On July 2, 2026, Pat Fallon introduced a bill that no news outlet wrote about and no other member of Congress signed.

It is called the Hold Vandals Accountable Act of 2026, and the operative part of it is a single sentence. Here it is, in full, from the bill text:

"Section 1361 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by striking '$1,000' and inserting '$500' each place such term appears."

That's the whole thing. One number, cut in half.

To understand what that does, you have to know what Section 1361 is.

What the law says now

18 U.S.C. § 1361 makes it a federal crime to willfully damage property of the United States. It has two tiers:

• Damage over $1,000 — a felony, punishable by up to ten years in federal prison.
• Damage of $1,000 or less — a misdemeanor, up to one year.

Fallon's bill moves that line to $500. Every act of damage between $500 and $1,000 that is currently a misdemeanor becomes a ten-year felony instead.

Five hundred dollars is not a lot of damage. It's a broken window. It's a door that has to be repainted. It's the cost of removing spray paint from a federal building's facade.

Under current law, that person faces up to a year. Under Fallon's bill, that person faces up to a decade — and a felony conviction, which in this country means losing the right to vote in many states, losing access to most professional licenses, and a permanent answer to every job application's background-check question.

The $1,000 line was not set casually or recently. Congress put it there in 1996, replacing a $100 threshold that had gone stale. It has not been raised since — which means three decades of inflation have already been quietly lowering it in real terms. Fallon's contribution is to cut the number in half on top of that.

What kind of damage this reaches

The statute covers "any property of the United States." In 2026, the federal buildings where Americans gather to protest are not abstract. They are immigration enforcement facilities, and Section 1361 is the statute federal prosecutors are already using to charge people over damage at them.

Fallon's bill would widen the range of conduct that can be charged as a felony rather than a misdemeanor for the same act. He introduced it alone, with no cosponsors, and no press release explaining why. It went to the Judiciary Committee, where it sits.

And it doesn't reach the serious stuff, because the serious stuff is already covered. Setting fire to a federal building is a separate crime under 18 U.S.C. § 844(f), which carries a mandatory minimum of five years and a maximum of twenty. Nothing in Fallon's bill touches that. What a $500 threshold adds is reach over the small stuff — the graffiti, the broken glass, the dented door.

That's not a drafting accident. It's the only thing the bill does.

Now hold it next to January 6

On January 6, 2021, a mob damaged the United States Capitol. The Justice Department and Capitol administrators put the cleanup and repair bill at nearly $3,000,000. By 2024, offenders had paid back about $437,000 of it — roughly 15%.

That is federal property. That is Section 1361 territory, three thousand times over Fallon's proposed threshold.

Here is what Pat Fallon did about it.

Hours after the attack, he voted to reject Pennsylvania's electoral votes — the thing the mob had come to stop. He told Texas Monthly he didn't blame Trump for the violence, pinning it on a "few, very few, bad apples." Days later he voted against impeaching Trump, calling the effort "political grandstanding at its worst." Then he voted against creating the committee to investigate the attack at all.

Every one of those votes made it less likely that anyone would be held accountable for the $3 million.

And it didn't stop with the votes. Trump pardoned roughly 1,500 January 6 defendants, and his administration has since pushed to go further — asking for $1.8 billion of taxpayer money to compensate them, describing the people who did that damage as "the great American Patriots who were hunted down like dogs."

The rule that emerges

Put the two halves together and Fallon's position is coherent, just not in a way he'd say out loud.

Damage federal property protesting immigration raids, and $500 should be enough to expose you to ten years in prison.

Damage federal property trying to stop the certification of a presidential election, and the appropriate response is no investigation, no impeachment, a pardon, and a check.

The Hold Vandals Accountable Act is one sentence long. It takes about four seconds to read. It took four votes in 2021 to establish that the accountability in its title was never meant for everyone.

Source

H.R. 9575, the Hold Vandals Accountable Act of 2026, introduced July 2, 2026, and referred to the House Judiciary Committee. Photo: official congressional portrait.