelligence Bill Pulte.
Senate Republican leadership also struggled to get their entire party on board with their legislative agenda. In June, Republicans Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky voted against an amendment which would have added the SAVE America Act to an immigration enforcement reconciliation package that passed in June. Thune repeatedly said leadership lacks the vote to pass the SAVE America Act, although some senators, such as Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee, disputed this claim.
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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.
