Some votes in Congress are hard. This one wasn't.

On March 19, 2024, the U.S. House voted on a resolution condemning Russia for kidnapping children out of Ukraine and shipping them into Russia to be adopted by Russian families. It passed 390 to 9.

Eric Burlison was one of the nine.

Not nine out of a close vote. Nine out of 399 members who showed up. Every Democrat who voted, voted yes. So did 196 Republicans. The Foreign Affairs Committee had already approved it 44 to 0 four months earlier, without a single dissent.

And the roll call has one more detail that Missourians should sit with: Burlison was the only member of Missouri's entire eight-person delegation to vote no. Every other Missourian in the House — Republican and Democrat — voted yes. The person who moved the resolution to the floor that day was Ann Wagner, the Republican who represents the St. Louis suburbs.

Burlison's own party, his own state delegation, and the Republican colleague who ran the bill all landed on one side. He landed on the other.

What the resolution actually said

It's worth reading the thing he voted against, because it isn't a spending bill or a war authorization. It's four paragraphs of words.

H.Res.149 — sponsored by Rep. Susan Wild of Pennsylvania — laid out the record: that Russia's own Children's Rights Commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, "admitted to abducting and forcibly transferring Ukrainian children and facilitating forced adoptions to Russian families." That Russia declared children born in occupied Ukraine after the invasion to be Russian citizens. That Secretary of State Antony Blinken had called on Russia to halt "filtration operations" that swept up between 900,000 and 1,600,000 Ukrainians — roughly 260,000 of them children.

Then it did four things. It declared the abductions "contrary to Russia's obligations under the Genocide Convention" and said they "amount to genocide." It said Russia was "attempting to wipe out a generation of Ukrainian children." It noted those children face trafficking, forced labor, and violence. And it held Vladimir Putin's government "responsible for the wrongful and illegal abduction and forcible transfer of children from Ukraine."

That's the whole resolution. No money. No troops. No treaty. Just Congress saying, on the record, that taking other people's children is wrong.

Burlison said no.

The others explained themselves. Burlison didn't.

Here's what makes this vote worse than it already looks.

When HuffPost went to the nine Republicans who voted no, several of them gave a reason — a bad reason, mostly, but a reason. Chip Roy said the country was "under frickin' siege" at the border and this was "a Democrat messaging resolution." Warren Davidson worried it would "insert the United States and the International Criminal Court into a dispute." Tom Tiffany argued that "every war is not a genocide, and declaring one after 40 minutes of debate... isn't just irresponsible, it's reckless." Matt Rosendale said the genocide language "only escalates conflict." Thomas Massie's office called the resolution a cynical attempt to build support for foreign aid spending. Marjorie Taylor Greene refused to comment.

And Eric Burlison? His office didn't respond at all.

Two years later, there's still no public explanation to find — no press release, no statement, nothing turned up by searching for one. He took a position that put him outside roughly 98% of the House of Representatives, and he has never had to defend it out loud.

That is a choice, and it's a familiar one. This is the same congressman who holds his town halls by telephone and told St. Louis Public Radio that in-person town halls "create a dynamic where only political nutjobs show up." It's the same pattern we documented when hundreds of his constituents opposed a data center and he wrote a letter supporting it anyway. Take the unpopular position. Skip the room where somebody might ask about it.

What he is willing to say about Ukraine

He hasn't explained the kidnapping vote. But he's been perfectly clear about Ukraine in general.

Six weeks before that vote, in February 2024, Burlison posted on social media: "Funding corrupt regimes like Ukraine is wasteful and irresponsible. We should focus on problems at home, not across the globe. American taxpayers deserve better than squandered money abroad." The year before, he'd posted "Audit all Ukraine funding." Both are logged on the Ukraine scorecard kept by Republicans for Ukraine, a project of the conservative group Defending Democracy Together.

Then on April 20, 2024, he voted against the Ukraine aid package, which passed the House 311 to 112.

You can hold that view about foreign aid. Plenty of people do, and it's a real argument about money and priorities. But H.Res.149 wasn't a check. It cost nothing. Whatever you believe about the war budget, there was no fiscal reason to refuse to say that stealing children is a crime — and Burlison has never claimed there was one, because he's never said anything at all.

He's made a habit of being the lone "no"

This is not a one-off.

Just over a year later, on April 28, 2025, the House voted on the TAKE IT DOWN Act — the bill making it a crime to post revenge porn and AI deepfake nudes, and requiring platforms to remove them when a victim asks. It was championed by Melania Trump. It passed 409 to 2.

Burlison was one of the two.

Kidnapped children in one vote, sexual-abuse images in another. Both times, near-unanimous. Both times, Burlison found himself on a list you could count on one hand.

The difference is that he eventually answered for the second one. After a Springfield TV station went and asked him, his office put out a statement arguing the bill was redundant because states already had deepfake laws on the books — a claim that, as we documented, wasn't true. Missouri had no such law then and still doesn't, after five failed attempts to pass one.

A bad explanation is still an explanation. On the Ukrainian children, southwest Missouri never even got that much.

The children are still gone — and the people counting them lost their funding

The kids in that resolution are real, and the story didn't stop in 2024.

In March 2025, Senator Dick Durbin asked the Senate to pass a simple resolution condemning Russia's abduction of Ukrainian children and calling for their return. Senate Republicans blocked it, along with other straightforward resolutions on Russian war crimes and Ukraine's sovereignty. Durbin's office noted that at least 20,000 Ukrainian children have been abducted, forcibly transferred, or illegally deported by Russia since the full-scale invasion began.

At almost the same moment, the U.S. government defunded the main effort to track them. Yale's Humanitarian Research Lab ran the Conflict Observatory, the project documenting where these children had been taken and building the evidence file on it. The State Department ended its funding in March 2025, following a stop-work order on foreign aid earlier that year. Researchers got a short reprieve — just long enough to hand their data to Ukrainian authorities and to Europol before the lights went out.

That's the through-line. It's the same instinct behind Scott Perry's push to zero out the Peace Corps and America's democracy programs: treat everything the United States does beyond its borders as waste, and don't ask what breaks when it's gone. Here, what broke was the evidence trail for a war crime against children.

The bottom line

Eric Burlison has been in Congress since 2023. In that time he has voted against protecting victims of image-based sexual abuse, and voted against a resolution — costing nothing, binding no one — saying that stealing a country's children is a crime. He was the only Missourian in the House to do the second one, on a bill his fellow Missouri Republican carried to the floor.

He has never explained it. He does his town halls by phone and calls the people who show up in person "nutjobs," so the question mostly doesn't get asked.

Nobody in the 7th District voted for a congressman whose defining habit is landing on a list of nine.

We deserve better.

Sources

• Roll Call 88, March 19, 2024 — H.Res.149, 390–9, Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives
• These 9 House Republicans voted against a resolution condemning the Russian abduction of Ukrainian children — Business Insider, March 19, 2024
• Photo: Official congressional portrait, 118th Congress, via Wikimedia Commons