MAGA Report Cards — Arkansas

Sarah Sanders Hasn't Called the Session That Would Clear Arkansas' Disability Waitlist. Her Republican Predecessor Zeroed Out the Same List for $37 Million.

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:51:58 +0000

Landri Hellinga is 15. She has a rare joint condition called Arthrogryposis Multiplex Congenita that locks her joints straight or bent, so she spends most of her day in a motorized wheelchair. She has had more than 40 surgeries. Her mother, Laura, walked away from a career as a national accounts manager at Walmart when Landri was born, because she knew she would be doing all of the caring herself.

Laura Hellinga applied in 2022 to get Landri into an Arkansas program that pays for exactly the things a family like hers needs. She had to apply more than once. She was accepted in 2024.

The last time her mother checked, Landri was number 636 on the waiting list.

There are more than 2,400 people on that list. And Arkansas's leaders are, at the same moment, touting a $655 million surplus.

The program, and the governor who cleared it

The program has a bureaucratic name — the Community and Employment Support Waiver, or CES — and a simple job. Run by the Department of Human Services, it pays for the things ordinary Medicaid does not: a customized wheelchair, a bathtub seat, a ramp, a lift, home modifications, medical supplies. The point of it is to let a disabled person live at home instead of in a nursing home.

Families have waited as long as ten years to get in.

In 2021, Arkansas's previous governor decided that was unacceptable. Republican Asa Hutchinson put up more than $37 million to zero out a waitlist of more than 3,200 disabled Arkansans. The state cleared it over four years. He did not need a special session to do it: the legislature dedicated the $37.6 million during the short fiscal session Arkansas holds in even-numbered years.

Sarah Sanders took the office after him. Four years after Hutchinson left, the list is back above 2,400.

What it would cost, and what she spent instead

State Rep. Andrew Collins, a Little Rock Democrat, has asked Sanders to call a special session to deal with it. Clearing the list means asking federal Medicaid officials to open more slots, and Arkansas paying for them.

"Right now, the estimate is that it would cost somewhere between $35 (million) and $50 million," Collins said. He also noted that Arkansas's share of CES costs runs about 30% — the federal government covers the rest.

So the state's own portion of fixing this is a fraction of a fraction. Collins set that against what Sanders has chosen to fund instead: the LEARNS voucher program, which pays private school tuition for families that do not necessarily need the help — at an estimated cost, the paper notes, approaching $400 million a year — plus tax cuts for the highest earners.

His verdict was one sentence:

"If it was a priority, it would have been done already."

We have put a number on that voucher program before. Sanders' voucher program will cost $367 million this year, and Arkansas has never permanently barred a single school from that program while asking those schools for little more than fire drills, shot records and a flagpole.

Collins was blunter about what the waiting means for families:

"To allow those individuals to be burdened in this way feels morally indefensible," he said. "You're telling them they have to spend years on end waiting for help that may never come."

What answering a letter looks like

Laura Hellinga did the thing citizens are told to do. She wrote to her elected officials.

"I have written Sarah Huckabee Sanders and (Sen.) John Boozman and (Sen) Tom Cotton," she said. "Mostly, I got the same letter back, thanking me for writing."

Boozman, she said, replied that it was not his area of responsibility. Cotton wrote back only after several letters. Sanders, she said, has largely ignored her.

The state office handling Landri's paperwork has lost or misplaced her four-inch binder of medical records more than once. Her place in line moves up and down, and nobody can tell her why, because the office is understaffed. Sometimes no one answers the phone.

What she is asking for is not complicated:

"I just want to talk to the governor, one on one," she said. "Not a photo-op, just a conversation on what her plan is. What is the plan for these thousands of individuals on this list? I just want to know where this is going and what to expect. So far, I have not gotten those answers."

Asked what she would hope for from the waiver if and when Landri is accepted, Laura Hellinga listed a pool membership — Landri has her best range of motion in water — a lift system she can actually operate, and adaptive tools around the house. Then, the reporter noted, her voice trembled.

"And I'd like for her to learn to drive," Laura Hellinga said. "I just want her to be able to do things."

The Arkansas Times sent questions about the CES program to the governor's office by email. They got no response.

Nothing happens until January 2027

Hutchinson fixed this in a scheduled session. Arkansas's next regular session does not start until January 2027. Parents have been pushing publicly for Sanders to call a special session before then. She has not called one for the waitlist. She did call one this spring: on April 30 she summoned the legislature into extraordinary session to cut the top individual income tax rate to 3.7% and the corporate rate to 4.1%.

That is a decision, not a delay. And it is consistent with how Sanders has treated health coverage in Arkansas generally: she cheered the budget bill that ended the state's Medicaid expansion, leaving about 200,000 Arkansans hanging.

What it adds up to

A Republican governor of Arkansas spent more than $37 million in 2021 to clear a waitlist of 3,200 disabled people off the CES waiver. Under Sarah Sanders it has grown back past 2,400, a Little Rock lawmaker puts the cost of clearing it at $35 to $50 million with the state paying about 30%, and the state is touting a $655 million surplus. Sanders has not called the special session parents are asking for, so nothing can happen before January 2027 — though she did call one in the spring to cut income taxes. Her voucher program for private school tuition costs more than $367 million this year. Landri Hellinga is 15, has had more than 40 surgeries, and was number 636 in line the last time her mother checked.

Source

Arkansas Times, Aid program for disabled Arkansans that took priority for Hutchinson languishes under Sanders, by Byron Tate, September 8, 2026. Photo: Laura Hellinga, via Arkansas Times.

Four Republicans Filed a Bill to Ban the Government From Preferring Contractors Who Pay Union Wages. Trump's Own Budget Office Kept That Rule in Place.

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 05:51:55 +0000

On September 3, 2026, Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma introduced a bill with a mild-sounding name and one blunt sentence in it.

The bill is called the No Preference Act. Here is what it would add to federal contracting law:

"The head of an executive agency may not require or give preference to an offeror on the basis of whether the offeror will use workers subject to a collective bargaining agreement."

Then it says the same thing again for the Pentagon.

That is the whole bill. Two sentences. It would make it illegal for any federal agency to treat a contractor better because that contractor's workers have a union contract.

Steve Womack of Arkansas signed on the same day as an original cosponsor. John Rutherford of Florida and Jack Bergman of Michigan added their names the next day.

What the rule they're trying to kill actually does

Big federal construction jobs — anything costing $35 million or more — currently have to use something called a project labor agreement, unless the agency can justify an exception. It is a contract, negotiated before the first shovel goes in the ground, that sets the pay and benefits for everybody who works on the site.

The Economic Policy Institute describes what those agreements contain: they "specify workers' wages and fringe benefits," they can set up a process for settling disputes on the job, and they typically bar strikes for the length of the project while also barring the employer from locking workers out.

In other words, the deal cuts both ways. The workers get a wage floor and benefits in writing. The government gets a job site that doesn't shut down.

Take the preference away and the wage floor goes with it. As EPI put it about a Pentagon attempt to do exactly this, workers on those projects "will no longer have the guarantee of negotiating PLAs that include higher pay."

Trump's own administration looked at this and said no

This is the part that ought to end the argument.

In February 2025 the Defense Department tried to stop using these agreements on its large construction projects. A federal judge blocked it in May. And on June 12, 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget — Trump's own budget office, run by Russell Vought — issued a memo saying the requirement stays.

The memo called some agencies' moves to scrap the agreements "overly broad" and stated plainly that further attempts to prohibit them across the board "are precluded."

So the sitting Republican administration reviewed this exact policy and kept it. Bice, Womack, Rutherford and Bergman want Congress to override that.

What they say it's about

Bice frames it as fairness between states:

"Every qualified contractor deserves a fair opportunity to compete for federal projects. The government should not favor one individual over another simply because their workers are part of a union. This legislation ensures that right-to-work states, like Oklahoma, have an equal footing when competing for contracts."

Womack frames it as thrift:

"The playing field shouldn't be skewed toward contractors who choose to use union labor."

Neither of them mentions what the agreements guarantee the workers. That is the thing being removed, and it does not appear in either quote.

Who asked for this

The bill is backed by Associated Builders & Contractors and the Association of Oklahoma General Contractors.

Associated Builders and Contractors is the national trade group for non-union construction companies. Fighting project labor agreements is one of the things it exists to do. This is not a bill a contractor who lost a bid asked for. It is a bill the industry association whose members would collect the work is pushing.

The people on the other side of that transaction are the ones who currently have their wages written into the contract before they show up.

This keeps happening

The four names on this bill are not the only Republicans on this site pushing the same direction. Tom Tiffany has signed on to take right-to-work national, and he was the only member of the entire House who missed the vote on workers' right to organize. In Pennsylvania, the building trades council that endorsed Stacy Garrity in 2024 is now campaigning against her, and her campaign won't say whether she'd sign a right-to-work bill.

The No Preference Act is the federal-contracting version of the same fight. It doesn't ban unions. It just makes sure the government can never prefer the contractor who pays union scale — on a Pentagon base, a courthouse, a dam, or anything else the public is paying for.

What the bill says

Stephanie Bice wrote a two-sentence bill that would bar every federal agency, including the Defense Department, from giving any preference to a contractor whose workers have a union contract. Steve Womack, John Rutherford and Jack Bergman cosponsored it. It is backed by the national trade association for non-union builders. And it targets a rule that Trump's own Office of Management and Budget reviewed in June 2025 and expressly kept in force.

Sources

Bice, Womack seek to eliminate union labor preferences in federal contracts, Ripon Advance (September 4, 2026).
H.R. 10250, the No Preference Act — full text and cosponsor list, 119th Congress.
Department of Defense orders end to project labor agreements, Economic Policy Institute Federal Policy Watch.

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

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.

Rick Crawford Called Trump's Tariffs 'a Powerful Move to Help Support American Ag Producers.' That Same Year, Arkansas Led the Nation in Family Farm Bankruptcies.

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:31:03 +0000

On August 24, 2026, Arkansas Breaking News reported the results of a new tracking project out of the University of Arkansas. Between January 2021 and June 2026, Arkansas farms filed for bankruptcy 83 times. Only California filed more.

And 80 of those 83 Arkansas cases were filed under Chapter 12 — the chapter of the bankruptcy code written specifically for family farmers. That is the highest family-farm bankruptcy count of any state in the country.

Arkansas is the number one rice-producing state in America. Farming is its largest industry. And it is now the place where family farms file for bankruptcy more often than anywhere else in the United States.

Rick Crawford has represented Arkansas's 1st District — the Delta, the rice and soybean country — since 2011. His own biography calls him "a senior member on the House Agriculture Committee, having played a critical role in passing two Farm Bills, having served on the Conference Committees in 2014 and 2018." He has a degree in agriculture business and economics and built a career in farm-news broadcasting before Congress. If any member of Congress owns this file, it is him.

Here is what he has been saying while it happened.

2018: "I don't think it's going to be a problem"

In March 2018, when Trump first announced steel and aluminum tariffs, Arkansas agriculture officials went to the press worried. Crawford went the other way.

"I don't think it's going to be a problem," he told Talk Business & Politics of the tariff threat. "China is creating economic strife. … It's time to play hardball with China."

In the same article, the president of the Arkansas Farm Bureau said the opposite. Randy Veach warned that if the United States put tariffs on steel and aluminum, China, Canada and Mexico might retaliate against soybeans and rice. "It has the potential to hurt our farmers and ranchers," he said.

The president of the American Soybean Association, quoted in the same story, put it this way: "Our competitors in Brazil and Argentina are all too happy to pick up supplying the Chinese market."

Remember that sentence. It was published in March 2018.

A month later, Crawford was still not worried. "I think right now it's just rhetoric. … Ultimately our soybeans will find their way to China," he said. Soybean-producing countries such as Argentina, he added, wouldn't be able to match American farmers on quality or volume.

2025: "yielding some pretty positive results"

Seven years later, he had not changed his mind.

On August 3, 2025, Crawford told Talk Business & Politics: "I actually commend the president for taking the action that he's taken, and I see this as a powerful move to help support American ag producers, American workers, American industry, and American consumers." He added: "I think it's yielding some pretty positive results."

Here is what 2025 actually looked like for the farmers he represents.

The Arkansas Farm Bureau says the state's soybean, rice, corn and cotton growers lost an average of $243 per acre that year. Every major Arkansas row crop saw prices fall.

Nationally, Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies rose 46% in 2025 to 315 filings, the second straight annual increase. And the American Farm Bureau Federation named the state at the top of the list: "Arkansas, leads the U.S. in Chapter 12 filings in 2025 with 33 filings, more than double 2024 and the most in the state in the 21st century."

Thirty-three filings out of 315 nationwide. As KATV put it, that is roughly ten percent of the country's farm bankruptcies for 2025.

Kenneth Graves, chairman of the Arkansas Rice Growers Association, told the station what that feels like from inside it. "If things don't turn around, probably this year, if not the next year, the door won't be big enough for everybody to get out at the same time."

The Argentina part

In the fall of 2025 — weeks after Crawford called the tariffs a powerful move to support American ag producers — the U.S. Treasury signed a $20 billion currency lifeline for Argentina, and the Treasury Secretary said he was looking for ways to add another $20 billion on top. Around the same stretch, Argentina's government temporarily removed its export taxes on farm goods, and China bought roughly 7 million metric tons of Argentine soybeans almost immediately.

American taxpayers helped prop up the currency of the country that took the sale.

That is the scenario the American Soybean Association's president had described in March 2018 — in the very article where Crawford said tariffs wouldn't be a problem. Crawford was in Congress for all of it, on the Agriculture Committee for all of it. Arkansas farmers are still waiting to hear what he did to stop it.

The help that arrives too late

To his credit, Crawford now says the aid is not enough — and he is right.

A $12 billion farmer relief package cleared Congress in late December 2025, and the USDA promised the money would be distributed no later than February 28, 2026. Talk Business & Politics reported that many experts figured the $12 billion might offset as much as 25% of farm losses.

"It was an inadequate number by itself, which is why we're working aggressively to provide some legislative solutions," Crawford said in that February 2026 interview. "If the damage is done in 2025, you can't wait till 2026 to get help."

That is a good sentence. So look at what happened to the solution.

Crawford's answer was the Bridge the Gap for Rural Communities Act, H.R. 5710, which would let farmers take a 50% advance on their safety-net payments for the 2025 crop year instead of waiting until October 2026, and would lift the caps on those payments. He introduced it on October 8, 2025. It picked up 31 cosponsors.

On December 2, 2025, it was referred to the Agriculture Committee's Subcommittee on General Farm Commodities, Risk Management, and Credit — a subcommittee Crawford himself sits on.

It has not moved since. That is nearly nine months of nothing, in a subcommittee he serves on, in a committee run by his own party, in a House run by his own party, for the state with the most family-farm bankruptcies in the country.

The reason the "gap" exists at all is worth saying out loud. The improved farm safety-net payments Crawford wants to advance were written into Trump's budget bill — the same bill Crawford voted for on July 3, 2025, and the same bill that cut $187 billion from food assistance. Those farm payments don't start flowing until after October 1, 2026. By his own account, the damage was done in 2025.

Meanwhile the farm bill itself — the actual law that sets the safety net — has been extended on a temporary basis yet again, now running through September 30, roughly three years behind schedule. Republicans have held the House majority for that entire stretch.

This is a pattern in Arkansas

Crawford is not the only one. Steve Womack spent years backing the spending-bill rider that stopped the USDA from enforcing protections for chicken farmers against the meat companies that buy their birds. When we went through what Arkansas's whole congressional delegation is costing the state, farm policy was one of the clearest examples: six Republicans, one of the most agricultural states in the country, and a record of votes that keeps landing on the wrong side of the people who grow things.

Crawford's version has one extra feature. He was warned in print, in an Arkansas business paper, by the president of the Arkansas Farm Bureau, before any of it happened. He said it wouldn't be a problem.

What the record shows

Arkansas has recorded 83 farm bankruptcies since 2021 — second in the nation, and first in the country for Chapter 12 family-farm filings, with 80. Its soybean, rice, corn and cotton growers lost an average of $243 an acre in 2025, the year Rick Crawford called Trump's tariffs "a powerful move to help support American ag producers" that were "yielding some pretty positive results." Crawford has been in Congress since 2011 and calls himself a senior member of the House Agriculture Committee. His own relief bill for those farmers has sat in a subcommittee he serves on since December 2, 2025, and the farm bill is roughly three years behind schedule.

Source

Arkansas ranks second in nation for farm bankruptcies, new tracking project shows — Field Walsh, Arkansas Breaking News, August 24, 2026. Photo courtesy of Arkansas Breaking News.

Arkansas Will Spend Up to $379 Million on Sarah Sanders' Vouchers. It Asks Those Schools for Fire Drills, Shot Records, and a Flagpole.

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 13:05:26 +0000

Arkansas will spend up to $379 million on school vouchers this school year. That is $309 million for the students already enrolled, plus $70 million that Gov. Sarah Sanders asked lawmakers to set aside from the state surplus for the students still coming.

For that money, the state does not ask a family whether it could have paid the tuition anyway. It does not ask whether the child ever sat in an Arkansas public school. And in three years, it has never once permanently barred a school from cashing the checks.

That last one is not a talking point. It is what ProPublica and the Arkansas Times found in the state's own records: in three years of the Educational Freedom Account program, Arkansas has stepped in at exactly two schools, and it has "never permanently blocked a school from taking public money."

Keith M. Ingram, who served in the Arkansas Senate from 2013 to 2023 and was its minority leader, laid the whole thing out this week in a column in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He is not calling for repeal. He says he'd like it, but he's "practical enough to temper expectations." What he wants is for the program to be watched.

Here is why that is such a low bar.

What Arkansas actually requires

A private school that wants to take voucher money in Arkansas has to have accreditation or be seeking it, has to have been open for a year, and has to promise it will run background checks and fingerprint its employees. It has to teach English, math, science and social studies. It has to give a standardized test once a year — one the school picks for itself.

Past that, the list is: conduct regular fire drills, keep immunization records, and have an American flag and a flagpole.

That is close to the whole rulebook. Here is what is not on it:

The state does not review the curriculum.
The state does not review the background or the capability of the person running the school.
Schools promise background checks — but nothing in the rules says those checks have to come back clean. There is no requirement that an employee have no criminal history.
Test results go to the state, but they are pooled into one aggregate number. No parent can look up how a particular voucher school did. There is no requirement to report students' individual test scores to the state or to parents at all.

Meanwhile, a public school down the road reports test scores, attendance, discipline, finances and teacher credentials — and gets graded on every one of them. Same dollar. Same taxpayer. One of them grades itself.

What that bought

Since 2023, Arkansas has gone from about 100 private schools to about 220, plus roughly 100 microschools when that reporting was published — a category the state didn't track or fund before LEARNS existed, and one that has since grown to 142 registered schools. We wrote about it this week, after one of them collapsed three weeks before classes started.

Among the schools that got in was the Delta Institute for the Developing Brain, outside Jonesboro. Its owner made a 10-year-old with autism scrub floors and walls. She put a 13-year-old in a circle of his classmates, invited them to take turns hitting him, and joined in herself with a footlong plastic cylinder that resembled a pipe. It went on for nearly 40 minutes. Three employees were in the room.

Nearly half that school's students were on vouchers. It had collected more than $300,000 in public money. We covered the case and the guilty plea that followed.

Now the part that has not been said enough. The Education Department stopped the checks the day news of the owner's arrest broke, in April 2025.

It restarted them two days later. An assistant education commissioner who oversees the program told a colleague he was satisfied the school had put "appropriate safeguards" in place.

Asked to tighten the rules, the state changed the shopping list

This spring, the Education Department was asked to strengthen oversight of the program.

What it did instead was adjust what parents are allowed to buy with the money. Travel sports teams were banned.

Horseback riding lessons stayed on the approved vendor list.

"Choice" that mostly isn't

The pitch for vouchers was rescue: get children out of schools that are failing them. So Ingram's proposal is to hold the program to its own pitch — require that a child actually attended a public school the year before.

That isn't a new idea in Arkansas. It's the old one. The Succeed Scholarship, the program LEARNS absorbed, was built for students with disabilities and children in foster care, and it required a student to have spent the prior full year in a public school.

Under LEARNS, 12% of voucher participants reported previously attending a public school. The other 88% were already in private school, already homeschooled, or starting kindergarten — a number we've written about before as the program passed 50,000 students.

As Ingram puts it: that isn't choice. That's reimbursement.

And there is no income limit anywhere in the process. None. Since the program went universal there is no ceiling and no question about household income on the application. Ten of the program's private schools took in more than $60 million last school year. The top five are in Springdale, Little Rock, North Little Rock and Searcy — which are not communities short on options.

Means-testing a public benefit is not an attack on school choice. It is how nearly every other public benefit in Arkansas already works.

The teacher pay gap inside the same program

One school approved to take voucher money this fall plans to pay a first-year teacher $25,000.

The state minimum for a public school teacher in Arkansas is $50,000.

The same public dollar, paying half as much to the person standing in front of the kids, at a school whose curriculum and operator the state never reviews.

What $22 million would do instead

Arkansas closed the fiscal year with a $655 million surplus.

Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families calculated that $22 million of it would clear 1,500 children off the Arkansas Better Chance waiting list and raise what the state pays pre-K providers to three-quarters of the market rate.

The Arkansas Better Chance budget has not moved since 2011. Fifteen years flat, while the voucher line went from nothing to $379 million.

Twenty-two million dollars is under 6% of what the state is putting into vouchers this year. It would put 1,500 children in a pre-K classroom instead of reimbursing families for tuition they were already paying.

Nobody in charge wants a ceiling

In April, at a Little Rock luncheon, Senate President Pro Tempore Bart Hester was asked whether there was any cap on what this program should cost.

"We never talk about whether we spent too much for K-12. I will never talk about whether we spent too much for EFAs," Hester said.

Asked whether there was political will to add hundreds of millions more if enrollment kept climbing, he said he would never agree to capping it.

"If it goes up $100 million a year, so it does," Hester said.

That is the Republican leader of the Arkansas Senate, saying out loud that there is no number at which he would stop. And the governor whose law created the program is pointing at test scores from an exam Arkansas built for itself as proof it's working, while a legislative panel studies a third program to subsidize private education on top of this one.

The bottom line

Arkansas will spend up to $379 million this year on a voucher program Sarah Sanders created, with no income limit, no requirement that a child ever attended a public school, and no state review of a school's curriculum or of who is running it. In three years the state has intervened at two schools and permanently barred none — including the one where the owner had a 13-year-old's classmates take turns hitting him and joined in with a plastic cylinder that resembled a pipe, and where public money resumed two days after her arrest. Meanwhile $22 million, about 6% of the voucher bill, would clear 1,500 Arkansas children off a pre-K waiting list funded at 2011 levels.

Source

This post is based on "How to fix LEARNS", a column in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette by Keith M. Ingram of West Memphis, who served in the Arkansas Senate from 2013 to 2023, including as Senate minority leader, and previously served in the Arkansas House and as mayor of West Memphis. Photo: Office of the Governor of Arkansas, via Wikimedia Commons.

Sarah Sanders' Voucher Program Signed Up 142 Schools Arkansas Doesn't Routinely Inspect. One Took Money From 56 Students and Vanished.

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 13:03:48 +0000

Nina Freel found her daughter's new school in a Facebook ad.

Nova Roots Academy, in Hot Springs, promised flexibility, hands-on learning and real-life skills. It was built for kids who learn at their own pace. Freel's 7-year-old, Rhiannon, was working above her grade level. The woman running it, Donna Witte, had spent years teaching in the Hot Springs School District. It looked perfect.

Rhiannon never spent a day there. On August 1 — less than three weeks before fall classes were supposed to start — Witte emailed parents to say the school was shutting down. Then, parents say, she stopped answering. The website went dark. So did the Facebook page.

A complaint report the Arkansas Department of Education put together, obtained by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette under the state's open records law, says 56 students had registered and paid — for summer classes, for the coming school year, or both.

Here is the part that should stop you. In the eyes of the state of Arkansas, Nova Roots was not a private school. Its students were not private school students. They were officially homeschoolers, attending something the state calls a microschool — and the state was sending it public money anyway.

That money comes from Educational Freedom Accounts, the school voucher program created by the 2023 LEARNS Act. LEARNS is Sarah Sanders' signature law, the marquee bill of her first legislative session, and her office says she championed it.

A category of school the state made up, then declined to watch

Ask the Education Department what a microschool is and you get this, from spokeswoman Kaelin Clay: a "tuition-based organization serving a community of homeschool students." Parents who send a child to one have to tell their local school district they intend to homeschool. Microschools, Clay said, are explicitly not classified as private schools.

That distinction is not a technicality. It decides which rulebook applies — and the microschool rulebook is thinner.

Before a microschool can start cashing voucher checks, the Education Department looks at background-check and fingerprinting paperwork, instructor qualifications, and any licenses or accreditation the school happens to have. The school has to describe what it teaches, promise to cover math, English, social studies and science, and give students a national test once a year. Not the ATLAS exam Arkansas requires of every public school student — a different test.

And site visits?

"Site visits are not routinely conducted for approval of a microschool," Clay wrote. "However, they are one of the compliance tools available to ADE when a complaint or other information raises questions that warrant closer review."

The Democrat-Gazette asked the department a simple follow-up: has it ever done a site visit at a microschool? It did not answer.

96 last year. 142 now.

Educational Freedom Accounts opened to every Arkansas student in the 2025-26 school year. Microschools multiplied immediately.

Last August, the Education Department counted 96 microschools registered in the voucher program. For the 2026-27 school year, there are 142 — a jump of nearly half in twelve months. Most students in the program this year get $7,208 to spend, and students with disabilities can get more.

So the state built a new category of school, attached a per-child check to it, declined to inspect the schools as a matter of course, and then watched the category grow by half in a year.

We have written before about how big this program has gotten — roughly 50,000 students and more than $367 million this school year, with only 12 out of every 100 participants coming from a public school. The microschool numbers are the same story at a smaller scale, with even less watching.

The state says it's the parents' job

At a September 2025 State Board of Education meeting, Darrell Smith, who runs the Education Department's school choice office, was asked how vendors in the voucher program get vetted.

Smith's answer: the responsibility ultimately "comes from parents."

That is the actual oversight model. The state writes the check. The parent is the inspector. Parents also get an annual survey asking them to rate provider quality, service, communication and value.

Nina Freel is one of the parents that model was supposed to protect. She found the school in a Facebook ad, saw a licensed teacher she had reason to trust, and signed her daughter up.

"When you hear something that's too good to be true, you might want to take a beat before you jump on the opportunity," Freel said afterward. "I'm definitely going to remember that for next time."

She should not have to. Vetting a school is what the state is supposed to do before it puts that school on the payroll.

What the state found after the school was already gone

The Wittes told families on July 28 that Nova Roots would "cease operations." That same day, Education Department staff forwarded a complaint intake summary about the school up to Darrell Smith.

What that report describes is not a business that ran out of money. It is a list of things somebody should have caught earlier:

The stated reason for closing doesn't match the facts. The Wittes told parents the building's owner was selling the property. Marty Coco, the Hot Springs businessman who owns it, says he evicted them around July 15 for not paying rent — and says they owe him roughly $24,000.
The nonprofit status appears not to exist. The school claimed to be a 501(c)(3). A search of the IRS tax-exempt organization database turned up no records for it.
Voucher applications parents filled out may never have been filed. The report says the operators helped parents prepare their Educational Freedom Account applications and collected the completed forms directly — and those applications "may never have been submitted, causing families to miss funding deadlines."
Animals were left behind. Coco says the Wittes abandoned chickens and ducks on the property and that several died without food or water.

The report recommended the state refer "any potential fraud allegation to the appropriate local authorities."

Then the Education Department went looking at the money. It found 20 payments from students' voucher accounts that had to be refunded — for summer programming that was never delivered and for registration in a school year that never happened. A summer camp had ended two weeks early with no refunds.

Donna Witte disputed three of those 20 payments, $2,250 in all, saying they covered spring and summer courses the school had actually delivered to one high school senior. The department asked her for documentation. Three days later it wrote back to say nothing had arrived and that it could not "make adjustments to the original overpayment determination."

The bill came to $5,650. The deadline to return it was August 20. The Wittes missed it.

Who was in that school

Nova Roots advertised itself as an "inclusive microschool for neurodivergent & experiential learners." It sold special education services, nature-based learning, functional life skills.

In other words, it recruited the families with the fewest alternatives.

Callie Kimball's 10-year-old son Carter is autistic. She is a single mother with a full-time job. When Nova Roots collapsed, she couldn't find anywhere else that could take him — the other options in the area were full or couldn't meet his needs.

"I'm having to essentially bring my son to work with me for about 30 hours a week, and then at night we're having to do school," she said.

Freel's family had already moved to Glenwood. She got Rhiannon into Caddo Hills Elementary — a public school, on a four-day week — in time for the first day. "It was a 360 (degree) pivot for our entire family," she said.

This already happened once, in the same town

Nova Roots is not the first Hot Springs microschool the state has had to deal with.

Education Department employees visited Homestead Academy last fall after parents raised concerns about the quality of instruction, according to reporting by ProPublica and the Arkansas Times. The school's voucher funding was cut off for 10 weeks. It has since been reinstated to the program.

That is the pattern across this whole program. The state acts late, acts briefly, and then turns the money back on. It is exactly what happened at the private school where children were made to scrub floors and a 13-year-old was beaten by his classmates — a school that had already collected more than $300,000 in voucher money.

Lawmakers did make one change in June 2026: the Education Department now has to monitor tuition and fee increases at microschools, the way it already did for private schools. And the microschool application requires an operator who takes in $100,000 or more of voucher money in a year to post a surety bond the following school year — a financial guarantee it can repay what it owes.

Read that timing again. The bond comes after the year in which the school took the money. Nova Roots collected from 56 students and closed before a fall check ever cleared. A bond due next year protects nobody this year.

What we are actually paying for

Douglas N. Harris, who chairs the economics department at Tulane and holds its endowed chair in public education, told the Democrat-Gazette that microschools are clearly growing but that nobody can say with confidence how many exist nationally, because some lists fold them in with private schools.

He also said they aren't automatically better. He expects results to land "all over the place." And because microschools are small — one or two teachers covering many subjects and many grades — a lot of them lean on virtual learning, where he said student outcomes are "overwhelmingly negative."

"If you see a lot of evidence, as we do, that students are not learning even the basics (through virtual learning), then all the conversation about project-based learning and other things become a little less relevant," Harris said.

Arkansas has cleared 142 of these to draw public money without routinely looking inside any of them. The state's own answer to how they get checked is that parents do it.

Sarah Sanders championed the law that built this program and has defended its results. The oversight that would have caught Nova Roots before 56 families paid is not in it.

The bottom line

The Educational Freedom Account program now has 142 Arkansas microschools registered — a category the state says is not private school, does not routinely visit, and expects parents to vet on their own. One of them, marketed to families of children with disabilities, took money from 56 registered students and shut down three weeks before classes began, leaving $5,650 in unreturned public funds, a landlord owed about $24,000, and voucher applications that may never have been filed. The state found all of it after the school was already gone.

Source

This post is based on reporting by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: "Microschools get little state oversight, even as numbers surge under Arkansas LEARNS Act" and "Abrupt closure of Hot Springs microschool Nova Roots Academy leaves unanswered questions", both by Josh Snyder. Photo: The Sentinel-Record/Anna-Claire Butler.

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.

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.

Sarah Sanders Objected to Exactly One Part of Trump's Budget Bill. It Was the AI Rule, Not the Largest Food Aid Cut in American History.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 18:24:24 +0000

On Wednesday, the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance stood up in front of reporters in Little Rock and read out the worst hunger figure anyone has put on this state.

37% of Arkansans say they don't have enough food to meet their needs. That is roughly 1.14 million people. The finding comes from the Arkansas Hunger Survey — 3,500 paper surveys and 1,700 phone interviews — run by the Alliance together with the six Feeding America food banks that cover the state.

Break it apart and it gets worse. 14% of Arkansans get no food assistance at all and still don't have enough to eat. Another 23% do get help — SNAP, WIC, a church pantry, a food bank giveaway — and still fall short. Only 47% of Arkansans meet their food needs on their own. Nationally that figure is 62%.

Another 400,000 Arkansans are eating today only because a food assistance program is standing between them and an empty kitchen.

Sarah Sanders has been governor of Arkansas since January 2023. This is the state she runs.

The line on the chart has only gone one direction

Arkansas has come out the most food insecure state in the country in each of the federal government's last three reports — 16.6% of households over 2020–2022, then 18.9% over 2021–2023, then 19.4% over 2022–2024. The USDA averages three years of survey data to make a state estimate reliable, so those windows overlap. The direction doesn't change.

The state's own researchers put the number higher. In February, researchers at the University of Arkansas and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences published the Arkansas Health Survey — nearly 10,000 responses, reported down to each of the state's 823 census tracts — and found 28.8% of adult Arkansans food insecure, about 688,000 people. The Alliance's survey, taken in 2025 and published this week, puts it at 37%. Three different measures: households, adults, and everybody in the state.

Here is the part nobody has an easy answer for. Christie Jordan, CEO of the Food Bank of Northeast Arkansas, told the news conference that charity is not keeping up:

"Food banks across Arkansas have nearly doubled charitable food distributions in the last decade, yet food insecurity rates have continued to rise."

Sylvia Blain, who runs the Alliance, said the survey found no clean profile for who goes hungry here. Not education. Not employment. "It could be any of us," she said. "Many people are one paycheck, one car repair bill, one health emergency away from becoming food insecure."

"Just not this one part"

When Trump's budget bill was moving through Congress in the summer of 2025, Sarah Sanders picked a fight over it. A real one, in public, and she won it.

On June 26, 2025, she published an op-ed in the Washington Post under the headline "Yes, I support Trump's big, beautiful bill. Just not this one part." The one part was a provision blocking states from regulating artificial intelligence for ten years. The next day she led 17 Republican governors in a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Speaker Mike Johnson demanding it come out. On July 1 the Senate stripped it, 99 to 1, and her office put out a release taking the credit.

So we know exactly what it looks like when this governor decides a piece of a federal bill is bad for Arkansas. She writes the op-ed. She rounds up the governors. She calls the Speaker. And it works.

Now read the sentence she opened that op-ed with. This is the governor of the hungriest state in America, in her own words, explaining why the rest of the bill was good:

"President Donald Trump's one, big, beautiful bill will be a win for the American people by cutting taxes, moving welfare recipients off the path to dependency and onto the path to prosperity, growing the economy, and helping secure the border."

"Moving welfare recipients off the path to dependency" is what the food assistance cuts look like when you are for them.

That bill cut $187 billion out of food assistance over the next decade — the largest cut to SNAP in history. Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families estimates 25,000 Arkansans will lose their SNAP benefits because of it.

There was no op-ed about that. No letter. No 17 governors.

We have written before about the Medicaid half of this same story, now landing on the more than 211,000 Arkansans on the state's Medicaid expansion. The pattern in the food numbers is the same one.

Who lost their exemption

The cuts did not arrive as one big announcement. They arrived as paperwork.

A piece of the law stripped work-requirement exemptions from three groups: veterans, people without housing, and young adults who had aged out of foster care. Arkansas started enforcing it on November 21, 2025, under an emergency rule a legislative panel approved the day before. People who had never had to document 80 hours of work a month were given three months to start, or lose their groceries. The law also cut off some legally present immigrants, including refugees and people granted asylum.

The research on this is not ambiguous. SNAP work requirements reduce how many people get food assistance rather than raising how many people work.

Arkansas has been shedding people from the program for years anyway — roughly 35% of individuals and 23% of households since 2018, even as hunger got worse. Fewer people on food stamps in a state where more people are hungry is not a program working. It is a program shrinking.

The bill that comes due next year

The expensive part of the law was timed to land after the 2026 election, which we have laid out before. Arkansas is about to find out what that means.

Every dollar of food assistance handed out in Arkansas today is federal money — about $41 million a month. That is the arrangement the law ends.

Starting in October 2026, states pay 75% of the cost of administering SNAP instead of 50%. For Arkansas that is another $18 million to $23 million a year.

Then comes the second hit. For the first time in the program's history, states whose payment error rate runs above 6% have to pay a share of the benefits themselves. Arkansas's rate has been above 6% for years. The USDA released the official figures on June 24, 2026: Arkansas's error rate for the last federal fiscal year was 8.81%, down from 9.56% the year before, and still inside the band that makes a state cover 10% of its own benefit costs — about $50.7 million a year, starting in October 2027. Put the two together and Arkansas is facing up to $73 million in new SNAP costs it has never had to pay before.

Two things about that error rate matter.

The first is whose errors they are. When a state legislator asked the Department of Human Services in December whether the mistakes were being made by SNAP recipients or by state employees, the director of the Division of County Operations answered that there are more "agency errors than client errors." DHS is the agency Sarah Sanders's administration runs. Errors made at her department's desks are what set the size of the state's bill.

The second is that there is still no plan to pay it. The $6.7 billion state budget Sanders signed this spring did not address the gap, and the DHS budget stayed essentially flat at $1.86 billion. Asked how the agency would absorb the cost, a spokesman said officials were "continuing discussions." Blain, of the Hunger Relief Alliance, said what she has been waiting for is simple: "I believe it needs to be a line item to make sure that it's covered."

What Arkansas did find money for

On May 6, 2026, Sarah Sanders signed the state's fourth income tax cut since 2023.

Advocates had spent the spring telling legislators not to — that the food assistance shortfall was coming, and that the lower and middle classes see little from these cuts anyway. One of them, Valencia White, told reporters outside the Capitol what the arithmetic used to look like in her own house: "When they were younger, I would cry because my money didn't go as far as it should have, and I had to feed my children."

The surplus has been going the way the tax cuts push it. It was $698.4 million at the end of the 2024 budget year, $367.9 million a year later, and was projected to fall to $185.1 million by June 2026.

The state did find $1.2 million for a Chicago consulting firm called Sifter Solutions, whose job is keeping grocery stores supplied with an updated list of the products Arkansans on food assistance are no longer allowed to buy.

That is the governor's signature hunger policy. Since July 1, 2026, SNAP benefits in Arkansas cannot be used for soda — including diet soda — candy, or fruit drinks under 50% juice. Sanders has said taxpayers should not be "subsidizing poor health."

She launched it after a federal judge had already blocked the same idea elsewhere. U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson threw out the USDA's approval of the equivalent pilot programs in Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee and West Virginia, ruling that they broke federal law and that the agency had skipped its own rules for setting them up. Arkansas went ahead regardless. "Arkansas is moving full speed ahead," Sanders said, "because we won't wait around while our people get less and less healthy and we spend more and more taxpayer dollars trying to fix the problem."

Two women who volunteer at a Fayetteville church food pantry told the Arkansas Advocate that the premise is wrong to start with — that people stretching a tiny benefit are not buying junk with it. "Most people that I see that use SNAP are using it to get nutritious stuff," Wannalitha Anderson said, "but trying to tell someone what they can and can't eat [is] not going to fix anything."

The other one, Jen Cole, is on SNAP herself. She gets $20 a month, and she told the Advocate how a month of it goes: olive oil for cooking and smoked paprika, which between them took most of the benefit. "So I got that and a couple of avocados and an onion, and that was it."

The things she did do

It should be said plainly: Sanders has not done nothing.

She kept Arkansas in the federal summer grocery program for children in 2024 and again in 2025 — it served 260,000 Arkansas kids in its first year — while other Republican governors turned the same money down. She has repeatedly pointed to the law giving every Arkansas student breakfast at school regardless of family income. During the government shutdown last fall she moved $1 million out of state reserves to the food banks, in two installments.

All of it is real. None of it required her to tell Washington no.

What the record shows

Arkansas has the worst hunger in the United States, and a survey released this week put it at 37% of the state — about 1.14 million people. The federal law behind the largest food-aid cut in American history is expected to take SNAP from 25,000 Arkansans and leave the state up to $73 million in new costs that no budget has accounted for. Sarah Sanders publicly fought exactly one provision of that law, and it was the artificial intelligence provision. In the same op-ed, she called the rest of the bill a win for "moving welfare recipients off the path to dependency."

Source

Byron Tate, "Survey: New food insecurity number nears 40%," Arkansas Times, August 26, 2026. Survey details from the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance. Photo: Arkansas Times.

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

Trump Promised to Wipe Out the $19 Trillion Debt in Eight Years. This Week It Passed $40 Trillion.

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 12:04:11 +0000

On Wednesday, the national debt passed $40 trillion for the first time.

That is about $117,000 for every person in this country. About $297,000 for every household. It is roughly the size of the economies of China, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and India put together.

When Donald Trump was sworn in the first time in January 2017, the number was $19.95 trillion. It has doubled since.

He said he would pay it off

Ten years ago this spring, Trump told the country he was going to erase the whole thing.

Reason magazine went back and checked the tape on the tenth anniversary. In a March 31, 2016 interview with The Washington Post, Trump said this:

"We're not a rich country. We're a debtor nation. We've got to get rid of the $19 trillion in debt."

The Post's Bob Woodward asked him how long that would take. "Fairly quickly," Trump said. Pressed for a real answer, he gave one:

"Well, I would say over a period of eight years."

Eight years came and went. The debt did not go down. It doubled.

What the second term has actually done

Since Trump took office again in January 2025, the debt has grown by $3.8 trillion — in nineteen months. Across both of his terms it has grown by $11.6 trillion. (For the record, it grew $8.4 trillion under Joe Biden, who never promised to erase it.)

The yearly numbers are worse than the totals suggest:

The government ran a $1.8 trillion deficit in the budget year that ended last September. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a watchdog group that yells at both parties, put it plainly: "The federal government continues to borrow $5 billion per day."
This year is worse. Ten months in, we have already borrowed more than we borrowed in all of last year. The Congressional Budget Office now expects a $2.1 trillion deficit — $200 billion more than it thought in February.
July alone was a $432 billion hole. That is the fourth-worst single month in American history.
The group's president, Maya MacGuineas, updated her math this month: we are now borrowing "nearly $6 billion per day."

Interest on all that borrowing now costs more than $1 trillion a year. It is the second-biggest line in the entire federal budget — bigger than Medicare, bigger than the Pentagon. About a fifth of every tax dollar collected now goes to paying interest on money we already spent.

They were told the price. They voted for it anyway.

None of this was a surprise. The bill that did most of the damage was scored before anyone voted on it.

On July 3, 2025, House Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act 218 to 214. Trump signed it the next day. It extended his 2017 tax cuts, paid for part of them by cutting Medicaid and food aid, and raised the debt ceiling by $5 trillion — the largest increase in American history.

The Congressional Budget Office scored it at $3.4 trillion in new debt over ten years, or $4.1 trillion once the interest on that borrowing was counted. Republican leaders spent the spring telling everyone CBO was wrong.

While the bill was still moving, Speaker Mike Johnson went on CNN and called the deficit projections "dramatically overstated." He said the economy would grow fast enough to make them wrong. His exact words: "we're not buying it."

CBO has now run the numbers again — this time including the faster growth Johnson was counting on. The bill costs $4.7 trillion through 2035, or $4.2 trillion over the same ten-year window it first scored.

The estimate did not come down. Counting the growth added about $125 billion to the cost, because the bill's effect on interest rates outweighed its effect on the economy.

We have seen this exact movie twice before

Here is the part that gets left out of the story most people have in their heads.

In 2017, when Republicans were selling the last round of tax cuts, they said the same thing they said in 2025. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told the country, "Not only will this tax plan pay for itself, but it will pay down debt." Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the plan would "be revenue neutral for the government if not a revenue generator." Speaker Paul Ryan said they were "right there in the sweet spot."

The year after it passed, the deficit jumped 17 percent to $779 billion. Corporate tax collections fell 31 percent. CBO later figured the 2017 cuts would add about $1.8 trillion to deficits through 2028, before counting a dime of interest. The watchdog group's conclusion was seven words long: "Tax cuts do not pay for themselves."

And it had all happened before that. As CNBC noted at the time, deficits also rose after the tax cuts under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Three Republican presidents, three big tax cuts, three sets of promises that the cuts would pay for themselves, three explosions of debt.

"The party of fiscal responsibility"

Republicans have run on being the careful ones with money for forty years. They spent the Obama years, as CNBC put it, relentlessly attacking him over deficits and debt. The actual record runs the other way, and it isn't close.

The A-Mark Foundation, a nonpartisan research group, lined up every president since 1981 and compared the deficit for their first budget to the deficit for their last one. Its finding, in its own words:

"The four Republican presidents since 1981 (Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump—who served one term) increased the federal deficit by 94%, 67%, 1,204% and 317%, respectively."

"In the two completed Democratic presidencies since 1981 (Bill Clinton, Barack Obama), the federal deficit decreased by 150% and 53%, respectively."

Four for four one way. Two for two the other.

PolitiFact checked a version of this claim in 2019 and rated it Mostly True, with a fair caveat: presidents don't control the economy, recessions land on whoever happens to be in office, and a new president inherits the last one's budget.

That caveat is real. So look at the thing presidents do control — the bills they sign. There, the pattern is even cleaner. Reagan cut taxes and deficits rose. Bush cut taxes and deficits rose. Trump cut taxes twice and deficits rose both times.

One more fact worth sitting with: the last time this country ran a surplus was 2001. It was Bill Clinton's last budget.

DOGE was supposed to fix this

Trump's answer to the debt in his second term was DOGE, a cost-cutting operation he handed the job of slashing the federal workforce.

Almost all of what it went after was "discretionary" spending — the smallest slice of the budget. Around 60 percent of the roughly $7 trillion the government spends each year is locked into mandatory programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans' care among them — that grow on their own to keep pace with the cost of living. Another $1.1 trillion is interest.

The debt went up $3.8 trillion anyway.

What this costs you, personally

This is not an abstraction about a big number in Washington. It shows up in what you pay to borrow money.

The Budget Lab at Yale ran the math in March. Federal borrowing since 2015 has pushed long-term interest rates up about 97 basis points. For a family taking out a 30-year mortgage at today's median home price, that is about $2,500 more a year — roughly $76,000 over the life of the loan. A typical car loan costs about $120 more a year. A typical small business loan costs about $770 more.

Margaret Spellings, who runs the Bipartisan Policy Center, said it this way as the $40 trillion mark approached: "Federal debt is already raising the cost of living and choking out other spending and investment."

The debt hawks who voted for the debt

The tell isn't that Republicans borrowed money. Everybody borrows money. The tell is that they campaigned against borrowing right up until the vote.

Aaron Bean founded the House DOGE Caucus in November 2024 because the debt had hit $36 trillion. He called it "a wakeup call." Then he voted for the bill. The caucus stopped meeting, DOGE expired, and the debt went up $4 trillion.
Keith Self tells his constituents the national debt is "an existential threat to our Republic." He voted for the $3.4 trillion bill, then introduced a bill to stop bills like it.
Steve Womack is Arkansas's designated grown-up on the debt — a former Budget Committee chairman who just introduced a bipartisan fix. His press release celebrating the $3.4 trillion bill runs about five hundred words and never mentions the deficit once.
Tim Burchett said he'd probably vote no if the bill added to the deficit. The Senate sent back a version that added about $1 trillion more. He went to the White House, got a souvenir signed by Trump, and voted yes the next day.

There is a name for a party that runs on cutting the debt and then doubles it, twice, using the same promise both times. It isn't fiscal responsibility.

Sources

Al Jazeera and Reuters, "US national debt passes record $40 trillion," August 19, 2026. Photo: AFP.
Eric Boehm, Reason, "10 Years Ago Today, Trump Promised To Eliminate the National Debt. Instead, It Has Doubled," March 31, 2026.

Arkansas Threw Out Every Single Signature. Sarah Sanders Signed the Laws and Picked the Man Who Did It.

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 08:24:02 +0000

More than 95,000 Arkansans signed a petition this spring. They signed it at churches, and at the No Kings march in Little Rock. They were asking for one thing: the right to keep putting measures on their own ballot.

The state of Arkansas counted zero of those signatures.

Not "some were bad." Zero. Secretary of State Cole Jester sent Protect AR Rights a letter on July 30 saying that all 19,924 petition pages they turned in had the wrong name printed across the top, so under state law, "you have submitted zero countable signatures."

The name the attorney general approved was "The Arkansas Ballot Measure Rights Amendment." The name on the sheets left off a word and added a year. That was enough to erase every signature on every page.

Here's what makes it sting: Arkansas requires 90,704 valid signatures to put an amendment on the ballot. Protect AR Rights turned in 95,111. Nobody ever checked whether those signatures belonged to real registered voters, because a heading disqualified every page before verification could start.

Jester did give a second reason in the same letter: after his own office's culling, only 83,211 would have counted — 7,493 short of the number that triggers a check. So everything turns on how that culling was done.

They culled a man's signature for being illegible. It's the one on his driver's license.

Arkansas Times reporter Matt Campbell pulled the 19,000+ pages from Jester's own office and went looking for his name. He found it on page 12,759 — flagged as illegible.

It's the same signature he's used for more than 20 years. The same one on his Arkansas driver's license. The same one on his voter registration form. His printed name sat right next to it, perfectly readable, with his correct birthdate and address. Flagged anyway. The signature directly above his, which he says is harder to read than his own, sailed through.

He wasn't alone. A law professor in Fayetteville. A Democratic congressional candidate. A newly elected county prosecutor. A former state senator. A newspaper reporter. All flagged. Meanwhile a signature reading just "Madison," with no last name at all, was fine.

Then there are the four people who signed with an X — voters who, because of age or disability, had a canvasser fill out the rest of the form for them. Arkansas law explicitly allows this, as long as the canvasser initials the sheet. Every one of those was thrown out too.

How does the state decide? Under oath in federal court this July, Leslie Bellamy, the secretary of state's own director of elections, explained how her office catches two entries supposedly written in the same handwriting:

"We literally are having to eyeball that."

That's the process. Temporary employees, eyeballing it, deciding whose voice counts.

Every lever that did this belongs to Sarah Sanders

Here's the part that doesn't make the headlines. Sarah Sanders didn't personally cull anyone's signature. She didn't have to. She built the machine and she hired the operator.

She signed the laws. In the 2025 legislative session, Sanders signed a package of bills rewriting how Arkansans petition their own government. Her office announced the signings in batches that spring — one, then another. Lawmakers attached emergency clauses so each took effect immediately:

Act 218 — canvassers must announce that petition fraud is a crime before anyone signs.
Act 240 — canvassers must view a photo ID first.
Act 274 — the signer has to read the ballot title in front of the canvasser.
Act 241 — canvassers must file a sworn affidavit before any signature counts.
Act 273 — the Secretary of State can disqualify signatures if he decides a canvasser broke a rule.

Read that last one again, then look at what happened in July. Jester used exactly that power, writing that the petition "contains evidence of such laws being violated."

She picked the man holding the scissors. Cole Jester isn't a career elections official. He graduated from law school in 2022, clerked for six months, then spent two years as deputy chief attorney in Sanders' own governor's office. That's the whole résumé. Sanders appointed him Secretary of State in December 2024, describing him this way:

"If my team ever needs someone to do a deep dive on the law, prep for a court hearing, or craft a brilliant defense of conservative legal philosophy, one of the first people I always ask is Cole Jester."

Her lawyer now decides which Arkansans' signatures are real. A month after taking office, he held a Capitol press conference backing the very package of petition restrictions he would later use.

She picked judges on the court that heard the case. That same December announcement named Cody Hiland and Nicholas Bronni to the Arkansas Supreme Court — Hiland having already served, in Sanders' words, his "first 18 months on the Supreme Court." On August 5, seven Arkansans sued in that court, arguing the name change caused no "material confusion" and that Jester's decision "stifled Petitioners' voices."

They also point to a bipartisan law passed in 2025 that says the Secretary of State cannot rule signatures insufficient over a "failure of form." A heading printed across the top of a page is about as pure a question of form as there is.

"We're asking the Arkansas Supreme Court to let the voters decide this ballot measure, not Secretary Jester," said their attorney, Alexander Jones.

Arkansas' Supreme Court is officially nonpartisan. Republican-linked justices hold five of its seven seats.

Update, August 19: the court threw it out in one page, without explaining why

It took two weeks. Just after 6 p.m. on Wednesday, August 19, the Arkansas Supreme Court dismissed the case — Hanna v. Jester, No. CV-26-543 — and ended any chance the amendment had of reaching a ballot this year.

The court did not write an opinion. There is no reasoning to read, no vote to count, no dissent. The entire disposition is a single page from the clerk's office, and the operative sentences are these:

"Expedited consideration granted; respondent's motion to dismiss is granted. Petitioners' motion for temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction denied as moot. Motion of Bill Kopsky, individually and on behalf of Protect AR Rights, a ballot question committee, to intervene is moot."

That last line is the one to sit with. Protect AR Rights had filed to intervene precisely so it could put the individual culls in front of the court — several thousand questionable rejections, the driver's-license signature marked illegible, the four voters who signed with an X. Dismissing the case made that motion moot. The evidence of how the signatures were culled was never reached, because the case died at the heading on the page.

Protect AR Rights says it submitted 108,837 signatures on July 3, the deadline — the smaller 95,111 figure above came from the seven petitioners' complaint. Either raw number is larger than the 90,704 valid signatures the law requires. Neither was ever verified.

Jester put out a statement the same night:

"The rule of law is foundational in this country. As a constitutional lawyer and as the Secretary of State, I fight every day to make sure the law is followed as written. I am proud to announce that the Supreme Court has dismissed the lawsuit against my office, and our petition decision stands."

Protect AR Rights answered:

"We are deeply disappointed that the Arkansas Supreme Court dismissed this case without addressing the serious questions surrounding the Secretary of State's handling of more than 108,000 petition signatures. Those signatures represent Arkansans from across the state who acted in good faith because they believe the ballot initiative process belongs to the people. Signers deserve a complete and transparent review. Instead, the court's decision allows the Secretary of State to shut the door on the process without providing the public a clear explanation of why so many signatures were arbitrarily tossed."

They closed by invoking the Arkansas state motto — Regnat Populus, the people rule.

One more thing happened on August 19. Within the same hour that the docket entry landed, Sanders' office announced that she had appointed attorney Cory Cox as a special justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, filling in for Justice Barbara Webb, who has been recovering from a fall since May. Cox was chief of staff to Leslie Rutledge, the Republican now serving as lieutenant governor, when she was attorney general, and deputy legal counsel to Sanders' father when he was governor. The state constitution requires the governor to make that appointment when a justice can't serve, and the one-page order in this case names no justices at all — there is no indication Cox took part in it. But this is not the first time the arrangement has drawn an objection: when Sanders named him to hear two special-election appeals earlier this year, the Democratic Party of Arkansas objected that she should not get to pick the justice in a case where she was the defendant.

That is the shape of the whole thing. She signed the laws. She appointed the official who applied them. She has appointed judges to the court that reviews him, and named another to it the evening it ruled. And the ruling itself explains nothing.

A federal judge already called most of it unconstitutional

On July 1, U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks issued a 62-page order declaring a stack of these laws unconstitutional under the First Amendment — the photo ID requirement, the read-the-ballot-title requirement, the fraud-is-a-crime script, the affidavit rule, and a requirement that sponsors hand the state the home addresses of every paid canvasser.

That last one matters because those lists are public records. In 2024, an opposing group published the personal information of people gathering abortion-rights signatures. Brooks was blunt:

"Doxxing is a 21st Century heckler's veto, and the government should take care not to aid it. Arkansas has taken no such care here."

He was blunter about the fraud excuse. The state's own election director had testified that fraudulent signatures referred to their legal team were never actually pursued.

"Despite Defendant's hand wringing about fraud, the State of Arkansas remains stubbornly disinterested in investigating and prosecuting wrongdoers, instead opting to heap additional burdens on the sponsors and canvassers who do comply with the law."

A federal judge is saying the quiet part out loud: this was never about fraud. If it were, they'd prosecute fraud.

Instead, Jester's office hired a "petition fraud investigator" — a state employee named Patrick Hall who isn't a law enforcement officer and has no authority to arrest anyone. In February he showed up at a Unitarian Universalist church in Little Rock and asked canvassers to see their IDs.

Arkansas didn't invent that move. In 2024, Ron DeSantis sent state police to the homes of Floridians who had signed an abortion-rights petition, and defended it as part of an investigation that had already turned up fraud. Treating ordinary voters as suspects is a habit down there — Florida's attorney general at the time, Ashley Moody, once asked the FBI to investigate people who helped Floridians pay off court fines so they could register.

What Arkansans actually lose

Direct democracy is how Arkansas raised its own minimum wage over the business lobby's objection. It's how Arkansas got medical marijuana over the objection of the people running the state. It is, literally, the tool voters use when the legislature won't listen.

That's why it's being dismantled. The Fairness Project counts more than 200 bills attacking the ballot measure process nationwide since 2025 — and more than 65 in a single month at the start of 2026.

It doesn't have to go this way. In Missouri this month, voters were handed a constitutional amendment written to let any one congressional district veto a citizen-led initiative. They buried it 80% to 20%, and it lost in all eight districts. Missourians got to vote on it. Arkansans never did — their signatures were thrown out before the question could reach a ballot.

This is the third warning on our own about page: they come for your freedom to vote, your freedom to choose your politicians, and your freedom to make change. Arkansas is running all three at once.

The tell

Sanders' pattern here is not subtle. When her own Republican legislature killed her $750 million mega-prison, she recruited primary challengers against the Republicans who stopped her — and lost. When people tell her no, she goes looking for a different door.

And when someone does the job the way she wants it done, she says so out loud. Jester isn't even running to keep the office; he's running for land commissioner in November. Sanders gave him her full endorsement:

"Cole Jester did a fantastic job as my legal counsel, and he has been America's best secretary of state."

America's best secretary of state, in the same year his office threw out 95,111 signatures over a heading and flagged a reporter's driver's-license signature as unreadable.

Sarah Sanders is on the ballot this November. Jester's name will be there too, on a different line. The rest of it — the acts, the appointments, the eyeballing — was never put to a vote at all.

Source

Elizabeth L. Cline, "The ballot initiative process is rigged. Do liberals see that now?", Arkansas Times, August 18, 2026. Photo: Arkansas Times.

Updated August 20, 2026 with the Arkansas Supreme Court's dismissal of Hanna v. Jester:

Matt Campbell, "Supreme Court dismisses lawsuit challenging rejection of direct democracy amendment", Arkansas Times, August 19, 2026.
Arkansas Supreme Court, formal order in Hanna v. Jester, No. CV-26-543, August 19, 2026.
"Arkansas Supreme Court dismisses lawsuit by Protect AR Rights representatives to have ballot initiative verified", KARK, August 19, 2026.
Ainsley Platt, "Arkansas governor appoints temporary justice to state Supreme Court", Arkansas Advocate, August 19, 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.

Every State Has a Squad That Catches People Who Abuse Nursing Home Patients. Thirteen Republicans Want Them Investigating You Instead.

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 11:32:57 +0000

Every state has a small team of investigators whose job is catching people who steal from Medicaid.

They do two things. They go after the companies, clinics and caregivers who bill Medicaid for care they never gave. And they build criminal cases against people who beat, starve or neglect patients in nursing homes.

That second part is not a footnote. Last year those teams won 329 convictions for abusing or neglecting patients.

There is now a bill in Congress to give those same investigators a new target: the people who apply for Medicaid.

The Bill Is Three Phrases Long

The law that created these teams points them at "providers of" Medicaid services — the doctors, the clinics, the home care companies.

The bill inserts six words after that phrase, in every place it appears:

", and individuals applying for or receiving,"

Two more insertions do the same work on "the provision of," adding "application for" and "receipt of" — one in the same section, one in a conforming change alongside it. A start date 180 days after signing is the rest of it.

But those six words change who the investigators work on. Today they investigate the providers who take Medicaid money. Under this bill they would also investigate the people who sign up for it.

Right now they mostly can't: Arkansas has limited authority to prosecute Medicaid beneficiaries unless they are working with providers to commit fraud. Attorney General Tim Griffin said so at a press conference on August 14: "We cannot, and we know that, right? We can't go after them alone."

That limit is exactly what the bill removes.

These Teams Are Already Very Good at the Job They Have

Here's the part that makes the case for the bill hard to follow.

Last year, these investigators nationwide won 1,185 convictions and brought back nearly $2 billion. Running them cost about $424 million in federal and state money combined.

The government's own math: $4.64 comes back for every $1 spent.

That money comes from the provider side, because providers are the only side these units are allowed to work. The biggest single group convicted of fraud was home care attendants, at 326 cases.

The bill does not give these teams a single extra dollar. It just adds everyone who applies for or receives Medicaid to their workload.

So something has to give. Every hour spent going through somebody's Medicaid application is an hour not spent on a nursing home abuse case.

Who's Behind It

Ashley Moody of Florida filed the Senate version on March 24. Tom Cotton announced on August 14 that he would sign on as a cosponsor; he had not been added to the official list yet when this was written.

Derek Schmidt of Kansas filed the House version. Nine members signed on, and these are Republicans we track:

Russell Fry (South Carolina)
Tracey Mann (Kansas)
Ben Cline (Virginia)
Joe Wilson (South Carolina)
Brian Jack (Georgia)
Mike Haridopolos (Florida)
David Taylor (Ohio)
Tim Moore (North Carolina)
David Rouzer (North Carolina)

Governor Sarah Sanders stood with Cotton and Griffin at that August 14 press conference to back it.

Their Argument, and the Numbers Under It

Sanders put it this way: "When we have bad actors that cheat the system, it leaves less funding for those who really need that critical support."

Cotton added: "That's $2 billion that wouldn't have, or that should have gone to those needy individuals or rural hospitals and doctors."

Now look at what Arkansas actually found. Sanders said the state's Medicaid investigations team turned up $8 million in overpayments last year. Griffin's office reported 130 arrests, 114 convictions, more than $2.5 million paid back in criminal cases and more than $7.8 million recovered in civil ones.

Those are real numbers, and they were found under the rules we already have, by investigators already doing the work.

Now Put That Next to What They Did to Medicaid

Two days after that press conference, we wrote about the 200,000 Arkansans who could lose the coverage they have. The Trump administration refused to renew the deal that lets Arkansas run its Medicaid program the way it does, using power it got from the 2025 budget bill.

Every Arkansas Republican in Congress voted for that bill. Cotton voted for it, and two weeks after the rejection he came home to call Medicaid "an important program for sick children, pregnant women, the elderly, and the poor".

So hold the two numbers side by side:


Medicaid overpayments Arkansas found last year	$8 million
Arkansans who could lose coverage from the budget bill	200,000

The worry, they say, is that cheating "leaves less funding for those who really need that critical support."

But the budget bill is what put that support on a countdown clock — for 200,000 people nobody accused of anything.

One of those problems is getting new investigators. The other one they did on purpose.

What It Would Feel Like to You

Forget the bill for a second. Here is what changes for a regular person.

Today, if you apply for Medicaid and get something wrong on the form — the wrong month's income, an old address, the wrong number of people in your house because your grown kid moved back in — that's a paperwork problem. The state Medicaid office sorts it out. You fix it, or you pay it back.

Under this bill, that same form can land on the desk of a criminal fraud investigator. The same one who works nursing home abuse cases.

Nobody has to be charged for that to change how it feels to ask for help. And thirteen Republicans are asking for it at the same moment their own votes are taking coverage away from people who did nothing wrong at all.

Sources

The bill's full text (S. 4176, filed March 24, 2026) and the House version's cosponsor list — Congress.gov
Medicaid Fraud Control Units Annual Report: Fiscal Year 2025 — U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General
Arkansas leaders back bill to expand Medicaid fraud investigations — KATV, August 14, 2026

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.

Sarah Sanders' Voucher Program Will Cost $367 Million This Year.

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 19:59:20 +0000

On August 15, the Arkansas Department of Education said it expects about 5,500 more students to join the state's school voucher program this school year. That's roughly 50,000 kids on Educational Freedom Accounts, and a bill to taxpayers of more than $367 million.

The program is Sarah Sanders' baby. It was created by the LEARNS Act of 2023, the marquee bill of her first legislative session, and she championed it. Her spokesman, Sam Dubke, called the growth proof of "strong demand from families across the state."

Ten times bigger in four years

Watch what this thing has cost us, year by year. The numbers come from the state's own annual report, produced by the University of Arkansas:

2023–24: $37.3 million
2024–25: $93.8 million
2025–26: $309.4 million approved by the Legislature
2026–27: up to $379 million approved, with actual costs expected to top $367 million

That's a tenfold increase in four years. And the state keeps guessing low. That same University of Arkansas report projected the 2025–26 program would cost "about $277 million." Lawmakers ended up appropriating $309.4 million. This spring they went up another 22.5%.

The per-student award is climbing too — from $6,864 last year to $7,208 this year. Every year the number of students goes up, the award per student goes up, and the Legislature writes a bigger check.

Meanwhile, a legislative panel has already approved a study of a third Arkansas subsidy for private education — a $100 million tax credit on top of this — and Arkansas has opted into the new federal private school voucher that starts in January.

Only 12 out of every 100 came from a public school

The whole pitch for vouchers is rescue: kids trapped in bad public schools, finally getting a way out.

The state's own data says that is not what is happening.

In 2024–25, according to that University of Arkansas report, here is where voucher students came from:

12% had attended a public school
25% had attended a private school
17% were homeschooled
10% were first-time kindergarteners coming from preschool
3% weren't in school at all
and about a third were already in the voucher program from the year before

Twelve percent. For every one child who came out of a public school, more than three were already in a private school or homeschooled — and we started paying their bills.

That is not a rescue program. That is a subsidy for families who had already made their choice and were already paying for it themselves. We just picked up the check.

The scale tells the same story. In 2024–25 the state funded 474,337 kids in public schools and 14,256 through vouchers. The public school kids are the overwhelming majority of Arkansas children, and they are the ones whose schools are competing with a line item that has grown by more than $300 million since the program's first year.

Bill Kopsky, who directs the Arkansas Public Policy Panel, called the latest expansion "just absolutely the wrong direction for the state." He'd rather see the money go to early childhood education, special education and after-school programs — the things that actually reach the kids who need the most help.

The AI tool the governor's office announced ten months ago still doesn't exist

If you want a single example of how this program is run, use this one.

Last October, a spokesman for Sanders' office said the administration had "recently" launched an "AI screener in the ClassWallet platform to flag unusual expenses more quickly." ClassWallet is the Florida company that processes voucher payments under a $12 million state contract.

It hadn't. In April, the Education Department handed ClassWallet a 12-page memo calling its platform "fragmented, inefficient and increasingly misaligned" with what Arkansas needs. On AI-assisted review — a feature ClassWallet had pitched as "a core efficiency" when it bid for the job — the memo said the tools were "absent or materially incomplete."

Speaking to homeschool families in late May, Darrell Smith, the department's assistant commissioner for school choice, said the department had expected that technology back "in September or October of this past year," and it hadn't materialized.

And this month — ten months after the governor's office announced it was live — Smith said the state is still working with ClassWallet on developing a "pre-approval tool" that uses artificial intelligence.

The governor's office said in October that the AI screener was up and running. Ten months later, her Education Department is still trying to get one built.

It gets worse. In three years, Arkansas has changed voucher payment vendors twice. ClassWallet ran it in 2023–24. The state replaced it with an Indiana firm, Student First Technologies, for 2024–25 — then declared two months into the fall semester that the company had failed to produce a working system, and brought ClassWallet back. Last September, lawmakers approved a $4 million increase in ClassWallet's contract, up from $8 million — the department's chief of staff said that covered other work the company does for the state as well. The April memo warns Arkansas may drop the company again anyway.

What we're actually buying

Sanders and Education Secretary Jacob Oliva point to rising scores on ATLAS, the state's own end-of-year exam, where overall proficiency went from 36.9% in 2025 to 42.2% in 2026. Oliva told the State Board of Education this month that the gains are due to LEARNS.

Read that number again. 42.2% proficient means most Arkansas students still are not proficient.

There's a bigger problem with using that score to defend vouchers: ATLAS is a public school test. The private schools cashing the voucher checks don't have to give it. So the number the governor points to measures the half of LEARNS that isn't the expensive half.

As for whether vouchers themselves improve learning, the Democrat-Gazette, citing EdWeek, noted that comparing voucher students to public school students is difficult because the two aren't held to the same accountability rules — and that earlier studies of programs like Arkansas' often found either no effect on test scores or worse outcomes.

We do know what the oversight looks like. A private school in the program had students scrub floors as punishment and directed a room full of kids to attack a 13-year-old classmate. Its founder pleaded guilty to criminal charges. The state was paying tuition there the whole time — more than $300,000 in public money.

The bottom line

Sarah Sanders built a program that costs ten times what it did four years ago, sends most of its money to families who were never in public school to begin with, and runs on a payment system her own department calls broken.

She calls that strong demand. Arkansans never got to vote on any of it, and the roughly 474,000 kids still in our public schools are the ones competing with it for money.

Source

Arkansas officials expect 5,500 more freedom account students for 2026-27, or about 50,000 total — Josh Snyder, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, August 15, 2026. Photo: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Adam Vogler.

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.

Sarah Sanders Tried to Punish the Republicans Who Killed Her Prison. She Went 0 for 3.

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 07:40:23 +0000

On August 14, the Arkansas Times ran a piece asking a question that would have sounded ridiculous two years ago: could a Libertarian nobody had heard of have the best shot at beating our governor?

The Libertarian is Colt Shelby, a sixth-generation Franklin County man who works in oil and gas and says he "was not political at all" before 2024. He isn't in this race because he wanted to be a politician. He's in it because Sarah Sanders tried to build a 3,000-bed prison a mile from his property without telling anybody first.

That's the part worth sitting with. Sanders didn't get a challenger from the left. She got one from a rural county where more than three in four voters had picked her for governor two years earlier. And before Shelby ever filed to run, those same voters and their legislators had already beaten her — five times in her own Republican Senate. Then she tried to make them pay for it, and lost that fight too.

Here's how a governor with a Republican supermajority ends up losing to Republicans.

A prison nobody was told about

On Halloween 2024, Sanders announced that the state had already bought 815 acres north of Charleston in Franklin County. The land cost $2.9 million, and it was going to hold the largest prison in Arkansas history.

Nobody in Franklin County was asked. Not the county officials, not the utilities, not the people who live there. They found out when the rest of us did. And when public records requests later pried the emails loose, they showed state officials had intentionally hidden the purchase — and were passing around South Park clips to mock the residents who were upset about it.

A week after the announcement, more than 1,800 people packed the Charleston High School gym to tell the state no. That is an enormous turnout for a rural county. It did not change her mind.

Then there was the price. The first number Sanders gave the public was $470 million. Emails obtained through a records request showed that an architectural firm's initial estimate was $1.2 billion — more than two and a half times what she told us. By the time her allies went to the Legislature for money, the ask was $750 million, and adding the $75 million left over from Asa Hutchinson's administration put the estimated construction cost at $825 million, according to the California firm the state hired to run the project.

So: a secret purchase, a site the community rejected, and a cost that nearly doubled the moment anyone checked her math.

Her own Republican Senate said no. Five times.

Money bills in Arkansas need a three-fourths vote — 27 of the 35 state senators. Sanders' party holds far more seats than that. This should have been easy.

It wasn't. Senate Bill 354, the $750 million prison appropriation, was voted down over and over during the 2025 session. On the fifth and final try, it got 21 yes votes — still six short — with nine senators voting no and five more voting "present," which does the same job as a no. Seven of the nine no votes were Republicans.

Their objections weren't left-wing. Sen. Bryan King (R-Green Forest) called the project "fiscally irresponsible" and said the "only winners" would be the contractors hired to plan and build it. He pointed at Utah, which built a mega-prison, blew the budget, and then couldn't staff it. His alternative was to fund mental health treatment, help county jails, and add beds to prisons Arkansas already owns.

That is a conservative argument about wasting money, made by conservatives, and Sanders could not answer it. She didn't even try again during the 2026 fiscal session.

Then she went after the Republicans who stopped her

This is where it stops being a budget dispute and becomes a story about how our governor uses her office.

Sanders' response to losing a policy fight was to try to remove the legislators who beat her. In the March 3, 2026 primaries, she recruited challengers against two of them and backed a loyal incumbent in a third Senate race. She lost all three.

Sen. Ron Caldwell (R-Wynne) voted against the prison money all five times. Sanders hand-picked a challenger for him: Trey "BoDirt" Bohannan, a businessman with no political experience whom she described as "somebody I have known for a long time" and had handed a Small Business of the Month award in 2024.

Her candidate had a problem. His campaign told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette he'd lived in the district "for almost three years," but he had changed his voter registration into the district on October 21, 2025 — exactly one week before announcing his campaign. His own divorce filings put him in Jefferson County, outside the district, into November 2024. And for a candidate who called himself a huge Trump supporter, state records show he didn't vote at all in 2024. He got a late endorsement from Kid Rock. Caldwell beat him with about 70% of the vote.

Sen. Bryan King (R-Green Forest), the prison's loudest critic in the Legislature, drew a Sanders-backed challenger too — Bobby Ballinger Jr., son of the former senator King had already beaten in 2022. King took 60% and sent another Ballinger home.

Sen. Blake Johnson (R-Corning) had Sanders on his side and had held his seat since 2015. Rep. Jeremy Wooldridge beat him with over 62%, winning three of the district's four counties.

Three races. Three losses. In Republican primaries, in deep-red districts, against a sitting Republican governor's full public support.

She still won't say the site was wrong

Nearly two years and $2.9 million later, the land sits there. In April 2026, the Department of Corrections said flatly that "the project has been on hold for several months now with no new developments" and that "no work has been done outside of routine maintenance and upkeep." Sanders didn't ask for prison construction money in her budget for the coming year. She asked instead to spend the leftover $75 million on adding bed space to relieve county jails and on recidivism programs — much closer to what Bryan King had been proposing than to what she'd spent two years fighting for.

But she has not admitted she was wrong about the site. Asked about it, she said:

"I still firmly believe that we have to expand capacity and I've yet to see a better alternative than the Franklin County location."

Adam Watson, one of the Franklin County residents who organized against the prison, had a short answer to that: "I think if the governor is saying she hasn't heard any better ideas, then that just means she is not listening." Asked what would finally convince him the project was dead, he said it would take "When the ink is dry on a deed" handing those 815 acres to someone other than the state.

That's what our governor has earned in Franklin County. Not disagreement — distrust. They don't believe she'll stop.

Two years spent on this

Remember what all of this was supposed to be about. Sanders sold the prison as being tough on crime.

Arkansas already locks up its people at one of the highest rates in the country. We're still one of the least safe states in America — CNBC's 2026 rankings gave Arkansas a D– for quality of life and put us near the bottom for crime anyway. Building the biggest prison in state history on land that turned out to be a poor fit geologically and hydrologically was never going to fix that. Bryan King said so out loud, to his own party, and got a primary challenger for his trouble.

Meanwhile the things that actually determine whether Arkansans are safe, fed, and healthy haven't moved. We're still dead last in the country for food insecurity. We're still 49th of 50 for overall health. She has been governor since 2023.

The money doesn't scare them anymore

Which brings us back to Shelby, and to the reason a Libertarian with no money is suddenly worth writing about.

Sanders has raised $7.7 million and had more than $5 million in the bank as of the end of June. Shelby has raised just under $25,000. That is not a close race on paper, and Sanders is still the clear favorite in November.

Shelby's argument is that in Arkansas in 2026, the governor's backing has become a liability:

"Money does matter, but it doesn't always matter... All these guys were outspent and outgunned, and they all won because their opponents were endorsed by the governor."

He isn't making that up. That's exactly what happened to Bohannan, to Ballinger, and to Johnson. And Sanders keeps making it easier — she skipped the one debate her challengers showed up for in June, leaving an empty chair on the stage while they spent an hour on her record.

Shelby's own summary is the sharpest thing anybody has said about the governor's standing with her own party this year:

"The worst thing that could happen to my campaign at this point would be if the governor endorsed me."

A governor whose endorsement is a punchline in her own primaries isn't strong. She's just well-funded. Franklin County figured that out first. We deserve better.

Source

Colt Following: Could Libertarian candidate Colt Shelby have the best shot against Gov. Sarah Sanders? — Matt Campbell, Arkansas Times, August 14, 2026. Photo: Colt Shelby for Governor, via Arkansas Times.

200,000 Arkansans Could Lose the Coverage They Have. The Rule Doing It Came From the Bill Arkansas's Republicans Passed.

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:37:57 +0000

About 200,000 low-income Arkansans are about to find out what a paperwork rule can do to a doctor's appointment.

The Trump administration has told Arkansas officials it will not renew the state's 13-year-old Medicaid waiver — the agreement that lets Arkansas run its Medicaid expansion the way it does. The reason federal officials gave, reported by Phil Galewitz of KFF Health News, is that the waiver doesn't comply with new "budget neutrality" rules taking effect in January. CMS has not finalized the decision.

Those rules exist because of a law. And that law had Arkansas fingerprints all over it.

What Arkansas is about to lose

Arkansas did something unusual when it expanded Medicaid in 2013. Instead of putting newly eligible adults into traditional Medicaid, the state got a waiver to buy them private Affordable Care Act marketplace plans. Arkansas calls it the "private option," and a Democratic governor and a Republican legislature built it together.

The point of doing it that way was access. Some doctors won't take traditional Medicaid, because it pays less. Private coverage pays more, so more doctors say yes. The move helped cut the state's uninsured rate by nearly half.

If the waiver goes away, Arkansas officials say they will keep covering the same people — but through regular Medicaid instead, a change that could leave enrollees with access to fewer doctors and other health providers.

Same person. Same income. Fewer places that will see them.

The state asked for a five-year renewal. CMS told Arkansas that wasn't happening. Arkansas is now asking for two years.

Where the rule came from

Here is the part that matters for anyone deciding how to vote in November.

CMS is citing authority granted under the 2025 Republican budget bill — H.R. 1, the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act." Before that law, the federal government checked retroactively whether a state's waiver had kept its budget promises. In June, the administration announced it would no longer approve or renew any waiver unless CMS certified up front that it wouldn't increase federal costs.

The agency's own guidance says the new waiver rules are expected to reduce federal spending.

Robert Nelb, policy director at America's Essential Hospitals, said that when the bill passed, he and most experts believed it was merely writing existing CMS policy on budget neutrality into law. The administration has instead read it as a tool to restrict how states use waivers at all.

Nicole Huberfeld, a health law professor at Boston University, was blunter:

"What we have here is a sneaky way to cut Medicaid expansion and the Medicaid program."

Huberfeld also made the point that ought to worry the people who voted for this most: because the changes run through obscure regulatory machinery, Medicaid enrollees who lose coverage won't know whom to blame.

So let's make that easy.

The votes

On July 3, 2025, the House passed H.R. 1 by 218 to 214. All four of Arkansas's Republican congressmen voted for it:

Rick Crawford — Aye
French Hill — Aye
Steve Womack — Aye
Bruce Westerman — Aye

Two days earlier, the Senate had passed it 50 to 50, with the vice president breaking the tie. Tom Cotton voted yes.

In the Senate, 50–50 means one Republican switching would have sunk it. In the House, two would have. Arkansas's delegation didn't go along with a done deal. They made it a done deal.

This is the same delegation whose record we laid out in what Arkansas's Republicans in Congress are costing you — a state already ranked 49th of 50 on the measures we track, whose own members voted to cut the programs propping it up.

What the governor's office is saying

Sarah Sanders' administration is now trying to negotiate a temporary extension. Her spokesman Sam Dubke told KFF Health News the goal is "to ensure impacted Arkansans maintain access to quality, affordable healthcare during this transition period."

Then he said this:

"Looking ahead to the next legislative session, CMS has provided the state with an opportunity for bold, conservative healthcare reform, and the governor will work with her partners in the legislature to build a sustainable model that maintains the same high quality of care and saves taxpayer dollars."

Read that again. The federal government has told Arkansas it will not renew the waiver covering 200,000 people, and the governor's office is calling it an opportunity. "Saves taxpayer dollars" is doing a lot of work in that sentence — the taxpayer dollars in question are what pays for those people's coverage.

It gets worse from here

Arkansans on Medicaid expansion were already headed into a rough winter before any of this:

Starting in January, they must prove they work or qualify for an exemption to keep coverage, under the same law.
One of the two private insurers in the program, Centene, announced in July it is pulling out at the end of the year.
And Arkansas has already lost 14,441 people off its Obamacare marketplace coverage since the premium tax credits lapsed.

Now add the waiver.

Arkansas is not alone. It is one of a dozen states whose waiver expires December 31. Georgia, which has added about 18,000 people to Medicaid under its waiver, and California, which uses its waiver to cover food and housing services, are both still negotiating with CMS. Indiana, Michigan, New Hampshire and Iowa all expanded Medicaid using waivers too.

The overall law cuts Medicaid spending by about $900 billion over a decade. About a third of the nearly $600 billion the federal government spent on Medicaid and CHIP in 2024 went to programs created by waivers, according to CMS.

That's the size of the lever the administration just picked up — handed to it, on a 218–214 vote and a tiebreaker, by people who are on the ballot this year.

Source

Phil Galewitz, KFF Health News, republished by the Arkansas Advocate: "Trump Team's Use of Arcane Budget Rule Threatens Medicaid Coverage." Photo: John Sykes / Arkansas Advocate.

Tom Cotton Came Home to Praise Medicaid. Two Weeks Earlier, 200,000 Arkansans' Coverage Got an Expiration Date.

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 10:37:09 +0000

On July 31, the Trump administration rejected Arkansas's request to renew ARHOME — the state's hybrid Medicaid expansion, which covers more than 200,000 low-income Arkansans. The waiver runs out December 31.

Two weeks later, Tom Cotton was back in Arkansas for a day and a half of looking folksy — a fish fry in North Little Rock, a hard hat at the North Little Rock Rail Yards. Then he stood next to Attorney General Tim Griffin at a press conference announcing a federal Medicaid-fraud bill, and said this:

"Medicaid is an important program for sick children, pregnant women, the elderly, and the poor."

That is a lovely sentence. It's also a sentence from a man who voted for the law that just put 200,000 of those people's coverage on a countdown clock.

What actually happened to ARHOME

ARHOME isn't some fringe program. Arkansas built it in 2013 as a compromise between a Democratic governor and a Republican legislature — instead of enrolling people in traditional Medicaid, the state uses the money to buy them private insurance. Republicans in Arkansas have defended it for over a decade precisely because it isn't government-run coverage.

The federal government rejected the renewal on budget neutrality grounds. In plain English: the rules require the program not to cost Washington more than it would have spent without it, and under the new federal law, Arkansas couldn't clear that bar. Separately, Centene — one of the two insurers selling coverage through ARHOME — announced in July that it would leave the program next year, though the state says that decision is unrelated to the federal rejection.

The rules that tightened? Those came from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — Trump's budget bill. Cotton voted for it.

Arkansas has since gone back and asked for a two-year reprieve to keep the program alive through 2028. That is what a state does when the floor gives out.

Cotton's answer: it wasn't really me

Asked directly about his vote and what it did, Cotton didn't defend the cut. He reframed it until it belonged to somebody else.

First, he described the budget bill as basically a fraud crackdown:

"It was the large budget bill last year that was designed in part to try to crack down on various kinds of Medicaid fraud across the country."

Then he described the provision squeezing ARHOME as a formality that changed nothing:

"It simply codified a longstanding internal practice at the Department of Health and Human Services when it comes to the Medicaid expansion under Obamacare."

If it simply codified a longstanding practice — if nothing changed — then why did a program that had been renewed for over a decade suddenly fail the test?

And finally, he handed the problem to Little Rock:

"It's primarily a decision for our legislature and the Governor, but Senator Boozman and I and our four Congressmen stand ready to help any way we can as they move forward."

Read that as a voter. The U.S. senator who voted for the federal law says the consequences of that federal law are a state problem, and he stands ready to help with them.

"Con artists and criminals"

Here's the full version of Cotton's warm words about Medicaid, with the part that usually gets left out of the clip:

"Medicaid is an important program for sick children, pregnant women, the elderly, and the poor. We don't want to just crack down on con artists and criminals, but we want to make sure that Medicaid funds are being spent on those who need it most, or going to our doctors and our hospitals in rural areas who are struggling."

Notice what the sentence does. It splits Medicaid recipients into two piles — the deserving sick children and the "con artists and criminals" — and then justifies the cut as protection for the first pile.

But budget neutrality isn't a fraud rule. It's an accounting rule. It didn't find a single con artist in Arkansas. It found that ARHOME's math no longer worked under the new federal formula, and 200,000 people are the ones holding the bag.

Cotton has spent a career warning Arkansans about socialism. The moment his own state's Medicaid program actually broke, he discovered that Medicaid is an important program.

What this costs Arkansas

Arkansas is not a state with slack in the system. The Commonwealth Fund ranks it 48th of 51 on health care access, affordability, equity and outcomes, and 49th in infant mortality — 7.7 deaths per 1,000 live births against a national average of 5.6 — and the state consistently posts high maternal mortality too.

KFF's allocation of the law's Medicaid cuts puts Arkansas's share at $8.9 billion in lost federal Medicaid funding over ten years, about 11% of what Washington would otherwise have spent on the state's program. A report from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform found the cuts could shut down more than half of Arkansas's rural hospitals.
Arkansas health care providers were already alarmed within days of the ARHOME rejection.
This is on top of the 14,441 Arkansans who lost Obamacare coverage when the enhanced tax credits expired — a separate hit, from the same crowd.

Add it up and you get the picture we laid out in what Arkansas's Republicans in Congress are costing you. ARHOME is the newest line item.

The pattern

This is the second time this year Cotton has taken a position and then acted like he'd always been somewhere else. He spent his entire career attacking any deal with Iran — until Trump made one, at which point the objection evaporated.

The move is the same both times. Cotton doesn't reverse himself out loud. He just narrates his way to a version of events where the thing he voted for isn't the thing that happened.

Two hundred thousand Arkansans don't get that option. Their coverage expires December 31, and no amount of standing ready to help changes the date.

Source

Elizabeth L. Cline, "Tom Cotton comes home to praise Medicaid, which he helped imperil," Arkansas Times, Aug. 14, 2026. Photo: Elizabeth L. Cline / Arkansas Times.

More Than 40 Republicans Just Asked the Attorney General Not to Defend a 92-Year-Old Gun Law in Court

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:07:38 +0000

Since 1934, if you wanted to buy a silencer, a short-barreled rifle, or a sawed-off shotgun in America, you had to register it with the federal government. Fingerprints. Paperwork. A background check. A $200 tax stamp. That law — the National Firearms Act — was written during the gangster era for exactly the categories of weapon Congress decided were too dangerous to sell over a counter like a scope or a sling.

On August 5, 2026, a federal judge in Texas threw the registration requirement out.

Six days later, more than 40 congressional Republicans wrote to the Attorney General asking him not to fight it.

What the judge did

U.S. District Judge James Hendrix ruled that the National Firearms Act's registration scheme can no longer be enforced against suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns. He wrote the order to reach only the parties to the case — two consolidated lawsuits whose plaintiffs include fifteen states, Gun Owners of America, the NRA's Texas affiliate and a set of manufacturers and retailers, plus those companies' current and future customers — and held it for a week so the government could appeal.

His reasoning turned on something Congress itself did. The NFA has always been justified as a tax law — the registration and paperwork were legal because they helped collect the $200 tax. In Trump's 2025 budget bill, Republicans set that tax to zero for these three categories. Hendrix concluded that when the tax went away, the constitutional basis for the paperwork went with it.

"No longer can the challenged NFA provisions be justified — as they have been for nearly 90 years — under Congress's taxing power."

Adam Skaggs, chief counsel at the Giffords Law Center, described what was actually lost: "That process effectively functioned as a heightened background check for NFA weapons, and that process is no longer enforceable."

So Republicans zeroed out the tax in a budget bill. A judge then used the missing tax to strike down the background check. And now the same members of Congress are writing to make sure nobody appeals.

What the letter asks for

On August 11, 2026, Senator Steve Daines and Andrew Clyde sent a letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche with three requests:

Don't appeal. They ask DOJ "to decline any appeal of the court's decision."
Apply it to everyone, right now. Apply the ruling "nationwide to all persons, regardless of whether they are formally covered by the court's injunction."
Make it permanent. Start rulemaking "to rescind or amend the challenged NFA regulations as to untaxed firearms," and don't wait for that process to finish before changing enforcement practice.

Read that first item again. These are members of Congress asking the government's own lawyer to stop defending a federal statute in court.

That's not a policy disagreement. Congress has a way to repeal a law: pass a bill. They've tried — Michael Cloud has a bill to strike silencers from the National Firearms Act entirely and void state silencer taxes and registration rules on top. It hasn't passed. So the ask here is for the executive branch to deliver by non-enforcement what the legislative branch couldn't deliver by vote.

The man who led it sells the products

Andrew Clyde owns two gun stores — Clyde Armory, which by his own account "currently operates two brick-and-mortar locations in Georgia."

That is not an insinuation; it's his business. And it's the second time this month he's asked a federal agency to unwind gun rules that touch what he sells. On August 5 — the very day the Texas ruling came down — Clyde led a separate letter asking the ATF to start destroying firearm transaction records, the records police use to trace guns recovered at crime scenes.

Destroy the trace records. Skip the appeal on registration. Two letters, six days apart, from a sitting congressman who runs gun shops.

Who signed

Thirty-three of the signers have a report card on this site.

In the Senate: Roger Marshall joined Daines, along with John Barrasso, John Cornyn, Mike Crapo, Mike Lee, and Cynthia Lummis.

In the House, the signers include Brian Babin, Sheri Biggs, Andy Biggs, Lauren Boebert, Josh Brecheen, Tim Burchett, Eric Burlison, Kat Cammack, Ben Cline, Michael Cloud, Mike Collins, Eli Crane, Warren Davidson, Scott DesJarlais, Morgan Griffith, Clay Higgins, Richard Hudson, Mary Miller, Riley Moore, Ralph Norman, Jimmy Patronis, Scott Perry, Derek Schmidt, Austin Scott, Keith Self, Pete Sessions, Victoria Spartz, Claudia Tenney, Derrick Van Orden, Randy Weber, and Bruce Westerman.

Some of these names should look familiar. Jimmy Patronis filed what gun media called the first bill ever written to fully repeal America's machine gun ban — the single sentence of federal law that also makes Glock switches illegal. Michael Cloud wants silencers treated like accessories. Clyde wants the trace records gone.

This letter is where those separate efforts converge on one target.

What registration was actually doing

Gun-rights groups describe suppressors as hearing protection. The Giffords Law Center's research says the hearing math doesn't work: a gunshot exceeds 140 decibels, the most effective silencers cut about 28 decibels, and ordinary dual ear protection cuts 40 to 50.

What silencers do reliably is make gunfire harder to recognize and harder to locate.

In 2023 alone, the ATF recovered and traced more than 400 silencers from crime scenes.
When a gunman opened fire in Virginia Beach in 2019 with a silenced .45-caliber handgun, survivors said they thought they heard a nail gun — so they didn't evacuate.
Three months before the 2023 Lewiston, Maine mass shooting, the gunman tried to buy a silencer and was denied. On the federal form required to complete the transfer he checked the box saying he had been committed to a mental institution, and the store's staff read it and refused to hand the silencer over.

That last one is the whole argument in a single fact. The paperwork worked. It stopped a sale to a man who went on to commit a mass shooting three months later. That paperwork — the NFA's registration and application requirements — is what this letter asks the Justice Department to stop enforcing.

The pattern

Every step of this happened in public and each step looked small on its own.

A tax rate set to zero, buried in a budget bill. A district court ruling in one Texas courthouse. A letter on Senate letterhead.

Put together, they make a 92-year-old federal registration requirement unenforceable for three categories of weapon — for the plaintiffs now, and for everyone if the Justice Department does what the letter asks — without a single floor vote to repeal it, and with a request that the government decline to defend the law on appeal so no higher court ever reviews the question.

If you live in one of these members' districts, they signed their name to that.

Source

"Daines, Clyde Lead Letter Urging DOJ to Protect Second Amendment Rights, Apply Ruling Nationwide", Office of Sen. Steve Daines, August 11, 2026, including the full signatory list. Ruling coverage: Associated Press, "Texas Judge Strikes Down Law Regulating Firearm Suppressors and Some Guns", August 10, 2026.

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.

Sarah Sanders Says LEARNS Is Working. The Test She's Citing Is the One Arkansas Built Itself.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:48:31 +0000

On August 10, Baker Kurrus published what he said may be his last article about Arkansas public schools. He is an attorney in Little Rock, and he was superintendent of the Little Rock School District in 2015 and 2016. He has spent about two years writing long, careful, fact-heavy pieces about what the LEARNS Act would do to the state.

He ended this one like this:

"I am reduced to watching the state I love so deeply commit educational and economic suicide, and all I can say is that I told you so."

The "I told you so" is the part worth sitting with. Kurrus wrote down his predictions in advance. Nearly every one of them came true.

The scoreboard the state built for itself

Two months ago, Sarah Sanders put out a press release with a headline that could not be clearer: "LEARNS is Working: Student Test Scores Rise Across the Board."

The numbers in it are real. Since 2024, math proficiency went from 36.4% to 44.2%. Science went from 35.6% to 44.0%. English went from 33.8% to 39.5%. Overall proficiency went from 35% to 42%.

"Arkansas LEARNS is working and students across Arkansas are doing better because of it," Sanders said.

Two things about that.

First, "proficiency has risen by more than 20%" is doing some work. Going from 35% to 42% is a gain of seven percentage points. Calling that "more than 20%" is technically true, and it sounds twice as big as it is.

Second, and this is Kurrus's actual point: every one of those numbers comes from ATLAS — the Arkansas Teaching, Learning, and Assessment System. Arkansas wrote that test. Arkansas set the standards it measures. Kurrus explains what that means:

"The trick there is to keep the standards simple and keep the test at a level that is easy to master."

He is not saying anyone cheated. He is saying that when the state that wants the good news also gets to write the exam and decide what counts as passing, the good news is not worth much on its own. He predicted the ATLAS scores would keep climbing. He also predicted what the national test would show.

The national test says Arkansas is falling behind

The National Assessment of Educational Progress is the one test given the same way in every state. People call it the nation's report card. It's the clearest way to compare Arkansas to anywhere else.

By that measure, Arkansas has been going backwards — and not slowly. The Arkansas Times walked through the numbers from a state Department of Education presentation:

4th grade math, 2013: Arkansas was one point behind the national average. 2024: seven points behind. The nation dropped four points over that decade. Arkansas dropped ten.
4th grade reading, 2013: Arkansas was two points behind. 2024: four points behind.

Scores fell almost everywhere in the country. Arkansas fell faster. And this isn't a critic's spin on the data — it's what Sanders' own education secretary told lawmakers. Jacob Oliva said Arkansas had been following the national decline "if not at the same level, a more rapid level."

That is the same Jacob Oliva who said in June that "the plan is working."

So: on the test Arkansas built, Arkansas is improving. On the test everyone takes, Arkansas is losing ground faster than the rest of the country. The governor's press release reports results from only one of them. Its single reference to the national test is a line at the bottom noting that the next NAEP results are not expected until late 2026 or early 2027.

Half of LEARNS isn't even on the scoreboard

Here's the part that should bother everybody, whatever you think about vouchers.

The centerpiece of LEARNS is the voucher program — Educational Freedom Accounts. Lawmakers approved up to $379 million for it this year, and Kurrus puts the real cost at close to $400 million. And the private schools cashing those checks don't have to give ATLAS. They don't have to give any one test. They don't report results to the state the way public schools do.

Read that against the press release again. "LEARNS is working" is a claim about the whole law. The evidence offered is a test score from the public school students — the part of the system LEARNS is drawing money away from. The voucher half, the expensive half, the part that is actually new, contributes nothing to that number at all.

When the state did try to report on voucher students, the result was a mess. A mandated annual report released in October 2025 said EFA students outperformed 57% of students nationally in math and 59% in English. But as KATV reported, those students took 17 different tests. April Reisma of the Arkansas Education Association put it plainly: "You're comparing apples to oranges."

The same report claimed potential savings to the state of $12 million to $22 million. Its own data showed only 12% of voucher students were known to have switched out of public school. At least 42% were already in private school or homeschooled.

The people grading the program are paid by the people who wanted it

Kurrus raises the funding question directly, and he names names:

"The University of Arkansas Office for Education Policy has lots of positive things to say about LEARNS. That's not surprising. The office is partially funded through grants from voucher proponents – think the Walton Family Foundation – and it certainly seems to find ways to keep getting those large grants."

That checks out. In June 2024, the Office for Education Policy announced it had been awarded $1.175 million from the Walton Family Foundation over three years.

And the new three-year evaluation of the voucher program itself? Also funded by the Walton Family Foundation, announced in July 2026, run out of the same University of Arkansas department, with support from that same office. The state's mandated annual report on vouchers is co-produced with that department too.

None of that proves any researcher is bending a finding. But it means the state's official evidence that vouchers work is largely produced by an operation kept running by the foundation that spent years pushing for vouchers. If you would find that arrangement suspicious coming from a union or an environmental group, it should read the same way here.

Kurrus asked the researchers a question that doesn't need a grant to answer:

"I want the folks there to explain how students who were already in private schools or already home schooled will attain higher academic achievement simply because public tax dollars are now used to pay the costs that their parents paid before."

$400 million to change nothing

That question lands because of what Kurrus laid out in part one of this series in June.

There are 54,442 voucher applications pending for this school year. About $320 million of the money, he calculates, goes to families who are doing exactly what they were already doing and planned to keep doing — just with the state paying now.

The homeschool numbers make the case by themselves. Homeschool vouchers went from 3,422 to 11,286 in one year. Over that same stretch, the total number of homeschoolers in Arkansas went down by roughly 2,000. Eight thousand more checks. Two thousand fewer homeschoolers.

Meanwhile the promise — rescuing kids from failing schools — barely happened. The last official LEARNS report showed 3% of voucher students had left public schools graded D or F.

And the schools taking the money answer to almost nobody. Private schools don't have to follow the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Their teachers don't have to be certified. They can turn down any child for any reason. That last one is what Kurrus can't get past:

"School choice is not parental choice. Parents apply, then private schools make the choice of the students they want and don't want, getting paid for the number of students they accept."

We've seen where thin oversight goes. A private school in the Delta collected more than $300,000 in voucher money while its founder had students attack a 13-year-old and made kids scrub floors as punishment. She pleaded guilty. The checks kept coming.

Her father saw it the exact opposite way

The sharpest thing in Kurrus's two columns is the family history.

In 2002, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled in Lake View School District v. Huckabee that the state must provide an adequate and equitable education to every child — and that the state can hand the job to school districts but can never hand off the responsibility.

The Huckabee in that case name is Mike Huckabee, Sanders' father. He didn't fight the ruling. In his 2003 State of the State address, he proposed consolidating districts with fewer than 1,500 students, because small schools couldn't offer a full curriculum. In 2004 he signed a bill forcing districts that stayed under 350 students two years running to consolidate.

Arkansas had gone from 4,711 school districts in 1927 down to 240 by 2010. That was a century of deliberate work, and Mike Huckabee pushed it forward.

His daughter's law runs it in reverse. By Kurrus's count, the state will soon fund at least 228 more schools and districts than it did before LEARNS — including about 100 microschools that average around 15 students each, the exact kind of tiny, thinly-staffed school the consolidation era existed to end.

The lawsuit he sees coming

Kurrus closes with a warning that isn't rhetorical:

"Some day, some child who comes out of a micro school, a private school or even a home school might just sue this state because it failed to provide an adequate education. The constitution requires it, Gov. Mike Huckabee acknowledged it, and Lake View confirmed it."

The state can delegate the teaching. It cannot delegate the accountability. And Arkansas is now writing checks to hundreds of schools it openly does not have the staff to inspect.

That's the trajectory. A second state voucher program is already being studied at the Capitol — a $3,000 refundable tax credit that Kurrus calls "a wasteful example of political grandstanding." A federal voucher with no cap on its cost starts in Arkansas on January 1. And in Washington, 37 House Republicans have signed on to a one-sentence bill to abolish the Department of Education entirely.

Nine out of ten American children go to a public school, and Arkansas is no exception. Those parents are being handed a rising number from a test the state wrote itself, while the national scorecard says their kids are falling further behind — and while hundreds of millions a year go to schools that are not required to report a comparable score at all.

The man who ran Little Rock's schools called it two years ago, in writing, and got it right. We deserve better.

Source

Baker Kurrus, "State committing educational, economic suicide, former Supt. Baker Kurrus says," Arkansas Times, August 10, 2026 — part two of a two-part series. Photo: Arkansas Times.

Sarah Sanders Gave Arkansas Two Voucher Programs. A Republican Wants a Third — and the Selling Point Is That It Has Fewer Rules.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 09:32:22 +0000

On August 3, the Arkansas House and Senate education committees met at the state Capitol. The next day, the news out of that meeting was that a legislative panel had approved a request to study a new $100 million tax credit for private school and homeschool families.

That would be Arkansas's third program for subsidizing private education costs.

The state already runs Educational Freedom Accounts, the voucher program Sarah Sanders created with the LEARNS Act in 2023. Arkansas has also opted into the new federal private school voucher that starts January 1. Now a Republican state representative wants to add a third — and his argument for it is worth reading closely, because he is not hiding what it's for.

What's being proposed

Rep. Brit McKenzie of Rogers asked for the interim study. The proposal outlines:

A tax credit worth up to $3,000 per child for education expenses — tuition, fees, textbooks, curriculum, tutoring, educational therapies, transportation, and technology.
A $100 million program starting in 2027.
Expansion to "uncapped universal availability" in 2029.
The credit would be refundable — meaning, per the study proposal, families could claim it even if they have no income tax liability at all, and get the balance as a payment.

McKenzie has not written a bill. "I would love (lawmakers) to consider" it, he said, but added: "I have no bills drafted for next session." What he has is a study, approved, with a mandate to gather input from state agencies, education providers, parent advocacy groups, and other states.

The pitch is that it skips the paperwork

Here is McKenzie's stated reason for wanting a second state program alongside the one Arkansas already has:

"Basically, this would be for anyone interested in school choice and not in EFA."

He said lawmakers have heard from homeschool families reluctant to apply for Educational Freedom Accounts because the program "did create regulation whereas they didn't have it before."

That is the sales pitch: a version with fewer rules attached.

It's worth knowing how few rules we're talking about. Educational Freedom Account families do have to take a norm-referenced test each year — but they get to choose which test. In June, lawmakers tightened things slightly: no using the money on sports that "limit participation based on tryouts or ability," and pre-approval now required to be reimbursed for anything the Arkansas Department of Education doesn't count as a "core educational expense."

Those are the "regulatory hurdles" the new program is designed to route around.

McKenzie's own framing was blunt: "My main thing is, I want a buffet of education freedom in Arkansas."

Meanwhile, the first program keeps growing

Arkansas is not short on ways to spend money on private education right now.

Educational Freedom Accounts opened to every K-12 student in the state last year. Lawmakers have approved up to $379 million for 2026-27, with most participants getting $7,208 each, and more than 54,000 students have applied.

Getting there took three separate votes. As the Arkansas Advocate laid out, lawmakers budgeted more than $187 million for the program in April 2025 — then had to add $90 million that June and another $32 million in January 2026 when that wasn't enough. Final cost for the year: more than $309 million. The governor's budget then asked for at least $309 million again, plus $70 million more set aside from surplus for "anticipated program growth."

The Advocate reports bipartisan worry about this. Democrats and rural Republicans have raised concerns about what else in the state budget gets squeezed, and the paper notes a similar program has contributed to budget problems in Arizona.

Into that, a proposal for $100 million more — heading for "uncapped."

Who the money has actually been going to

The case for vouchers is that they rescue kids from bad public schools. Arkansas's own numbers say otherwise.

According to the state Department of Education, 95% of participants in the voucher program's first year had never attended a public school before receiving a voucher. The state's most recent annual report says 12% of 2024-25 participants had previously attended a public school. The program is not moving children out of struggling schools. It is paying tuition bills for families who had already chosen private school.

And oversight of where that money lands has been thin. A private school in the Delta collected more than $300,000 in voucher money while its founder directed students to attack a 13-year-old and made kids scrub floors as punishment — she pleaded guilty to criminal charges, and the state has no record of ever visiting the school or investigating it.

That is the program a new proposal would sit beside, with fewer requirements.

Even a conservative school choice group says no

The most interesting opposition isn't from the left.

Opportunity Arkansas, a conservative advocacy group that supports school choice, came out against the idea. CEO Nic Horton said the group stands "in full support of protecting and preserving" the Educational Freedom Account program, and added: "We see no reason to change course now."

Horton's other objection is about money. He argues state leaders should stay focused on eliminating the Arkansas income tax — and that a new personal education tax credit would slow that down. Sanders has approved four income tax cuts since taking office in 2023 and has pledged to phase the income tax out.

That is the collision at the center of this. You cannot promise to phase out the income tax, run a voucher program that has already needed two emergency funding votes on top of its budget in a single year, and bolt on a $100 million refundable credit headed for "uncapped," all at once. Something gives.

From the other direction, Rep. Jessie McGruder, a Democrat from Marion who sits on the Education Committee, put it simply:

"I can't understand why we need another tax credit."

He also went after the premise directly. Money going to private schools and homeschools should face more scrutiny, not less: "I do not think we need fewer hoops to jump through. I think we need more hoops to jump through, because when we're spending taxpayers dollars, we need to have accountability in place."

Where the governor stands

Sanders has not endorsed this. Her spokesman, Sam Dubke, said she is interested in the study's findings, and declined to say whether she'd support the program. His full statement was a résumé:

"Governor Sanders has supported education freedom by establishing the EFA program, now used by nearly 50,000 students to attend the school of their choice, and by opting Arkansas into President Trump's federal tax credit scholarship program for school choice, and looks forward to reviewing this study's results when it is complete."

Read that again. It is not a position on the proposal. It is a list of the two reasons this proposal exists.

Sanders built the first program. She opted Arkansas into the second in January, saying she was "excited to see that with President Trump back in office, he's taking the education freedom movement nationwide." That federal credit — the first national private school voucher in American history, with no cap on what it can drain from the Treasury — starts in Arkansas on January 1.

A third program is now a live idea in the legislature because the first two made it one. "Looks forward to reviewing this study's results" is what a governor says when the answer is probably yes and the price tag isn't public yet.

Nine out of ten American children go to a public school, and Arkansas is no exception. Their families have spent three years watching the state build program after program for the other one in ten — each one bigger than the last, each one carrying fewer requirements than the state program that came first, and each one drawing on the same budget that pays for their kids' classrooms. We deserve better.

Source

Reporting by Josh Snyder for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: "Arkansas legislative panel approves study of proposed $100 million school choice tax credit." Photo: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/Thomas Metthe.

$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.

Rick Crawford Voted to Cut Food Assistance by $187 Billion. Then He Threw a Party Over Letting People Buy a Hot Chicken.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 19:46:00 +0000

On April 30, 2026, the House of Representatives voted 384 to 35 in favor of an amendment to the Farm Bill written by Rick Crawford. Under current rules, someone on food assistance can buy a rotisserie chicken off the grocery store shelf if it's cold, but not if it's hot. Crawford's amendment fixes that.

It is, on its own, a perfectly good little rule change. The hot/cold distinction is silly. A $7 chicken feeds a family.

Here's the thing they didn't put in the press release.

Ten months earlier

On July 3, 2025, Crawford voted "Aye" on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — Trump's budget bill.

The Congressional Budget Office scores that law as cutting food assistance by nearly $187 billion over ten years. As we've written, it is the largest cut to food assistance in American history. Four million people are no longer receiving food aid, and the expensive parts — shifting costs onto the states — were timed to land after the 2026 votes were counted.

So the sequence is:

July 2025: Vote to take $187 billion out of the program.
April 2026: Win a 384-35 bipartisan vote for letting the people still in the program buy their chicken warm.

What the amendment does and doesn't do

The National Chicken Council was clear about the limits, in its own celebration of the vote. The provision:

does not expand food assistance funding
does not broaden who is eligible
does not open the program to restaurants
applies only to hot rotisserie chicken, at retailers already in the program

In other words: it costs the federal government nothing and it does nothing at all for the four million people who no longer have a benefit to spend. If you were cut off last year, the temperature of the chicken is not your problem.

Who was happiest about it

The trade group for the companies that sell rotisserie chickens. Its president, Harrison Kircher, said the bill "is popular because it's a winner on affordability and nutrition."

Of course it is. Every hot chicken bought with food assistance dollars is a chicken sold. The amendment moves grocery-store poultry sales from one column to another at no cost to the industry and no cost to the Treasury. It is the rarest thing in Washington: a bill with no opponent because it asks nothing of anyone.

Crawford sits on the House Agriculture Committee — the committee that writes the Farm Bill and sets food assistance policy. OpenSecrets' tally of FEC filings for this cycle shows the industries that committee regulates all through his top twenty donors this cycle, every one of them maxed out: Tyson Foods ($10,000), the National Cattlemen's Beef Association ($10,000), the Farm Credit Council ($10,000) and American Crystal Sugar ($10,000). The National Cotton Council's PAC gave him $10,000 too, in two $5,000 checks.

That's the tell. Crawford will absolutely go to the mat on a food assistance rule — when the beneficiary is a company that sells food. When the beneficiary is a family that eats it, he votes the other way.

The 35 votes against tell you something too

Three hundred eighty-four members voted yes. Only 35 voted no.

A bill that passes 384-35 isn't a fight. It's a photo. And the reason it's a photo is that it doesn't cost anything or take anything from anyone with a lobbyist. Compare that to the actual food assistance fight, where Crawford was on the side that took $187 billion out and did it on a party-line budget bill that needed only a simple majority.

The chicken vote is what he'll put in the mailer. The $187 billion is what will show up in the grocery line.

The Farm Bill part nobody talks about

This isn't the first time the Farm Bill has been used this way. For fifty years the bill kept farm supports and food assistance together on purpose — so rural Republicans and urban Democrats needed each other, and neither program could be picked off alone. We've written about how Republicans worked to split them apart, and what happens to hungry families once that link is broken.

The rotisserie chicken amendment is the friendly face of that arrangement. Everyone gets a bipartisan win on a $7 chicken while the actual money moves somewhere else entirely.

What this costs the First District

That budget bill, together with the health insurance tax credits that expired at the end of 2025, will leave 40,000 more people in the First District without health insurance by 2034. In January 2026 he joined every Arkansas Republican in voting against restoring those credits, which had been holding premiums down. He has opposed raising Arkansas's minimum wage. And DOGE cancelled a $1.8 million Department of Education grant to the Cross County School District in Cherry Valley, and terminated the leases on federal offices around the district — Social Security in Jonesboro and in Batesville, and the Farm Service Agency, the soil conservation service and the rural housing office in Batesville.

The last in-person town hall his own office announced was a joint appearance with Tom Cotton in Heber Springs on March 4, 2017, so nobody gets to bring this up to his face.

The bottom line

Nobody should be against warm chicken. Take the win.

But do not let a $7 chicken buy off a $187 billion cut. Rick Crawford sits on the committee that writes food policy for this country, and when it counted — when the money was real and the vote was hard — he took food off the table for millions of people and then came home with a coupon.

We deserve better.

Source

National Chicken Council, "House Passed Farm Bill Includes Provision to Include Hot Rotisserie Chicken in SNAP", April 30, 2026.

Rick Crawford Spent 2026 Fighting to Let the FBI Read Americans' Emails Without a Warrant

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 19:43:00 +0000

There is a law that lets the government collect the emails, texts, and phone calls of foreign targets overseas. It's called Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and almost nobody disputes that it's useful.

The fight is over what happens when an American is on the other end of one of those conversations. Those messages land in a government database. And right now the FBI can go into that database, search for an American by name, and read what's there — without a warrant, without probable cause, without a judge.

Critics call it the backdoor search. In 2026 Congress had a chance to close it.

Rick Crawford, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, spent the year making sure it stayed open.

What he pushed for

In March 2026, with the authority set to expire, Crawford's plan was what Washington calls a "clean" reauthorization — 18 more months of Section 702 with no changes at all. Roll Call reported that a clean extension was what the Trump administration and Speaker Mike Johnson wanted too, and that it meant no warrant requirement for searching Americans' communications.

"I'm doing everything I can to try to advance the 18-month clean" reauthorization. — Rep. Rick Crawford

The resistance wasn't partisan. Republican Andrew Clyde of Georgia said he would probably not support a clean extension, though he had not made a final call. Republican Andy Harris of Maryland said his decision turned on the length, and that 18 months would probably be off the table for him. Democrats objected too — Jamie Raskin said of the administration, "It's an administration which has set itself against the privacy rights of the people and against civil liberties."

The 9/11 argument

When Crawford went home to Arkansas television to sell it, he reached for the biggest thing he had. On April 24, 2026, he told KATV:

"If we had had 702 prior to 9/11 very good likelihood and all probability would not—9/11 would not have happened."

And:

"What we don't want to do is let that go dark and run the risk of another type of 9/11."

Notice the sleight of hand. The reform on the table was not to let it go dark. The reformers wanted to keep the foreign collection and require a warrant before the FBI reads an American's side of it. Crawford answered a question about Americans' Fourth Amendment rights by invoking the worst terrorist attack in American history.

He also claimed his revised bill had solved the privacy problem — "We've been able to clean that up to satisfy, you know, both sides Being able to walk and chew gum at the same time, we absolutely want to protect every American citizen's civil liberties."

The ACLU's Kia Hamadanchy, quoted in the same KATV story, disagreed:

"Quite insidious because it doesn't have to provide any new protections. All it essentially does is restate existing law."

That's the whole argument in one line. Crawford's "reform" added review paperwork and restated rules already on the books. What it did not add was the one thing that actually protects you: a judge.

What the reformers were asking for

The Electronic Frontier Foundation laid out the ask in June 2026: Section 702 "should require a warrant before the Federal Bureau of Investigation can look at digital communications collected from Americans." If Congress wouldn't do that, EFF said, let the authority lapse.

Today, as EFF describes it, the FBI can "query and even read the U.S. side of that communication without a warrant." A warrant requirement would mean an agent has to convince a judge there's probable cause first. That's it. That's the reform Crawford spent months resisting.

Why it matters right now, specifically

EFF pointed at something more immediate than principle: who would be holding this power.

When EFF wrote that in June, the man about to take over the intelligence community was Bill Pulte, who had already "accused several of the President's political foes and targets… of mortgage fraud based on private data held by his agency." That is not a hypothetical about abuse. That is a federal official using private government records against the president's political enemies, before ever getting the keys. He went on to run the office on an interim basis until the Senate confirmed Jay Clayton to replace him on July 28.

Crawford's answer was to hand that administration eighteen more months of warrantless access to Americans' communications.

We've documented what this looks like in practice: ICE is paying contractors to scan social media around the clock and then subpoenaing platforms to unmask Americans who criticize the agency. And in the Senate, Tom Cotton has been asking the Justice Department to open investigations into American protest groups. Arkansas's two most powerful members of Congress on intelligence are both pushing in the same direction — more surveillance power, aimed inward, with fewer people allowed to say no.

How it ended

Crawford didn't get his clean bill. On April 29, 2026, the House passed a reauthorization, 235 to 191 — Crawford put out a statement celebrating it — and then both chambers fell back to a stopgap that carried the authority to June 12 while negotiators kept fighting over the warrant question.

They never resolved it. The Senate never took up the House bill, one more extension failed on the House floor on June 11 by 198 to 218, and Section 702 lapsed the next day.

So the chairman who insisted the sky would fall without an immediate clean renewal ended up presiding over the lapse he warned about — because he would not accept the one reform that could have gotten the votes. He had a Republican-controlled House and members of his own party telling him what they needed. He chose the version the administration wanted instead.

The bottom line

Rick Crawford has represented eastern Arkansas since 2011. The last in-person town hall his own office announced was a joint appearance with Tom Cotton in Heber Springs on March 4, 2017.

So no constituent got to stand up and ask the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee the simple version of this question:

If the government wants to read my email, why shouldn't it have to ask a judge first?

For everyone else in America, that answer is in the Fourth Amendment. Crawford spent a year arguing it shouldn't apply here.

Source

Roll Call, "Uncertainty shrouds key surveillance authority renewal in House", March 18, 2026, and KATV, "Rep. Crawford warns FISA 702 surveillance law must be renewed to prevent 'another 9/11'", April 24, 2026. Photo: KATV.