MAGA Report Cards — Alabama

Troy Downing Wrote a Bill to Cut Off Every HUD Housing Grant to Cities That Limit ICE Cooperation. Nineteen Republicans We Cover Signed On.

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 05:55:09 +0000

On September 2, 2026, Troy Downing of Montana introduced a bill that would strip every dollar of federal housing grant money from any city, county or state that limits how much its police help federal immigration agents.

Not immigration money. Housing money.

H.R. 10222, the No HUD Funding for Sanctuary Cities Act, says a "sanctuary jurisdiction" is "ineligible for any grant funds distributed by the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for use in such jurisdiction."

Any grant. All of them.

What that money actually pays for

The Department of Housing and Urban Development does not hand out one grant. It hands out many, and they are the backbone of how communities keep people off the street.

In Montana, the state's homelessness grant is worth about $7.2 million. Montana Free Press has described what it covers: "permanent supportive housing, rapid rehousing rental assistance, supportive services, transitional housing, youth homelessness programs and the state's database that housing providers use to place homeless people into housing programs and connect them to other resources."

That is the money Downing's bill would switch off — not for the people who wrote a city resolution, but for whoever is currently sleeping in a shelter it pays for.

How wide the net is

Read the definition carefully. The trigger is refusal. A place loses its housing money for what it declines to do, not for anything it does. Downing's bill covers any "State or political subdivision of a State" that has a law, an ordinance, a policy or even a "practice" telling its officials not to:

share information about someone's citizenship or immigration status with a federal, state or local agency, or
hold someone in jail past their release date when Homeland Security asks, or tell federal agents when that person is let go.

Decline either one and the entire jurisdiction is a sanctuary jurisdiction. The word "State" is in there. Under this bill an entire state can be declared a sanctuary jurisdiction and lose every HUD grant inside its borders. And the decision doesn't go to a court — HUD would consult with the Department of Homeland Security to decide who qualifies.

The Montana communities in the crosshairs

Downing has said what he thinks:

"If a sanctuary city is not complying with federal law, we should not allocate American taxpayers' hard-earned money to those areas."

He posted a sharper version on social media: "If a city refuses to cooperate with federal immigration law, it should not receive a dime in HUD funding."

Montana Free Press asked him a specific question — what would this bill have done to Helena? Helena passed a noncooperation resolution in January 2026, then rescinded it after Attorney General Austin Knudsen threatened to sue. Bozeman police say their job is public safety, not immigration enforcement. Missoula police don't ask about immigration status.

Downing did not respond.

That is the whole problem with the bill in one exchange. He will say the principle. He will not say which Montana towns lose their housing money under it, or how much.

Nineteen Republicans on this site signed it

Downing didn't do this alone. Nineteen of the Republicans we track cosponsored the bill within two days of introduction:

Warren Davidson (Ohio) · Pete Sessions (Texas) · Scott Fitzgerald (Wisconsin) · Rich McCormick (Georgia)
Scott Perry (Pennsylvania) · Michael Cloud (Texas) · Barry Moore (Alabama) · Harriet Hageman (Wyoming)
Ben Cline (Virginia) · Randy Weber (Texas) · Josh Brecheen (Oklahoma) · Sheri Biggs (South Carolina)
Andy Harris (Maryland) · Brian Babin (Texas) · Michael Rulli (Ohio) · Keith Self (Texas)
Tim Moore (North Carolina) · Andy Barr (Kentucky) · Pete Stauber (Minnesota)

Barry Loudermilk and Buddy Carter, both of Georgia, also signed; we don't have pages for them.

All but two of those names are printed in the bill's own text as introduced on September 2. Andy Barr and Pete Stauber added theirs the next day. Twenty-one Republicans in total. Not one Democrat.

The part nobody is saying out loud

There is a straightforward argument for making cities cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. Six in 10 Montanans support local police working with ICE, according to Montana Free Press polling. Downing could make that argument on its merits and put it to a vote.

This bill doesn't do that. It takes housing assistance hostage.

The person who loses is not the city council member who voted for the resolution. It's the family in rapid rehousing, the teenager in a youth homelessness program, the person in permanent supportive housing who would otherwise be outside. None of them had a vote on the resolution. All of them are the leverage.

What the bill does

Troy Downing's bill would make any city, county or state that limits police cooperation with immigration agents ineligible for every housing grant the federal government gives out — homeless shelter money, rapid rehousing, youth homelessness programs and the rest. In Montana the homelessness grant alone is about $7.2 million. Nineteen Republicans we cover cosponsored it within two days, along with two more we do not track. Downing declined to say which Montana communities it would hit.

Sources

Tom Lutey, Downing proposes HUD cuts for cities noncompliant with ICE, Montana Free Press (September 4, 2026).
H.R. 10222, the No HUD Funding for Sanctuary Cities Act — full text and cosponsors, 119th Congress.
Katie Fairbanks, Montana could lose millions for low-income housing under new federal policy, Montana Free Press (November 26, 2025).

Sixty-Three House Republicans Told the Supreme Court the AR-15 Deserves Protection Because It Is a Military Weapon

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 06:53:08 +0000

On September 4, 2026, sixty-three Republican members of the U.S. House signed their names to a legal brief asking the Supreme Court to strike down bans on AR-15-style rifles.

The argument they signed is the part worth reading twice.

For years, the case against banning these rifles has been that they are ordinary — sporting guns, hunting guns, nothing special. This brief argues close to the opposite. It tells the justices that an AR-15's resemblance to a soldier's rifle is a reason the Constitution protects it.

The brief was led by Andrew Clyde, who represents Georgia's 9th District and owns two gun stores. It was written by the American Center for Law & Justice and filed in Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins, the two cases the Supreme Court agreed on June 30 to hear together. They are the first cases in which the Court has ever taken up whether assault weapons bans are constitutional.

What the brief actually argues

The core claim is that lower courts have the test backwards.

Judges upholding these bans have pointed to a rifle's battlefield qualities — its design for combat, its resemblance to the military's M-16 — as the reason a state may restrict it. The brief says that reasoning inverts the Second Amendment. In its words, military usefulness "is, if anything, an indication that an arm lies within the Amendment's guarantee, not outside it."

It goes further. The brief describes AR-15-platform rifles as "the modern lineal descendants of the standard infantry arm the Militia Act of 1792 required citizens to keep," and says they "remain the basic individual weapon of light infantry forces."

So the argument is not that the AR-15 is a sporting rifle that happens to look scary. The argument is that it is the standard infantry weapon of our time, and that this is precisely why Congress and the states may not ban it.

Clyde put the political version more simply. "'Shall not be infringed' is not a suggestion, regardless of the firearm in question," he said. He called the bans "blatantly unconstitutional."

Who signed it

Sixty-three House Republicans put their names in the appendix. Fifty-seven of them have a report card on this site. Those fifty-seven are below, with the districts the brief gives:

Alabama: Barry Moore (AL-01)
Alaska: Nick Begich (AK-AL)
Arizona: Eli Crane (AZ-02), Paul Gosar (AZ-09)
California: Tom McClintock (CA-05)
Colorado: Lauren Boebert (CO-04)
Florida: Randy Fine (FL-06), Anna Paulina Luna (FL-13), John Rutherford (FL-05)
Georgia: Andrew Clyde (GA-09), Mike Collins (GA-10), Brian Jack (GA-03), Rich McCormick (GA-07)
Idaho: Russ Fulcher (ID-01)
Illinois: Mary Miller (IL-15)
Indiana: Jim Baird (IN-04), Erin Houchin (IN-09), Jefferson Shreve (IN-06)
Kansas: Tracey Mann (KS-01)
Louisiana: Clay Higgins (LA-03)
Maryland: Andy Harris (MD-01)
Mississippi: Michael Guest (MS-03)
Missouri: Eric Burlison (MO-07), Bob Onder (MO-03)
Montana: Troy Downing (MT-02)
Nebraska: Adrian Smith (NE-03)
New York: Claudia Tenney (NY-24)
North Carolina: Chuck Edwards (NC-11), Pat Harrigan (NC-10), Mark Harris (NC-08), Addison McDowell (NC-06)
North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak (ND-AL)
Ohio: Warren Davidson (OH-08), Michael Rulli (OH-06), David Taylor (OH-02)
Oklahoma: Josh Brecheen (OK-02), Kevin Hern (OK-01)
Pennsylvania: Scott Perry (PA-10), Guy Reschenthaler (PA-14)
South Carolina: Sheri Biggs (SC-03), Russell Fry (SC-07), Ralph Norman (SC-05)
Tennessee: Tim Burchett (TN-02), Scott DesJarlais (TN-04), Chuck Fleischmann (TN-03), Diana Harshbarger (TN-01), John Rose (TN-06)
Texas: Brian Babin (TX-36), Michael Cloud (TX-27), Brandon Gill (TX-26), Keith Self (TX-03), Beth Van Duyne (TX-24)
Virginia: Ben Cline (VA-06), Morgan Griffith (VA-09), John McGuire (VA-05)
West Virginia: Riley Moore (WV-02)
Wisconsin: Derrick Van Orden (WI-03)

Some of these names carry their own history

Illinois banned assault weapons statewide in January 2023, six months after a gunman fired on a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park with an AR-15-style rifle. Mary Miller, who signed this brief, represents Illinois. The Cook County ordinance now before the Supreme Court came first, and the Second Amendment Foundation, which brought both cases, describes it as the precursor to the nearly identical statewide law.

Jefferson Shreve ran for mayor of Indianapolis in 2023 on banning assault weapon sales, and the NRA gave him an F for it. He signed this brief. We wrote about that reversal when he cosponsored national concealed carry on his first day in Congress.

Tim Burchett signed. After a shooter killed three nine-year-olds and three adults at the Covenant School in his own state, Burchett was asked what could be done to protect children. He said that he and his wife homeschool their daughter.

Barry Moore signed. He is the member who wrote a bill to designate the AR-15 as the official national gun of the United States.

Andrew Clyde signed and led it. He owns two gun stores in Georgia, and he has separately asked the federal government to destroy the firearms records police use to trace guns recovered at crime scenes.

Clyde also recently led a letter asking the attorney general not to appeal a ruling that threw out the registration rules for silencers and short-barreled rifles. Thirty-three of the members who signed that letter have report cards here too.

Why the argument matters beyond this case

Courts do not just decide who wins. They decide what test applies next time.

If the Supreme Court adopts the reasoning in this brief — that a weapon's fitness for infantry combat weighs toward constitutional protection — the effect reaches past the AR-15. Every future restriction on a militarily useful firearm would have to survive a standard under which military usefulness is a point in the gun's favor.

The brief is careful to say the Second Amendment "does not protect every weapon merely because it is militarily useful." But the direction it pushes is unmistakable, and the members who signed it are asking the Court to push that way.

AR-15-style rifles were used at Sandy Hook, at Parkland, at Uvalde and at Highland Park. CBS News has called it the weapon of choice for mass shooters. The signers are telling the highest court in the country that the rifle's design for war is an argument for keeping it on the shelves.

What the filing shows

Sixty-three House Republicans, fifty-seven of whom this site tracks, signed a brief on September 4 asking the Supreme Court to hold that a rifle's usefulness as an infantry weapon counts in favor of protecting it. Among the signers are a member who wrote a bill making the AR-15 the national gun, a member who campaigned on banning assault weapons three years ago, a member who answered a school massacre in his own state by saying he homeschools his daughter, and the Georgia gun-store owner who organized the filing.

Source

Reporting by the North Gwinnett Voice, which published the full brief. Every quotation and every name above was taken from that filing.

Your Health Premiums Jumped 58%. House Republicans Came Back and Voted to Tell Colleges What They're Allowed to Boycott.

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:06:57 +0000

Your health insurance costs more than it used to. A lot more. When Congress let the enhanced premium tax credits expire at the end of 2025, what Marketplace enrollees pay toward their own premiums rose by an average of 58%, from $113 to $178 a month, according to KFF. Deductibles went up 37% — about $1,027 a person — to a record $3,786, the steepest jump this market has ever seen. And it is not done: insurers have filed for a median premium increase of another 15% in 2027, the second straight year of double-digit hikes.

The House came back from its August recess on August 31. Over the next four days it held twelve recorded votes. Not one of them was about your premiums.

Here is what the House did vote on instead, according to the Clerk's own record: a resolution condemning socialism, a constitutional amendment to freeze the Supreme Court at nine seats, a bill fast-tracking mining permits, a bill delaying protections for the endangered North Atlantic right whale, and — on Thursday morning — a bill that strips federal student aid from any college that boycotts Israel.

That last one is H.R. 4795, and it passed 237–169. House Republicans voted for it 203–2.

What the bill actually does

Read the text and the reach of it is the point. The bill amends the Higher Education Act so that any college taking part in a "nonexpressive commercial boycott" of Israel loses eligibility for federal student aid — Pell Grants, federal student loans, the money most students actually use to go to school. A second section says that if a school takes federal foreign-language and international-education funding, it has to file a certification every July 31 promising it will let students and faculty study in Israel on the same terms as anywhere else, and let Israeli students and faculty into its own programs on the same terms as students and faculty from any other foreign university. Miss the deadline and the money stops.

The operative text never says the word "Israel." It says "major strategic partner," and defines that by pointing at a 2014 law — the United States-Israel Strategic Partnership Act. The bill's official title says Israel out loud.

What counts as a boycott is a "commercial action" meant to limit business with Israel that "is not based on a valid business reason." So a university has to be prepared to explain, to the federal government, that its business decisions had a valid business reason and not a political one.

Nobody is doing the thing the bill bans

At the Rules Committee markup, Democrats made a simple point. "There has not been a single case of an American college or university administration adopting the BDS movement policies that are described in the bill. Not one," Rep. Bobby Scott said.

Morgan Griffith, who voted yes, answered that argument by embracing it. "Let's take my colleagues on the other side of the aisle and their argument, and that is the bill does nothing, and there's nothing to see here," he said at the markup. "Then there's no harm in passing it."

That is the whole defense: a federal speech rule aimed at conduct nobody has engaged in, and the case for it is that it might not do anything.

This is control, not freedom

The bill is called the Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act. It does the opposite. It tells private and public institutions what political positions they are allowed to take with their own money, and puts their students' tuition aid on the table if they get it wrong.

The word doing the work is "nonexpressive." Boycotting is speech — that is why people do it. Congress can't punish speech, so the bill relabels the boycott as commercial conduct and punishes that instead. The ACLU told Congress exactly what that is: "Many of those engaged in boycotts of Israel do so not for commercial reasons, but because they wish to express their political opposition to the policies of the Israeli government... HR 4795's labeling such boycotts as 'non-expressive' does nothing to change this reality."

Rep. Jerry Nadler, who opposes the boycott movement and said so at length, called the bill "a direct and gross violation of the First Amendment." His reason is the one that should matter to everybody, whatever they think about Israel: "The First Amendment right to free speech does not apply only to agreeable speech... I will always fight to protect Americans' right to speech with which I disagree. It is the only way to ensure speech I do agree with is equally protected." Nadler also warns that the bill's definition sweeps in the occupied West Bank, treating it as part of Israel and erasing the Green Line.

And the certification requirement flips a ban into a mandate. Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace put it plainly: "The goal here is to basically say every university not only cannot refuse cooperation with Israel but must actively seek every opportunity to cooperate with Israel... And if they're not doing that, they're pro-BDS and anti-Israel." She notes that any group that wants to can go hunting for a missing Israeli partnership and accuse a school of lying on its federal certification.

A government that decides which boycotts you may join, and requires you to prove your cooperation with a foreign country every July to keep your students' financial aid, is not protecting freedom. It is rationing it.

Two Republicans said no

Warren Davidson and Thomas Massie were the only two Republicans who voted against the bill. Thirty-three Democrats voted for it, and the bill's sole cosponsor is a Democrat, Josh Gottheimer. This was not a party-line vote. It was a vote where two Republicans out of 205 were willing to say that the federal government does not get to police what a college may boycott.

The bill now goes to the Senate.

The choice they made

Nobody has to guess at the priorities here. In the same four days the House found floor time to condemn socialism, to fast-track mines, to delay whale protections, to try to lock the Supreme Court at nine seats, and to police what colleges say about a foreign country, the premium bills already sitting on kitchen tables went up 58% and are set to climb again next year. The House has taken 295 recorded votes in 2026. It has not used one of them to put the premium tax credits back.

Every Republican we track who voted yes

These 184 members have a report card on this site and voted yes on H.R. 4795. (Kevin Kiley left the Republican Party in March 2026 but still caucuses with Republicans; he voted yes.)

Alabama: Barry Moore, Dale Strong, Gary Palmer, Mike Rogers, Robert Aderholt

Alaska: Nick Begich

Arizona: Abraham Hamadeh, Andy Biggs, David Schweikert, Eli Crane, Paul Gosar

Arkansas: Bruce Westerman, French Hill, Rick Crawford, Steve Womack

California: David Valadao, James Gallagher, Ken Calvert, Kevin Kiley, Tom McClintock, Vince Fong, Young Kim

Colorado: Gabe Evans, Jeff Crank, Jeff Hurd, Lauren Boebert

Florida: Aaron Bean, Anna Paulina Luna, Brian Mast, Carlos Gimenez, Greg Steube, Gus Bilirakis, Jimmy Patronis, John Rutherford, Kat Cammack, Laurel Lee, Maria Elvira Salazar, Mario Diaz-Balart, Mike Haridopolos, Randy Fine, Scott Franklin

Georgia: Andrew Clyde, Austin Scott, Brian Jack, Clay Fuller, Mike Collins, Rich McCormick, Rick Allen

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

Indiana: Erin Houchin, Jefferson Shreve, Jim Baird, Mark Messmer, Marlin Stutzman, Rudy Yakym

Iowa: Ashley Hinson, Zach Nunn

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

Kentucky: Andy Barr, Brett Guthrie, Hal Rogers, James Comer

Louisiana: Clay Higgins, Julia Letlow, Mike Johnson, Steve Scalise

Maryland: Andy Harris

Michigan: Bill Huizenga, Jack Bergman, John James, John Moolenaar, Lisa McClain, Tim Walberg, Tom Barrett

Minnesota: Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach, Pete Stauber, Tom Emmer

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

Missouri: Ann Wagner, Bob Onder, Eric Burlison, Jason Smith, Mark Alford

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey: Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew, Tom Kean Jr.

New York: Andrew Garbarino, Claudia Tenney, Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota, Nick Langworthy, Nicole Malliotakis

North Carolina: Brad Knott, Chuck Edwards, David Rouzer, Greg Murphy, Mark Harris, Pat Harrigan, Richard Hudson, Tim Moore, Virginia Foxx

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

Ohio: Bob Latta, David Joyce, David Taylor, Jim Jordan, Max Miller, Michael Rulli, Mike Carey, Mike Turner, Troy Balderson

Oklahoma: Frank Lucas, Josh Brecheen, Kevin Hern, Stephanie Bice, Tom Cole

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

Pennsylvania: Brian Fitzpatrick, Dan Meuser, Glenn Thompson, Guy Reschenthaler, John Joyce, Lloyd Smucker, Mike Kelly, Rob Bresnahan, Ryan Mackenzie, Scott Perry

South Carolina: Ralph Norman, Russell Fry, Sheri Biggs, William Timmons

Tennessee: Chuck Fleischmann, David Kustoff, Diana Harshbarger, John Rose, Matt Van Epps, Scott DesJarlais, Tim Burchett

Texas: August Pfluger, Beth Van Duyne, Brandon Gill, Brian Babin, Craig Goldman, Jake Ellzey, John Carter, Keith Self, Lance Gooden, Michael Cloud, Monica De La Cruz, Nathaniel Moran, Pat Fallon, Pete Sessions, Randy Weber, Roger Williams, Ronny Jackson

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

Virginia: Ben Cline, Jen Kiggans, John McGuire, Morgan Griffith, Rob Wittman

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

Wisconsin: Bryan Steil, Derrick Van Orden, Glenn Grothman, Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Tiffany, Tony Wied

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

Tommy Tuberville Says Alabamians Worried About Data Centers Are Repeating Chinese Propaganda. As a Senator He Bought and Sold Alibaba — and Was Late Disclosing About 130 Trades.

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 06:53:20 +0000

Tommy Tuberville has one explanation for why so many Alabama towns keep voting down data centers, and it is not their water bills.

In July he told the Alabama Sheriffs Association that his neighbors in Cullman, Bessemer, Fort Payne and elsewhere were repeating talking points from China. "They are listening to all this nonsense they see on social media that's coming from China because China does not want us to grow," he said, and called their concerns "bull crap."

On September 2, 2026, Doug Jones — the Democrat running against him for governor — pointed at Tuberville's own Senate financial disclosures and asked a question about that.

"Scare tactics about China don't acknowledge the fact that on 14 different occasions, while a United States senator, Tommy Tuberville, bought and sold stock and options in Alibaba."

Alibaba is a Chinese company. It is also one of the largest builders of AI and data centers in China.

The disclosures are not in dispute

Jones is an opponent, and opponents make claims. This one has been reported for years by outlets with no stake in an Alabama governor's race.

CNBC reported in January 2022 that Tuberville — described in the piece as a China critic — had, with his wife, bought Alibaba shares across three purchases between December 14 and December 21. Business Insider, reading the same filing, put the couple's total at between $115,000 and $250,000, and noted that his disclosures the previous June showed he held Alibaba put options as well. On January 14, 2022, three more options trades ended the Alibaba position.

Six months earlier, CNBC had reported that Tuberville violated the STOCK Act — the federal law requiring members of Congress to disclose their trades within 45 days. He was late on roughly 130 stock and options trades made between January and May of 2021, worth somewhere between $894,000 and more than $3.5 million. One of the trades he was late reporting was a sale of Alibaba put options.

His office said at the time that he had been unaware of the trades and that financial advisers made them.

That explanation is worth holding onto, because it is the same shape as the argument he is making now. When the trades look bad, he did not know about them. When Alabamians raise concerns, they are the ones being manipulated.

What Jones is actually asking

Jones raised a broader figure too: more than 250 trades disclosed in Senate financial filings, in the range of $5 million to $14 million, involving companies tied to artificial intelligence and data centers.

His ask follows from it. Jones has called for a one-year moratorium on new data centers in Alabama while the state writes rules, and a package of ethics changes to go with it: full transparency, a ban on nondisclosure agreements between developers and legislators, a prohibition on destroying records, and a ban on state officeholders trading stocks while in office. He asked Tuberville directly to divest from AI and data center companies.

"Alabama can build data centers, but we can do it right with appropriate guardrails," Jones said. "And Alabama can do it without a governor who trades the stock of these companies."

What Tuberville said back

His campaign declined to answer Jones directly. It pointed instead to an opinion piece Tuberville published the day before, in which he laid out a data center plan: local communities get the final say, developers cover the full cost of the energy and water they use, they replace what they consume, and they are taxed at the highest property tax rate.

That is a more accommodating position than "bull crap," and the shift is itself the story. Two months ago the people asking for exactly those guardrails were dupes of the Chinese government. Now the guardrails are his platform.

What he has not done is answer the money question. He was also asked, in August, to debate Jones, and declined: "There's so much difference between us. I mean, there's no reason to get up there and argue about differences of opinion."

The money keeps arriving

Whether Tuberville personally profits is only half of it. Last month we wrote about the other half: twenty-five days after he called Alabamians' data center worries "bull crap," a data center developer gave his campaign $25,000.

Data centers are becoming a defining Alabama issue, and Jones says it is not breaking along the usual lines. "It crosses party lines. It crosses racial lines. It crosses economic lines," he said.

Alabama towns are being asked to host facilities that draw enormous amounts of power and water, in a state where residents will pay the utility bills either way. The man who wants to run that state has told them their worries are foreign propaganda, has taken money from the industry, and spent his Senate years trading the stock of the companies building it — including a Chinese one.

What the filings show

Tommy Tuberville told Alabamians that opposition to data centers in their own towns is Chinese propaganda. His Senate financial disclosures record that he and his wife bought between $115,000 and $250,000 of stock in Alibaba, a Chinese AI and data center giant, that he held put options in it, and that the position was closed out in January 2022 — and that he was late disclosing about 130 trades worth between $894,000 and more than $3.5 million, one of them an Alibaba options sale, in violation of the STOCK Act. Doug Jones puts the wider total at more than 250 disclosed trades in AI and data center companies and has asked him to divest. Tuberville's campaign declined to respond and he has declined to debate.

Source

Doug Jones questions Tommy Tuberville's stock trades and data center stance — Kayla Davis, WVTM 13, September 2, 2026.

Americans Say Groceries Are Their Biggest Money Worry. House Republicans Spent the Evening of September 1 Voting to Condemn Socialism.

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 07:14:18 +0000

At 5:47 on the evening of Tuesday, September 1, the U.S. House of Representatives stopped what it was doing and voted on socialism.

The vote was 220 to 192, with two members voting present. Every single Republican who cast a vote — 211 of them — voted yes. Not one voted no. Eight Democrats crossed over.

The measure was H.Res. 1490, introduced five days earlier by Jeff Crank of Colorado. CBS News called it what it was: a political messaging exercise ahead of the November elections.

A House resolution is not a law. It does not go to the Senate. It does not go to the President. It cannot lower a grocery bill, cover a prescription, or hire an inspector. It is the House talking to itself, on the record, using floor time that belongs to the rest of us.

Four of its five demands are words. The fifth one isn't.

Read the resolution and you find it asks the House to do five things. It condemns socialism. It reaffirms support for free and fair elections. It reiterates that American elections are for citizens. It recommits itself to the Constitution.

Then comes number five, and it is the only part with an object in the real world. The House "calls for enactment of the SAVE America Act."

That is the whole trick. Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar said Democrats had offered their own version of a socialism resolution with that clause taken out. "We're capitalists. We believe in a capitalist system and rules and laws," he said. "But what Republicans are seeking to do here is to just add in another talking point where they can talk about the SAVE Act."

Majority Leader Steve Scalise did not pretend otherwise. "Not only do we denounce socialism, but also the idea of people that aren't American citizens voting in our elections, because that's part of their platform," he said.

What the SAVE America Act would actually do to voters

The House passed the SAVE America Act in February with the support of all 217 House Republicans and one Democrat. It has sat in the Senate ever since, short of the votes.

It would require every person registering to vote in a federal election to hand over a document proving citizenship. Today a new registrant swears to it under penalty of perjury. Under this bill you bring a passport, a birth certificate, or a naturalization certificate — in person. It would also require photo identification to vote, and force states to run their voter rolls through a Department of Homeland Security database. Every provision takes effect immediately on enactment.

Three states currently require new registrants to prove citizenship. Twenty-seven states do not require photo ID to vote. And a 2023 survey by SSRS for the University of Maryland and three voting-rights groups found that 9% of voting-age citizens do not have easy access to a document proving their citizenship. Because the proof has to be presented in person, the bill would also effectively end registering by mail or online.

We already know what this looks like, because a state tried it. After Kansas began requiring proof of citizenship in 2013, 31,089 people could not register because they could not produce the document — 12% of everyone who tried to register in that period. Over the previous 14 years, Kansas had identified 39 confirmed noncitizens on its rolls. A court struck the law down in 2018.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon put it plainly: "This is bad for voters, but this will be a nightmare for election administrators." In Orange County, California, the registrar calculated what it would have taken to verify citizenship for the 633,568 people who registered or updated a registration in 2024. The answer was 59 more staff and $6 million.

The emergency the resolution describes

The resolution's own evidence is thin enough to read in full.

It cites New Jersey, where roughly 6,600 noncitizens ended up on the voter rolls. That happened because of a motor vehicle software error that mislabeled people who had truthfully answered that they were not citizens. Fewer than 400 of them voted, and Governor Mikie Sherrill said there was "no evidence at this time that any elections were swayed" as a result.

It cites a federal investigation that charged four people.

That is the case for rebuilding voter registration for every American.

What was actually in front of them that week

The same afternoon, a group of Republican hardliners voted against their own party's procedural rule to protest a short-term government funding bill. The federal fiscal year ends September 30. Funding the government is the one job the Constitution actually assigns the House.

Outside the chamber:

A survey of 30,000 Americans by the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation found that 90% named groceries and food prices as a top cost concern — ahead of housing, ahead of healthcare. Food-at-home prices are up about 25% over five years. Nearly one in ten adults has used a buy-now-pay-later loan to buy groceries.
Health insurers have proposed a median premium increase of 15% for 2027 across 276 companies in all 50 states and D.C. That is the second straight year of double-digit increases. Insurers themselves attribute roughly 4 percentage points of it to Congress letting the enhanced premium tax credits die — which these same members voted to do.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said he would vote no because of the SAVE America Act clause. "House Republicans continue to desperately push toxic voter suppression legislation instead of working to make life more affordable for everyday Americans in the midst of a searing cost-of-living crisis."

In their own words

The Republican Study Committee put out a press release collecting what its members had to say about the evening. Not one of the quotes mentions a grocery bill or an insurance premium. The one that mentions a paycheck is about the government taking more of it.

Jeff Crank, who wrote it: "This evening's vote showed who stands for freedom, and others who stand with socialism."

August Pfluger, who chairs the committee: "Today's vote puts the Left on the record and removes any doubt about where my colleagues on the other side of the aisle stand."

Riley Moore of West Virginia: "Socialism has no place in America. It is driven by envy and resentment... America is a Christian nation and we must never accept socialism."

Lance Gooden of Texas: "With the enemy already inside our gates, we must reject this failed ideology wherever it exists."

Harriet Hageman of Wyoming: "We will never succumb to ideologies behind history's worst episodes of destruction and despair."

Robert Aderholt of Alabama, Nicole Malliotakis of New York, Warren Davidson of Ohio, Tim Walberg of Michigan, Jack Bergman of Michigan, William Timmons of South Carolina, Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma, Sheri Biggs of South Carolina, James Gallagher of California, Addison McDowell of North Carolina, Troy Nehls of Texas, Matt Van Epps of Tennessee, Nick Langworthy of New York and Mike Kennedy of Utah all added statements of their own.

That is the work product. A resolution that becomes nothing, a demand for a bill that is going nowhere, and a press release.

The 189 who voted yes

These are the members who voted for H.Res. 1490 and have a report card on this site.

Alabama — Barry Moore, Dale Strong, Gary Palmer, Mike Rogers, Robert Aderholt

Alaska — Nick Begich

Arizona — Abraham Hamadeh, Andy Biggs, David Schweikert, Eli Crane, Juan Ciscomani, Paul Gosar

Arkansas — Bruce Westerman, French Hill, Rick Crawford, Steve Womack

California — David Valadao, James Gallagher, Ken Calvert, Kevin Kiley, Tom McClintock, Vince Fong, Young Kim

Colorado — Gabe Evans, Jeff Crank, Jeff Hurd, Lauren Boebert

Florida — Aaron Bean, Anna Paulina Luna, Brian Mast, Carlos Gimenez, Greg Steube, Gus Bilirakis, Jimmy Patronis, John Rutherford, Kat Cammack, Laurel Lee, Maria Elvira Salazar, Mario Diaz-Balart, Mike Haridopolos, Randy Fine, Scott Franklin

Georgia — Andrew Clyde, Austin Scott, Brian Jack, Clay Fuller, Mike Collins, Rich McCormick, Rick Allen

Idaho — Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

Indiana — Erin Houchin, Jefferson Shreve, Jim Baird, Mark Messmer, Marlin Stutzman, Rudy Yakym, Victoria Spartz

Iowa — Ashley Hinson, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Zach Nunn

Kansas — Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

Kentucky — Andy Barr, Brett Guthrie, Hal Rogers, James Comer

Louisiana — Clay Higgins, Julia Letlow, Mike Johnson, Steve Scalise

Maryland — Andy Harris

Michigan — Bill Huizenga, Jack Bergman, John James, John Moolenaar, Lisa McClain, Tim Walberg, Tom Barrett

Minnesota — Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach, Pete Stauber, Tom Emmer

Mississippi — Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

Missouri — Ann Wagner, Bob Onder, Eric Burlison, Jason Smith, Mark Alford

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey — Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

New York — Andrew Garbarino, Claudia Tenney, Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota, Nick Langworthy, Nicole Malliotakis

North Carolina — Addison McDowell, Brad Knott, Chuck Edwards, David Rouzer, Greg Murphy, Mark Harris, Pat Harrigan, Richard Hudson, Tim Moore, Virginia Foxx

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

Ohio — Bob Latta, David Joyce, David Taylor, Jim Jordan, Max Miller, Michael Rulli, Mike Carey, Mike Turner, Troy Balderson, Warren Davidson

Oklahoma — Frank Lucas, Josh Brecheen, Kevin Hern, Stephanie Bice, Tom Cole

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

Pennsylvania — Brian Fitzpatrick, Dan Meuser, Glenn Thompson, Guy Reschenthaler, John Joyce, Lloyd Smucker, Mike Kelly, Rob Bresnahan, Ryan Mackenzie, Scott Perry

South Carolina — Joe Wilson, Ralph Norman, Russell Fry, Sheri Biggs, William Timmons

Tennessee — Chuck Fleischmann, David Kustoff, Diana Harshbarger, John Rose, Matt Van Epps, Scott DesJarlais, Tim Burchett

Texas — August Pfluger, Beth Van Duyne, Brandon Gill, Brian Babin, Craig Goldman, Jake Ellzey, John Carter, Keith Self, Lance Gooden, Michael Cloud, Monica De La Cruz, Nathaniel Moran, Pat Fallon, Pete Sessions, Randy Weber, Roger Williams, Ronny Jackson

Utah — Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

Virginia — Ben Cline, Jen Kiggans, John McGuire, Morgan Griffith, Rob Wittman

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

Wisconsin — Bryan Steil, Derrick Van Orden, Glenn Grothman, Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Tiffany, Tony Wied

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

How they voted

Roll Call 289, H.Res. 1490 — Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives (September 1, 2026)
Full text of H.Res. 1490

These 188 Republicans Voted to Lock the Supreme Court at Nine Seats While Republican Appointees Hold Six of Them

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 07:11:10 +0000

On September 2, 2026, the House voted on a change to the United States Constitution. Not a bill. Not a spending fight. An amendment to the founding document itself — one that would have written a single sentence into it: "The Supreme Court of the United States shall be composed of nine justices consisting of one chief justice and eight associate justices."

It failed, 212 to 206. Amendments need two-thirds of the House, and it did not come close. But 211 Republicans voted for it, and 188 of them have a report card on this site.

The number nine is not in the Constitution

That is the part worth sitting with. The founders wrote Article III and left the size of the Supreme Court blank on purpose. As the federal courts' own historians put it, the Constitution "leaves for Congress to determine the size and responsibilities of the Court."

And Congress has determined it, over and over. The Judiciary Act of 1789 created a Court of six. A seventh justice was added in 1807. An eighth and a ninth in 1837. A tenth in 1863. In 1866 Congress shrank it back to seven. In 1869 Congress settled on nine, and there it has stayed ever since.

Five changes. Every one of them made by ordinary law, by the elected representatives of the people, exactly as the founders designed it.

What they were actually voting on

The amendment would not have frozen the justices themselves. Justices still die. Justices still retire. Seats still come open, and whoever is president when that happens still fills them. That much stays the same.

What the amendment would have frozen is the number — and, more to the point, it would have taken that number out of Congress's hands and put it somewhere Congress cannot reach. An ordinary law can be changed by the next Congress. A constitutional amendment can only be undone by another constitutional amendment: two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, and ratification by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states. Thirty-eight of them.

So the question is not really about the number nine. It is about who gets to decide, and when they decided to stop deciding.

The timing

Six of the nine sitting justices were appointed by Republican presidents: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Three of those six — Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett — were put there by Donald Trump. The other three justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, were appointed by Democrats.

That six-to-three majority is not an abstraction. It is the majority that overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending the constitutional right to an abortion in this country and handing the question to state legislatures. Six of them ruled for Mississippi. Five of the six voted to throw out Roe itself — Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett. Chief Justice Roberts would not go that far, writing that he would "take a more measured course."

Republicans chose this moment — with that Court seated and that record on the books — to try to bolt the door shut behind it.

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon of Pennsylvania said on the floor that the amendment would "lock in for a generation or more a right-wing majority." Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, called it "another partisan power grab." The office of House Minority Whip Katherine Clark told members it would "strip Congress of yet another constitutional authority that is meant to be controlled by the American people's representatives."

Who pushed it

The amendment was written by Arizona's Andy Biggs, who is now running for governor of his state. He introduced it on the first day of this Congress and picked up exactly two cosponsors along the way: Georgia's Rick Allen and Kansas's Derek Schmidt. The House Judiciary Committee sent it to the floor on a 15-to-8 vote in June, and Speaker Mike Johnson brought it up for a vote on September 2.

Biggs argued the change was about fairness across administrations. "If a sitting majority can change the size of the Supreme Court the moment it dislikes rulings, what happens the next time the other side is in power?" he asked. In a statement after the committee vote, he said special interests were "threatening to pack this iconic American institution to ensure favorable outcomes for their causes," and that his amendment would "protect the Court's legitimacy."

North Carolina's Mark Harris said the push from the left was meant "to consolidate power and intimidate the court."

Here is the trouble with that argument. There is exactly one bill in this Congress to add seats to the Supreme Court. Texas Democrat Al Green introduced it on May 4, 2026, it would raise the number from nine to thirteen, and it has picked up zero cosponsors. It was referred to the House Judiciary Committee — the committee Republicans run — and it has not moved since. No hearing. No markup. No vote.

So nothing was being stopped on September 2. What was on the floor was a permanent change to the Constitution, offered by the side that currently holds the advantage, at the exact moment it holds it. If the principle really is that the rules should be the same no matter who is in power, the year to write it down is not the year your own appointees hold six of the nine seats.

Only one Democrat, Rep. Don Davis of North Carolina, voted yes.

Who voted to freeze the Court

188 Republicans with a report card on this site voted for the amendment. Here they are, grouped by state:

Alabama: Barry Moore, Dale Strong, Gary Palmer, Mike Rogers, Robert Aderholt

Alaska: Nick Begich

Arizona: Abraham Hamadeh, Andy Biggs, David Schweikert, Eli Crane, Juan Ciscomani, Paul Gosar

Arkansas: Bruce Westerman, French Hill, Rick Crawford, Steve Womack

California: David Valadao, James Gallagher, Ken Calvert, Tom McClintock, Vince Fong, Young Kim

Colorado: Gabe Evans, Jeff Crank, Jeff Hurd, Lauren Boebert

Georgia: Andrew Clyde, Austin Scott, Brian Jack, Clay Fuller, Mike Collins, Rich McCormick, Rick Allen

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

Indiana: Erin Houchin, Jefferson Shreve, Jim Baird, Mark Messmer, Marlin Stutzman, Rudy Yakym, Victoria Spartz

Iowa: Ashley Hinson, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Zach Nunn

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

Kentucky: Andy Barr, Brett Guthrie, Hal Rogers, James Comer

Louisiana: Clay Higgins, Julia Letlow, Mike Johnson, Steve Scalise

Maryland: Andy Harris

Michigan: Bill Huizenga, Jack Bergman, John James, John Moolenaar, Lisa McClain, Tim Walberg, Tom Barrett

Minnesota: Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach, Pete Stauber, Tom Emmer

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

Missouri: Ann Wagner, Bob Onder, Eric Burlison, Jason Smith, Mark Alford

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey: Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

New York: Andrew Garbarino, Claudia Tenney, Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota, Nick Langworthy, Nicole Malliotakis

North Carolina: Brad Knott, Chuck Edwards, David Rouzer, Greg Murphy, Mark Harris, Pat Harrigan, Richard Hudson, Tim Moore, Virginia Foxx

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

Ohio: Bob Latta, David Joyce, David Taylor, Jim Jordan, Max Miller, Michael Rulli, Mike Carey, Mike Turner, Troy Balderson, Warren Davidson

Oklahoma: Frank Lucas, Josh Brecheen, Kevin Hern, Stephanie Bice, Tom Cole

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

Pennsylvania: Brian Fitzpatrick, Dan Meuser, Glenn Thompson, Guy Reschenthaler, John Joyce, Lloyd Smucker, Mike Kelly, Rob Bresnahan, Ryan Mackenzie, Scott Perry

South Carolina: Joe Wilson, Ralph Norman, Russell Fry, Sheri Biggs, William Timmons

Tennessee: Andy Ogles, Chuck Fleischmann, David Kustoff, Diana Harshbarger, John Rose, Matt Van Epps, Scott DesJarlais, Tim Burchett

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

Virginia: Ben Cline, Jen Kiggans, John McGuire, Morgan Griffith, Rob Wittman

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

Wisconsin: Bryan Steil, Derrick Van Orden, Glenn Grothman, Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Tiffany, Tony Wied

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

House Roll Call 293, September 2, 2026 — the official record of every member's vote
Full member-by-member XML from the Clerk of the House
The text of H.J.Res. 1 as reported to the House
The Federal Judicial Center on Congress's power over the Court's size

Fifty Republican Senators Voted Against Even Debating an End to the Boat Strikes. A Year Into the Campaign, 227 People Are Dead in a "Year of Murders".

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 06:38:45 +0000

On September 2, 2025, the U.S. military blew up a speedboat in the Caribbean Sea. Eleven men were on it.

Two of them lived through it. They pulled themselves onto a piece of the overturned hull and floated there for about 45 minutes, holding on, with nowhere to go.

Then a second missile killed them.

That was the first strike. One year later, The Intercept reports that the campaign has never stopped. The U.S. has carried out more than 65 attacks in the Caribbean and the Pacific. 227 people are dead. The most recent strike, on August 25, killed four.

Congress never voted to authorize any of it.

Congress did get the chance to stop it. Five weeks in, the Senate held that vote. Fifty Republicans voted no.

We do not know who most of these people were

Start with the part that should end the argument on its own.

Of the 227 people killed, 26 have been identified by name. That number comes from Airwars, a U.K.-based group that monitors conflicts around the world and worked with the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism to put names to the dead. The U.S. government has not named a single victim.

Every person identified so far appears to be a man. The ones whose ages are known were between 24 and 46. Of the 41 identified by nationality, 18 were Venezuelan, 13 Mexican, three Colombian, three Ecuadorian, two from Trinidad and Tobago, and two from Saint Lucia.

Reporters who managed to put names to some of them found a bus driver. A mototaxi driver. Men who fished or worked in the seafood trade. A futsal player. They came from poor towns, and whatever connection they had to the drug trade was at the very bottom of it.

Families in six countries still do not know whether the men they are missing were on one of those boats.

What the Senate actually voted on

On September 18, 2025 — sixteen days after the first strike — Senators Adam Schiff and Tim Kaine introduced Senate Joint Resolution 83.

It is a short document, and it is not complicated. It says Congress has the sole power to declare war. It says Congress has not declared war on, or authorized force against, any group the administration newly labeled a terrorist organization, any country those groups operate in, or "any non-state organization engaged in the promotion, trafficking, and distribution of illegal drugs and other related activities." It says calling a group a terrorist organization does not by itself give a president permission to kill its members. And it says none of those groups have attacked the United States.

What it comes down to is simple. If you want to shoot at people, come ask Congress first.

The resolution was parked in the Foreign Relations Committee, which is where things go to be ignored. So on October 8, 2025, the Senate held a vote on whether to pull it out of committee so the full chamber could debate it at all.

Not a vote to end the strikes. A vote on whether senators would be permitted to discuss ending the strikes.

It failed, 48 to 51.

Fifty Republicans voted no. Only two voted yes: Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rand Paul of Kentucky. Ted Cruz did not vote. One Democrat, John Fetterman, voted with the Republicans.

These are the fourteen Republican senators we track who voted to keep the question off the Senate floor:

Alabama — Tommy Tuberville
Alaska — Dan Sullivan
Arkansas — Tom Cotton
Florida — Ashley Moody
Idaho — Jim Risch
Kansas — Roger Marshall
Maine — Susan Collins
Mississippi — Cindy Hyde-Smith
Nebraska — Pete Ricketts
Ohio — Jon Husted
South Dakota — Mike Rounds
Tennessee — Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty
West Virginia — Shelley Moore Capito

Two of them switching sides would have carried it.

Then they did it again. And again. And again.

October was not a one-time thing. The Senate came back to this three more times, and the same names kept showing up on the same side.

November 6, 2025. A second resolution, this one specifically about Venezuela. Same procedure, same result: rejected, 49 to 51. Again, the only two Republicans voting yes were Murkowski and Paul.

January 8, 2026. Something changed. Five Republicans crossed over and the motion passed, 52 to 47. For six days it looked like the Senate might actually take a position.

January 14, 2026. It didn't. A procedural objection was raised — a challenge to whether the resolution even qualified for the fast track that guarantees it a floor vote. It is a way to kill a measure without anyone having to say out loud whether the killings should stop. Two of the five Republicans who had just voted yes, Josh Hawley and Todd Young, switched back. The chamber split 50 to 50, and Vice President JD Vance came over to break the tie in favor of shutting it down.

Thirteen of the fourteen senators listed above voted to block every one of those resolutions. All four times. Susan Collins is the only one who broke ranks, and only in January — on the October and November resolutions she voted with the rest of them.

If this pattern feels familiar, it should. It is the same thirteen senators who, on July 30, 2026, voted to keep the Senate from debating an end to the Iran war — the thirteenth time that chamber had taken up the question. And Jim Risch chairs the committee where all of these resolutions were buried in the first place. He is the one who decides whether a subject gets a public hearing, and on Trump's Iran war he decided it wouldn't.

The legal case for all this is classified

Here is the reasoning the administration is operating on, according to the classified Justice Department opinion The Intercept describes: the drugs on the boats are a legitimate military target, because selling them makes money for cartels, and the cartels are supposedly in an armed conflict with the United States. Attached to that memo is a secret list of the groups it applies to.

The list is secret. The memo is secret. The Pentagon has withheld both from Congress, along with the basic facts about who has been killed.

A government official who has read the opinion called it "flimsy yet expansive," and said that even under its own generous terms, the U.S. has killed people it did not cover.

Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer who specializes in the laws of war, put it more bluntly:

"There is no plausible legal justification for the strikes. They're obviously not occurring in the context of an armed conflict and outside of armed conflict, the term for premeditated killing is murder."

U.S. Southern Command disagrees. Its spokesman, Steven McLoud, said every operation is "planned and executed within the full bounds of our legal framework, ensuring that every target meets the legal criteria established by our Office of Legal Counsel." That is the same Office of Legal Counsel whose opinion nobody outside the executive branch is allowed to read.

Senator Tim Kaine, who sits on both the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees, reviewed the highly classified material and wrote to the president in August. His conclusion was that the "available evidence suggests that the United States has killed individuals who are not involved in narcotrafficking."

The House looked into it for ten days

The Senate is not the only chamber that folded.

When the Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had verbally ordered the crew to "kill everybody," the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee promised a full accounting. Mike Rogers of Alabama and his ranking Democrat put out a joint statement about "rigorous oversight" and "bipartisan action."

Ten days later, after one classified briefing, he told reporters "it's done" and closed the inquiry. The video the committee watched has still never been released.

The one piece of real pressure Congress has managed in a year is buried in this year's defense policy bill: it holds back 25 percent of the travel money for the Defense Secretary's office until the Pentagon turns over the overdue reports and the unedited strike footage lawmakers have been asking for.

A quarter of a travel budget. That is what a year of accountability looks like.

What the record shows

In the twelve months since the first strike, the U.S. military has killed 227 people at sea in a campaign Congress never authorized, and has publicly named none of them. Twenty-six were identified by outside journalists; the dead include a bus driver, a mototaxi driver and men who worked in fishing. The Senate voted four times on whether to make the president come to Congress first, and fourteen Republican senators we track voted no the first time — thirteen of them voted no every time. That first vote, five weeks into the killings, came down to two senators.

Source

Nick Turse, "The U.S. Has Killed 227 Civilians in Boat Strikes During 'A Year of Murders'", The Intercept, September 2, 2026. Lead image: a U.S. Southern Command social media post from August 25, 2026, showing a vessel in the Caribbean moments before a U.S. strike killed four people. Screenshot: @Southcom on X, via The Intercept.

208 House Republicans Just Voted to Lock In the Food-Safety Layoffs. Complaints About Contaminated Meat Had Risen 40%.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:51:48 +0000

Last year, complaints to the federal government about contaminated meat, poultry and egg products rose by nearly 40% — from 1,443 to 2,016 — according to the USDA's own Food Safety and Inspection Service.

That happened because the people who do the inspecting had been leaving in numbers. Since the start of 2025, the FDA has laid off nearly 4,300 employees, and the Food Safety and Inspection Service — the branch that puts inspectors physically inside slaughterhouses and processing plants — has lost roughly 900 positions, about 9% of its workforce in six months.

On June 4, 2026, the House had a chance to decide what to do about that. It voted, 213 to 210, to leave it alone.

What the bill actually does

Be precise here, because Republicans dispute the word "cut," and on one point they have a case.

H.R. 8646 is the agriculture and Food and Drug Administration spending bill for 2027. By the Appropriations Committee's own summary, it:

provides $26.27 billion in total — $380 million, or 1.4%, below the level enacted for 2026;
gives the FDA $7.1 billion; and
claims to increase money for the Food Safety and Inspection Service "to fund frontline meat and poultry inspectors and bolster support for state inspection programs."

So this is not a bill that zeroes out food safety, and anyone telling you it is has skipped the document.

Here is the line that matters instead. It sits in the committee's own list of the bill's accomplishments, under "Safeguards American taxpayer dollars":

"Reducing salaries and expenses where appropriate to account for staffing reductions and shrinking grant programs that housed canceled grants."

Read that in plain English. Thousands of federal food-safety staff were fired. Congress's response was not to fund those jobs back. It was to lower the budget line to match the emptier building — and to call that a saving.

That is what 213 members voted for. The staffing losses stop being an emergency and become the new baseline.

The man who quit over this said so at the time

None of this was a surprise to anyone in the building.

Jim Jones, who ran the FDA's food division, resigned in February 2025. His resignation letter named the number: "The indiscriminate firing of 89 staff in the Human Foods Program is beyond short sighted." He wrote that the people fired "represent the future of the agency," and that staying on would be "fruitless" given the administration's "disdain for the very people necessary to implement" its own agenda.

Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group called his departure "a huge step backward for the FDA and the safety of our food."

The consequences reached specific places. On April 21, 2025, the FDA's Division of Dairy Safety suspended its proficiency testing program for Grade A raw milk and finished dairy products, because its Moffett Center laboratory was "no longer able to provide laboratory support for proficiency testing and data analysis." Grade A milk kept being tested. What stopped was the federal government's annual check that the labs doing the testing are getting it right — the same staffing problem, one more thing the government stopped doing.

The 188 who voted yes

Everyone below has a page on this site and is recorded voting Yea on H.R. 8646. All but one are Republicans — the clerk records Kevin Kiley of California as an independent. Grouped by state:

Alabama (5) — Barry Moore, Dale Strong, Gary Palmer, Mike Rogers, Robert Aderholt
Alaska (1) — Nick Begich
Arizona (6) — Abraham Hamadeh, Andy Biggs, David Schweikert, Eli Crane, Juan Ciscomani, Paul Gosar
Arkansas (4) — Bruce Westerman, French Hill, Rick Crawford, Steve Womack
California (6) — David Valadao, Jay Obernolte, Ken Calvert, Kevin Kiley, Vince Fong, Young Kim
Colorado (4) — Gabe Evans, Jeff Crank, Jeff Hurd, Lauren Boebert
Florida (16) — Aaron Bean, Anna Paulina Luna, Brian Mast, Byron Donalds, Carlos Gimenez, Cory Mills, Gus Bilirakis, Jimmy Patronis, John Rutherford, Kat Cammack, Laurel Lee, Maria Elvira Salazar, Mario Diaz-Balart, Mike Haridopolos, Randy Fine, Scott Franklin
Georgia (7) — Andrew Clyde, Austin Scott, Brian Jack, Clay Fuller, Mike Collins, Rich McCormick, Rick Allen
Idaho (2) — Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher
Illinois (3) — Darin LaHood, Mary Miller, Mike Bost
Indiana (7) — Erin Houchin, Jefferson Shreve, Jim Baird, Mark Messmer, Marlin Stutzman, Rudy Yakym, Victoria Spartz
Iowa (3) — Ashley Hinson, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Zach Nunn
Kansas (3) — Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann
Kentucky (4) — Andy Barr, Brett Guthrie, Hal Rogers, James Comer
Louisiana (4) — Clay Higgins, Julia Letlow, Mike Johnson, Steve Scalise
Maryland (1) — Andy Harris
Michigan (7) — Bill Huizenga, Jack Bergman, John James, John Moolenaar, Lisa McClain, Tim Walberg, Tom Barrett
Minnesota (4) — Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach, Pete Stauber, Tom Emmer
Mississippi (3) — Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly
Missouri (5) — Ann Wagner, Bob Onder, Eric Burlison, Jason Smith, Mark Alford
Montana (1) — Troy Downing
Nebraska (2) — Adrian Smith, Mike Flood
New Jersey (2) — Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew
New York (6) — Andrew Garbarino, Claudia Tenney, Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota, Nick Langworthy, Nicole Malliotakis
North Carolina (10) — Addison McDowell, Brad Knott, Chuck Edwards, David Rouzer, Greg Murphy, Mark Harris, Pat Harrigan, Richard Hudson, Tim Moore, Virginia Foxx
North Dakota (1) — Julie Fedorchak
Ohio (10) — Bob Latta, David Joyce, David Taylor, Jim Jordan, Max Miller, Michael Rulli, Mike Carey, Mike Turner, Troy Balderson, Warren Davidson
Oklahoma (5) — Frank Lucas, Josh Brecheen, Kevin Hern, Stephanie Bice, Tom Cole
Oregon (1) — Cliff Bentz
Pennsylvania (8) — Dan Meuser, Glenn Thompson, Guy Reschenthaler, John Joyce, Lloyd Smucker, Mike Kelly, Ryan Mackenzie, Scott Perry
South Carolina (4) — Joe Wilson, Russell Fry, Sheri Biggs, William Timmons
Tennessee (8) — Andy Ogles, Chuck Fleischmann, David Kustoff, Diana Harshbarger, John Rose, Matt Van Epps, Scott DesJarlais, Tim Burchett
Texas (17) — August Pfluger, Beth Van Duyne, Brandon Gill, Brian Babin, Craig Goldman, Jake Ellzey, John Carter, Keith Self, Lance Gooden, Michael Cloud, Monica De La Cruz, Nathaniel Moran, Pat Fallon, Pete Sessions, Randy Weber, Roger Williams, Ronny Jackson
Utah (3) — Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy
Virginia (5) — Ben Cline, Jen Kiggans, John McGuire, Morgan Griffith, Rob Wittman
Washington (1) — Michael Baumgartner
West Virginia (2) — Carol Miller, Riley Moore
Wisconsin (6) — Bryan Steil, Derrick Van Orden, Glenn Grothman, Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Tiffany, Tony Wied
Wyoming (1) — Harriet Hageman

The four who voted no

Only five House Republicans in the entire chamber voted against this bill. Four of them have pages here, and they deserve to be named for it:

Brian Fitzpatrick (Pennsylvania)
Rob Bresnahan (Pennsylvania)
Tom McClintock (California)
Greg Steube (Florida)

The fifth was Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who has no page on this site. Their reasons were not identical and several are fiscal conservatives who vote against spending bills as a matter of course — but on this roll call, they are the Republicans who did not vote to bank the losses.

Four more Republicans did not vote at all: Dusty Johnson of South Dakota, Tom Kean of New Jersey, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, and Chip Roy of Texas. Not voting is not a no, and none of them are on either list above.

What the record shows

Complaints about contaminated meat, poultry and eggs climbed nearly 40% in one year, to 2,016, after the FDA shed nearly 4,300 employees and the federal meat inspection service about 900. On June 4, 2026, the House passed a spending bill that comes in $380 million under last year and, by the Appropriations Committee's own description, trims salaries and expenses "to account for staffing reductions" rather than restoring them. It passed 213-210. Two hundred and eight Republicans voted for it, 187 of them people we track — 188 counting Kevin Kiley of California, whom the clerk records as an independent. Five Republicans voted no.

How they voted

The official record: Roll Call 205, H.R. 8646, 119th Congress, 2nd Session, June 4, 2026 — On Passage, Passed 213-210. Bill details from the House Appropriations Committee. Staffing figures from UpNorthNews.

Tommy Tuberville Called Alabamians' Data Center Worries 'Bull Crap.' Twenty-Five Days Later, a Data Center Developer Gave Him $25,000.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:26:42 +0000

On August 7, 2026, a Dallas company called Applied Digital Corporation wrote a $25,000 check to the campaign of Tommy Tuberville, the Republican nominee for governor of Alabama.

Applied Digital owns 1,300 acres in Brookwood, in Tuscaloosa County. It has pulled some permits for an industrial project there. It will not confirm whether it is building a data center on the land. The Tuscaloosa Thread, which has been covering the site for months, describes the company plainly as one of the developers wanting to build a data center near Brookwood.

The people who live around those 1,300 acres cannot find out what is going in next to them, because Brookwood's own officials have signed a non-disclosure agreement with the company.

Tuberville, meanwhile, has spent the summer telling Alabamians that their objections to data centers are not real.

What he said in July

On July 13, Tuberville stood in front of the Alabama Sheriffs Association in Opelika and dismissed the concerns of nine or more Alabama communities that have organized against data center projects — Cullman, Birmingham, Leeds, Homewood, Fort Payne, Bessemer, Pinson, Wilsonville, Mobile. He said the worry about noise and the environment was "bull crap," and blamed the opposition on Chinese propaganda. We wrote that story at the time: Alabama Towns Are Saying No to Data Centers. Tommy Tuberville Says That's 'Bull Crap' — and Blames China.

That post ended on an open question — who is on the other side of the deal Tuberville keeps selling.

Twenty-five days later, part of the answer arrived as a campaign contribution.

The company, the land, and the gag order

Here is what is publicly known about Applied Digital in Alabama, and what is not.

It owns 1,300 acres in Brookwood, according to county property records.
It has received some permits for an industrial project on that land.
It will not confirm whether a data center is planned. An Applied Digital spokesperson did not immediately respond to AL.com's request for comment.
Brookwood Mayor Joe Barger has signed a non-disclosure agreement tied to data center proposals, according to city officials. So the town's elected leadership is legally barred from telling residents what it knows.
The company is developing a data center campus in Louisiana called Delta Forge 1 and has facilities in North Dakota, so it is not a small operator testing the waters.

Fifty Brookwood residents have signed up to speak at a public meeting about the project. They will be speaking to a mayor who cannot answer them.

"The meeting wasn't about the Brookwood project"

Tuberville's campaign confirmed to AL.com that the senator met with Applied Digital recently. His communications director, Mallory Jaspers, drew a careful line around it:

"The meeting wasn't about the Brookwood project, it was an overview of how they communicate their projects to communities they want to invest in."

Read that again. The meeting was not about the specific project the company owns land for in Alabama. It was about how the company talks to communities it wants to build in.

Jaspers also said neither Tuberville nor anyone on his team has signed a non-disclosure agreement with Applied Digital. That is worth something. It is also not the problem. The problem is that the mayor of the affected town has signed one, and the man who wants to run the state took the company's money twenty-five days after telling those residents their concerns were nonsense.

Terry Grammer, a Brookwood-area resident who is currently raising money for legal fees to try to stop the project, told AL.com what it looks like from where he lives:

"This going on is almost like a pay to play deal. This is corruption at its finest."

The industry group asking the state to go easy

Applied Digital is a listed member of the Data Center Coalition, the industry's national lobbying group. Earlier in August, that coalition asked Alabama's Public Service Commission to make sure any new rules governing data centers and electricity rates allow "sufficient flexibility."

That is the fight that decides whether Alabama families or the data centers pay for the new power plants and transmission lines these facilities require. The industry is at that table. Tuberville's answer to the people who aren't is that they've been fooled by China.

This is not an Alabama-only pattern. In Wisconsin, Tom Tiffany campaigned against data center subsidies while taking $5,000 from the only registered lobbyist for the state's data center coalition. In Ohio, Jon Husted promised to protect people's electric bills while collecting $69,750 from the tech and utility companies driving those bills up. Same industry, same script, three states.

What $25,000 buys in this race

The contribution is not an outlier in size. Tuberville reported several comparable checks in August: $50,000 from Rapid Deployment Inc. of Mobile, $35,000 each from Trimed Billing Solutions of Hoover and K12 Management of Reston, Virginia, and $25,000 each from Schola Management of Birmingham, Newlight Healthcare of Austin, Advantage Capital Management of New Orleans, and Long & Long of Mobile.

He does not need the money. Tuberville ended July with $9.2 million on hand. His opponent, former U.S. Senator Doug Jones, had $1.7 million — and actually out-raised him that month, $622,000 to $289,597.

So this is not a candidate who took a check because he was desperate. It is a candidate who took a check from a company with 1,300 acres and a gag order in a town whose residents he had just called dupes of a foreign government.

Jones has called for a one-year moratorium on new Alabama data centers while the state updates its water and energy rules. Tuberville's position is that data centers are a "gold mine" and that opposition is imported disinformation. Only one of those two positions has a $25,000 contribution attached to it from a company that stands to build one.

What the filings show

Applied Digital Corporation, which owns 1,300 acres in Brookwood and will not say what it is building there, gave Tommy Tuberville's campaign for governor $25,000 on August 7 — twenty-five days after Tuberville publicly called Alabamians' data center concerns "bull crap" and blamed them on China. The town's mayor has signed a non-disclosure agreement, so the fifty residents signed up to speak at next week's public meeting cannot get a straight answer from their own government. Tuberville, who is sitting on more than $9 million, took the money anyway.

Source

Ruth Serven Smith and Hannah Denham, Data center company tied to Alabama project donates $25,000 to Tuberville campaign, AL.com, August 28, 2026. Photo: Will McLelland / AL.com. Additional reporting from Don Hartley, Tuberville Gets $25,000 From Data Center Developer With Land in Brookwood, Tuscaloosa Thread, August 28, 2026. Fundraising figures from Andrea Tinker, Jones outraises Tuberville in July; Tuberville retains financial edge in governor's race, Alabama Reflector, August 6, 2026.

Fourteen Republican Senators We Track Confirmed RFK Jr. After He Said His Samoa Trip Had 'Nothing to Do With Vaccines.' He Had Already Written the Prime Minister Asking to Study Samoa's MMR Vaccines.

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:08:16 +0000

In late January 2025, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sat in front of two Senate committees and needed Republican votes to become health secretary. One of the questions senators kept coming back to was about a trip.

In 2019, Kennedy — then the chairman of an anti-vaccine nonprofit — flew to Samoa. Months later, the island nation had a measles outbreak that killed 83 people, most of them children under five. Senators wanted to know what he had been doing there.

He told them it had nothing to do with vaccines.

Asked by Sen. Ron Wyden, he said: "I went there, nothing to do with vaccines. I went there to introduce a medical informatics system that would digitalize records in Samoa and make health delivery much more efficient." The next day Sen. Ed Markey asked the same thing. "My purpose in going down there had nothing to do with vaccines," Kennedy said.

On August 27, 2026, The Associated Press and The Guardian published a letter that Kennedy wrote to Samoa's prime minister on January 20, 2019 — before the trip, on the letterhead of his anti-vaccine group. In it he asked to send his team to Samoa to run a "detailed health informatics assessment" of "what happened with your MMR vaccines." He used the word vaccine or vaccination eight times.

The prime minister wrote back a month later and welcomed the visit, saying Samoa would benefit from an "independent health assessment of our MMR Vaccines."

What Kennedy did not tell the senators

The backstory matters, because the letter fits into it exactly.

In July 2018, two Samoan children died after being given an MMR shot that had been mixed incorrectly. Two nurses were criminally charged and later pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Samoa stopped all vaccinations for ten months while it sorted it out. Vaccination rates collapsed.

Kennedy's organization, Children's Health Defense, started contacting the Samoan government during that shutdown. Kennedy's letter told the prime minister he suspected the deaths might have come from problems with the vaccine itself — with particular batches — and offered to have his team check.

By the time Kennedy actually arrived in May and June of 2019, Samoa's own top health official had already announced the answer: human error, not the vaccine. Kennedy went anyway, and while he was there he met with anti-vaccine activists. Months later, with vaccination rates still dangerously low, measles broke out and swept the country.

Kennedy's department told the AP the visit "was unrelated to vaccines" and called any suggestion that he lied "outright defamatory." Kennedy was not under oath at his confirmation hearings. Knowingly giving materially false testimony to Congress is a crime anyway, sworn or not, though the AP notes it is rarely prosecuted.

The fourteen votes

On February 13, 2025, the Senate confirmed Kennedy 52 to 48. Every yes vote was a Republican. Mitch McConnell was the only Republican to vote no.

Fourteen of those yes votes came from Republicans we track:

Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, now running for governor
Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia
Susan Collins of Maine
Tom Cotton of Arkansas
Bill Hagerty of Tennessee
Jon Husted of Ohio
Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi
Roger Marshall of Kansas
Ashley Moody of Florida
Pete Ricketts of Nebraska
Jim Risch of Idaho
Mike Rounds of South Dakota
Dan Sullivan of Alaska
Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, now running for governor

Thirteen of these fourteen voted again this month, at 4:17 in the morning, to make Trump's personal lawyer the attorney general. Collins was the one who did not. Confirmation votes are where a senator's private assurances meet the public record, and the assurances keep losing.

What Susan Collins was promised

Two days before the vote, Collins told Maine Public why she was voting yes. Kennedy had assured her the polio vaccine works and that he would not restrict access to it. He had promised to back research on a Lyme disease vaccine. He had said he would revisit the administration's cuts to research funding that Maine labs depend on. And Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana doctor who chairs the Senate health committee, had assured her that the committee would hold regular oversight hearings on whatever Kennedy did.

"Based on all of that, I reached the decision to vote for him," Collins said.

She also explained the underlying rule she was following: "In general, I give deference to presidents to build their own team, whether they are Democratic presidents or Republican presidents." She has voted against roughly ten of nearly 200 nominees in her career. More than 180 Maine doctors had signed a national letter, endorsed by about 22,000 physicians, calling Kennedy "actively dangerous" to public health. She voted for him anyway.

That is the same senator the Bangor Daily News found had cast 200 deciding votes in her Senate career. Maine Democrats count 19 of them as deciding votes for Trump nominees, and none against one.

What happened to the promises

Cassidy's stated reason for voting yes was that Kennedy had pledged to leave the government's vaccine advisory committee "without changes." Once in office, Kennedy removed all 17 members of that committee and named his own advisers.

By August of 2025, the Trump administration had fired the CDC director three weeks into the job, after she reportedly refused to sign off on vaccine changes. Collins said she was "alarmed." She said she did not agree with Kennedy's approach to the vaccine committee, which she said "is likely to weaken the independent and professional recommendations of the committee." Then she added: "But, I do believe that he has some valid points about ultra-processed foods and their impact on obesity and the health of many Americans."

Her proposed remedy was oversight. Cassidy's was oversight. Neither of them has a vote to take back.

By June of 2026, Cassidy was on CBS saying flatly that the commitments made to him had been violated, and accusing Kennedy of building public health "upon a foundation of lies."

Roger Marshall celebrated instead. Marshall is a physician, and on the day of the vote he put out a statement calling it "a great day for America, particularly for our nation's children" and thanking the "Make America Healthy Again movement" for pushing Kennedy "across the finish line." He is also the senator who spread COVID misinformation for years and is still saying it.

The MMR vaccine is now the target

Here is what the Samoa letter is worth reading next to.

On August 10, 2026, with Kennedy standing beside him, President Trump signed an executive order telling federal officials to draw up plans, within 90 days, for splitting combination childhood shots into separate injections — the MMR shot specifically — and for spreading vaccine appointments further apart.

There are no separate measles, mumps or rubella vaccines sold in the United States. Every version the FDA has approved is a combination shot, and has been since the 1970s. Breaking the MMR apart would turn two doctor visits into six, and would require drug companies to spend years and tens of millions of dollars on new studies and new factories to make shots nobody has asked for.

"To date, there has been no published scientific evidence that shows any benefit in separating the combination MMR vaccine into three individual shots," Merck said.

Dr. Anna Durbin of Johns Hopkins put the consequence plainly: "It's going to be less convenient, more expensive and you're going to have fewer people getting vaccinated."

Meanwhile, the CDC's own count says the United States has confirmed 2,777 measles cases in 2026 as of August 20 — more than the 2,289 recorded in all of 2025, with four months of the year still to run. Ninety-four percent of this year's cases are in people who were unvaccinated or whose vaccination status is unknown. Kindergarten MMR coverage has slid from 95.2 percent in the 2019–20 school year to 92.4 percent in 2025–26, which the CDC estimates leaves about 280,000 kindergartners unprotected.

This is the same secretary who headlined a May fundraiser in San Antonio for a Republican congressional candidate, six weeks after a judge ruled his vaccine rollbacks unlawful. And it is the same political movement that produced a nominee for governor of Florida who, asked directly whether parents should vaccinate their children against measles, answered "No".

Who would have to investigate

Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, says he will press Republicans to refer the matter to the Justice Department, and that he will pursue it if Democrats take the Senate this fall. "There are consequences for lying to Congress," he said.

Attorneys told the AP that lawmakers could use Kennedy's statements as the basis for hearings, an investigation, or an impeachment inquiry. The AP also noted the obvious: none of that is likely to happen in a Republican Congress aligned with the administration.

That is not an abstract institutional problem. It is a decision that belongs to specific people. Collins sits on the health committee that was promised regular oversight hearings on exactly this. Capito, Cotton, Hagerty, Husted, Hyde-Smith, Marshall, Moody, Ricketts, Risch, Rounds and Sullivan all still hold the seats they voted from, and any of them can ask for a hearing.

What the record shows

Fourteen Republican senators we track voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after he told Congress his 2019 Samoa trip had nothing to do with vaccines. A letter he wrote before that trip, obtained by the AP and the Guardian, asked Samoa's prime minister to let his team study the country's MMR vaccines and used the word vaccine or vaccination eight times. Once in office he removed all 17 members of the vaccine advisory committee whose survival was the stated condition of Bill Cassidy's vote, and this month he stood beside the president as Trump ordered planning to break the MMR shot into three. There have been 2,777 confirmed measles cases in the United States so far this year, more than in all of 2025, and the AP reports that an investigation is unlikely in a Republican Congress.

Source

Ali Swenson, "Exclusive: RFK Jr. said a Samoa trip had nothing to do with vaccines. New documents refute that," The Associated Press, August 27, 2026. Photo: Misiona Simo / Samoa Observer via AP.

A Michigan Senate Nominee Criticized Tommy Tuberville's Anti-Sharia Bills. Tuberville Called Him a 'Terrorist Sympathizer.'

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:10:07 +0000

On August 24, 2026, Abdul El-Sayed — the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, and a Muslim — went on Fox News and said this:

"The idea that you have somebody like Tommy Tuberville, who barely was good at coaching football, is trying to ban Sharia law when there's less than 1% of the Muslim community in America, as if somehow Muslims are out here trying to push Sharia law, that seems to me to be deliberately targeting the Muslim community because they're different."

That is a criticism of a senator's legislation. It contains a jab about football and an argument about a bill.

Tommy Tuberville's reply, posted on X the next day:

"Sounds like something a terrorist sympathizer would say."

What that sentence actually does

A sitting United States senator called a major-party nominee for the United States Senate a terrorist sympathizer.

Not "he's wrong about the bill." Not "here's why Sharia is a threat." A man criticized his legislation, and the senator's answer was that criticizing it is what a terrorist sympathizer sounds like.

There is only one thing distinguishing El-Sayed from everyone else who has criticized this legislation — including a George Mason University law professor who told a House Judiciary subcommittee in February that the House companion of Tuberville's own deportation bill is "manifestly unconstitutional". El-Sayed is Muslim.

Tuberville did not say that. He didn't have to.

The legislation El-Sayed was criticizing

Two of the Senate's anti-Sharia bills are Tuberville's own. He introduced both on October 15, 2025: S. 3008, the "No Shari'a Act," which would bar the application of Sharia in the United States where it would violate constitutional rights, and S. 3009, the "Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act," which would amend immigration law so that advocating for Sharia is grounds to be denied a visa, declared deportable and removed from the country. It is the House companion of that second bill the George Mason professor testified against.

A third is Sen. John Cornyn's. On February 12, 2026, Cornyn introduced S. 3887, the "Defeat Sharia Law in America Act," which would amend the Civil Rights Act so that a business covered by its public-accommodations section that provides goods or services "by implementing Sharia law" counts as discriminating on the ground of religion. Tuberville is its only co-sponsor. He signed on the day it was introduced.

CAIR's Alabama chapter called that bill an "unconstitutional attack on religious freedom," noting that Sharia, "like Jewish Halacha, provides Muslims with guidance for their daily life and religious practice, requiring them to offer their five daily prayers, fast in Ramadan, give in charity, stand up for justice, obey the laws of the land in which they live, and advocate for the religious rights of their neighbors."

El-Sayed's factual point in the Fox interview is not in dispute. Muslims are a small share of the U.S. population, and Sharia — a religious framework — does not have standing over the U.S. Constitution.

This is not a one-off

Tuberville's answer to El-Sayed reads worse next to what he has already posted.

In March 2026 he put up a photo of the September 11 attacks beside a photo of New York's Muslim mayor, captioned "The enemy is inside the gates." We laid that out, along with the rest of the machinery — a 50-member congressional caucus, a state bill, a governor and an attorney general, all mobilized against a Sharia takeover that traced back to a hate group's blog post and five houses in Little Rock, two of them occupied by Christians.

The bigger picture is a spending decision. Republicans have put more than $10 million into television ads mentioning Sharia or Islam negatively this cycle — about ten times the total of each of the last four cycles. A pollster who studies this found anti-Muslim sentiment spikes during election cycles, not after terrorist attacks.

Tuberville isn't improvising. He's reading from a budget.

He's running to govern Alabama

Tuberville is not running for reelection to the Senate. He is running for governor of Alabama.

A governor signs bills, appoints judges, runs the state police, and decides which Alabamians the state protects. Alabama has Muslim citizens — doctors, students, small-business owners, engineers at the Huntsville research corridor, people whose families have been in Birmingham for generations.

The man asking to run their state has said, in public, that a Muslim who criticizes his bill sounds like a terrorist sympathizer.

Every Alabama Muslim watching that exchange now knows what happens if they say the same thing El-Sayed said.

What the record shows

On August 24, 2026, Abdul El-Sayed criticized Tommy Tuberville's anti-Sharia legislation on Fox News, arguing it targets Muslims for being different. On August 25, Tuberville publicly called that "something a terrorist sympathizer would say." Tuberville wrote two of the Senate's anti-Sharia bills himself and is the sole co-sponsor of a third, S. 3887, which CAIR's Alabama chapter calls an "unconstitutional attack on religious freedom." He is running to be governor of Alabama.

Source

Tuberville fires back at El-Sayed over Sharia law criticism: 'Sounds like something a terrorist sympathizer would say' — Yellowhammer News, August 25, 2026. Image via Yellowhammer News.

One Hundred Nine Republicans We Track Signed a Bill to Impose Right-to-Work on Every State. Twenty of Them Come From States That Don't Have It.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:15:56 +0000

"Right-to-work" has always been a decision each state makes for itself. Some states passed it. Some never did. Two have put one on the books and then, in the last decade, taken it back off.

There is a bill sitting in the House right now that would end that argument by taking the decision away from all fifty of them.

It's called the National Right-to-Work Act, H.R. 1232. It has 124 cosponsors. One hundred eight of them are Republicans we track on this site — and so is the man who wrote it.

What the bill actually does

Strip out the legal language and it's one move.

Right now, federal law lets a union and an employer write a contract saying that everyone the contract covers helps pay for it. Not that you have to join the union, and not that you have to agree with its politics — just that if the union negotiates your wages, your overtime, your safety rules and your grievance process, you chip in for the cost of that.

H.R. 1232 deletes that permission — out of the National Labor Relations Act, which covers most private workers, and out of the Railway Labor Act, which covers railroads and airlines. It doesn't preempt state law or overrule anybody's legislature. It does something simpler: it makes those agreements illegal everywhere, so no state's answer matters anymore.

The bill's own stated purpose is "to preserve and protect the free choice of individual employees." The free choice it protects is the choice to take everything a union bargains for you and pay nothing toward it. Do that at scale and the union runs out of money to bargain with. That is not a side effect. That is the mechanism.

Joe Wilson wrote it

Joe Wilson of South Carolina is the sponsor. He introduced it on February 12, 2025, with 74 original cosponsors already attached, and it went to the Education and Workforce Committee, where it has sat ever since.

South Carolina is already a right-to-work state, and 2.7% of its workers belonged to a union in 2025 — among the lowest rates in the country. Wilson is not fighting for something his own constituents are being denied. He already has it at home. The bill is about the other states.

Missouri voted this down by 35 points. All three Missouri signers went ahead anyway.

In 2017, Missouri Republicans passed a right-to-work law. Unions gathered signatures to put it to a public vote before it ever took effect.

On August 7, 2018, Missouri voters repealed it 67.5% to 32.5%. Not a legislature, not a court. The voters, by almost 35 points.

Mark Alford, Eric Burlison and Bob Onder all represent that state in Congress. All three signed H.R. 1232 as original cosponsors, on the day it was introduced.

Missourians were asked this exact question and gave an answer that was not close. Their congressmen's response was to sign a bill that would make the answer irrelevant.

Michigan repealed it. Three Michigan Republicans want it back — from Washington.

Michigan passed right-to-work in 2012. Eleven years later it changed its mind: in March 2023 the legislature repealed the law and Governor Whitmer signed it, and the repeal took effect on February 13, 2024. Michigan was the first state in decades to repeal a right-to-work law — the last was Indiana, in 1965.

John Moolenaar signed H.R. 1232 as an original cosponsor. John James and Tom Barrett signed on after.

All three represent a state that tried right-to-work, lived with it for a decade, and voted to end it. The bill they signed would put it back — permanently, and without Michigan getting a say the next time.

Ohio said no in 2011. Jim Jordan signed anyway.

Ohio has never had right-to-work, and the last time Ohio Republicans came for collective bargaining, it did not go well for them. Senate Bill 5 would have limited bargaining for the state's 400,000 public workers. On November 8, 2011, Ohio voters repealed it 61% to 39% — a campaign carried by firefighters, police officers and teachers.

Jim Jordan is Ohio's signature on this bill.

It is worth knowing who funds that position. Jordan's donors include $32,500 from Associated Builders and Contractors, the anti-union construction lobby — which has business before the Oversight Committee he sits on.

Pennsylvania sent five signatures on a law it never wanted

Pennsylvania is not a right-to-work state and never has been. Five Pennsylvania Republicans put their names on the bill that would make it one: Scott Perry, Mike Kelly, John Joyce, Glenn Thompson and Lloyd Smucker.

They are joined by signers from seven more states that have declined to pass right-to-work on their own: Cliff Bentz of Oregon, Mary Miller of Illinois, Jay Obernolte and Ken Calvert of California, Jeff Crank of Colorado, Troy Downing of Montana, Michael Baumgartner of Washington, and Nick Begich of Alaska.

Twenty members, eleven states, one bill to overrule all of them at once.

What it costs a paycheck

The argument for right-to-work is always freedom. The measurable result is smaller paychecks.

An August 2014 study by researchers at the University of Illinois and the Illinois Economic Policy Institute found that, controlling for other variables, right-to-work laws reduced workers' wages and salaries by 3.2% on average. The same study found the laws cut union membership by almost 10%, and reduced the share of workers with health insurance by 3.5% and with a pension by 3%. Those figures were reported this month by Civic Media and the Milwaukee Courier in their look at Wisconsin's own right-to-work record.

That last number is the one that compounds. Wisconsin's experience is the clearest case: after Act 10 and a 2015 right-to-work law, the state lost about 137,000 union members between 2010 and 2019, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

This is not a one-off

H.R. 1232 has been filed in Congress after Congress, and this version has not moved out of the Education and Workforce Committee since February 2025. It is easy to write it off as a message bill.

Don't. Look at what these same members do when a labor question actually reaches the floor. When a bipartisan bill to restore collective bargaining to more than a million federal workers came up, it passed the House 231–195 — and 195 Republicans voted no. The Senate has sat on it since.

And this is the third time we've had to write about the same group. We've covered the Republicans with the worst records on workers and unions, and the ones who voted against the CHIPS Act and then took credit for the factories. Different bills, overlapping signatures, one direction of travel.

One hundred nine Republicans we track have already told you where they stand on this, and one hundred five of them are still running. It's in writing, with their names on it, filed with the Clerk of the House. Missouri asked its voters and got 67% the other way. Michigan tried it and undid it.

The bill is still sitting there, waiting for a Congress willing to move it.

Sources

H.R. 1232 — National Right-to-Work Act, sponsor and full cosponsor list, 119th Congress
Full text of H.R. 1232 as introduced — U.S. Government Publishing Office
Missouri Proposition A, Right to Work Referendum (August 2018) — Ballotpedia
Michigan's repeal of right-to-work — Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity
Ohio Senate Bill 5 Veto Referendum, Issue 2 (2011) — Ballotpedia

Marsha Blackburn and Tommy Tuberville Signed a Bill to Ban Federal Money for Studying Trans Kids' Care. Two Weeks Later, Trump's Medicare Agency Moved to End the Coverage.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:01:17 +0000

On July 30, seven Republican senators put their names on a bill called the Protecting Our Kids from Harmful Research Act. Two of them were Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

Read the name again, because the name is the whole story. Not harmful care. Harmful research.

S. 5202 does not ban a treatment. It bans finding out about one. In Blackburn's own words, the bill would "prohibit the use of federal funds for any research or study on gender transition surgeries for minors." Sen. Mike Lee of Utah is the sponsor; Blackburn, Tuberville, Ted Cruz, Steve Daines, Cynthia Lummis and James Lankford signed on. It was read twice and sent to the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, where it sits.

The timing tells you what this is

They went after the research first.

Two weeks after this bill was filed, Trump's Medicare agency published a rule barring state Medicaid and CHIP plans from covering puberty blockers, hormones or surgery for minors. It hit the Federal Register on August 13 and takes effect October 13. Kids already on hormone therapy get six more months of federal money, and then it stops.

So the order is the reverse of what you would guess. The bill to keep the federal government from ever funding a study of what happens to these kids was filed and referred to committee before the coverage was taken away — not after, as a tidy-up. Whatever these senators knew was coming, the study went on the chopping block first.

That is not a policy that protects anyone. You cannot protect children from a treatment by refusing to learn its outcomes. If the treatment is as dangerous as these senators say it is, research is the thing that would prove it. A ban on research is only useful if you would rather not know.

What they said about it

The three senators quoted in Blackburn's announcement did not make a scientific argument. They made a rhetorical one.

Lee: "Why is the federal bureaucracy in the child mutilation business?" And: "President Trump rightly halted this attack on America's kids."

Lankford: "For too long, taxpayers have been forced to fund sex-rejecting studies on kids."

Blackburn: taxpayers "should not be spending a penny on research done by those who want to push harmful gender transition surgeries and radical gender ideology on our kids."

Notice what's missing from all three. No study is named. No finding is disputed. No researcher is accused of anything specific. The case against the research is that the people doing it are assumed to want the wrong answer.

Federal health research funding does not work that way, and these senators know it. A grant is reviewed, the methods are public, and the results are published whether or not anyone likes them. Cutting the funding doesn't correct a bias. It just ends the record.

Two senators running for governor, spending their Senate time here

Here is the part their own voters should weigh.

Blackburn's Senate term runs to 2031 and she is running for governor of Tennessee anyway — if she wins, she gets to name her own replacement in the Senate. Tuberville's term ends in January, and he is running for governor of Alabama. Both are asking their states to hand them the job of managing hospitals, schools, budgets and rural health systems.

The bill these two chose to put their names on while running for those jobs does nothing for either state. It removes federal research dollars from a field that affects a very small number of children, in a country where the Medicaid money for that care is already being taken away.

This is the same lane Tennessee's congressional delegation keeps working. Rep. Diana Harshbarger celebrated the Medicaid cutoff and then said she "will not rest" until Congress bans the care outright, with $100,000 penalties per violation. And it's the same playbook as the surrogacy bill twenty-five Republicans we track have signed — a bill about a handful of families, aimed at a much larger audience.

The pattern is the point

Ban the research. Ban the coverage. Ban the care.

Each step is defended with the others as evidence — the treatment must be dangerous, look how much of it we've prohibited. And the step Blackburn and Tuberville put their names on is the one that makes sure nobody can check.

Tennessee and Alabama both vote November 3.

Sources

Blackburn, Colleagues Introduce Bill to End Federal Funding for Harmful Gender Transition Research on Minors — Office of Sen. Marsha Blackburn, August 21, 2026
S. 5202 — Protecting Our Kids from Harmful Research Act — sponsor and cosponsor list, introduced July 30, 2026
Medicaid Program; Prohibition on Federal Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program Funding for Sex-Rejecting Procedures Furnished to Children — Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services final rule, published August 13, 2026, effective October 13, 2026

Your Town Fought a Data Center. Seven Republicans Decided You Might Be Working for China.

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 07:10:18 +0000

Data centers are enormous warehouses full of computers that run AI. They drink electricity and water, and somebody has to build the power plants and power lines that feed them. That somebody is everyone else on the grid.

So people have started showing up at county meetings to say no. Not activists — county commissioners, farmers, retirees, parents worried about a well.

They are not a fringe. Gallup found that 71% of Americans oppose building a data center in their area — far more than the 53% who oppose a nuclear plant nearby. Seven in ten of your neighbors.

Seven Republicans have landed on the same answer to those seven in ten. Not "here's why you're wrong." Not "here's how we'll protect your bill."

They have decided you might be on a foreign payroll — and several of them have asked federal law enforcement to find out.

Tom Cotton asked the Justice Department to investigate the objectors

On June 10, 2026, Tom Cotton sent a two-page letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche asking DOJ to "investigate foreign influence efforts targeting the buildout of American AI infrastructure."

Not the companies building them. The people objecting to them. The specific ask was an investigation under the Foreign Agents Registration Act — the law for people secretly working for foreign governments.

The remarkable part is what's in the middle of his own letter:

"Americans certainly have valid concerns about potential rising energy costs and strains on natural resources related to data centers, and we should implement common sense regulations and legislation to protect communities from adverse effects."

He agrees with them in writing, then asks the federal government's top law enforcement agency to open a file on them anyway.

His evidence names one person and reaches for a professor who appeared on a panel. That's the case.

Bob Latta, Brett Guthrie and John Joyce wrote to the FBI

Six days earlier, on June 4, three House Republicans signed a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel asking what the administration was doing about "foreign influence campaigns" behind the data center backlash.

Bob Latta chairs the Energy Subcommittee. Brett Guthrie chairs the full Energy and Commerce Committee. John Joyce chairs its Oversight Subcommittee. These are the three men in the House with the most direct power to actually do something about an electric bill.

Their press release quotes Guthrie: "Americans deserve to know who is bankrolling the disinformation campaign that seeks to block critical infrastructure investments."

The letter leans on two reports — one from the Bitcoin Policy Institute, one from a group called Power the Future. Neither establishes any link between a foreign government and a township meeting in Ohio or Kentucky.

Latta's problem is the calendar. Thirty-six days before he signed it, he gaveled in his own subcommittee hearing and said this in his opening statement:

"Many question whether AI, and the data centers that power it, will ultimately do more harm than good, particularly when it comes to individual energy costs. These concerns deserve to be taken seriously."

In April the concerns deserved to be taken seriously. In June they were an FBI matter. Nothing changed in between except that the backlash got louder — because the bills got bigger. We laid out the whole timeline on Latta.

Guthrie's problem is his own district. Breckinridge County passed a one-year moratorium. Daviess County passed one too. Meade County killed a project outright after 3,000 people signed a petition. Three county governments in a deep-red Kentucky district, hitting the brakes — and the woman who started the Daviess petition said she'd never engaged with Guthrie's office at all. The chairman of the committee that governs the grid, and his constituents took their grid fight to the county courthouse instead.

Derrick Van Orden and Tim Burchett skipped the paperwork

Derrick Van Orden represents Wisconsin's 3rd District, where a data center is planned in Wisconsin Rapids. Asked about opposition, he said a lot of the information against the project comes "from the Chinese companies" who are "paying people to say this stuff."

Tim Burchett of Tennessee put it at one remove. There is "a lot of misinformation out there," he said, and "there's talk that the Chinese are putting it out because they're the ones that want to be in the business of it."

No letter, no FBI request. Just the theory, aired in public about their own constituents.

Tommy Tuberville called his neighbors' concerns "bull crap"

At least ten Alabama communities — Cullman, Birmingham, Leeds, Homewood, Fort Payne, Bessemer, Pinson, Wilsonville, Fairfield, Mobile — have pushed back on data centers. Cullman's city council voted unanimously for a one-year moratorium.

Tommy Tuberville, the Republican nominee for governor, told the Alabama Sheriffs Association:

"It's going to ruin the climate — bull crap. They are listening to all this nonsense they see on social media that's coming from China because China does not want us to grow."

Then he told them it wouldn't matter what they decided: "You can forget about doing away with it because it's coming."

The things Alabama city councils have actually been debating are water use, noise, electrical demand and landscaping. That's zoning, not a foreign influence campaign.

Somebody actually checked

This is the part that should end the argument.

NPR went looking for the Chinese campaign. Darren Linvill co-leads the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson, which tracks foreign influence operations online. His finding:

"We haven't found much."

His larger point was that the premise doesn't hold together. China runs enormous bot networks, but they're not interested in your county zoning board. As he put it, China "tends to care a lot more about what you think about China and China's economy than they tend to do about what you think about your neighbor and what's happening in your own backyard."

He told NPR he can't rule out that China is quietly paying influencers to oppose data centers. His point is that there would be no need to.

And on the people organizing:

"I think in this case, the people talking about data centers are real people with real passions and real perspectives and real opinions."

There is one real case. OpenAI banned a cluster of likely Chinese accounts generating anti-data-center content — probably a private Chinese firm working for provincial government clients. Read what OpenAI's own threat investigations lead, Ben Nimmo, said about it:

"This was not a case of an influence operation creating a debate. The debate existed already. This was an influence operation from China trying to interfere in it. We didn't see any signs that they succeeded."

The debate existed already. Seventy-one percent.

What this actually is

Strip the national-security language off and look at the structure.

Seven in ten Americans object to something. The politicians who want it built anyway cannot answer the objection on the merits — because the merits are a water table and an electric bill, and those are measurable. So the objection itself gets reclassified as a hostile act.

That move has a cost beyond this one fight. Cotton chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose job is to keep the surveillance apparatus pointed outward and inside the law. Latta, Guthrie and Joyce run the committee that decides what your utility can charge you. Every one of them chose to aim the government at the people asking questions rather than at the problem.

The neighbors in Cullman and Meade County and Wisconsin Rapids did not get a foreign wire transfer. They got a bill.

Sources

Geoff Brumfiel, "The theory taking the rich by storm: China funds data center haters," NPR, June 10, 2026 — Linvill, Nimmo and the OpenAI takedown. Van Orden's and Burchett's quotes are from "The data centers are coming. Is Congress ready?" Roll Call, Aug. 12, 2026. Cotton's request is in his June 10, 2026 letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, reported by Fox News; the Guthrie, Joyce and Latta letter to FBI Director Kash Patel is in their own June 4, 2026 press release. Tuberville's remarks to the Alabama Sheriffs Association were reported by WBRC, July 14, 2026, and by Yellowhammer News, July 14, 2026, which has the "forget about doing away with it" line. The list of Alabama communities is Brian Lyman's in the Alabama Reflector, July 27, 2026. Polling: Gallup, "Americans Oppose Data Centers in Their Area". Photo: protesters at the Utah state Capitol in Salt Lake City on May 23, 2026, opposing the Stratos data center in Box Elder County, by Natalie Behring / Getty Images, via NPR.

95,000 Alabamians Just Lost Their Obamacare Coverage. Here's How Each of Their Republicans Voted.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:53:50 +0000

Alabama lost 95,000 people from its Affordable Care Act health plans this year — a 23% drop, the Alabama Reflector reports, citing a late-July analysis from KFF.

They didn't stop needing insurance. They got priced out. When the enhanced premium tax credits expired at the end of 2025, premiums rose an average of 58%.

This was not weather. It was a series of recorded votes, and every Alabamian can look up how their own member of Congress cast one.

Who loses coverage

Before the roll calls, it's worth being clear about who these 95,000 people are, because "ACA enrollees" is an abstraction and they are not.

Matt McGough, a KFF policy analyst, described the marketplace as a "last best option." Most enrollees are:

small business owners
people working multiple jobs that don't offer insurance
retirees who aren't yet old enough for Medicare

"This is a group of people who, just by the nature of their work, don't have health insurance benefits. Every other potential door in our fragmented health insurance system is closed to them."

And in Alabama, that door is narrower than almost anywhere. Alabama is one of only ten states that never expanded Medicaid. The program here covers children, the elderly and people with disabilities almost exclusively. An adult with children qualifies only if the family makes 18% of the poverty level — $5,940 a year for a family of four.

So for a working Alabamian earning more than $5,940 and less than a comfortable living, the ACA marketplace wasn't one option among several. It was the only one.

Nationally, 49 states saw enrollment fall. The single exception was New Mexico, which spent its own state money to replace the lost federal help. Alabama did not.

The Senate vote: Tommy Tuberville

On December 11, 2025, the Senate voted on whether to even begin debating S. 3385, a bill to extend the expiring tax credits.

It needed 60 votes to proceed. It got 51. The motion was rejected and the bill died without ever receiving an up-or-down vote.

Tommy Tuberville voted no, according to the official Senate roll call.

Tuberville is now running for governor of Alabama — asking to lead the state whose hospitals absorb the cost of the uninsured he helped create.

The House vote: the bill with the reassuring name

Six days later, on December 17, 2025, House Republicans passed their own health bill and called it the "Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act." It passed 216–211.

It does not extend the enhanced premium tax credits. As the Association of American Medical Colleges documented, the bill contains no extension at all. Instead it loosens the rules on "association health plans," lets employers set aside pre-tax dollars for employees to buy marketplace coverage, and lets employers buy stop-loss insurance.

Association health plans are cheaper largely because they don't have to cover everything a normal plan covers — plans with large-group status are exempt from the requirement to cover all ten essential health benefits.

So the name says "lower health care premiums." The bill leaves the premium increase exactly where it is.

Here is how Alabama's delegation voted, per the official House roll call:

Member	District	Vote
Robert Aderholt	4th	Yea
Barry Moore	1st	Yea
Mike Rogers	3rd	Yea
Dale Strong	5th	Yea
Gary Palmer	6th	Not Voting

Four Alabama Republicans voted for the bill that doesn't extend the credits. Gary Palmer was recorded "Not Voting" on passage — six minutes after he voted no on the Democrats' motion to recommit the same bill, and with premiums about to jump 58% on average.

Alabama's two Democrats, Terri Sewell and Shomari Figures, voted no.

What it does to the hospitals

The damage doesn't stop with the 95,000. Debbie Smith, who directs Cover Alabama at Alabama Arise, explained the chain reaction:

"What that means is more people are going to the ER without health insurance coverage. The hospital has to pick up that cost, and that makes it more likely for that hospital to not be able to absorb it, and possibly have to get rid of services at that hospital, or even shut down."

That isn't hypothetical in Alabama. Hospitals here are already struggling, and some have closed in the past year. Jackson Hospital in Montgomery was set to close in July after filing for bankruptcy — a safety-net hospital in a state that never expanded Medicaid. It survived only by reaching an agreement with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama. (It's the same hospital a Georgia billionaire lent $35 million at 14% interest and called "venture philanthropy.")

Every uninsured Alabamian who walks into an emergency room is a bill somebody pays. Right now that somebody is a hospital system already running on fumes.

"They knew in advance"

Smith's summary is the fairest description of what happened:

"This was a policy choice by Congress to let these extra tax credits expire... For Congress to just let these tax credits expire and allow that many people to lose their health coverage, they knew in advance that this would cause a lot of people across the country and here in Alabama to lose their health insurance."

That's the part worth holding onto. Nobody was surprised. KFF's March poll had already found that 17% of returning enrollees weren't confident they could afford their 2026 premiums. The projections were published. The votes happened anyway.

Alabama is not alone, and that's the point

We've now written this same story about state after state:

197 Republicans voted to spike health insurance premiums — the full national tally of both votes.
14,441 Arkansans lost Obamacare and their Republicans let it happen.
In Wisconsin, 45,000 people lost coverage while their congressman defended the cuts.

Alabama's 95,000 is among the worst of them, in the state least equipped to absorb it, because there's no expanded Medicaid underneath to catch anyone.

For the fuller accounting of what this delegation costs the state, see what Alabama's Republicans in Congress are costing you.

What to ask them

The tax credits may come back in some form — McGough notes it's "really hard for the government to offer a benefit to someone and then actually take it away," and it will be an issue through the midterms.

Until then, Alabamians have five specific questions for five specific people:

To Aderholt, Moore, Rogers and Strong: you voted for a bill named "Lower Health Care Premiums." Premiums went up 58%. What exactly did your vote lower?
To Palmer: you voted on the motion to recommit at 6:21 that evening and were not recorded on final passage at 6:27. What happened in those six minutes?
To Tuberville: you blocked the extension, and now you want to be governor. What's your plan for the 95,000?

Alabama deserves representatives who read the bill, not just the title.

Sources

Alabama Obamacare enrollment drops 23% after tax credits expire — Anna Barrett, Alabama Reflector, August 19, 2026.
Senate Roll Call Vote 644, S. 3385 cloture, December 11, 2025
House Roll Call 349, H.R. 6703, December 17, 2025
House Passes Health Care Bill Without Extending Enhanced ACA Subsidies — AAMC

The Republicans With the Worst Records on Workers and Unions

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:01:46 +0000

On Monday, five of the biggest unions in Wisconsin — teachers, state workers, service workers, Teamsters — asked the state Supreme Court to reinstate a ruling that Act 10 is unconstitutional.

Act 10 is the 2011 Wisconsin law that stripped collective bargaining rights from most public employees. Fifteen years later, it is still in court.

That's a useful reminder of something worth saying plainly: taking away a worker's right to bargain is not a one-news-cycle event. It's a thing that shapes paychecks for a generation, and the people who did it usually get promoted.

Here is a look at Republicans in Congress with the worst records on workers — including the man who ran Act 10 through the Wisconsin Senate.

Scott Fitzgerald wrote the playbook

Scott Fitzgerald was Wisconsin's Senate Majority Leader when Act 10 passed. His brother Jeff was Assembly Speaker. Between them, the Fitzgerald brothers controlled both chambers of the legislature that sent the bill to Scott Walker's desk.

It is still the most consequential thing he has ever done.

And the reason Act 10 is still in court traces to which workers the law let off the hook. It exempted certain public safety employees — including the State Patrol. Three days before the bill was introduced, the Walker administration had named Stephen Fitzgerald — Scott's father — superintendent of that same State Patrol.

The Wisconsin State Journal's editorial board called the appointment out at the time under the headline "Fitzgerald pick to head State Patrol smacks of favoritism." We laid out the full timeline here.

The dissenting appeals judge in this case made the point sharper: the unions that kept their bargaining rights under Act 10 had backed Walker's election months earlier. Your rights depended on which side you'd been on.

Glenn Grothman called the overnight protesters "slobs"

When tens of thousands of Wisconsinites filled the Capitol to protest Act 10, then-state senator Glenn Grothman called the ones staying overnight "a bunch of slobs taking up the building" — "college students who are having a fun party."

That was not a one-off mood. It's a worldview, and he's kept at it in Congress.

He asked Trump to cut 100,000 to 200,000 federal jobs, explaining that "a lot of these people are not working very hard at all". And he wrote a bill making it easier to pay workers with disabilities a median of $3.46 an hour — stripping out 2014 protections that keep teenagers with disabilities from being funneled straight into subminimum-wage jobs.

Pete Stauber wrote a union bill, then voted twice to kill it

This one is in a category of its own, because Pete Stauber didn't just vote wrong. He wrote the bill.

In September 2025 he co-authored the Faster Labor Contracts Act with a New Jersey Democrat. It addresses a real problem: workers vote to unionize, and the employer simply runs out the clock instead of bargaining. Stauber's own release said it takes an average of 458 days to reach a first contract.

He sold it on his biography: "As a former police office who organized my union, I've seen firsthand how unfair and frustrating this process can be for some." The Teamsters' general president praised him. Nearly 20 national unions endorsed it.

Then, on June 9, 2026, the bill needed procedural votes to actually reach the floor.

He voted no. Twice. On his own bill.

There is a way to tell whether a politician wants a bill to pass, and it isn't the press release at the Teamsters hall.

Byron Donalds: no water, no shade, no break

OSHA proposed the first federal rule ever written to protect workers from extreme heat. When the temperature passes 80 degrees, employers would have to provide rest breaks, shade, and clean drinking water.

That's the whole rule. Water, shade, and a break.

Byron Donalds — running to be Florida's next governor, in a state where people roof houses and pick crops in July — is one of 60 Republicans co-sponsoring a bill to block it, and to bar OSHA from ever issuing anything "substantially similar."

Rich McCormick wants you fired for using the Fifth Amendment

Rich McCormick revived a bill that would bar people from federal employment if they decline to answer certain questions from members of Congress, and let lawmakers refer them to the Justice Department for prosecution.

His pitch: "If you don't want to answer questions about what you did wrong, we should be able to fire you."

The Fifth Amendment is not a loophole. The Supreme Court settled in 1968 that a public employee cannot be fired simply for invoking it. McCormick's bill would put roughly two million federal workers to a choice between their constitutional rights and their jobs.

Robert Aderholt deleted the job training

Robert Aderholt chairs the House subcommittee that writes the spending bill for Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education — the panel deciding what goes to worker training and to the agencies that enforce wage laws.

In the bill his subcommittee advanced in June 2026, the job training programs aren't trimmed. They're zeroed out. He then announced $22 million for his own district.

He described the bill as one that "restores accountability."

Tom Tiffany takes the anti-union lobby's money

Tom Tiffany's donor list includes Associated Builders and Contractors, the anti-union construction lobby — an organization whose central purpose is keeping job sites non-union.

He also promoted DOGE while it brought office closures and funding cuts to a state where 18,000 people work for the federal government.

This isn't seven bad apples

The tell isn't any one of these records. It's what happened when the whole conference had to vote.

Two executive orders, plus an earlier move against TSA screeners, stripped collective bargaining from 84.4% of the unionized federal workforce. A bipartisan bill to restore it passed the House 231-195 — not one Democrat voted against it, and 195 Republicans did. The Senate has sat on it for eight months.

Meanwhile the administration has been subpoenaing the financial records of labor unions and putting a teachers' local on a criminal conspiracy chart shown to a grand jury.

Fifteen years after Act 10, Wisconsin's public workers are still in court trying to get back what was taken. That is how long this fight lasts once you lose it — which is exactly why the people who take it away count on you forgetting who they were.

They're on the ballot in November.

One in Every 14 Union Members in America Just Lost Their Contract by Executive Order. 195 House Republicans Voted to Keep It That Way.

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:25:23 +0000

More than a million federal workers lost the right to negotiate their own contracts in the space of five months, and it happened by memo.

In March 2025, President Trump signed an executive order using a rarely-used national security exception in a 1978 law to strip federal workers of collective bargaining — the right to negotiate as a group over pay, schedules, staffing and safety. On August 28, 2025 he signed a second order widening it further.

Together the two orders ended collective bargaining for more than a million federal workers. Counted alongside an earlier decision to end bargaining at the Transportation Security Administration, the Center for American Progress puts the total at 84.4 percent of the unionized federal workforce, or one out of every 14 workers in the entire country covered by a union contract. Federal News Network put the reach of the two orders alone at "an estimated two-thirds of the federal workforce".

Congress had a clean chance to reverse it. A bipartisan bill to give those workers their contracts back passed the House on December 11, 2025.

195 Republicans voted no. The Senate has not touched it since.

What is actually being taken away

"Collective bargaining" is a bloodless phrase for a very specific thing.

It is the reason a nurse at a VA hospital can say "this unit is short-staffed and it isn't safe" without her manager being the only person who decides what happens to her next. It is the reason a shift assignment or a schedule change is something you negotiate rather than something you're handed. It is a written agreement, and a process for enforcing it, that exists whether or not the person above you is having a good day.

Cancel the contract and every one of those questions goes back to being settled by management alone — no agreement to point to, no process to invoke.

That is what more than a million workers lost, and what the House voted in December to give back.

The VA has now tried to cancel the same contract three times in one year

On Friday, August 7, 2026, a federal judge in Rhode Island had to tell the Department of Veterans Affairs the same thing she had already told it twice before: you cannot cancel your workers' union contract.

The contract covers about 320,000 VA employees — the nurses, claims processors, housekeepers and schedulers who take care of veterans. U.S. District Court Judge Melissa DuBose said the VA's plan to end it was "in direct contravention" of her orders. The department had informed the union on July 24 that it intended to terminate the agreement on August 8.

Think about what that means. A federal agency has been ordered by a court, three separate times, to stop doing something — and it keeps trying anyway. The only thing standing between 320,000 workers and the loss of their contract is one judge's patience.

And TSA screeners got the same treatment

This was never limited to the VA. On December 12, 2025, TSA announced it would tear up the contract covering 47,000 airport screeners — the people who run security at every airport in the country. A federal judge had blocked exactly that back in June, finding the effort was aimed at "punishing" the union. Government Executive called the announcement an apparent violation of a court order that had been in place since June.

The pattern is the same everywhere: cancel the contract, lose in court, wait, try again.

That pattern is itself the strategy. Every round costs the union money and staff time it would otherwise spend representing its members, and the agency only has to win once.

The House had a bill to end it permanently

It was called the Protect America's Workforce Act, H.R. 2550. It did one simple thing: give federal workers their union back. It wiped out the executive order and barred agencies from tearing up contracts that existed before it.

It was not a party-line bill. It was led by Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican, and Jared Golden, a Maine Democrat — Golden introduced it and Fitzpatrick was its first Republican cosponsor, on the day it was filed.

Republican leadership never scheduled a vote on it. So rank-and-file members went around them, using something called a discharge petition — a rule that forces a bill onto the floor if a majority of the House, 218 members, signs their name to it in public. The petition hit 218 in November 2025.

On December 11, 2025, the bill passed 231 to 195.

Every Democrat who was present voted for it. Twenty Republicans joined them. 195 Republicans voted against it — including Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who voted down a bill their own conference member co-led.

The 20 Republicans who voted yes

They deserve to be named, because they prove the rest had a choice:

Don Bacon (NE), Mike Bost (IL), Rob Bresnahan (PA), Gabe Evans (CO), Brian Fitzpatrick (PA), Andrew Garbarino (NY), David Joyce (OH), Tom Kean Jr. (NJ), Nick LaLota (NY), Mike Lawler (NY), Ryan Mackenzie (PA), Nicole Malliotakis (NY), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA), Zach Nunn (IA), Chris Smith (NJ), Pete Stauber (MN), Mike Turner (OH), David Valadao (CA), Jeff Van Drew (NJ) and Derrick Van Orden (WI).

Twenty Republicans looked at this bill and decided their constituents mattered more than the White House. That is the whole point. Nobody who voted no can say the party made them do it.

Being on the right side of one vote does not settle the account, either — and if you're going to judge these members, judge them on the procedural votes too, not the press releases. Pete Stauber voted for this bill, then six months later voted twice against his own union bill on the procedural votes that decided whether it would reach the floor, then put out a press release taking credit when it passed anyway.

The 195 who voted no

169 of them have a report card on this site. Here they are, by state:

Alabama — Robert Aderholt, Barry Moore, Gary Palmer, Mike Rogers, Dale Strong

Alaska — Nick Begich

Arizona — Andy Biggs, Juan Ciscomani, Eli Crane, Paul Gosar, Abraham Hamadeh, David Schweikert

Arkansas — Rick Crawford, French Hill, Bruce Westerman, Steve Womack

California — Ken Calvert, Vince Fong, Kevin Kiley, Young Kim, Tom McClintock, Jay Obernolte

Colorado — Lauren Boebert, Jeff Crank, Jeff Hurd

Florida — Aaron Bean, Gus Bilirakis, Kat Cammack, Randy Fine, Scott Franklin, Mike Haridopolos, Laurel Lee, Anna Paulina Luna, Brian Mast, Cory Mills, Jimmy Patronis, Greg Steube

Georgia — Rick Allen, Andrew Clyde, Mike Collins, Brian Jack, Rich McCormick, Austin Scott

Idaho — Russ Fulcher, Mike Simpson

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mary Miller

Indiana — Jim Baird, Erin Houchin, Mark Messmer, Jefferson Shreve, Victoria Spartz, Marlin Stutzman, Rudy Yakym

Iowa — Ashley Hinson

Kansas — Ron Estes, Tracey Mann, Derek Schmidt

Kentucky — Andy Barr, James Comer, Brett Guthrie, Hal Rogers

Louisiana — Clay Higgins, Mike Johnson, Julia Letlow, Steve Scalise

Maryland — Andy Harris

Michigan — Tom Barrett, Jack Bergman, Bill Huizenga, John James, Lisa McClain, John Moolenaar, Tim Walberg

Minnesota — Tom Emmer, Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach

Mississippi — Mike Ezell, Michael Guest, Trent Kelly

Missouri — Mark Alford, Eric Burlison, Bob Onder, Jason Smith, Ann Wagner

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Mike Flood, Adrian Smith

New York — Nick Langworthy, Claudia Tenney

North Carolina — Chuck Edwards, Virginia Foxx, Pat Harrigan, Mark Harris, Richard Hudson, Brad Knott, Addison McDowell, Tim Moore, Greg Murphy, David Rouzer

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

Ohio — Troy Balderson, Mike Carey, Warren Davidson, Jim Jordan, Bob Latta, Max Miller, Michael Rulli, David Taylor

Oklahoma — Stephanie Bice, Josh Brecheen, Tom Cole, Kevin Hern, Frank Lucas

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

Pennsylvania — John Joyce, Mike Kelly, Dan Meuser, Scott Perry, Guy Reschenthaler, Lloyd Smucker, Glenn Thompson

South Carolina — Sheri Biggs, Russell Fry, Ralph Norman, William Timmons, Joe Wilson

Tennessee — Tim Burchett, Scott DesJarlais, Matt Van Epps, Chuck Fleischmann, Diana Harshbarger, David Kustoff, Andy Ogles, John Rose

Texas — Brian Babin, John Carter, Michael Cloud, Monica De La Cruz, Beth Van Duyne, Jake Ellzey, Pat Fallon, Brandon Gill, Craig Goldman, Lance Gooden, Ronny Jackson, Nathaniel Moran, August Pfluger, Keith Self, Pete Sessions, Randy Weber, Roger Williams

Utah — Mike Kennedy, Celeste Maloy, Blake Moore

Virginia — Ben Cline, Morgan Griffith, Jen Kiggans, John McGuire, Rob Wittman

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

Wisconsin — Scott Fitzgerald, Glenn Grothman, Bryan Steil, Tom Tiffany, Tony Wied

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

The Senate has done nothing for eight months

The bill passed the House on December 11. It has sat in the Senate ever since. No hearing, no vote, no floor time.

That is not an accident of the calendar. Senate Republicans had already put themselves on the record on the same question. On April 4, 2025 — eight days after the executive order was signed — they voted down a budget amendment whose stated purpose was "prohibiting attacks on Federal employees by protecting legally binding collective bargaining agreements and the right to organize." It was rejected 48 to 51.

Fifty-one Republicans voted no. Two voted yes: Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski.

So both chambers have now been asked, and both times the answer from most Republicans was the same. Which is why a district judge in Rhode Island is still doing this job one emergency order at a time.

This is not a fringe position they're protecting

Unions are not unpopular. Gallup's August 2026 poll put approval at 71 percent, tying its recent high, extending a six-year stretch in which it has stayed between 67 and 71 percent. A year earlier, when Gallup broke that approval out by party, it was "90% of Democrats, 69% of independents and 41% of Republicans".

Forty-one percent of Republicans. There are union households in every one of the districts on that list above, and a lot of them sent these members to Washington.

And these are not abstract workers. They are VA nurses and TSA screeners. Some of the same members who voted to take away their union have spent the last year arguing there are too many of them anyway — Glenn Grothman went on public radio during the 2025 shutdown and asked the president to cut up to 200,000 federal jobs on the grounds that "a lot of these people are not working very hard at all."

A union contract is how a nurse at a VA hospital says "this unit is short-staffed and it isn't safe" without losing her job for saying it. That is the thing 195 House Republicans voted to keep out of her hands, and the thing 51 Senate Republicans voted down before them.

We deserve better.

How they voted

House Roll Call 332, December 11, 2025 — H.R. 2550, the Protect America's Workforce Act. Passed 231–195.
Senate Roll Call 175, April 4, 2025 — budget-resolution amendment on protecting federal collective bargaining agreements and the right to organize. Rejected 48–51.

Source

Judge orders VA again to maintain collective bargaining with AFGE — Federal News Network, August 10, 2026. Photo: Getty Images.

Republicans Once Voted for a 12-Year Limit on Congress. Forty-Six on This Site Are Already Past It — by 909 Years.

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 19:09:29 +0000

On Sunday, August 16, 2026, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear went on CBS's Face the Nation and told Ed O'Keefe what he thinks it would take to fix the federal government. Here is what he said:

"Constitutional amendment. It is time. It should outlaw partisan redistricting and enshrine part of the Voting Rights Act right there in the constitution. It should create term limits for Congress and the Supreme Court."

He is not a lonely voice, and this is not a Democratic idea. Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, has pushed a 12-year cap on congressional service for years. But when the House has actually voted on it — in 1995, and again in 1997 — it was the Republican Party's own proposal, and the number both times was 12 years.

Ordinary Americans are not close to divided on this. When Pew Research Center asked in 2023, 87% favored limiting how long members of Congress can serve — 56% strongly. Only 12% were opposed. Republicans and Republican leaners said yes at 90%. Democrats and Democratic leaners, 86%.

There is almost nothing in American politics that 87% of people agree on.

So let's use their own number. Twelve years. Here is who is already past it.

The 12-year line, and the 46 people over it

In 1995, term limits were a plank in the Contract with America — the Citizen Legislature Act, which promised "a first-ever vote on term limits to replace career politicians with citizen legislators." The amendment Republican leaders then brought to the floor, H.J. Res. 73, capped service at 12 years: six terms in the House, two in the Senate. That is the standard Republicans wrote for themselves.

These are the Republicans with a report card on this site who have already served 12 years or more in Congress, without a break. Years and ages are as of today, August 17, 2026.

Name	Years	Age	Seat	In office since
Chris Smith	45	73	New Jersey-4	January 1981
Hal Rogers	45	88	Kentucky-5	January 1981
Ken Calvert	33	73	California-41	January 1993
Frank Lucas	32	66	Oklahoma-3	May 1994
Robert Aderholt	29	61	Alabama-4	January 1997
Susan Collins	29	73	Maine, U.S. Senate	January 1997
Mike Simpson	27	75	Idaho-2	January 1999
Shelley Moore Capito	25	72	West Virginia, U.S. Senate	January 2001
Joe Wilson	24	79	South Carolina-2	December 2001
John Carter	23	84	Texas-31	January 2003
Mario Diaz-Balart	23	64	Florida-26	January 2003
Marsha Blackburn	23	74	Tennessee, U.S. Senate	January 2003
Mike Rogers	23	68	Alabama-3	January 2003
Mike Turner	23	66	Ohio-10	January 2003
Tom Cole	23	77	Oklahoma-4	January 2003
Virginia Foxx	21	83	North Carolina-5	January 2005
Adrian Smith	19	55	Nebraska-3	January 2007
Gus Bilirakis	19	63	Florida-12	January 2007
Jim Jordan	19	62	Ohio-4	January 2007
Bob Latta	18	70	Ohio-5	December 2007
Rob Wittman	18	67	Virginia-1	December 2007
Steve Scalise	18	60	Louisiana-1	May 2008
Brett Guthrie	17	62	Kentucky-2	January 2009
Glenn Thompson	17	67	Pennsylvania-15	January 2009
Jim Risch	17	83	Idaho, U.S. Senate	January 2009
Tom McClintock	17	70	California-5	January 2009
Andy Harris	15	69	Maryland-1	January 2011
Austin Scott	15	56	Georgia-8	January 2011
Bill Huizenga	15	57	Michigan-4	January 2011
Chuck Fleischmann	15	63	Tennessee-3	January 2011
Mike Kelly	15	78	Pennsylvania-16	January 2011
Morgan Griffith	15	68	Virginia-9	January 2011
Paul Gosar	15	67	Arizona-9	January 2011
Rick Crawford	15	60	Arkansas-1	January 2011
Scott DesJarlais	15	62	Tennessee-4	January 2011
Steve Womack	15	69	Arkansas-3	January 2011
Tim Walberg	15	75	Michigan-5	January 2011
Andy Barr	13	53	Kentucky-6	January 2013
Ann Wagner	13	63	Missouri-2	January 2013
David Joyce	13	69	Ohio-14	January 2013
Randy Weber	13	73	Texas-14	January 2013
Richard Hudson	13	54	North Carolina-9	January 2013
Roger Williams	13	76	Texas-25	January 2013
Scott Perry	13	64	Pennsylvania-10	January 2013
Tom Cotton	13	49	Arkansas, U.S. Senate	January 2013
Jason Smith	13	46	Missouri-8	June 2013

Forty-six people. Twenty-four states. 909 years.

Nine of them have served double the limit their own party proposed. Two of them — Hal Rogers and Chris Smith — are approaching four times it. Eighteen of the 46 are 70 or older. Four are past 80.

Two of them were sworn in before Reagan was inaugurated

Hal Rogers and Chris Smith both took office on January 5, 1981 — fifteen days before Ronald Reagan's inauguration. They have both been in the House ever since. Forty-five years.

Rogers has been there so long there is a title for it. The House's own historians keep the list: he has been Dean of the House — the longest-serving member of the entire chamber — since 2022, through three Speakers.

He is 88 years old. In November 2025 he filed for re-election again, and in May 2026 he beat four primary challengers for the nomination. If he wins in November, he starts his 24th term at 89.

Four of them were there for the vote. Two voted for the limit.

Here is the part that should end the argument.

On March 29, 1995, the House voted on that amendment. Four of the forty-six were already in Congress that day. Here is the roll call:

Ken Calvert — Aye. He had served two years. He has served 31 more since.
Frank Lucas — Aye. He had been there ten months. He has served 31 more since.
Hal Rogers — No.
Chris Smith — No.

The amendment got 227 votes to 204. A constitutional amendment needs two-thirds, so it failed.

Read that again. Calvert and Lucas voted for a rule that would have ended their own House careers after twelve years. Both are now past thirty. Rogers and Smith voted to keep the door open — and then stayed another 31 years apiece.

Nobody in that group ever needed a law to leave. They could have just left.

Five of them are cosponsoring a three-term cap right now

This is not history everyone has quietly moved on from. It is happening in this Congress.

On January 6, 2025, Rep. Ralph Norman introduced House Joint Resolution 12, a constitutional amendment with a much harsher line than 1995's: "No person who has served 3 terms as a Representative shall be eligible for election to the House of Representatives." Three terms. Six years.

Five people on the list above signed their names to it. Every one of them is already past three terms:

Cosponsor	Terms served	Signed on
Scott Perry	7	January 6, 2025
Richard Hudson	7	January 13, 2025
Gus Bilirakis	10	March 10, 2025
Frank Lucas	17	April 8, 2025
Ann Wagner	7	August 8, 2025

Frank Lucas is cosponsoring a cap of three terms in his seventeenth.

None of them is required to quit for signing it — these amendments are written to apply going forward, and the pledge groups never ask anyone to pack up. But that is exactly the point. Putting your name on a resolution that will die in committee costs nothing. Leaving costs something. Guess which one keeps happening.

We have watched this move up close before. Alabama's Gary Palmer promised voters he'd serve five terms, then ran for a seventh and said he'd prayed about it. Pennsylvania's Guy Reschenthaler quietly stopped signing the term-limits amendment he'd backed three times — and signed again only eleven days after a billboard about it went up in his district.

Why they don't leave: eleven of thirteen gavels

None of this is an accident. Congress hands out power by seniority, and the gavels are where the money gets decided.

Look at the House Appropriations Committee, which writes the federal spending bills. It has one full-committee chair and twelve subcommittee chairs. Per the committee's own subcommittee rosters, eleven of those thirteen gavels belong to people on the list above:

Tom Cole — chairman of the full committee
Hal Rogers — Commerce, Justice, Science
Ken Calvert — Defense
Mike Simpson — Interior and Environment
Robert Aderholt — Labor, Health and Human Services, Education
John Carter — Military Construction and Veterans Affairs
Mario Diaz-Balart — National Security and State
Andy Harris — Agriculture and the FDA
Chuck Fleischmann — Energy and Water
David Joyce — Financial Services
Steve Womack — Transportation and Housing

Over in the Senate, Susan Collins chairs the Appropriations Committee too. Steve Scalise is the House Majority Leader. Jim Jordan chairs the Judiciary Committee. Virginia Foxx — 21 years in, and 83 — was handed the Rules Committee by Speaker Mike Johnson, the panel that decides which bills reach the floor and whether anyone gets to amend them.

We have already shown what those gavels buy. Rogers chaired the subcommittee controlling the entire Homeland Security budget — and a New York Times investigation found he steered a national ID-card program into a town of 8,000 in his own district while taking eleven trips, six of them to Hawaii, from a group in line to profit from a no-bid contract he arranged. Calvert campaigns on bringing home more federal money than any member in California history; the LA Times found $16 million of it landing within a few miles of rental properties he owns, including a building he had never disclosed.

Even Khanna, who wants the 12-year cap, admits out loud why this is hard. Describing the pushback he gets, he put the objection this way: "Well, look, we finally got seniority in a system where you have to wait 10 years before the voice really matters."

That is the whole trap in one sentence. The system is built so a new member has no power — and that is then used as the argument for why the old ones can never go.

The ones who won't even stand in a room

Long tenure would be easier to defend if it came with more accountability. It comes with less.

John Carter has held Texas's 31st District since 2003. His last documented in-person town hall was in 2013. When about 150 constituents held one for him in Belton in March 2025, they brought a life-size cardboard cutout to stand in for him, and his office dismissed them as "the far-left Indivisible group."

Mike Turner has held Ohio's 10th since 2003. When his opponent publicly asked him to debate and the Dayton Daily News put the question to him directly — would he debate, or hold a town hall? — he answered a different question entirely, responding with a press release about her health care plan. Not a yes. Not a no. Not one word about either.

That is what a safe seat buys you after two decades: you stop having to explain yourself.

And then there's Grassley

Iowa's Chuck Grassley doesn't have a report card here, because we track people on the 2026 ballot and he isn't on it. But he is the clearest picture of where this road ends.

Grassley has been in Congress since January 1975 — six years in the House, then the Senate ever since. That is 51 years, more than four times the limit his party once voted on. He is 92. His current term runs to January 2029, when he'll be 95.

He has already filed a statement of candidacy with the FEC for 2028. Asked in August 2025 whether he'd actually run for a ninth term, he wouldn't rule it out — his answer was "ask me the question in a couple of years."

A ninth Senate term would run to January 2035. Grassley was born on September 17, 1933. He would be 101 years old on the last day of it.

This was supposed to be a job you leave

Nobody on that list is there because of a conspiracy. They are there because they keep winning, in districts drawn to make sure they keep winning, with money that flows to incumbents because incumbents hold the gavels.

But "it's legal" and "they got elected" are answers to a question nobody asked. The question is whether a dozen years is enough — and Republicans themselves already answered it, on the record, in 1995. Twelve years. Six terms. Then go home and live under the laws you wrote.

Forty-six of them are past that line. Nine are past double it. Two are near four times it. Not one has treated their own party's number as binding on themselves.

Serving in Congress was supposed to be something you do for a while, as your part of the deal, and then hand off. A civic duty with an end date. Not a career, not a pension plan, and not a chair you sit in until you are 101.

Eighty-seven percent of Americans already agree. So does a Democratic governor in Kentucky, a Democratic congressman from Silicon Valley, and — in writing, twice, thirty years apart — the Republican Party itself.

They don't need a constitutional amendment to do the right thing. They could just go home.

Sources

Transcript: Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan," Aug. 16, 2026 — CBS News
How Americans View Proposals to Change the Political System — Pew Research Center, 2023
Roll Call 277, H.J. Res. 73, 104th Congress — Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives
H.J. Res. 12, 119th Congress — text and cosponsor list, Congress.gov

Years of service, term counts and ages are calculated from the public congress-legislators dataset, compiled from the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress and the official House and Senate rosters. "Years" counts continuous service, so a member who left and later returned is credited only from their return.

"A Big Win for Americans": Dale Strong Celebrates a Ruling the Judge Herself Said Would Cause Irreparable Harm

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 07:43:07 +0000

On Saturday morning, at the monthly meeting of the Madison County Republican Men's Club, Dale Strong was asked about a federal court ruling that cleared the way to deport Somali immigrants who have been living here legally.

He was delighted.

"I think it's a big win, not just for President Trump. I think it's a big win for Americans. You start looking at what these Somalis have done to this country. We're not going fast enough for most. I promise you, I hope that we see more handcuffs on those who have stolen from this country."

That's Alabama's 5th District congressman, on the record, to 1819 News.

Three things are worth knowing about the ruling he was celebrating, because he described none of them.

The judge who ruled for the administration said the people losing protection would be irreparably harmed

On Friday, August 14, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs lifted the stay that had been keeping the Trump administration from ending Temporary Protected Status for Somalia. That is the decision Strong called a big win.

Here is what Burroughs actually wrote, as The Hill reported:

"Plaintiffs have made a convincing showing that they will suffer irreparable harm if the injunction is withheld … and the balance of hardships and the public interest also favor Plaintiffs, given that the government has made no showing that maintaining TPS status for the duration of this litigation would impose an undue burden."

Read that again. The judge found that the people about to lose their status had proven they would be irreparably harmed. She found the public interest was on their side. She found the government had not even bothered to argue that letting them keep their status during the lawsuit would burden anyone.

She ruled against them anyway — because in June the Supreme Court decided 6-3, in a case carrying Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin's name, that courts have almost no power to review DHS decisions about Temporary Protected Status. Burroughs wrote that she was "bound … to view things through the Mullin prism."

And on the claim that Somalis were being singled out because of their race, she wrote this:

"Though Plaintiffs lay out a strong case for why the at-issue statements were racist … after Mullin, which included a constitutional race-discrimination claim, the Court cannot discern a path to concluding that Plaintiffs will succeed on the merits of this claim."

A strong case that the statements were racist. She just no longer had the power to act on it.

That is what Strong is calling a win for Americans: not a judge who found the policy was lawful and fair, but a judge who said her hands were tied.

We wrote about the earlier stage of this same case when Tennessee's Andy Ogles announced he would file articles of impeachment against Burroughs for issuing the stay in the first place. She has now ruled the way he wanted. The impeachment threat was never about the law.

Somalia has been too dangerous to send people back to since 1991

Temporary Protected Status is not a loophole. Congress created it so that people from countries torn apart by war or disaster would not be deported into the middle of it.

Somalia was first designated in 1991, at the start of a civil war that scattered a diaspora across the world. It was designated again by the Biden administration, which pointed to widespread and ongoing armed conflict. That is 35 years of every administration — Republican and Democratic — reaching the same conclusion: you cannot safely send people there.

Nothing about Somalia has improved. The State Department still tells Americans "Do not travel to Somalia for any reason", citing unrest, crime, kidnapping, terrorism, limited medical services, landmines and piracy.

Roughly 700 people are affected by Friday's order, according to The Hill. 1819 News put the number living in the U.S. under Somali TPS at more than 2,400, with more than 1,380 applications still pending.

To qualify for TPS, applicants go through a background check and pay application fees at every renewal cycle. These are the people who did the paperwork.

"What these Somalis have done to this country"

Strong did not say "some people committed fraud." He said "these Somalis." Then he went further:

"They're not stealing from the government. They're stealing from the American taxpayer, and I think that the price has got to be paid for what they've done. You've got more than 80,000 Somalians in one state, and I'll tell you this right here: they have cleaned that state out left and right."

The state is Minnesota. Here is what is actually there.

About 108,000 people of Somali descent live in Minnesota, according to Census Bureau estimates compiled by the Minnesota Reformer. Roughly 5,000 of them are not U.S. citizens. And that 5,000 includes green card holders and permanent residents. The number actually covered by Temporary Protected Status is, in the Reformer's words, "the couple hundred."

So Strong took a group of about 108,000 people, of whom roughly 103,000 are American citizens and a couple hundred hold TPS, and said they cleaned out the state.

Nearly two in five Somali Minnesotans were born in the United States. In 2001, more than 76 percent of Somalis in Minnesota were non-citizens. By 2023 that was 9 percent. These are American families.

The fraud is real. So is who prosecuted it.

There has been serious fraud in Minnesota's Medicaid programs, and people should go to prison for it. That is not in dispute, and this post is not going to pretend otherwise.

What Strong did was take that fraud and hang it on an ethnic group — and then suggest the officials who prosecuted it were in on it:

"I believe that some of the Democratic officials in those states have allowed it to happen, and I think that they need to be investigated to find out if they were co-conspirators in this process."

He offered no evidence. He named no one.

Here is the public record. In December 2025, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison — a Democrat — praised the federal indictments and set out his own office's part in them, for fraud in the Housing Stabilization Services and autism-services programs. His office's Medicaid Fraud Control Unit interviewed witnesses, executed a search warrant, took part in investigations at multiple companies, and handed data analysis to federal law enforcement.

"Today's charges and guilty plea are an important step in combatting fraud and protecting our tax dollars," Ellison said.

The Democratic official Strong wants investigated as a possible co-conspirator is the one whose fraud unit helped build the case, and who put out a statement welcoming the charges.

That is the difference between accountability and a smear. Accountability names the person and shows the evidence. Strong gestured at "some of the Democratic officials" and asked for investigations into whoever that turns out to be.

What followed the last round of this rhetoric in Minnesota

This is not an abstract argument about tone.

The Hill noted that the plaintiffs in the Somali TPS case pointed to Trump's comments about Somali people specifically, made in the wake of the Minnesota fraud investigation — comments followed by widespread immigration raids in the state.

Minneapolis is where an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, an American citizen and a mother of three, in January 2026. It is where a Customs and Border Protection agent killed an ICU nurse who had gone to help a man agents had pushed to the ground. Both were Americans. Neither had anything to do with Medicaid fraud.

"I hope that we see more handcuffs" is a sentence with consequences attached, and Strong's own district sends him to Washington to weigh them.

He is not the only one, and that is the point

Strong's remarks fit a pattern we keep documenting. Ohio's Michael Rulli went on Fox News to cheer the mass deportation of Haitians in his own state — after a court had found the policy was rooted in part in racial animus. And the Supreme Court decision that made all of this possible came with a dissent that laid out, quote by quote, the animus behind it.

Each time, the move is the same: a court removes a legal protection on narrow procedural grounds, a member of Congress calls it a victory, and the reasoning the judges actually wrote down goes unmentioned.

Strong sits on the House Appropriations Committee — the panel that writes the checks for the agencies carrying this out.

When he was handed a court ruling that said the people losing their protection would be irreparably harmed, that the public interest favored them, and that the case for calling the statements against them racist was strong, he read all of that and said: not fast enough.

Source

1819 News, "'Big win for Americans': Strong hails legal win allowing Trump administration to end TPS for Somalis" (August 16, 2026)

Republicans Are Coming for IVF and Surrogacy. Twenty-Five of the Ones We Track Signed the Bill.

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:31:40 +0000

For years, the political line on in vitro fertilization was simple. Everybody said they were for it. It is one of the most popular things in American medicine — this March, the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology reported that for the first time, more than 100,000 babies were born in a single year with the help of IVF. Even Donald Trump has talked about making it cheaper.

That line is breaking. And you can watch it break in two places at once: in state Republican party platforms, and in a bill sitting in Congress right now with a long list of Republican names on it.

What the state parties wrote down

In June, the Texas Republican Party adopted a 2026 platform that opposes public funding for IVF and calls for regulating the whole assisted-reproduction industry, including mandatory reporting on how embryos are created and stored. One section says the Texas Legislature must "protect fetal life from destructive practices, such as IVF and commercial surrogacy."

Another section goes after surrogacy directly:

"We support a ban on contract surrogacy involving foreign nationals, which may involve a form of trafficking and may lead to claims of citizenship. We also support prohibiting third-party egg and sperm donations and the commercialization of human reproduction in Texas; and support policies that promote the welfare of children, medical transparency, and the protection of biological parents."

The Idaho Republican Party added language to its own 2026 platform opposing "the destruction of human embryos." Republicans in Missouri, North Carolina and Oklahoma adopted similar language in 2024 and 2025. That is five states in two years.

Party platforms are not law. But they tell you where a party is heading. As Sean Tipton of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine put it to Stateline, "Party platforms are mostly about intraparty politics and jockeying for position, but at the same time, you have to pay attention, because that symbolism matters."

The bill below is what happens when the symbolism grows teeth.

The SAFE KIDS Act

On November 4, 2025, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida introduced S. 3101, the SAFE KIDS Act. On January 13, 2026, Rep. Blake Moore of Utah introduced the House version, H.R. 7040.

Here is what it does, in the sponsors' own words: it "invalidates commercial surrogacy agreements with citizens of foreign adversary countries, such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, and creates a misdemeanor for brokers — not surrogates — who knowingly facilitate these agreements."

Read that again. A surrogacy contract — the document that protects the surrogate, the intended parents, and the child — becomes legally void if one of the parties holds the wrong passport. The people who signed it in good faith are left with nothing to enforce.

The bill is pitched almost entirely as a national security measure. John Moolenaar of Michigan, who chairs the House Select Committee on China, said Chinese nationals "are exploiting gaps in US law to buy children from America," and that "this legislation will ensure accountability and protect innocent children from nationals of foreign adversary countries who want to buy American babies."

Blake Moore said the "espionage risks that could emerge from China and Russia bringing children with U.S. passports into their countries should be further cause for alarm."

Rich McCormick of Georgia was blunter about which door this actually opens:

"The SAFE KIDS Act closes a dangerous loophole that allows foreign adversaries to exploit our 14th Amendment through surrogate pregnancies. This bill protects vulnerable women and children while preventing hostile regimes from abusing U.S. birthright citizenship."

That is the tell. The 14th Amendment "loophole" McCormick is describing is birthright citizenship — the rule that people born here are citizens, in place since 1868. The Supreme Court upheld it on June 30, 2026, rejecting Trump's order trying to end it. Republicans have been hunting for a way around that ruling ever since, and subpoenaing maternity clinics while they look. Surrogacy is the newest angle of attack.

Robert Aderholt of Alabama, Jen Kiggans of Virginia, Nathaniel Moran of Texas, Mike Kennedy of Utah, Addison McDowell of North Carolina, John McGuire of Virginia and Jefferson Shreve of Indiana all supplied supporting statements for the same announcement.

Who signed it

These are the cosponsors who have report cards on this site. In the House, alongside Moore and Moolenaar:

Robert Aderholt
Jen Kiggans
Nathaniel Moran
Paul Gosar
Diana Harshbarger
Rich McCormick
Michael Rulli
Addison McDowell
Mike Kennedy
John McGuire
Pete Sessions
Jefferson Shreve
John Rose
Ben Cline
Harriet Hageman
Andy Harris
Chuck Fleischmann
Sheri Biggs

And in the Senate, on Rick Scott's version: Dan Sullivan, Pete Ricketts, Ashley Moody, Marsha Blackburn and Mike Rounds.

Neither bill has passed. The Senate version was referred to the Judiciary Committee the day it was introduced and has not moved since. But 25 sitting members of Congress decided this was worth attaching their name to.

The part they don't put in the press release

Here is the thing about the "we support IVF, we just want guardrails" position: four of the senators on that list already had a chance to vote on protecting IVF, and did not take it.

On September 17, 2024, the Senate voted on whether to take up the Right to IVF Act, which would have written a federal right to fertility treatment into law. Sen. Tammy Duckworth rewrote an earlier version of it after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in February 2024 that discarded embryos were children under state law — a ruling that prompted doctors in that state to halt IVF procedures.

The motion needed 60 votes to advance and failed 51–44. Two Republicans voted to advance it: Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. Sen. John Thune told reporters that week, "Republicans support IVF full stop," and called the vote an attempt "to create a political issue where there isn't one."

The roll call says otherwise. Dan Sullivan voted no. Marsha Blackburn voted no. Pete Ricketts voted no. Mike Rounds did not vote at all.

Rick Scott — who would introduce the surrogacy bill fourteen months later — spent that week floating his own IVF proposal to expand health savings accounts, and noted that his own daughter was undergoing IVF. Duckworth's answer to him at the time reads differently now: "you can't support a fertilized egg being a human being — this personhood stuff which Rick Scott has said he supported — and also say you support IVF. The two are contradictory."

This is the same pattern at the state level. In Nevada, a bill writing a right to IVF into state law passed the state Senate with Republican votes — and Joe Lombardo vetoed it anyway, while saying he supports making IVF more accessible.

Saying you support IVF costs nothing. Voting for it costs something.

Why surrogacy, and why now

The people pushing this are not shy about the reasoning. Emma Waters, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation — the group behind Project 2025 — calls surrogacy "baby selling," and says people from countries hostile to the U.S. can hire a surrogate to obtain citizenship. She has said that by age 35, a surrogate-born child from China could run for president.

Waters also thinks couples turn to IVF too early without exploring the underlying causes of infertility, an idea tied to a conservative philosophy called restorative reproductive medicine that also discourages birth control. In a blog post last month, she said that over the past six months she has received more requests for help drafting surrogacy legislation than on any other topic.

Tipton, of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, thinks the appeal is broader than national security. "For groups like Heritage, (surrogacy) is a nice synergy that allows them to be xenophobic, homophobic and anti-choice all at once," he said.

There is a reason he says homophobic. Many same-sex couples build their families through IVF and surrogacy. There is no other route.

The numbers do not support a crisis. Babies born through surrogacy made up about 14 out of every 100,000 deliveries between 2017 and 2020, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. A study found about 32% of surrogate pregnancies between 2014 and 2020 were for international couples, and about 41% of those were from China — where surrogacy is illegal, which is why people leave.

Meanwhile, as of June, lawmakers in at least 17 states had introduced 36 bills this year to give embryos or fetuses legal personhood, according to a Guttmacher Institute count reported by Stateline. Those are the bills that actually threaten IVF, because a clinic that discards an embryo is suddenly exposed. Opponents beat them back by arguing that they might limit IVF — which remains broadly popular.

What this costs real people

Ashley Kirk-Robertson, an Idaho woman who has carried four surrogate pregnancies, described what these arrangements actually look like. Her first was for a single father from Spain, where surrogacy is illegal. The second was for a husband and wife from Israel. The third was for a same-sex couple from Israel. The fourth was for Brooke Green, a Democratic Idaho state representative who could not carry a second child because she was diagnosed with a hormone-fueled breast cancer weeks before her last embryo was to be implanted.

"They truly are just here because coming here for the surrogacy is cheaper or because in their country it's not allowed," Kirk-Robertson said.

None of Kirk-Robertson's four contracts would be touched by the SAFE KIDS Act. It reaches only prospective parents who are citizens or permanent residents of the four countries the defense code calls foreign entities of concern — North Korea, China, Russia and Iran — and Spain and Israel are not among them. But look at where the bill draws its line. Not at whether anyone was harmed. At a passport.

Twenty-five Republicans on this site's report cards signed their names to that.

Source

Kelcie Moseley-Morris, Stateline: "More GOP party platforms include anti-IVF language. Is surrogacy next?" Cosponsor lists from congress.gov; sponsor statements from Rep. Blake Moore's office.

Tommy Tuberville Asks ChatGPT About Medicare While He Drives Across Alabama. "You Don't Know Whether or Not They're 100 Percent Correct."

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 07:54:43 +0000

A United States senator has a staff. He has committee hearings, nonpartisan analysts at the Congressional Budget Office, the Congressional Research Service, and the actual text of every bill he votes on.

Tommy Tuberville has a different method for the drive home.

A Washington Post investigation published August 13, 2026 found that members of Congress and their staff are handing large parts of their jobs to AI chatbots — with almost no rules anyone can name and no real enforcement. Tuberville is one of the members who told the Post about it on the record.

He asks ChatGPT questions about Medicare and Medicaid while driving across Alabama.

"It's kind of like you can sit there and talk to an expert," Tuberville told the Post. "You don't know whether or not they're 100 percent correct. But they put you on the right path."

Read that second sentence again. He is describing a source he knows may be wrong, on the two programs that pay for his constituents' health care.

Alabama is not an abstraction here

Medicare and Medicaid are not hypothetical topics for a senator from Alabama. They are the topics.

Alabama is one of the ten states that still has not expanded Medicaid, which means the coverage gap there is already about as wide as it gets in America. When a senator from that state says he is asking a chatbot about Medicaid to get "on the right path," the path in question runs through hospitals deciding whether to keep a labor and delivery unit open.

This is also not the first time Tuberville has talked about a program he clearly hasn't studied. In July, he stood on the Senate floor and called Social Security a government-approved "Ponzi scheme" — a program he has personally drawn about $93,000 from in three years, on top of his Senate salary.

He is now running for governor of Alabama, on the strength of that judgment.

The staffer who fed his phone into a chatbot

The Post's findings go well past one senator's commute.

The House and Senate have cleared staffers to use ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini; the House also approved Claude. The House bought 6,000 Copilot licenses last year to push staff toward using them.

What staff are actually doing with them:

Drafting speeches, press releases and questions for congressional hearings
Managing constituent mail
Drafting bill amendments
One staffer fed years of his phone contacts and text messages into Claude and had it build a database of reporters — what he pitched, what they took, what went badly
That same office has Claude running its communications budget, overseeing taxpayer-funded mailers and every ad sent to constituents

Congress does have rules. AI can't be used to make deepfakes, make personnel decisions, handle sensitive information like constituent data, or finalize legislation. A bot may help draft a bill, but a human has to do the final review. A bot may help draft a constituent reply, but it isn't supposed to be told who the constituent is.

Most staffers who talked to the Post didn't know those rules existed. Enforcement is left to staff policing themselves or turning in a colleague.

"You're still not supposed to put constituent data into AI," one staffer said. "There are weird things around where the rules are. I don't know all of them."

"Claude responded:"

We already know what happens when nobody checks, because it happened in public this summer.

Anna Paulina Luna filed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act — the annual bill that sets Pentagon policy and spending levels — directing Defense Department resources to the southwest border. Her office posted a summary of it.

The summary began: "increasing example specific factors. Identical to H.R. 100 (118th Congress).11:25 AM???? Claude responded:"

Washington Post reporter John Hudson posted the screenshot. The site was quietly edited to remove the line. Luna defended the practice, saying her staff had used AI to spell- and grammar-check the summary rather than the amendment text, and that "most staff use it."

That defense is worth taking seriously, because of what it concedes. The chatbot output went out under a member of Congress's name, with the chatbot's own words still in it, and nobody in the office read it before it published. If that is the level of review a summary gets, the question of what review the amendment got answers itself.

The one who admitted he hadn't read the bill

Mike Flood also turned up in the Post's reporting. He asked a chatbot where private equity firms were buying single-family homes while he worked on a bipartisan housing bill last year.

On its own that's the most defensible use on this list — a factual lookup, in an area where the answer is checkable.

But Flood is a specific case. In May 2025 he voted for Trump's budget bill, and five days later stood in front of constituents in Seward, Nebraska, and admitted that a provision stripping federal courts of the power to enforce their own orders "was unknown to me when I voted for that bill."

That's the worry in one sentence. The problem in Congress was never a shortage of information. It's that members vote on 1,100-page bills they haven't read. A tool that produces a confident-sounding paragraph in four seconds doesn't fix that. It makes not reading feel like reading.

Why this matters more than it sounds

It is easy to make this a joke about an old senator and a chatbot. It isn't one.

A chatbot will answer a question about Medicaid eligibility rules with total confidence whether or not it is right. It does not know which version of a bill passed. It cannot tell you that the CBO revised a number last month. It has no idea how many people in Alabama's 3rd District are on SNAP.

Tuberville knows that — he said so. "You don't know whether or not they're 100 percent correct."

He said it anyway, out loud, to a national newspaper, as a description of how he learns about the programs he votes on. The only account any of these three has given of checking the output is Luna's, after the fact: she said she had told her staff to double-check and be more thorough.

There is a version of this story where AI helps a small congressional office do more with less. There is also the version the Post actually found: no training, rules nobody has read, no enforcement, and a member of Congress deciding what he thinks about Medicare somewhere on I-65.

Source

The Wild—and Unregulated—Ways Lawmakers Are Using AI Chatbots — Hafiz Rashid, The New Republic, August 13, 2026, reporting on The Washington Post's investigation, also summarized by Raw Story. Photo: Finn Gomez / Getty Images via The New Republic.

Five Republicans Filed Five Resolutions in Five Days to Undo California's Clean-Air Rules. Three of Them Represent California.

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:10:33 +0000

Over five days in August 2026, five House Republicans filed five separate resolutions in Congress. Each one kills a different Environmental Protection Agency decision. Every single one is about California.

Here they are, straight off the congressional record:

Filed	Resolution	Sponsor	What it kills
Aug 6	H.J.Res. 210	Vince Fong (cosponsor: Gallagher)	The rule for ocean-going ships idling at California docks
Aug 6	H.J.Res. 211	Gary Palmer	California's waiver for greenhouse gas standards on cars, 2009 and later
Aug 6	H.J.Res. 212	August Pfluger	California's Advanced Clean Cars program waiver
Aug 10	H.J.Res. 213	James Gallagher (cosponsor: Fong)	Commercial harbor craft emission rules
Aug 10	H.J.Res. 214	Jay Obernolte	Small off-road engines — lawn mowers, leaf blowers, generators

All five went to the same committee: House Energy and Commerce.

That isn't five members having the same idea by accident. That's a package.

What a "waiver" actually is

California has been allowed to set stricter air pollution limits than the federal government since the Clean Air Act was written. The reason is simple and old: Los Angeles had the worst smog in America, and Congress let the state that already had its own program keep going. Other states can then choose to follow California's standards instead of the weaker federal ones. The authority is Section 209 of the Clean Air Act. For cars, EPA "shall grant a waiver unless" it finds California was arbitrary and capricious in concluding its standards are at least as protective as the federal ones, or doesn't need them for its own conditions, or wrote enforcement rules that clash with federal law. For engines that aren't cars — ships, boats, lawn mowers — the same three-part test runs under a parallel provision EPA calls an authorization. Under Section 177, other states can adopt California's car standards without asking EPA at all.

Either way, California can't enforce its rules until EPA signs off. Each of these five resolutions targets one of those decisions: two waivers and three authorizations.

Pfluger, Palmer and Obernolte's own announcement of their three is direct about the goal. August Pfluger:

"California should not be allowed to dictate what kind of vehicles Texans and Americans across the country can drive. … I'm proud to introduce this CRA to restore consumer choice, protect American families from costly mandates, and put an end to California setting de facto national auto policy."

Gary Palmer: "California should not be allowed to set de facto national vehicle standards for the rest of the country. This resolution reaffirms that the Clean Air Act cannot be used to give one state the power to reshape America's auto market."

Their release says the point is to stop California's rules "from quietly becoming the law of the land, without a single vote in Congress."

That line is worth holding onto, because of what the tool they picked actually does.

The tool they picked

The Congressional Review Act is a fast lane. A CRA resolution can't be filibustered in the Senate, needs only simple majorities, and skips the normal committee grind.

It also does something ordinary legislation doesn't: once a rule is killed by CRA, the agency is barred from issuing a rule in "substantially the same form" ever again — unless Congress passes a new law authorizing it. That's written into the statute itself: a disapproved rule "may not be reissued in substantially the same form … unless the reissued or new rule is specifically authorized by a law enacted after" the disapproval.

So the complaint is that California's standards might take effect without a full congressional debate. The remedy is a procedure specifically designed to avoid a full congressional debate, with a permanent lock on the door afterward.

What's on the list is not abstract

Three of the five resolutions aren't about cars at all.

H.J.Res. 210 targets the at-berth rule for ocean-going vessels. That regulation requires that every vessel visit to a regulated California port use an approved emission control strategy for the whole time it's docked, unless the visit qualifies for an exception — instead of running diesel engines while tied up next to a neighborhood. Container, refrigerated and cruise ships came under it starting January 2023.

H.J.Res. 213 goes after the commercial harbor craft rules — tugboats, ferries, fishing boats working the same waters.

Those two rules are about the air in port communities. Long Beach. Wilmington. Oakland. The people who live there breathe what idles at the dock.

H.J.Res. 214 covers small off-road engines: lawn mowers, leaf blowers, portable generators. Jay Obernolte's contribution to the package is the lawn equipment.

Who filed them

This is the part that makes the package legible.

Gary Palmer chairs the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on the Environment — the panel that is supposed to protect America's air and water. He has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025 and a 1% lifetime score. In 2025 he cast 33 anti-environment votes and zero pro-environment votes, with a coal company, a power company and a quarry company on his donor list.

August Pfluger has a 0% LCV score for 2025 and 0% lifetime. He represents the Permian Basin and sits on Energy and Commerce.

Vince Fong has a 0% 2025 score and 4% lifetime — a record built while serving on the Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment.

Jay Obernolte has a 3% 2025 score and 6% lifetime.

James Gallagher represents California's 1st District, which contains Paradise — the town destroyed by the deadliest wildfire in California history. In eleven years in the California Legislature he compiled an 11% lifetime environmental score, and California Environmental Voters put him in what it calls the "Polluter Caucus."

Four of the five have a lifetime League of Conservation Voters score in the single digits. The fifth spent eleven years earning an 11% lifetime score in the state legislature of the state these resolutions target.

Three of them represent California

That's the detail that should stop a Californian cold.

Fong, Obernolte and Gallagher are all California congressmen. They are not defending their constituents from another state's rules. They are asking Washington to overrule their own state — including the rules governing the ports and harbors on California's coast and the smog their own districts sit downwind of.

Pfluger's argument is about Texans being told what cars to drive. Fine — that's a real argument, and voters can weigh it. But nobody in Texas is affected by whether a tugboat in Oakland has to run a cleaner engine, or whether a container ship plugs into shore power in Long Beach instead of burning diesel at the pier.

Those two resolutions do only one thing: let more pollution into the air over California port towns. Both were filed by California Republicans.

Where it stands

All five resolutions are sitting in the Energy and Commerce Committee, where Palmer chairs the environment subcommittee and Pfluger and Obernolte are members.

They are not law yet. But CRA resolutions move fast when leadership wants them to, and this package was clearly built to move together.

If you live in one of these five districts, your congressman put his name on it.

Sources

Congressional record for H.J.Res. 210, 211, 212, 213 and 214, 119th Congress. Members' announcement: "Pfluger, Palmer, and Obernolte Push Back on California's EPA Waivers".

Congress Gave ICE $70 Billion and No Rules on Conduct. Now ICE Is Buying Electric Shock Gloves.

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 17:51:14 +0000

On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security published a purchase notice. By Tuesday the Associated Press had read it and written it up: Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to spend up to $20 million on thousands of gloves that deliver painful electric shocks, and it wants them in agents' hands by March.

The notice said the solicitation for a no-bid contract could go out as soon as Friday.

That is the whole story of what a blank check does. Two months ago Congress handed ICE roughly $70 billion and declined to write a single rule about how its agents may treat people. This is one of the things the agency decided to buy with a budget nobody attached conditions to.

What the gloves are

The device is called the G.L.O.V.E. — Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter — made by Compliant Technologies LLC of Lexington, Kentucky. In the DHS notice they are described, without apparent irony, as "conductive distraction and de-escalation devices."

They look and work like ordinary patrol gloves until the officer flips a switch. Then the officer has to touch bare skin to deliver the shock. The company's pitch is speed: it advertises "3 seconds or less" as the typical time to compliance in reported field use, promises to bring "resisting subjects into compliance in seconds, without lasting harm to anyone involved," and bills the product as the best hands-on de-escalation tool on the market.

John Peters, who runs the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths and is studying how the device gets used, described the sensation to the AP:

"It's immediate and sharp, and it will distract you. I call it like a bee sting."

Peters said he believed the order would likely be the largest the company has ever received, and that he could picture officers using the gloves to pull uncooperative people out of cars and houses and in and out of detention facilities.

The warnings come from the company that sells them

Here is the part worth slowing down for. The manufacturer itself warns that the device should not be used as punishment, should not be used on people who are merely showing "verbal defiance or belligerence," and should not be used on high-risk populations — children, pregnant women, elderly people, disabled people.

Those are not rules. They are a vendor's recommendations. Nothing in the law that paid for these gloves requires ICE to follow any of them, because that law does not contain rules about agent conduct at all.

Jenn Rolnick Borchetta of the ACLU put the practical problem plainly:

"ICE spent the last year showing this country they are too quick to use force. Now they will be able to deploy electric shocks with the slight push of a button that maybe nobody else can see them do."

Kica Matos of the National Immigration Law Center told Common Dreams the same thing in fewer words: Congress must end the blank check to ICE.

The guardrail she points to is $2 million for de-escalation training

Of the 52 Republican senators who voted for the money, the one taking the most heat for it right now is Susan Collins, who is in a tough reelection fight in a state where an ICE officer shot and killed a young father last month.

When Democratic Governor Janet Mills wrote to her about that killing, Collins wrote back on July 16 with a list of what she had secured in this year's Homeland Security spending bill. Three items:

$20 million for body-worn cameras
$2 million for de-escalation training, plus new de-escalation training requirements for ICE and CBP officers
a 17 percent increase for the DHS Inspector General

Set that against Monday's notice. ICE is prepared to spend $20 million on shock gloves — ten times the entire de-escalation training budget Collins points to, and dollar for dollar the same amount she secured for the cameras.

Both purchases are filed under the same word. One of them trains officers to talk someone down. The other lets an officer end the conversation with a button. ICE is spending ten times more on the button.

Collins' office did not immediately respond when Common Dreams asked whether she considers electric shock gloves a good form of de-escalation. Asked after the Biddeford shooting whether she regretted her vote for the funding, she declined to say she did.

The pain tool takes seven months. The accountability tool took five years.

Compare the two timelines, because the contrast is the argument.

The gloves: notice published Monday, no-bid solicitation possibly by Friday, thousands of units by March. Seven months, no competitive bidding.

The body cameras: ICE started testing them in 2021 and had distributed 1,400 by 2024. Returning to office in 2025, Trump cancelled the Biden order requiring federal law enforcement agencies to use them. The agency did not buy cameras even after receiving a $75 billion infusion in 2025 and hiring thousands of new officers. It finally spent $30.9 million on Axon equipment in July — the spending beginning one day after an ICE officer shot and killed a 25-year-old motorist in Maine. Days before that, another ICE officer shot and killed a Houston homebuilder driving to work. Neither shooting was recorded, because neither officer had a camera.

Jason Houser, who was ICE chief of staff under Biden and helped implement the camera pilot program, told the AP the delay was a choice: "This is not hard to deploy, but they've slow-rolled it."

And the cameras Congress paid for come with a policy that decides for itself what the public sees. ICE will promptly release video of a shooting or a death only after determining "it is in the best interests of the agency" to do so, and the director can block or indefinitely delay any release by finding "specific and compelling circumstances." Even when footage does come out, every officer's face, name and badge number gets redacted.

Katherine Hawkins of the Project On Government Oversight said the policy makes the recordings "virtually useless": "Without any clear way for the public to get access to it, it doesn't do much good."

One more detail on the reform Collins has been promoting. On July 31 she announced that body cameras would be deployed nationwide by the end of August, and added that the acting ICE director had agreed to prioritize delivery to Maine "at my request". That was eight weeks after she voted, on June 5, against Senator Alex Padilla's amendment to this same bill, which would have set aside at least $300 million to deploy body cameras and to store the footage and make it accessible to Congress and to the people filmed. It was rejected 46 to 53. A week later, ICE told the AP the rest of its field officers would get cameras by the end of September, a timeline the AP noted pushes back the agency's earlier public statements.

Congress wrote guardrails. They were about equipment.

This is not a case where lawmakers tried to attach conditions and lost. They wrote restrictions into the $70 billion law — the restrictions were just about procurement. No money for surveillance towers that haven't passed acceptance testing. No hiring processing coordinators after October 2028.

As we found reading the bill, that is the entire list. Congress found time to specify what gear CBP is allowed to buy, and no time to specify what agents may do with the gear. No conduct rules. No requirement that agents be identifiable. No mandatory reporting on who is detained, where, or for how long.

Which is why there is no provision anyone can point to now that says a federal officer may not press a shock button against a child, or against someone who talked back. The vendor says don't. The law says nothing.

We've also written about the ICE record arrest month that followed — 51,000 arrests in July, with fewer than a third of people in detention holding a criminal conviction — and about the House Homeland Security chairman who held the hearing on body cameras, funded them, and voted for the three more years of money anyway.

Two votes made this possible

The money came through in two roll calls, days apart.

The Senate, 52 to 47, at 4:42 in the morning on June 5. Every Republican voted yes except Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Not one Democrat voted for it. Our writeup of that vote is here.

The House, 214 to 212, on June 9 — a two-vote margin, meaning every Republican yes was a deciding vote. Zero Republicans voted no. The bill became law the next day.

That is the chain. Two roll calls, no conduct rules, and eight weeks later a no-bid order for thousands of devices designed to hurt people into compliance.

The 201 with report cards on this site

Two hundred sixty-six Republicans in the two chambers voted for this money. These are the ones with a report card here, by state — senators marked, everyone else voted in the House:

Alabama: Tommy Tuberville (Sen.), Robert Aderholt, Barry Moore, Gary Palmer, Mike Rogers, Dale Strong Alaska: Dan Sullivan (Sen.), Nick Begich Arizona: Andy Biggs, Juan Ciscomani, Eli Crane, Paul Gosar, Abraham Hamadeh Arkansas: Tom Cotton (Sen.), Rick Crawford, French Hill, Bruce Westerman, Steve Womack California: Ken Calvert, Vince Fong, Young Kim, Tom McClintock, Jay Obernolte, David Valadao Colorado: Lauren Boebert, Jeff Crank, Gabe Evans, Jeff Hurd Florida: Ashley Moody (Sen.), Aaron Bean, Gus Bilirakis, Kat Cammack, Mario Diaz-Balart, Byron Donalds, Randy Fine, Scott Franklin, Carlos Gimenez, Mike Haridopolos, Laurel Lee, Anna Paulina Luna, Brian Mast, Cory Mills, Jimmy Patronis, John Rutherford, Maria Elvira Salazar, Greg Steube Georgia: Rick Allen, Andrew Clyde, Mike Collins, Clay Fuller, Brian Jack, Rich McCormick, Austin Scott Idaho: Jim Risch (Sen.), Russ Fulcher, Mike Simpson Illinois: Mike Bost, Darin LaHood, Mary Miller Indiana: Jim Baird, Erin Houchin, Mark Messmer, Jefferson Shreve, Victoria Spartz, Marlin Stutzman, Rudy Yakym Iowa: Ashley Hinson, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Zach Nunn Kansas: Roger Marshall (Sen.), Ron Estes, Tracey Mann, Derek Schmidt Kentucky: Andy Barr, James Comer, Brett Guthrie, Hal Rogers Louisiana: Clay Higgins, Mike Johnson, Julia Letlow, Steve Scalise Maine: Susan Collins (Sen.) Maryland: Andy Harris Michigan: Tom Barrett, Jack Bergman, Bill Huizenga, John James, Lisa McClain, John Moolenaar, Tim Walberg Minnesota: Tom Emmer, Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach, Pete Stauber Mississippi: Cindy Hyde-Smith (Sen.), Mike Ezell, Michael Guest, Trent Kelly Missouri: Mark Alford, Eric Burlison, Bob Onder, Jason Smith, Ann Wagner Montana: Troy Downing Nebraska: Pete Ricketts (Sen.), Mike Flood, Adrian Smith New Jersey: Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew New York: Andrew Garbarino, Nick LaLota, Nick Langworthy, Mike Lawler, Nicole Malliotakis, Claudia Tenney North Carolina: Virginia Foxx, Pat Harrigan, Mark Harris, Richard Hudson, Brad Knott, Addison McDowell, Tim Moore, Greg Murphy, David Rouzer North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak Ohio: Jon Husted (Sen.), Troy Balderson, Mike Carey, Warren Davidson, Jim Jordan, David Joyce, Bob Latta, Max Miller, Michael Rulli, David Taylor, Mike Turner Oklahoma: Stephanie Bice, Josh Brecheen, Tom Cole, Kevin Hern, Frank Lucas Oregon: Cliff Bentz Pennsylvania: Rob Bresnahan, Brian Fitzpatrick, John Joyce, Mike Kelly, Ryan Mackenzie, Dan Meuser, Scott Perry, Guy Reschenthaler, Lloyd Smucker, Glenn Thompson South Carolina: Sheri Biggs, Russell Fry, William Timmons, Joe Wilson South Dakota: Mike Rounds (Sen.) Tennessee: Marsha Blackburn (Sen.), Bill Hagerty (Sen.), Tim Burchett, Scott DesJarlais, Chuck Fleischmann, Diana Harshbarger, David Kustoff, Matt Van Epps Texas: Brian Babin, John Carter, Michael Cloud, Jake Ellzey, Pat Fallon, Brandon Gill, Craig Goldman, Lance Gooden, Ronny Jackson, Monica De La Cruz, Nathaniel Moran, August Pfluger, Keith Self, Pete Sessions, Beth Van Duyne, Randy Weber, Roger Williams Utah: Mike Kennedy, Celeste Maloy, Blake Moore Virginia: Ben Cline, Morgan Griffith, Jen Kiggans, John McGuire, Rob Wittman Washington: Michael Baumgartner West Virginia: Shelley Moore Capito (Sen.), Carol Miller, Riley Moore Wisconsin: Scott Fitzgerald, Glenn Grothman, Bryan Steil, Tom Tiffany, Derrick Van Orden, Tony Wied Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

None of them wrote the shock-glove order. That's the point. They wrote a check with no conditions on it and handed it to an agency, and now the agency is deciding what to buy with it — quickly, without competitive bidding, and with the only limits on use coming from the vendor's brochure.

If your senator or representative is on that list and tells you they have concerns about how ICE is behaving, the question to ask is simple: which rule did you write?

Source

Stephen Prager, "ICE Funding Approved by Susan Collins and Trump GOP to Deliver Electric Shock Gloves to Agents Nationwide," Common Dreams, August 12, 2026. The underlying reporting on the purchase notice is by Ryan J. Foley of the Associated Press. Photo: a federal agent walks near tear gas used on protesters in Minneapolis, January 14, 2026, by Seth Herald/Reuters.

$70 Billion for ICE Passed the House by Two Votes. Not One Republican Voted No.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:57:39 +0000

Most big bills pass with room to spare. This one didn't.

On June 9, 2026, the House passed S. 2 — the "Secure America Act" — by 214 votes to 212. The next day it became Public Law 119-98.

Two votes. That's the whole margin. And when a bill passes by two, there is no such thing as a symbolic yes. Every single Republican who pressed the green button that day cast a deciding vote. If any one of them had voted no instead, the bill would have tied 213 to 213 and failed on the floor.

Not one of them did. Zero Republicans voted against it. All 211 Democrats present voted no, along with the House's one independent. Three Republicans didn't vote at all.

We've already written about the Senate half of this bill, which passed 52 to 47 at 4:42 in the morning on June 5. This is the other half — the one that actually made it law, by the narrowest margin either chamber managed.

What the money is for

S. 2 puts $70 billion into the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and it keeps that money available through fiscal year 2029.

The official summary of the law spells out what ICE's share pays for: hiring, paying and training personnel; transportation; facilities and fleet; 287(g) agreements, which deputize state and local police to do federal immigration enforcement; the agency's legal office; and, in the summary's own words, "operations by ICE to arrest certain unlawful aliens."

CBP's share buys agents and hardware — surveillance towers along the southern and northern borders, air and marine platforms, biometric entry-and-exit systems, and inspection equipment the summary describes as using "artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other innovative technologies."

This is not a border-security budget in the ordinary sense. It is the interior enforcement machine: the arrests, the local police partnerships, the surveillance, all funded four years out in a single lump.

The only limits Congress wrote were about equipment

Here is the detail that tells you what this Congress cared about.

S. 2 does contain restrictions. Read the summary and you'll find them. Funds can't be used to hire or train processing coordinators after October 31, 2028. And no money may go to surveillance towers "that have not been tested and accepted by CBP to deliver autonomous capabilities."

Those two, plus a handful of clauses steering Title I money to work other than immigration enforcement, are the whole of it. The guardrails Congress bothered to write into a $70 billion law are about procurement — what gear CBP is allowed to buy, and when it may stop hiring a particular job title.

Nothing about what agents may do. No body-camera requirement. No rule against agents concealing their identities. No limit on funding family separation. No mandated reporting on who is being detained, or where, or for how long. Congress found the time to specify that a surveillance tower must pass acceptance testing, and did not find the time to specify that the people operating it must be identifiable.

That omission is a choice, and it was made by the 214 members below the line.

Why the margin matters more than the bill

We write up a lot of party-line votes. Usually the honest framing is that any one member's vote didn't change the outcome — 220 Republicans vote yes, and the bill passes whether or not your representative shows up.

This vote was not that. At 214–212, the outcome turned on every last one of them.

That means the usual answer — I was one vote out of hundreds, leadership had the votes anyway — is factually unavailable here. Any one of these members could have walked to the well and changed the result. It would have taken one person out of 214 deciding that a $70 billion enforcement fund with no conduct rules attached was worth a second look.

Two. Out of 214. And the number who did it was zero.

That's worth remembering the next time one of them tells a town hall they have concerns about how ICE is operating. They had a moment where their individual vote was the whole ballgame, and they used it to hand the agency four years of money with no strings on its conduct.

The 187 with report cards

Two hundred fourteen Republicans voted yes. These are the ones who have a report card on this site and were still in their races when this published, by state:

Alabama: Robert Aderholt, Barry Moore, Gary Palmer, Mike Rogers, Dale Strong Alaska: Nick Begich Arizona: Andy Biggs, Juan Ciscomani, Eli Crane, Paul Gosar, Abraham Hamadeh Arkansas: Rick Crawford, French Hill, Bruce Westerman, Steve Womack California: Ken Calvert, Vince Fong, Young Kim, Tom McClintock, Jay Obernolte, David Valadao Colorado: Lauren Boebert, Jeff Crank, Gabe Evans, Jeff Hurd Florida: Aaron Bean, Gus Bilirakis, Kat Cammack, Mario Diaz-Balart, Byron Donalds, Randy Fine, Scott Franklin, Carlos Gimenez, Mike Haridopolos, Laurel Lee, Anna Paulina Luna, Brian Mast, Cory Mills, Jimmy Patronis, John Rutherford, Maria Elvira Salazar, Greg Steube Georgia: Rick Allen, Andrew Clyde, Mike Collins, Clay Fuller, Brian Jack, Rich McCormick, Austin Scott Idaho: Russ Fulcher, Mike Simpson Illinois: Mike Bost, Darin LaHood, Mary Miller Indiana: Jim Baird, Erin Houchin, Mark Messmer, Jefferson Shreve, Victoria Spartz, Marlin Stutzman, Rudy Yakym Iowa: Ashley Hinson, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Zach Nunn Kansas: Ron Estes, Tracey Mann, Derek Schmidt Kentucky: Andy Barr, James Comer, Brett Guthrie, Hal Rogers Louisiana: Clay Higgins, Mike Johnson, Julia Letlow, Steve Scalise Maryland: Andy Harris Michigan: Tom Barrett, Jack Bergman, Bill Huizenga, John James, Lisa McClain, John Moolenaar, Tim Walberg Minnesota: Tom Emmer, Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach, Pete Stauber Mississippi: Mike Ezell, Michael Guest, Trent Kelly Missouri: Mark Alford, Eric Burlison, Bob Onder, Jason Smith, Ann Wagner Montana: Troy Downing Nebraska: Mike Flood, Adrian Smith New Jersey: Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew New York: Andrew Garbarino, Nick LaLota, Nick Langworthy, Mike Lawler, Nicole Malliotakis, Claudia Tenney North Carolina: Virginia Foxx, Pat Harrigan, Mark Harris, Richard Hudson, Brad Knott, Addison McDowell, Tim Moore, Greg Murphy, David Rouzer North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak Ohio: Troy Balderson, Mike Carey, Warren Davidson, Jim Jordan, David Joyce, Bob Latta, Max Miller, Michael Rulli, David Taylor, Mike Turner Oklahoma: Stephanie Bice, Josh Brecheen, Tom Cole, Kevin Hern, Frank Lucas Oregon: Cliff Bentz Pennsylvania: Rob Bresnahan, Brian Fitzpatrick, John Joyce, Mike Kelly, Ryan Mackenzie, Dan Meuser, Scott Perry, Guy Reschenthaler, Lloyd Smucker, Glenn Thompson South Carolina: Sheri Biggs, Russell Fry, William Timmons, Joe Wilson Tennessee: Tim Burchett, Scott DesJarlais, Chuck Fleischmann, Diana Harshbarger, David Kustoff, Matt Van Epps Texas: Brian Babin, John Carter, Michael Cloud, Monica De La Cruz, Jake Ellzey, Pat Fallon, Brandon Gill, Craig Goldman, Lance Gooden, Ronny Jackson, Nathaniel Moran, August Pfluger, Keith Self, Pete Sessions, Beth Van Duyne, Randy Weber, Roger Williams Utah: Mike Kennedy, Celeste Maloy, Blake Moore Virginia: Ben Cline, Morgan Griffith, Jen Kiggans, John McGuire, Rob Wittman Washington: Michael Baumgartner West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore Wisconsin: Scott Fitzgerald, Glenn Grothman, Bryan Steil, Tom Tiffany, Derrick Van Orden, Tony Wied Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

None of this is our characterization. It's the official record, and it will be there permanently: the House Clerk's roll call for vote 214 on S. 2, June 9, 2026 — every name, every vote — and the bill itself on congress.gov, including the summary of what the $70 billion buys.

If your representative is on that list, this bill needed their vote to pass.

415 Members Voted to Make Juneteenth a Holiday. Mike Rogers Was One of the 14 Who Didn't.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:39:58 +0000

On June 16, 2021, the U.S. House voted on whether to make Juneteenth — June 19, the day in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas were finally told they were free — a federal holiday.

The Senate had already passed it unanimously. Not one senator objected.

In the House, the vote was 415 to 14.

Mike Rogers was one of the 14.

Who else was in that group

The full list of no votes on the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act, straight from the House Clerk's roll call:

Andy Biggs, Mo Brooks, Andrew Clyde, Scott DesJarlais, Paul Gosar, Ronny Jackson, Doug LaMalfa, Thomas Massie, Tom McClintock, Ralph Norman, Mike Rogers of Alabama, Matt Rosendale, Chip Roy, and Tom Tiffany.

Fourteen people out of 429 who voted. That is not a party position. Republicans voted for this bill 195 to 14.

His own delegation went the other way

Alabama sent seven members to the House that year. Here is how they voted on the same roll call:

Member	Party	Vote
Robert Aderholt	R	Yea
Jerry Carl	R	Yea
Barry Moore	R	Yea
Gary Palmer	R	Yea
Terri Sewell	D	Yea
Mo Brooks	R	Nay
Mike Rogers	R	Nay

Four of Alabama's six House Republicans voted to recognize the end of slavery as a national holiday. Rogers didn't.

He represents Alabama's 3rd District, which the Census Bureau puts at about 20% Black — 143,947 of 726,115 residents.

Alabama itself disagrees with him

Here's the part that's hard to argue around.

Look at the State of Alabama's official 2026 holiday calendar, published by the State Personnel Department. State offices close, with pay, on:

Monday, April 27 — Confederate Memorial Day
Monday, June 1 — Jefferson Davis' Birthday
Friday, June 19 — Juneteenth

Alabama — a state that still gives its employees a paid day off for the birthday of the president of the Confederacy, and that observes Martin Luther King Jr. Day jointly with Robert E. Lee's birthday — puts Juneteenth on its own holiday calendar.

The congressman from Alabama's 3rd District voted against doing the same thing nationally.

He has never explained it

We looked for a public statement from Mike Rogers explaining his vote and could not find one. No press release. No floor speech. No interview we could locate.

That is partly a function of how he operates. Rogers has not held a public, in-person town hall since 2017 — the meeting where he told a constituent to "be a man or we'll take it outside," and called the idea that he needs town halls "laughable." So the obvious venue for a voter in Anniston or Auburn to ask him about it does not exist.

A vote is a public act. This one took about ten seconds and put him in a group of fourteen. Five years later there is still no answer on the record about why.

What the vote was actually about

It's worth being precise about what Rogers voted against, because it was not a spending program or a mandate or a regulation.

The Juneteenth National Independence Day Act did one thing: it added June 19 to the list of federal holidays. That's it. It commemorates the day the last enslaved Americans learned that slavery was over — two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, because nobody had told them.

Ninety-seven percent of the members who voted thought that was worth marking. In the Senate, not one objected.

Mike Rogers, who has represented east Alabama since 2003, did not — and hasn't said why since.

Source

House Roll Call 170, June 16, 2021 — Juneteenth National Independence Day Act (S. 475) — Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives. Photo: Galveston Juneteenth Parade and Celebration, June 19, 2025, by 2C2KPhotography (CC BY 4.0).

"Be a Man or We'll Take It Outside": Mike Rogers Threatened a Disabled Veteran at His Last Town Hall — Nine Years Ago

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:37:48 +0000

On the afternoon of August 10, 2017, Mike Rogers stood in front of a room of constituents in Oxford, Alabama and took questions. A man named David Land had one about money.

Land walked with a cane. He said he'd been injured in Bosnia serving in the U.S. military.

His question was about campaign contributions from Mike Hubbard, the former Speaker of the Alabama House, to the 2010 judicial campaign of Rogers's wife, Beth Rogers, who was elected a Calhoun County district judge that year.

Hubbard had been convicted in June 2016 on 12 felony violations of Alabama's ethics law and sentenced to four years in prison. Beth Rogers's 2010 campaign finance filings, the Anniston Star reported, show $20,000 in contributions from "Friends of Mike Hubbard."

Land warned Rogers that the question was "going to get your hackles up, I assure you," then asked how Rogers could give money to Hubbard, who then gave money to Rogers's wife "to facilitate her election." Land said he had already contacted the state Ethics Commission about it.

Rogers said Hubbard is "one of my closest friends." Then he said this:

"And he gave her money because we're friends ... so you keep my wife out of this and be a man or we'll take it outside."

Several people in the audience applauded.

Land stood up. Others told him to sit down. He took his seat after the Oxford police chief, Bill Partridge, came over and spoke to him.

After the meeting, Land said he filed a complaint with the Oxford police over what Rogers had said to him.

A sitting congressman offered to fight a constituent for asking a question

Strip away everything else and that's what happened. A voter asked an elected official about a documented $20,000 in campaign money from a man convicted of a dozen ethics felonies, and the official's answer was an invitation to step outside.

Not "that's a fair question." Not "here's the timeline." Not even "no comment." Be a man or we'll take it outside.

The man he said it to uses a cane and says he was wounded on active duty.

(For what it's worth on the underlying facts: Hubbard's case went through years of appeals. In April 2020 the Alabama Supreme Court upheld six of his convictions and reversed five. That September he turned himself in to begin his sentence. The convictions Rogers was being asked about were real.)

The other thing he said that day

Later in the same meeting, Karen Barwick of Pell City — who had managed the campaign of Rogers's Democratic opponent, Jesse Smith — asked Rogers a simple question: would he hold more town halls, so he could hear from constituents?

Rogers said he has staff working throughout the district who know what people want and need — and that the argument that he needs to hold town hall meetings to find that out is "laughable."

He then made it true. That August 2017 meeting in Oxford appears to be the last public, in-person town hall Mike Rogers has held.

Nine years of laughable

In April 2025, the group Indivisible Auburn-Opelika organized their own "People's Town Hall" at the Opelika library and invited Rogers. He didn't come.

Committee member Lee McInnis told WRBL, in an account picked up by Raw Story:

"So as far as I can tell, Mike Rogers hasn't held a town hall meeting in eight years."

McInnis added:

"But I think it breaks the basic social contract that our elected representatives have. They were elected to represent the people of the third District of Alabama. If he is not going to meet with a broad spectrum of his constituents, he does not know what his constituents think and he does not know how to represent."

They recorded the town hall anyway and said they would send a copy to his office.

That was more than a year ago. The count is now nine years.

Rogers is not unusual in this — French Hill has gone a full year with a 90-year-old constituent protesting outside his office every Thursday, and constituents put Scott Franklin's face on a "MISSING" flyer. What's unusual is the reason Rogers gave for stopping. Most of them plead scheduling, or security, or the telephone. Rogers said out loud that hearing from you directly is unnecessary, because his staff already know what you need.

What he's avoided being asked about since

Nine years is a long stretch of American history to skip.

In that time Rogers has become chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, voted for a budget bill whose Medicaid cuts, together with the lapsing Affordable Care Act tax credits, the Joint Economic Committee's House Minority staff projects will cost 23,506 people in his district their health coverage — 20,900 of them losing Affordable Care Act coverage and 2,606 losing Medicaid, and — as chairman — shut down his own committee's inquiry into a military strike that killed two survivors of a shipwreck after ten days.

There are 36,374 households in Alabama's 3rd District on SNAP — about 12% of the district's households, including 18,325 households with children. None of them have had a chance to stand up in a room and ask him about the food-assistance cuts he voted for.

His staff, presumably, already know what they need.

Source

Congressman gets earful from constituents at Oxford town hall event — The Anniston Star, August 11, 2017.

"It's Done": Mike Rogers Promised Rigorous Oversight of a Strike That Killed Shipwreck Survivors. It Lasted 10 Days.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:34:54 +0000

On September 2, 2025, the U.S. military blew up a boat in the Caribbean it said was carrying drugs.

Two people survived that first strike. They were in the water, clinging to the smoldering wreck of their boat.

A second strike killed them.

Almost three months later, the Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had verbally ordered the crew to "kill everybody." The story landed on November 28, 2025.

The next day, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee put out a statement promising to find out what happened.

Ten days after that, he said he was done.

The promise

Mike Rogers has represented Alabama's 3rd District since 2003, and he chairs the House Armed Services Committee — the panel with jurisdiction over the entire Department of Defense. If Congress is going to ask the Pentagon a hard question, his committee is where that happens.

On November 29, 2025, Rogers and the committee's ranking Democrat, Adam Smith, issued a joint statement:

"This committee is committed to providing rigorous oversight of the Department of Defense's military operations in the Caribbean. We take seriously the reports of follow-on strikes on boats alleged to be ferrying narcotics in the SOUTHCOM region and are taking bipartisan action to gather a full accounting of the operation in question."

A full accounting. Bipartisan action. Rigorous oversight.

The ending

In early December, Rogers and other leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services and Intelligence panels sat through a classified briefing from Adm. Frank Bradley, the head of U.S. Special Operations Command — the officer who oversaw the strike. They watched the video. Bradley told them there had been no "kill them all" order from Hegseth, contradicting the Post's reporting.

On Tuesday, December 9, asked what he would do next, Rogers told POLITICO:

"It's done."

"I've got all the answers I needed."

The next day his office confirmed it to ABC News. His spokesperson put it this way: "The video and classified briefings from the Pentagon were sufficient to convince Chairman Rogers that this was a legal action."

Rogers took the briefer's answer, from the officer who ran the operation, and closed the file.

Nobody outside that briefing room has seen the video.

What the law actually says about this

The thing Rogers declared legal in ten days is not a close call in the legal literature. It is one of the oldest bright lines there is.

TIME reported on December 1, 2025 that legal scholars were unequivocal about orders to leave no survivors:

"It is absolutely unlawful to order that there will be no survivors." — Rebecca Ingber, Cardozo School of Law

"In an armed conflict, the intentional killing of a protected person... is a war crime." — Laura Dickinson, George Washington University Law School

Dickinson also told TIME that the Defense Department's own Law of War Manual treats an order to kill shipwrecked people as so clearly illegal that service members have a duty to disobey it.

Legal experts differed on whether the U.S. is in an armed conflict at all in the Caribbean, which changes which body of law applies. That's a genuinely hard question. It is also exactly the kind of hard question a congressional investigation exists to work through in public — not the kind you settle by watching a video once and announcing the answer.

The senator who saw it differently

Rogers wasn't the only member of Congress with access. Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has been pushing for the footage to be declassified and released. His assessment, per ABC:

"I think anybody who saw that video would be quite disturbed about it."

Same country, same footage, opposite conclusions. One of them wants you to see it. The other says it's done.

Congress ultimately had so little confidence in voluntary disclosure that the defense policy bill tied Hegseth's travel budget to releasing the video. That's what oversight looks like when the committee chairman won't do it: other members reaching for the only lever left.

This is the second chairman to do this

Rogers is not an outlier. He's a pattern.

The Senate has its own version: Jim Risch chairs the Foreign Relations Committee and refused to hold a single public hearing on Trump's war with Iran. Same structure — the one person with the gavel decides the public doesn't need to hear the answers, and there is no appeal.

That's the whole design failure. Committee oversight isn't a right the public holds. It's a favor the chairman grants.

Who pays for the gavel

There's one more thing worth knowing about the man who decided the Pentagon had answered enough questions.

The weapons industry funds him. FEC records compiled by Who Bought My Rep, counting contributions and super PAC spending from 2020 to the present, show $40,000 each from the PACs of RTX, BAE Systems, L3Harris and General Atomics — four contractors whose business runs through his committee — and they're not alone on the list.

Of the $8.2 million that site counts over those years, about $41,700 came from small grassroots donors. That's half of one percent.

None of that proves anything about the boat. It does describe a chairman whose career depends on a good working relationship with the institution he is supposed to be checking.

He also won't take the question at home

If you live in Alabama's 3rd District and want to ask him about any of this in person, you can't. Rogers has not held a public, in-person town hall since 2017. When constituents in Opelika organized their own in April 2025 and invited him, he didn't come.

Two men were killed in the water after their boat was already destroyed. The committee chairman who promised America a full accounting gave it ten days and a closed door.

Sources

House Republican drops his inquiry into Sept. 2 boat strikes — ABC News, December 10, 2025. Photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images.
Rogers and Smith Issue Joint Statement on Recent Reports of Follow-Up Strike Ordered in SOUTHCOM AOR — House Armed Services Committee, November 29, 2025.
Could Hegseth Face Prosecution For Alleged Boat Strike? — TIME, December 1, 2025.
'It's done': House Armed Services chair ends probe into boat strike — The National News Desk, December 10, 2025.
Mike Rogers: 'I've got all the answers I needed' on military strikes on drug boats — 1819 News, December 10, 2025, reporting POLITICO.
Hegseth Ordered Second Strike to Kill Caribbean Boat Survivors: Report — Military.com, November 28, 2025.

45 Republicans We Cover Broke the Law That's Supposed to Stop Insider Trading in Congress

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:36:26 +0000

On July 22, 2026, the U.S. House passed a bill called the Stop Insider Trading Act. It passed 232 to 198, and every single Republican who voted — all 218 of them — voted yes.

Watching that, you'd think Congress had finally decided to deal with its stock trading problem.

Congress does have a stock trading problem. But there is already a law on the books meant to handle the most basic part of it, and it has been there since 2012. It asks members of Congress to do one simple thing.

We went through the report cards on this site and counted how many of the Republicans we cover have failed to do that one simple thing.

The answer is 45.

What the STOCK Act actually asks

The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act — the STOCK Act — was signed into law on April 4, 2012 after a national scandal over lawmakers appearing to profit from what they learned on the job. The Brennan Center describes it as closing part of a loophole that had exempted Congress from rules other traders had lived under since 1934.

The core requirement is almost embarrassingly easy. If you, your spouse, or your kids buy or sell a stock, a bond, or crypto worth more than $1,000, you file a form. You have 30 days from when you find out about it, and no more than 45 days from the trade itself.

That's the whole thing. It doesn't stop anyone from trading. It doesn't limit what they can own. It just says: tell us.

And there's a good reason it says that. Members of Congress know things before we do. They know which company is about to win a federal contract, which industry is about to get a tax break, whether the tariffs are real. If we can see what they bought and when they bought it, we can hold their trades up against their votes and decide for ourselves who they're working for.

Disclosure is the only tool voters get. Miss the deadline, and by the time we find out, the vote has happened, the profit is banked, and the election is over.

The roll call

Here's what "breaking a transparency law" looks like in practice. All of these are Republicans with report cards on this site.

The biggest offenders:

Rick Allen (GA) — failed to properly report 136 transactions worth between $3.05 million and $8.56 million. The oldest was a Monsanto purchase from February 2017 that he didn't disclose until August 2023 — roughly six and a half years late.
Diana Harshbarger (TN) — late on more than 700 stock trades worth between $728,000 and $10.9 million.
Julia Letlow (LA) — late on more than 210 stock and bond trades worth $225,000 to $3.3 million, some by more than a year.
Tommy Tuberville (AL) — in his first year in the Senate, disclosed 132 trades late, worth at least $894,000.
John James (MI) — 145 stock trades not disclosed on time, worth up to $2.2 million, the oldest more than eight months late. The campaign finance group End Citizens United filed an ethics complaint over them.
Lisa McClain (MI) — the No. 4 Republican in House leadership broke the law twice in 2025: first on more than 500 transactions, then again months later on $360,000 to $900,000 of her husband's trades, including up to $450,000 of Palantir stock.
Byron Donalds (FL) — months late on up to $1.6 million in trades.
Blake Moore (UT) — broke it more than 70 times in his first six months in office, on trades worth as much as $1.1 million.

The two the ethics office formally looked at. In May 2022 the nonpartisan Office of Congressional Ethics found "substantial reason to believe" that two Republicans had violated the law. Pat Fallon (TX) had failed to timely disclose 122 transactions worth between $9 million and $21 million in 2021 alone. John Rutherford (FL) had 157 late transactions worth $652,000 to $3.5 million, stretching back to the year he was sworn in.

Caught by watchdogs and reporters. A 2021 Campaign Legal Center complaint reported by NPR named three Republicans. Roger Williams (TX) filed no transaction reports for three of his wife's 2019 stock sales — General Electric, Nvidia and Disney. Warren Davidson (OH) sold $50,000 to $100,000 in Workhorse Group stock in 2020 with no disclosure form on file at all. And Lance Gooden (TX) reported a dozen stock purchases worth between $60,019 and $376,000 on his annual disclosure — American Airlines, Delta, Royal Caribbean, Hertz, Marathon Oil and others — without ever filing the transaction reports for them. All three sat on the House Financial Services Committee. What made that complaint unusual, NPR noted, is that these members appeared never to have filed reports at all. NOTUS's August 2025 investigation into late filings named Scott Franklin (FL), Brandon Gill (TX), Tim Moore (NC), Austin Scott (GA) and Dan Meuser (PA). A 2021 Business Insider review flagged Victoria Spartz (IN) and Mike Kelly (PA), whose wife's purchase of Beauty Health Company stock went unreported for more than seven weeks past the deadline.

And the rest. Raw Story's September 2024 investigation into 62 members of Congress who broke the law included Stephanie Bice (OK), Ron Estes (KS), Russ Fulcher (ID), Glenn Grothman (WI), Bill Hagerty (TN), Bill Huizenga (MI), David Joyce (OH), Tom Kean Jr. (NJ), Darin LaHood (IL), Nicole Malliotakis (NY), Maria Elvira Salazar (FL), Adrian Smith (NE), Rob Wittman (VA) and Mike Collins (GA). Add Dan Sullivan (AK), who sold Mowi and Five Below stock in August 2022 and didn't report either sale until November 3; Mike Rounds (SD), more than five months late on a $1 million to $5 million stock sale; Kevin Hern (OK), nearly two dozen trades worth up to $2.7 million; Brian Mast (FL), a year and a half late on an Ideal Power sale; Carol Miller (WV), almost a year late on at least $217,000 of her husband's trades; August Pfluger (TX), late on family trades worth up to $150,000; Juan Ciscomani (AZ), about nine months late on a Treasury bond worth up to $50,000; plus Susan Collins (ME), Roger Marshall (KS), Chuck Fleischmann (TN) and Pete Sessions (TX), whose stories are below.

Not all of these are the same size. Bill Huizenga filed an annual report ten days late. Nicole Malliotakis was late on two transactions in the $1,001-to-$15,000 range. That is nothing like Rick Allen's six and a half years, and we're saying so.

The point isn't that all 45 are equally bad. The point is that 45 of them couldn't clear a bar this low.

"My broker did it"

Read the responses side by side and a script emerges.

Rick Allen's office said his trades are "handled by a financial adviser" and blamed a compliance firm. Harshbarger's chief of staff blamed a financial advisor's "gross oversight." Julia Letlow's spokesman said she was "two layers removed" because Merrill Lynch had discretionary trading authority and "did not consult with the congresswoman." Mike Rounds's office said the sale "happened via a third-party investment firm" and that the senator "does not have direct involvement." Susan Collins's spokesperson blamed "a delay in notification from the third-party advisor." Tom Kean Jr. blamed an attorney and a family trust. Kevin Hern's office said he and his accountant forgot to hit send. Bill Hagerty called it a "clerical error."

Chuck Fleischmann's office went one better. He first reported that "a dependent child had made these trades" — then acknowledged he has no dependent children, and filed an amended disclosure six days later saying it was his financial advisor after all.

This got common enough that NOTUS ran a whole piece on it in August 2025, headlined "Lawmakers' New Botched Stock Disclosure Scapegoat: Financial Advisers." That story quoted the House Ethics Committee's own written guidance, which settles the argument in one sentence:

"You are personally responsible for incomplete and inaccurate information contained in your [financial reports], regardless of who assisted in preparation."

If you hire someone and they don't do the job, it's still your problem. Every one of us knows that from our own lives. A late mortgage payment doesn't get forgiven because the bank's website was confusing.

The penalty is $200

Here's why none of them seem especially worried.

The fine for filing late is $200 — what the Campaign Legal Center calls "a hardly impactful deterrence from the potential millions to be made off the stock market." Blake Moore broke the law more than 70 times and, as we've written before, paid $200 total. Dan Meuser was more than a year late reporting as much as $600,000 in family trades made at the very bottom of the pandemic market crash. He paid $200.

It gets softer than that. A January 2023 House Ethics memo says a report "is late if submitted any time after the due date, but there is a 30-day grace period before late fees are imposed." Chuck Fleischmann's office used exactly that to avoid paying anything at all. And the fees that do get assessed are frequently waived by the ethics committees.

The criminal side is emptier still. No member of Congress has ever been prosecuted for insider trading under the STOCK Act. The Bangor Daily News reported the same thing this June, alongside the long-standing criticism that the law "has no teeth."

So the deal on offer to a member of Congress is this: disclose your trades and let voters judge you, or don't, and risk a $200 fee you can ask to have waived. Forty-five of the Republicans on this site took the second option.

Why the timing is the whole story

A late form sounds like a paperwork problem. It isn't. It matters because of what stays hidden and for how long.

Tim Moore failed to disclose 12 trades made around Trump's April 2025 tariff announcement — the announcement that moved every market in the country.
Ron Estes was about four months late reporting up to $45,000 in Treasury savings bonds. He sits on the Ways and Means Committee, which oversees the nation's bonded debt.
Blake Moore bought up to $60,000 of Raytheon stock while sitting on the House Armed Services Committee, and didn't report it on time.
David Joyce was nearly two years late on trades that included Boeing, Citigroup and TC Energy.
Scott Franklin's late-reported trades included General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin — federal contractors.

None of that is proof anybody traded on inside information. That's exactly the point. The disclosure rule exists so the question can be asked while it still matters. When a member reports a trade two years after making it, nobody can hold it up against the vote he cast that week. The delay isn't a side effect of breaking the rule. The delay is what the rule was written to prevent.

We know what it looks like when the timeline is visible. Mike Kelly's wife bought 5,000 shares of Cleveland-Cliffs the morning after his office learned the Butler steel plant would get the federal help he had been lobbying for, then sold at a $64,476 profit — and the House Ethics Committee voted unanimously to formally reprove him, one of the very few times any of this produced a real consequence. Rob Bresnahan sold six figures of Medicaid company stock a week before voting to cut Medicaid. We only know either of those things because the filings eventually surfaced.

The ones who campaigned on this

The hypocrisy isn't incidental. It's the pattern.

Susan Collins helped write the law. She helped write it in 2012, alongside the late Sen. Joe Lieberman. In February 2026 she disclosed her husband's purchase of a Pfizer corporate bond five days after the deadline — a violation FactCheck.org confirmed even while knocking down a separate Democratic attack ad against her as false. A review of her earlier filings found 24 transactions from 2013 to 2018 reported more than 100 days late, worth up to $395,000. Her campaign notes she has never personally bought or sold an individual stock — her husband's outside advisor makes those calls.

Byron Donalds went on television in March 2022 to demand consequences for members who violate the STOCK Act — "That's when you have to have sanctions and the House has to get real" — and then broke it himself. He is now running for governor of Florida.

Maria Elvira Salazar attacked her Democratic predecessor in April 2020 over financial disclosure problems, writing that Donna Shalala "violates and skirts federal law with her own finances." Then she filed late herself — more than two months past the deadline on a Cano Health transaction worth up to $500,000 — and asked for the $200 penalty to be waived.

Tom Kean Jr. won his seat in 2022 by hammering his opponent over late stock disclosures and promising "the highest level of ethics and transparency." He has violated the STOCK Act repeatedly since.

Roger Marshall hid a dependent child's pandemic-era trades for 17 months — then, in March 2026, put his name on a bill to ban exactly that.

Mike Collins endorsed a ban on congressional stock trading while being one of the busiest crypto traders in Congress. He was also late reporting two Ethereum purchases.

And then there's Pete Sessions, who is at least consistent. He opposes banning congressional stock trading, calling it a "populist move" and saying, "I think we have enough rules and regulations." His argument for leaving things as they are was this: "If you have nothing to hide, then transparency is your friend."

He has been late on his own disclosures twice.

Back to that July vote

Which brings us back to the bill all 218 voting Republicans supported on July 22.

The Stop Insider Trading Act bans members from making new purchases of individual stocks — but lets them keep everything they already own, reinvest the dividends, and sell later. Rep. Pramila Jayapal called it a "so-called stock trading ban that literally does nothing of the sort." Rep. Joe Morelle said it was "so filled with holes, it would make Swiss cheese blush." And the bill carried a second payload most people never heard about: a set of strict new voter ID rules that would bar student IDs and require voters to photocopy their ID to vote by mail.

So the same members who couldn't be bothered to file a form got to vote for a "ban" that grandfathers in everything they already hold — and attached new hurdles for the rest of us to vote, on the way through.

The bottom line

Nobody here is on trial. Most of these are late forms, and late forms are boring.

But a democracy runs on a handful of small, boring obligations, and this is one of them. Congress wrote itself the gentlest possible rule — trade all you want, just tell us within 45 days — attached a $200 fine, waived the fine much of the time, and has never once prosecuted anyone under it. Forty-five of the Republicans we cover still couldn't follow it.

Every time one of them misses that deadline, we lose the only thing the law was ever designed to give us: the ability to look at what they bought, look at how they voted, and draw our own conclusions while it still matters.

They know that. That's why the deadline keeps getting missed.

We deserve better.

Dale Strong Voted to Let the Ukraine Aid Bill Reach the Floor — Then Voted Against It. Huntsville Workers Were Building the Rockets It Paid For.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:43:59 +0000

On April 20, 2024, the House passed the Ukraine Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, 311–112. Dale Strong voted no. You can see it on the House Clerk's roll call — H.R. 8035, roll call 151, Strong: Nay.

Two things make that vote worth a closer look.

The first: he voted for the bill to get a vote

Before a bill can be voted on, the House has to adopt a "rule" allowing it to the floor. Without the rule, the bill never comes up and never passes.

Strong voted for the rule that let Speaker Mike Johnson bring the Ukraine package to the floor. Then he voted against the package itself.

A Washington Post opinion column mapping where the aid money actually goes flagged exactly this, naming Strong as one of seven House Republicans who "voted against Ukraine aid going to their districts did vote for the rule that allowed Speaker Mike Johnson (La.) to bring the bill to the floor — without which aid could not have moved forward."

That's a member getting it both ways. The aid passes, the district keeps the work, and his public record still shows a no vote he can point to.

The second: the money was coming to Huntsville

The column's whole point is that most Ukraine military aid is spent in the United States, replenishing American stockpiles at American plants. It listed where in Alabama:

Anniston — Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and Hercules recovery vehicles
Huntsville — Hydra 70 rockets
Troy — HIMARS and Javelin missiles

Huntsville is Strong's district. He was one of 16 House members the column identified as voting against aid money that supports defense jobs where they live.

Why this matters more for him than for most members

Strong is not a backbencher on this subject. He sits on the House Appropriations Committee, where he is vice chair of the subcommittee funding NASA, the Justice Department, and the Commerce Department, and he chairs a Homeland Security subcommittee. His district contains Redstone Arsenal, one of the largest military installations in the country.

And the defense industry is, by a wide margin, his financial base. OpenSecrets' benchmarking of his PAC money shows he takes $239,500 from the defense sector against an average House member's $29,408 — more than eight times the norm, and about 40% of every PAC dollar he raises.

The names on the list are the ones you'd expect: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Leidos, L3Harris, Parsons, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin. Plus Huntsville's own contractors — Torch Technologies and Verity Integrated Systems, whose employees rank among his largest individual donors. Overall, 89% of his money comes from PACs, super PACs, and large donors, and about 1% from small grassroots donors.

So the man who takes eight times the average defense money, from an Appropriations seat, in a district built around a federal arsenal, cast the safe symbolic vote against the defense bill — after quietly making sure it could pass.

The rest of the ledger

That instinct — take the credit, dodge the blame — shows up in the rest of his record too.

He told a Huntsville audience in February 2025 that the DOGE cuts would work out for the city because Space Command and the Iron Dome were coming: "These jobs, while we may lose a couple, we will gain many of them in the end." Then 279 senior Marshall Space Flight Center employees went on the list to leave.

He voted for the budget bill that is projected to cost 22,103 people in his district their health coverage, according to the Joint Economic Committee's district-level analysis — while 28,867 households in AL-05, about 9% of the district, rely on SNAP for groceries.

And he has never held a public in-person town hall where a constituent could ask him to explain any of it. When his opponent invited him to four public forums in writing this July, his office didn't reply.

The bottom line

A vote for the rule and against the bill is a vote that only makes sense if you want the outcome and not the record.

Strong got the outcome. Huntsville built the rockets. And the roll call still says Nay.

Sources

House Clerk, Roll Call 151, 118th Congress, 2nd Session — April 20, 2024.

"These legislators opposed Ukraine aid and their own states' interests" — Marc A. Thiessen, Washington Post Opinion, April 25, 2024. Photo: U.S. Army via Wikimedia Commons.

"We May Lose a Couple": Dale Strong Promised Huntsville Would Come Out Ahead on DOGE. Then 279 Senior Marshall Employees Went on the List to Leave.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:42:33 +0000

On February 20, 2025, Dale Strong stood up at Drake State Community and Technical College in Huntsville and told his district not to worry about the federal cuts coming their way.

"I still believe Space Command is coming to our area. And then, you hear talk about Iron Dome. That right there is Alabama. These jobs, while we may lose a couple, we will gain many of them in the end."

That's Alabama Political Reporter's account, published four days later. The same month, he told a Huntsville audience the cuts would ultimately benefit the city.

"A couple." Here's what actually happened.

The numbers

Huntsville isn't a place where federal jobs are a side business. It is where more than half of Alabama's roughly 40,000 federal workers work — Redstone Arsenal, and NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, which employed about 7,000 people out of roughly 21,000 federal workers in the city.

Then came the buyouts. POLITICO, working from documents it obtained, reported that at least 2,145 senior-ranking NASA employees were set to leave — and that 279 of them were at Marshall. WHNT relayed the numbers and asked NASA about them; NASA said only that the deferred resignation program was "a voluntary opportunity available to NASA employees."

These were not entry-level positions. POLITICO reported they were GS-13 through GS-15 — the senior technical and management grades a space agency is built on, the people with the specialized skills you cannot hire back in a quarter.

On top of that, in November 2025 NASA laid off contractors at Marshall who were working on International Space Station programs as ISS work winds down — a few dozen jobs, confirmed by Rep. Robert Aderholt's office.

That is not "a couple."

The two things he promised instead

Strong's argument wasn't that the cuts wouldn't happen. It was that Huntsville would come out ahead because of two specific wins he named on stage: Space Command and the Iron Dome missile-defense program.

Notice what both of those are. They are not jobs. They are hopes about future federal spending decisions made by other people — the exact kind of promise that costs a congressman nothing to make and that voters can't hold him to for years.

Meanwhile the losses were immediate, specific, and already scheduled when he said it.

He wasn't a bystander

Strong sits on the House Appropriations Committee. He is vice chair of the subcommittee that funds NASA, the Justice Department, and the Commerce Department, and he chairs a Homeland Security subcommittee.

That means the agency losing 279 senior people in his own district is an agency he helps write the budget for. When a member of the Appropriations Committee says the cuts to his district will work out in the end, he isn't a spectator offering a prediction. He is one of the people with a vote on it.

He is also, by a wide margin, funded by the industry that lives off those budgets. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Leidos, L3Harris, Parsons, and Blue Origin are all on his donor list, along with Huntsville contractors like Torch Technologies and Verity Integrated Systems. He takes more than eight times what the average House member takes from the defense sector — $239,500 against an average of $29,408 — according to OpenSecrets' sector benchmarking. Only about 1% of his money comes from small grassroots donors.

The contractors kept their contracts. The civil servants at Marshall took the buyout.

The pattern across the party

Strong is one of several Republicans who told their districts DOGE would be fine and then didn't check. Alabama's own Gary Palmer said DOGE did better oversight in six weeks than Congress had done in 40 years. Texas's Beth Van Duyne called it the golden age of DOGE. South Carolina's William Timmons, who sat on the DOGE oversight subcommittee, said firing federal workers was "freeing the bureaucrats... it's just fantastic".

On August 6, 2026, the Government Accountability Office published what it found when it examined DOGE's public savings claims. CBS News reported that DOGE could not verify the calculation method behind 96 percent of its claimed grant savings, that 108 of the 264 leases it took credit for terminating were already ending before DOGE existed, and that DOGE "did not respond to GAO's request for information or interviews."

DOGE itself expired on July 4, 2026 without filing a final report.

What Huntsville is left with

Strong's own prediction is now testable, and the test is not going his way. The senior NASA workforce in his district got smaller. The two things he said would make up for it are still promises.

He has never held a public in-person town hall where anyone could ask him about it. His opponent invited him to four of them in writing on July 27, 2026, and his office didn't reply.

"We may lose a couple." Two hundred seventy-nine of the most senior people at Marshall Space Flight Center were on the list, and the district's congressman — a man who sits on Appropriations — told them it would all work out.

Sources

Wesley Walter, "DOGE meet with mixed response in AL" — Alabama Political Reporter, February 24, 2025.

"Report says MSFC will lose nearly 300 employees in effort to shed staff, NASA responds" — WHNT. Photo: NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center.