On June 4, 2026 — seven weeks after being sworn into Congress — Clay Fuller introduced a bill called the Millstone Act.

It is short, and it does one thing, over and over: it takes federal criminal statutes and inserts the words "punished by death."

Nobody wants to defend people who hurt children. That is exactly why a bill like this is worth reading closely instead of nodding at the title. So let's read it.

What the bill actually does

The text of H.R. 9146 is a list of amendments to title 18 of the U.S. Code. Each one adds the death penalty to an existing offense. Here is the list, in the bill's own order:

• Female genital mutilation — currently up to 10 years. Fuller's bill: "punished by death or imprisonment for any term of years or for life."
• Civil rights offenses involving sexual misconduct — death added to four of the penalty provisions in 18 U.S.C. § 250(b), none of which requires that the victim died.
• Sex trafficking of children — death inserted.
• Sexual abuse of a minor — currently a maximum of 15 years. Fuller's bill strikes "imprisoned not more than 15 years" and inserts "punished by death."
• Abusive sexual contact — a touching offense. Death.
• Sexual exploitation of children — the entire penalty subsection is rewritten so that anyone who "violates, or attempts or conspires to violate" it "shall be fined under this title and punished by death."
• Selling or buying of children — death.
• Material involving the sexual exploitation of minors — the whole penalty rewritten to death for anyone who violates, attempts, or conspires.
• Material constituting or containing child pornography — same rewrite, same sentence.
• Coercion and enticement — death.
• Transportation of minors — death.

Read that list again. Not one of those crimes requires that anyone died.

And two of them are possession offenses. 18 U.S.C. § 2252A covers, among other things, knowingly possessing or accessing illegal images — an offense that today carries a maximum of 10 years, or 20 in aggravated cases. Fuller's bill deletes that entire penalty scheme and replaces it with a single sentence ending in "death or imprisonment for any term of years or for life."

A crime that is a ten-year sentence today would become a capital crime. The bill also extends the death penalty to attempts and conspiracies.

The Supreme Court settled this in 2008

This is not a close constitutional question, and it is not new.

In Kennedy v. Louisiana, decided in 2008, the Supreme Court held — in the words of the syllabus — that "The Eighth Amendment bars Louisiana from imposing the death penalty for the rape of a child where the crime did not result, and was not intended to result, in the victim's death."

The Court drew the line at death. Capital punishment is reserved for crimes where the victim was killed or the defendant intended to kill. The Death Penalty Information Center's summary of the case puts the vote at 5–4.

Fuller's bill runs headlong into that holding on every single line. Not one of the eleven offenses it makes capital requires a death.

He is not the first to try. Since Kennedy, Florida, Tennessee, Idaho, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi have all passed state laws doing something similar, on the open theory that a differently constituted Supreme Court might overrule the precedent. Florida's governor said flatly that Kennedy was "wrongly decided."

That is the strategy: pass a law you know is unconstitutional today and hope the Court changes its mind.

The part that makes this his

Plenty of members of Congress introduce bills they haven't read. Clay Fuller read this one. He wrote it.

Fuller's own House biography says he "served as the District Attorney for the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit," that he was "the top prosecutor for the region," and that he "secured convictions in numerous jury trials, including murder, rape, and armed robbery, resulting in life sentences for the perpetrators." It adds that he "has argued criminal cases before the Supreme Court of Georgia and the Court of Appeals of Georgia," and that he is a lieutenant colonel and Deputy Staff Judge Advocate in the Air National Guard.

So he is a career prosecutor who has stood in front of a state supreme court and argued about what the law permits. He knows what binding precedent is. He knows what the Eighth Amendment says. He knows that a sentence a court will strike down is not a sentence anyone will ever serve.

He wrote the bill anyway.

This is the same instinct we documented when he demanded five separate times that Anthony Fauci be jailed, and called a private citizen's use of the Fifth Amendment proof of guilt — and when he proposed amending the Constitution to bar naturalized Americans from serving as federal judges. The pattern is a lawyer who knows the rules using his office to perform contempt for them.

Then he wrote a second one

Twenty-six days later, on June 30, Fuller introduced the HONEST Act of 2026 — H.R. 9545, with no cosponsors.

It reaches the same statutes — female genital mutilation, the civil rights sexual misconduct penalties, sex trafficking — with one change. This version applies the death penalty specifically when the offender is "an officer of the United States or a Member of Congress."

Same non-fatal crimes. Same constitutional problem. He just added a category of defendant.

What this doesn't do

A sentence a court will strike down is not a sentence anyone serves. And the Millstone Act does not add a single investigator, a single prosecutor, or a single dollar to the agencies that actually find and charge people who abuse children. Every section of it changes the number at the end of a statute. That is the whole bill.

Fuller was the top prosecutor in a four-county circuit until January. He knows the difference between a charge that sticks and a headline.

Where it stands

Both bills were referred to the House Judiciary Committee and have gone no further. The Millstone Act picked up six cosponsors — Brian Babin, Rich McCormick, Randy Weber, Mike Collins, Keith Self and Tim Burchett. The HONEST Act got none.

Fuller has been in Congress since April 2026. In that time he has introduced a constitutional amendment to end automatic citizenship for children born here, a bill to bar non-citizens from federal benefits, a Congressional Gold Medal for Donald Trump, and two bills to expand the federal death penalty past the line the Supreme Court drew eighteen years ago.

Northwest Georgia's grocery prices, insurance premiums and hospital access are what they are. We deserve better.

Sources

The bill texts are the primary record: H.R. 9146, the Millstone Act, introduced June 4, 2026, and H.R. 9545, the HONEST Act of 2026, introduced June 30, 2026 — both on Congress.gov. The controlling precedent is Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008), syllabus via Cornell Legal Information Institute. Biography and legislative list from Fuller's own House website. Photo: Clay Fuller sworn in, 2026, via Wikimedia Commons.