SEKULOW

Logan Sekulow: Welcome to Sekulow. It is Friday. Not only is it Friday, it is Friday the 13th. How appropriate, as another government shutdown is looming tonight at midnight. Technically, Valentine's Day is when that government shutdown will occur. A lot of you are going to be asking the big questions: what does it mean to me? How is this going to impact my life? We know what happened with the last government shutdown.

This one is a partial government shutdown. Within this segment and the next segment, we are going to break down exactly what it means and who it affects. It affects quite a bit of people negatively, not necessarily who the Democrats that are holding this up want you to believe are actually going to be affected by this. We are going to discuss this quite a bit because some of the big-ticket items are things you would love to continue to be funded. The things they are going to tell you are the reason are not going to be defunded.

The partial government shutdown for the Department of Homeland Security will begin February 14th at 12:01 AM. After weeks of rejected offers from the Democrats, mainly saying they would not budge if there was not major reform and the dismantling of ICE programs, here is what will actually be impacted. Transportation and Security Administration, the TSA. Once again, 95% of the 61,000 employees, about 58,000 people, are essential and will work, but they will work without pay. That is going to cause a potential for disruption. Paychecks due March 3rd could be reduced, and full paychecks will be at risk by the 17th.

Another big one involves our border security. This is the only armed force branch under the Department of Homeland Security: the U.S. Coast Guard. All 56,000 active duty, reserve, and civilian personnel will go without pay. That is terrifying if we are talking about where our vulnerabilities are. This is essentially our military. They are essential, but they will go without pay. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, will go to reduced operations. The Secret Service core functions will remain unaffected, but 94% of that 8,000-employee staff will work without pay.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, is deemed essential work. There was prior funding from the big bill, $75 billion over four years of the core functions, so that is taken care of. This is what happens when you start playing politics with people's lives and their livelihoods. You are going to hear the spin that comes out of Washington, D.C., but remember exactly what it is. It is spin to suddenly hurt the American people to start pushing forward the potential midterm elections in just a few months.

Democratic leaders said this week they were underwhelmed by any of the counter-proposals that came from the White House to their demands on ICE reforms. Look what is going on in Minnesota. The response from the American people was that things were getting out of hand and perhaps went too far. You switched up the leadership and brought in Tom Homan. He essentially said it is going a bit too far. He made some changes and wrapped up one of the operations there, and it seems to have done a good job of calming it down.

Proposals are being panned internally by Democrats as insufficient. It is hard to predict when a shutdown may end. Typically, I would have told you a couple of days or maybe a week, but after the last one, which went historically long, I think all bets are off. What do you think about this? We told you this was coming. When the original shutdown was solved, we said that in a few months, we would be talking about this again. Here we are.

FEMA, the Coast Guard, the TSA, the Secret Service, border security, customs and border protection, cybersecurity and infrastructure security agencies are the ones that will be really affected, not the Democratic leadership. These hundreds of thousands of human beings are just trying to do their job. Now they are going to be asked to do their job without pay or told not to come into work. A lot of times, they just stop going into work. Why would you when you feel like your job and your livelihood are pawns in a political swamp? Let's go to Michael in Florida.

Michael: I remember Congress and the Senate back in the day when a government shutdown was the absolute last thing you would want to get to. You would do anything to avoid it. Now, any time I hear that the left has decided they are going to try and force a shutdown, all I hear is that they are not getting their way.

Logan Sekulow: It feels like it has been trivialized. It would be something that they know would hurt the American people and hurt their potential voters, and they would vote accordingly. It was not necessarily as partisan as it is now. Now, they are mad that Republicans won't budge on certain things, so they want to shut it all down and go on their European vacation. That is what it feels like. Let's get out of Washington, D.C. It is cold up here right now. We do not want to be here. Let's get back to our home states and not have to worry about it. Let's go to Europe and complain about our country.

When we get back, there are elections and elections have consequences. There are a lot of election rules that are being moved around continually. The ACLJ has filed an amicus brief at the United States Supreme Court on behalf of 29 members of Congress to uphold Election Day and protect election integrity. In 2020, things got chaotic with how votes were counted and when they were allowed to be counted. Some were counting weeks later as mail-in balloting was happening in the chaos that erupted over it.

This is to make a standard that ballots postmarked by November 3rd, which continued to arrive after November 3rd, were counted in that 2020 election day. This move would safeguard the integrity of those elections. The amicus brief was filed for all of our ACLJ members and in support of them on behalf of 29 members of the United States Congress. The stakes are high. Ben Ferguson is joining us. What are your thoughts on this? Election integrity and security always start to bubble up as we head into the midterms.

Ben Ferguson: It is insane that we are even having to have the conversation. You and I should not be able to look at an election result and then, if we are bad actors, decide that we are going to figure out a way to keep the counting going for days and weeks until we get to the number that we need to overturn an election. Even if that doesn't happen 99% of the time, there is still a very big fear in the world on both sides of this that you should not have to wait a week to get results from an election.

We are the greatest nation in the world. Why are we waiting days or weeks to find out who the next President, mayor, governor, or congressman is? This is not hard with what we have in technology in 2026. Bad actors know how to use this to their advantage. We saw this during COVID. The Democrats were brilliant in the way that they legalized to figure out how we can change and alter the way we do the elections in the name of COVID and an emergency. Democrats felt that worked out really well for them where they did this in Pennsylvania or in Georgia in specific Democrat areas.

They exploited what they described as a loophole. I want every person's vote to count the same. If you are canceling out my vote by voting for Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, or Kamala Harris, that is fine as long as it is a legal ballot and it is done the right way. Thank you to the ACLJ for leading on this and filing this with the Supreme Court. It is vitally important for the integrity of elections. If you look at polling, data among Americans right now is extremely low when it comes to whether you believe that your vote matters, if it is counted, or if there is fraud or abuse.

We need to get rid of that. I want people to be inspired to go vote because they think their vote actually matters. Why do we have such low voter turnout and participation? It is because there are a lot of people that believe the system is rigged anyway. Let's not give them the reason to believe that it feels that way.

Logan Sekulow: In the last election, it was a pretty clear winner upfront for the President. When you do not have Trump on the ballot in three years or even going on the midterms, you are going to see a very tight election. If the world is the way it is today, it feels like a giant landslide happened electorally, but maybe won't happen vote-wise. We need to figure this out to make sure these don't go on for weeks and weeks, especially as we know in a lot of these elections, it is going to be incredibly tight.

Ben Ferguson: The American people deserve answers. You do not want delayed answers that then make you think maybe there was fraud or abuse, or they found a batch of ballots, or someone randomly drops off 2,000 ballots at a polling station or at a mailbox. These are the problems that we have right now. I was talking to a CEO of a bank the other day. How many times have you gone to an ATM and you have never gotten less or more than the amount of money that you wanted to take out? It has never happened. If I want $100 out, I get $100. If I put $100 in, it shows up as $100 on my account.

How is it that we live in a world where we are so secure in everything else we do, but our elections are still 50 years old? It does not make sense. Why would politicians, who have unlimited funds and trillions of dollars in a deficit, say we cannot fix this problem overnight if we wanted to? I believe the reason why it is not fixed is because it is deliberate and it is being done on purpose. There are bad actors that want areas that are gray with loopholes and ways that you can change and alter an election if it does not go your way. We have seen that and we have seen proof of it.

Democrats want to make sure that illegal immigrants have the ability to somehow try to vote. We talked about it yesterday. The SAVE Act is very popular. We have seen the polling from CNN. Even Democrats, 70% of them, approve of some kind of voter photo ID. The arguments have never been convincing. No one has ever given me even a moment to think of why we do not need this kind of security.

It is bipartisan. There is not an issue out there that is as bipartisan as the SAVE Act is, which is a simple question: do you or do you not show an ID to vote? Do we make sure you are who you say you are when you go to vote? This is not controversial. Liberals, moderates, and conservatives all agree unanimously on this issue probably more than any other issue in America right now. When you have that level of a consensus, it would be a landslide beyond landslides.

Why are Democrats against it? They are the only people holding this up. You have to get to 60 votes in the Senate. Republicans are fighting as hard as they can. It came out of the House and goes to the Senate. Why are Democrats hell-bent on not doing this? It is for one reason. They know that they have a better chance of winning in certain areas if you do not have to show an ID to vote. Every other major country has voter ID laws because my vote should not be canceled out by a dead voter, or someone lying about who they are, or someone that goes into a nursing home and grabs a bunch of ballots and takes advantage of the elderly and seniors.

Logan Sekulow: Ben, I appreciate you coming on and helping me out here while I am flying solo today. We have about a minute left. Plug away. Where can people find you? You are everywhere.

Ben Ferguson: I do a podcast called the 47 Morning Update. It is about 10 minutes long if you want to know what is coming out of the White House. I do another long-form called the Ben Ferguson Podcast. I also co-host a podcast three days a week with Senator Ted Cruz called Verdict with Ted Cruz. You can get all of those for free wherever you get your podcasts.

Logan Sekulow: Fantastic. Always great to follow you and have you on here. We have a second half-hour coming up. I want to hear from you. Always good to have Ben on and his great insights. We are going to continue this conversation. Go to ACLJ.org. If you do not get us on your local station, however you get your podcasts, you can find our show at ACLJ.org, YouTube, Rumble, and Apple Podcasts. We are there, but we are live right now for another half hour.