In September 2022, FBI agents showed up at Mark Houck's Pennsylvania home early in the morning, in front of his wife and seven kids.
Houck is a Catholic pro-life activist. The Biden Justice Department charged him under the FACE Act and wanted him locked up for as long as 11 years. His crime was a shoving incident with a clinic escort on a sidewalk outside an abortion clinic, a case local authorities had already let go.
A jury acquitted him. The Justice Department spent your money prosecuting him anyway.
That's what the federal government looked like the last time Democrats ran it. As voters head to the polls today, it's worth remembering that the party hasn't walked any of it back.
Houck wasn't the only one. An internal FBI memo out of the Richmond field office flagged "radical-traditionalist Catholics," including people who attend the Latin Mass, as potential domestic threats. The FBI had a long list of real threats to choose from, and it picked Catholics who like their liturgy in Latin.
The FACE Act was written to stop people from physically blocking clinic entrances. Under Biden, it became a weapon against peaceful pro-life demonstrators. Twenty-three of them were prosecuted and sat in legal limbo until President Trump pardoned them in his first week back in office.
Trump didn't stop there. In February 2025, he created the White House Faith Office and charged it with fighting anti-Christian, antisemitic and other religious bias. He signed an executive order to root out what the administration called "the anti-Christian weaponization of government." He ended federal funding for gender transition procedures on minors and reversed the Biden-era EEOC guidance on gender identity. The administration also announced $300 million in federal funding to protect houses of worship: churches, synagogues and mosques alike.
Now look at who wants to undo it.
If Democrats win the House today, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut is in line to chair the Appropriations Committee, the committee that controls federal spending. DeLauro has spent years trying to kill the Hyde Amendment, the decades-old rule that keeps taxpayer money from paying for abortions. "It is a discriminatory policy that makes access to basic reproductive health care based on your income," she has said. "That is simply wrong, and I oppose it."
The Hyde Amendment has survived Democratic and Republican Congresses for nearly 50 years. DeLauro calls it discrimination.
In Texas, Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico has told voters the Bible is "silent" on abortion and that God is "nonbinary." He's not running for a seminary job. He's running for the U.S. Senate.
The last time Democrats held power, the FBI profiled churchgoers and prosecutors went after people who prayed on sidewalks. The full weight of the federal government came down on people whose main offense was living out their faith in public.
Trump reversed that with executive orders, a new White House office, pardons and funding, all of it on the record. Democrats haven't changed their position. DeLauro and Talarico are telling you plainly what they'd do.
So the question in front of voters today is whether those protections survive a Congress that sees the Hyde Amendment as discrimination and treated the Latin Mass as a security threat.
Twenty-three pardons, one Faith Office and $300 million to protect houses of worship are on the ballot today.