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Authored by Scott Yenor via American Greatness,

The failure of the United States Senate to pass the SAVE America Act is as regrettable as it is predictable. Noncitizen voting is already a federal crime in America. SAVE would have required voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote. States would have to purge noncitizens from voting rolls, too.

Perhaps reliance on hostile state officials to implement the law would have rendered the SAVE America Act ineffective. We will never know.

The cause of election integrity is not dead. Congress has the constitutional power to ensure election integrity.

The American election system divides power between the states and the federal government.

States determine the “time, place, and manner” of elections and, within constitutional limits, determine who can vote.

Some states allow mail-in ballots. Others, like Oregon, send every voter a ballot. Other states allow mail-in ballots under special circumstances. Some states allow ballots to arrive well after Election Day. Some states require no identification for voters. Some wink at noncitizens voting. Others have rigorous identification requirements. Some countenance practices that sow the appearance of cheating into the counting of votes. Other states have clean elections that bring election results right away on election night.

But Congress has a plenary power to judge whether a state’s election results are consistent with the basic demands of representative government.

According to Article 1, Section 5 of the United States Constitution, “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns, and Qualifications of its own Members.”

Congress can ferret out fraudulent votes of all sorts—not just voting by noncitizens.

Congress can then declare elections invalid and order a new election when it judges elections to be fraudulent.

Both the Senate and the House have pre-established procedures for investigation, including the power to subpoena state officials and state voting data. This power helps Congress ensure its own integrity.

Hundreds of House elections have been challenged in American history. Often, complaints are frivolous. Sometimes complaints involve qualifications, strictly speaking. Albert Gallatin had his election to the U.S. Senate voided by a 14–12 vote in 1794 because he had not been a citizen for nine years.

Other investigations, like the McLane–Farr dispute from the 1918 election, concern corruption pure and simple. Patrick McLane was originally declared the winner in a Pennsylvania race, but once evidence of “wholesale fraud and illegality” from fictitious voters and voters who were not citizens came to light, Congress determined that John Farr won.

In the late 1990s, Loretta Sanchez defeated Congressman Bob Dornan by fewer than 1,000 votes. Dornan challenged the election. Congress found that more than 700 illegal votes were cast. Since it was not enough to sway the election, Dornan’s challenge was dropped.

Investigations into election integrity were especially common after the Civil War, when Democrat-secessionist voting practices led to severe undercounting of Republican votes in the South.

Voter intimidation compromised the entire voting environment.

Today, Republicans fear that similar broad-scale corruption plagues blue states like California, Illinois, Michigan, and Oregon, all of which seem to have weak voter identification laws, poor audit procedures, lax voter purging techniques, and a fear of federal investigations into their practices.

Are elections within these states outside the margin of fraud? To know the answer, we would have to know the margin of fraud in those states. And that requires congressional investigations.

Democrat establishments have little incentive to clean up their elections. They benefit from the fraud that keeps them in power, so they are wary of actually investigating their own elections. State election systems are not completely subject to federal oversight.

There are many reasons not to have confidence in Oregon’s elections for the national legislature, for instance. Noncitizens are welcomed and registered. Many counties have had more than 100 percent registrations among voters. Mail-in ballots are ubiquitous and automatic. Dead people or people who have moved out of state have voted in past elections, and Oregon has been particularly lax in purging its voting rolls. Oregon’s federal elections would be worth a serious look from Congress, especially federal races decided by less than 10,000 votes.

If Oregon does not want to fix its elections, it need not. The state must simply pay the penalty for porous elections by not having representation in the U.S. House or Senate.

Congress has the constitutional means and the motives to police state elections, not with new laws but with its investigatory powers.

If the rest of the country can have confidence in their elections, Congress would, no doubt, seat a delegation. Congress could deny representation to states without voter identification laws or those that wink at foreign nationals voting in their elections. Or Congress could require new elections when voting rolls are not properly purged.

Congress has the power to determine whether states have a republican form of government. States with rigged elections do not have republican governments. And Congress can dust off its own powers to ensure the integrity of the election of its own members, even without the SAVE America Act.

In a candid interview with Human Events editor Jack Posobiec, former Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) alleged that blackmail and sexual honeypot operations are far more prevalent than the American public is aware of.

Cawthorn, who was elected to represent North Carolina's 11th congressional district at just 25 years old in 2020, described the typical path these lurrid situations take. It often begins at donor dinners or late-night votes, when members unwind with drinks or head back toward Capitol Hill. While many lawmakers prefer socializing with fellow congressmen to avoid complications with staffers or outside interests, invitations can quickly turn strangely personal.

"Normally, the way I found that these things start getting off the ground is that it starts out—you’re maybe at a donor dinner or getting dinner after a late night of votes,” Cawthorn said. "Then, you know, everyone has friends inside of Congress, so you start hanging out with friends. Maybe you’re grabbing drinks, or on the way back to Capitol Hill, heading back to your homes."

"Then you start building these relationships, and most congressmen like to hang out with other congressmen, just because there are so many problems when you hang out with staffers or people with different angles in other parts of the Beltway, the former lawmaker continued. "I will tell you, normally, the way I came across this is that people start inviting me and saying, “Hey, why don’t you come back? My wife would love to hang out with you, and we can see what could be going on here. I think we’d have a really good time if we all got together in this way.”

"Then you start piecing it together and say, “Wait a minute, what kind of invitation is this? This sounds really weird. What do you mean leave my phone at the house?” That doesn’t make any sense—these random things they’re saying. It becomes very clear what they’re looking for. That’s the big one—“check your phone at the door,” that kind of thing,” he added.

WATCH: Madison Cawthorn explains how honeytrapping operations work in US Congress

"Once they have you on video they own you"pic.twitter.com/OVGCx4a7s9

— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) April 15, 2026

Cawthorn told Posobiec that he made it clear he had zero interest in such activities.

"I’ve got a phenomenal life. I was only 25 years old when I was in Congress, so that didn’t interest me whatsoever. I thought the majority of people in the United States were very cognizant of that. So I came out and talked about it, and they tried to destroy me for it,” Cawthorn said.

Cawthorn lost his bid for reelection in the 2022 North Carolina Republican primary, falling to state Sen. Chuck Edwards (R), who later went on to win the general election.

"I’ll tell you, there were 16 people that I really hold responsible - the architects of trying to take down my political career,” Cawthorn explained. "I want you to ask yourselves: out of all the people who came out against me or sent funds to make sure I was pushed out of Congress, where are those people now?”

"I’m very happy that I was able to take the majority of them down, or that the majority of them are now out of office or have terrible personal lives at this point. But I will tell you, there are so many people inside Washington, D.C., that have much worse on them than what’s going on inside of this video,” he concluded.

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, 'n Guns blog,

This is the only chart that matters right now…not borrowing costs (@lukegromen).

It’s the weekly chart of Brent Crude.

I’ve been telling my patrons for three weeks in the Market Reports that the Brent Crude chart has all the earmarks of a market being manipulated UP to support a narrative…

That narrative is Donald Trump is a madman who broke the world and is losing in Iran.

Look at the chart carefully, you see big gaps between weekly closes and opens. Also, note the tails to the downside versus the wicks to the upside. Tails are much longer than wicks…. telltale signs of a market that has topped but someone is trying to keep reflating it.

Why? Many reasons, from speculations, positions, narrative control, etc. Markets are the sum total of all of these players.

But the reality is that you can only manipulate a market over a short period of time (H/T@armstrongeconomics) unless you control the total pricing system for that market… i.e. central banks and currencies…. and why the gold and silver markets have been manipulated for years.

Oil is a market of immense volatility, with 5-year moving average of its Range/Price topping 7% on a weekly basis, which is in bitcoin territory. It should be the most boring market on the planet, since everyone depends on it. But it isn’t.

It trades like a penny stock on a double espresso. (H/T Dennis Miller).

Someone profits from that volatility. Someone works with others to create that volatility. All Roads don’t lead to DeMoines, FYI.

Oil volatility is the enemy of certainty. It retards investment in some cases and redirects it to other less viable investments in others… c.f. Wind, solar, LED lights, and all this Watermelon (Green on the outside, Commie Red on the inside) nonsense.

If we want a world of predictability, which is the essential purpose of Human Action (H/T Mises, something most Miseseans have forgotten), then we have to accept that sometimes we have to defend our right to a predictable future.

And no amount of asking for it nicely is going to get us there. We were never voting our way out of this.

That’s why I’ve been in full-throated favor of this conflict with Iran. It’s why I allowed myself to see the world differently than I did previously.

The Federal Reserve is just a tool. It can (and has) been a tool for evil, but it can also be a tool for good, like all technology. This is why SOFR was the beginning of this war, and why this morning’s announcement by Iran is end of the current battle in it. It should still be deprecated in importance, removed from duties it was never designed nor been allowed to perform.

The same can be said for the US military, which has been a tool used to enforce the “tyranny of evil men” (H/T Roger Avery & Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction) on Wall St., Bay Street, K Street, and 10 Downing Street. But, like the Fed, it can be used judiciously, to serve humanity with the right set of circumstances and the right mission.

It did so.

We’ve been blackmailed by evil people for generations to accept this lack of investment certainty to indulge our cynicism, or lack of faith in humanity.

We chuckled in “Collapsitarian” for too many years. And I, frankly, just got sick of it.

It’s pathetic and evil and we shouldn’t tolerate it in them or ourselves for another gods-damned minute. Period. It’s anathema to human life, common decency, and civilization itself.

This is the truth. And it all goes back to the intersection of selling narrative while hitting desperate people where they live and breathe… in their pocketbooks.

In the end, oil prices want to fall because the fundamentals are bearish (H/T @DoombergT). There is no Peak Oil. There is no Green New Deal.

There is only Zul…. okay, maybe not Zul. *grin*

This chart is your literal snapshot of a pricing control system being destroyed in real time… by one guy, Donald J. Trump, with support from his Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent, Sec. War Pete Hegseth and his merry band of warfighters, and his Sec. of State Marco Rubio.

He has both exposed and stolen London’s control over oil flows to support its centuries-old evil by the studious application of Gold (dollars), Goats (American Industrial Might) ‘n Guns (Brrrrrt!).

Stew all you want, haters. But, he’s done it. The Hormuz Blackmail is done.

Trump has his hand on the global oil spigot now… and he can turn the volatility up or down. The US is the global price setter now, like it or not.

… Why?

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.