MAGA Report Cards — California

Elon Musk's Super PAC Is Spending $5.1 Million on the Midterms, Almost All of It in Races With 18 Republicans on This Site. It Spent $3.7 Million of That Attacking Democrats.

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:44:19 +0000

In early September, a super PAC funded by Elon Musk dropped more than a million dollars into Michigan's Senate race in a matter of days. The money went to digital ads and mailers boosting Republican Mike Rogers (MI), the former seven-term congressman trying to win the seat, and attacking his Democratic opponent Abdul El-Sayed. It was part of $28 million in outside spending on that one race since the August 4 primary, according to Detroit News reporting.

Michigan is not the exception. It is one stop on a national tour.

We pulled every independent expenditure that Musk's America PAC has reported to the Federal Election Commission for the 2026 cycle. The filings show $5.1 million spent so far, spread across Senate and House races in seventeen states. Eighteen of the Republicans that money is meant to elect have report cards on this site. About $4.95 million of the total is in races those eighteen are running in; the remaining $199,000 is spread across four other races.

How the spending breaks down

America PAC's reported spending divides in two. Some of it pays for ads and mail supporting a Republican. The rest pays for ads and mail attacking that Republican's Democratic opponent. Here is how the support side breaks down for the eighteen candidates we track:

Candidate	Race	Reported in support
Mike Rogers (MI)	Michigan, Senate	$520,499
Jon Husted	Ohio, Senate	$397,848
Ken Paxton	Texas, Senate	$124,595
Randy Fine	Florida, 6th District	$87,134
Susan Collins	Maine, Senate	$78,306
Dan Sullivan	Alaska, Senate	$58,004
Ashley Hinson	Iowa, Senate	$27,300
Gabe Evans	Colorado, 8th District	$12,220
David Valadao	California, 22nd District	$12,220
Juan Ciscomani	Arizona, 6th District	$12,220
Jimmy Patronis	Florida, 1st District	$10,244
Rob Bresnahan	Pennsylvania, 8th District	$6,690
Scott Perry	Pennsylvania, 10th District	$6,431
Ryan Mackenzie	Pennsylvania, 7th District	$6,388
Tom Kean Jr.	New Jersey, 7th District	$5,908
Mike Lawler	New York, 17th District	$5,563
Derrick Van Orden	Wisconsin, 3rd District	$5,225
Jen Kiggans	Virginia, 2nd District	$5,000

That adds up to about $1.38 million. The other $3.7 million went somewhere else.

Nearly three-quarters of the money is an attack

Of the $5.1 million America PAC has reported this cycle, $3.7 million — about 73 cents of every dollar — was spent opposing Democratic candidates rather than supporting Republican ones.

The biggest single target is not a Republican's ally. It is James Talarico, the Democrat running against Ken Paxton in Texas, with $1.49 million spent against him. Sherrod Brown in Ohio drew $941,000. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan drew $527,000. Josh Turek in Iowa, Troy Jackson in Maine, Chris Pappas in New Hampshire and Mary Peltola in Alaska each drew six figures of opposition spending.

Put plainly: the single largest expense in Musk's entire 2026 portfolio is attacking one man in Texas. It is bigger than everything the PAC has spent supporting all eighteen Republicans on this list combined.

That is a choice about what the money is for. Ads that make a case for a candidate have to say something about the candidate. Ads that attack an opponent do not.

Four races got most of it. Eleven candidates got a rounding error.

The support money is not spread evenly either. Rogers, Husted, Paxton and Fine account for $1.13 million — 82% of everything America PAC has reported spending in support of the eighteen.

Eleven of the eighteen got less than $13,000 apiece. Five of them — Gabe Evans, David Valadao, Juan Ciscomani and two candidates without pages here — each show exactly $12,220, all of it billed to the same mail vendor on the same day — the signature of a single bundled buy split across districts rather than a campaign built for any one of them. Jen Kiggans shows $5,000 in support and $4,500 spent against her opponent Elaine Luria, which is to say Musk's PAC spent nearly as much attacking her opponent as backing her.

For most of this list, the money is not the point. Being on the list is.

What the man writing the checks wanted

Musk is not a stranger to these candidates. He ran the Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting operation that took an axe to federal agencies, contracts and grants — and several of the Republicans his PAC is now paying to protect defended those cuts while their own constituents absorbed them.

Jen Kiggans called the DOGE cuts "so necessary" while her Hampton Roads district lost at least 70 contracts with veteran-owned businesses. In Arizona, 700 people in Casa Grande lost their jobs, and six weeks later Juan Ciscomani brought the Speaker of the House there to celebrate. Susan Collins is running for a sixth term, and Musk's money went to Maine to keep her in the seat.

Ken Paxton is the clearest case of what the money buys. Republican donors spent months keeping their distance from a nominee who dragged out three felony counts including securities fraud for nearly nine years before settling them, and whose own party's Texas House impeached him 121 to 23. Trump and Musk are trying to buy him the seat anyway.

And America PAC's spending is not only ads. On August 29, the PAC's voter registration site gave itself the right to sell the personal information people type into it — the same registration push the PAC is running alongside these ads in Michigan.

Why this matters where you live

Every one of these eighteen races is a race for a seat that votes on your health care, your grocery bill and your taxes. None of the eighteen candidates raised this money. They do not have to disclose it, coordinate it, or answer for it, because independent expenditures are legally supposed to be independent.

But the money is not neutral about outcomes. One man with one fortune has picked eighteen Republicans on this site, and one Democrat to spend seven figures against, and he is doing it in seventeen states at once. When those eighteen get to Washington, the person who spent $5.1 million to put them there will have interests before the government they run — and every one of them will know exactly who it was.

What the filings show

Elon Musk's America PAC has reported $5.1 million in independent spending for the 2026 cycle, almost all of it in races with eighteen Republicans who have report cards on this site. Only $1.38 million of it — 27% — paid for anything supporting those candidates. The other $3.7 million paid to attack Democratic candidates, with $1.49 million aimed at Ken Paxton's opponent alone. Four races collected 82% of the support money; eleven of the eighteen candidates got less than $13,000 each.

Source

Detroit News, Elon Musk group wades into Michigan Senate race, boosting Mike Rogers. Spending figures are from America PAC's independent expenditure filings with the Federal Election Commission for the 2026 cycle, committee C00879510, retrieved September 10, 2026, with duplicate 24-hour-notice filings removed.

Young Kim's Campaign Website Called Her a 'Proven America First Fighter' on August 14. Today Trump's Name Is Gone From Her Homepage.

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:53:50 +0000

Young Kim is running for reelection in California against another sitting Republican, Ken Calvert, after redistricting put the two of them in the same seat. Something about her pitch to voters has changed since the summer, and you can watch it happen.

Politico's California Playbook noticed first, and the Daily Beast picked it up on September 8, 2026: Kim has quietly stripped Donald Trump off the front page of her campaign website.

We checked it ourselves, against the Internet Archive's saved copies of her own site.

What the site said in August, and what it says now

On August 14, 2026, the browser tab on youngkimforcongress.com read "Young Kim for Congress - Proven America First Fighter." The first line on the homepage was:

Young Kim is a Proven Fighter who will Stand with President Trump to deliver a bold America First Agenda.

Underneath it: "America First Leadership to Defend the American Dream."

Today the same page reads:

Young Kim is taking on Career Politicians to Restore the American Dream.

Underneath it: "Fighting for the American Dream." The tab now reads "Young Kim for Congress - Fighting for the American Dream." The word "Trump" does not appear on the homepage at all. It survives in one place: her Meet Young Kim page, but only on a phone. The site keeps separate desktop and mobile copies of her biography, and only the desktop one was rewritten. Open that page on a computer and the Trump language is gone. Open it on a phone and the old paragraph is still there: "with President Trump leading the charge, I'm looking forward to continuing to push through the bold, conservative, America First agenda." The page heading still reads "A Proven America First Fighter."

In a separate change her Issues page disappeared. The August 19 capture still lists Issues in the homepage menu. Two days later the menu item is gone.

Her spokesman says this is absurd

Kim's spokesman, Chris Pack, told Politico that the idea she is putting distance between herself and Trump is "completely absurd." He pointed to social media posts in which Kim wished Trump a happy birthday and mentioned a Trump-branded savings program.

A birthday post is not a campaign platform. Twenty-six days ago her website's headline promise was that she would stand with the President. Now it promises she will take on career politicians. Whatever the reason, the change is not in dispute — it is in the archive, and it is on the live page right now.

What she actually did while the Trump language was still up

The website is the part Kim controls completely. The record is the part she does not.

She wrote the House's official response to the Los Angeles immigration raids. After federal immigration sweeps there in June 2025, Kim introduced H.Res. 516, a resolution condemning the protests that followed. It calls the sweeps "lawful Federal immigration enforcement," says "California's leadership has prioritized protecting illegal immigrants and violent individuals over United States citizens," and closes by expressing gratitude to law enforcement, ICE included by name. The House passed it 215 to 195 on June 27, 2025.

She promised in writing that she would not vote for a budget that cut Medicaid, and then voted for it four times. About 1,000 people rallied outside her Anaheim office in April 2025 to hold her to that promise. The Joint Economic Committee estimates that 27,115 people in her district lose coverage by 2034 — 17,315 off Medicaid, and 9,800 more as the Affordable Care Act subsidies go.

She voted against writing protection for same-sex and interracial marriage into federal law — once in July 2022 and again in December 2022 — while five other California Republicans — Ken Calvert, Mike Garcia, Darrell Issa, Jay Obernolte and David Valadao — voted for it both times.

None of that has been deleted. It cannot be.

Why the words changed and the votes didn't

Kim has never held a single in-person town hall since taking office. Her constituents have not had a room in which to ask her about any of this. What they have had is her website, and her website has now been rewritten to say something different from what it said in August.

The votes are still on the House clerk's roll calls. The resolution condemning the protests against the Los Angeles sweeps is still in the Congressional Record with her name on it as sponsor. A campaign can change its slogan in an afternoon. It cannot change what it did in 2022 and 2025.

What the record shows

On August 14, 2026, Young Kim's campaign homepage described her as a "Proven America First Fighter" who would "Stand with President Trump." Twenty-six days later, that language is gone from the homepage, the page title has been rewritten, and her Issues page has been deleted. Her spokesman calls the suggestion she is distancing herself from Trump "completely absurd." In the period when the Trump language was still up, Kim sponsored the House resolution condemning the protests against the Los Angeles immigration sweeps and thanking law enforcement including ICE, voted four times for a budget bill the Joint Economic Committee estimates will cost 27,115 people in her district their health coverage, and voted twice against protecting same-sex marriage in federal law.

Source

"Republican Young Kim Busted Quietly Scrubbing Trump From Site," The Daily Beast, September 8, 2026, following reporting by Politico's California Playbook. Website comparisons verified independently against the Internet Archive and the live site on September 9, 2026. Photo: official U.S. House portrait, via Wikimedia Commons.

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

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

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

The argument they signed is the part worth reading twice.

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

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

What the brief actually argues

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

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

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

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

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

Who signed it

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

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

Some of these names carry their own history

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the argument matters beyond this case

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

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

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

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

What the filing shows

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

Nobody is doing the thing the bill bans

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

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

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

This is control, not freedom

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

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

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

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

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

Two Republicans said no

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

The bill now goes to the Senate.

The choice they made

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

Every Republican we track who voted yes

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

Iowa: Ashley Hinson, Zach Nunn

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

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

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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.

Twelve Republicans We Track Told Voters High Prices Aren't Really a Problem. One Said to Pick a Different Protein.

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:08:19 +0000

Groceries cost more. Gas costs about a dollar more per gallon than it did when Trump took office. Only 16 percent of Americans think the country is headed in the right direction.

This week NOTUS published a column by Dana Milbank collecting what Republican candidates have been telling voters about all of this. The answer, over and over, was some version of: you're wrong, or you're whining, or you should try harder.

Twelve of the Republicans he quoted on the cost of living have report cards on this site. Here is what each of them said.

"You have so many proteins to choose from"

Cindy Hyde-Smith is a senator from Mississippi. She is also a cattle rancher and sits on the Senate Agriculture Committee — which is to say, beef prices are her actual subject.

In February 2026 a host at the Gulf Coast station WLOX asked her what Republicans were doing about the cost of living, and specifically about the price of beef. Her answer, as the Mississippi Free Press reported, was: "You have so many proteins to choose from." She added that all commodities go through peaks and valleys.

The advice to people who could no longer afford meat was to buy different meat.

"The Democrats invented this term 'affordability'"

Derrick Van Orden represents western Wisconsin. On Fox Business in July 2026 he said the quiet part out loud: the Democrats invented the word.

Not that affordability is improving. That it isn't a real thing.

"Earn more"

Jon Husted was appointed to Ohio's Senate seat at the start of 2025. His advice to Ohioans struggling with affordability was two words: earn more.

In a January 16 interview with WOWO radio in Fort Wayne, discussing a bill he wrote to let states impose stricter work requirements on public assistance, Husted said, "Our work ethic is broken." He has also said that people living in poverty are "not very experienced at navigating the real world."

This week the Ohio Capital Journal reported that his wife held Intel stock while he worked to push federal money to the company.

"Gasoline prices are down 40 percent"

Michael Whatley is the Republican Senate nominee in North Carolina. In June 2025, when he was chairman of the Republican National Committee, he told a New York State Conservative Party dinner: "Gasoline prices are down 40 percent. Grocery prices are down … and inflation is dramatically down. Everything [Trump] said he was going to do, he has done."

Gas averaged $4.12 a gallon in April and sits around there now — roughly a dollar above where it was when Trump took office. The 40 percent claim was not true when he made it, either. In June 2025 the national average for regular gasoline was about $3.15 a gallon — slightly more than the $3.11 it cost the week Trump was sworn in.

Whatley is the same candidate who holds Duke Energy stock while the utility pursues a rate increase on North Carolina customers.

"Gas prices are at five-year lows"

Ashley Hinson is the Republican Senate nominee in Iowa. In an opinion column in January she wrote that "Under President Trump's leadership, America is back on the right track," that "Gas prices are at five-year lows," and that paychecks "finally go further at the grocery store."

By the time Milbank was writing, gas was about a dollar higher than at the start of the administration. Hinson's own money helps explain the enthusiasm: she has taken $64,500 from oil and gas companies and voted six times to keep the Iran war going — the war that pushed pump prices up.

The rest of the list

Mike Lawler, of New York's Hudson Valley, told NewsNation last year that the long-term benefits of Trump's tariffs were worth "a little bit of short-term pain." On CNN in July he said eliminating the threat from Iran was worth it — meaning worth the higher gas prices.
Mike Rogers (MI) is the Republican Senate nominee in Michigan. At a town hall in Metamora in September 2025 he mocked what he expected to hear "when the Democrats start getting at us" over prices: "Oh my gosh, coffee went up."
Zach Nunn represents central Iowa. In Politico in May he said inflation driven by the Iran war was "overhyped, candidly, by the media."
David Valadao represents California's Central Valley. He told a local station in March that "to pretend that Iran is the first reason why fuel prices are going up is false."
Dan Sullivan is a senator from Alaska. In February he still thought things were going in the "right direction." In May he sent out a fundraising email asking for donations in part to "pay for gas as we visit isolated rural areas of Alaska."
Mike Collins is the Republican Senate nominee in Georgia. As recently as June he still believed "the economy is moving."
Jim Desmond is a Republican running for the House in California. In a March interview on Real America's Voice he said of high oil prices: "No pain, no gain."

What they have in common

None of these are gaffes in the ordinary sense. A gaffe is a slip. This is a position, and it is remarkably consistent across twelve people in ten states: the prices are fine, or the pain is worth it, or the problem is the person complaining.

Nine of the twelve currently serve in Congress, and their voting records are part of why the prices are what they are. Every one of the twelve has a record on this site, and the pattern is the same — the Iran war that moved gas prices, the tariffs that moved grocery prices, the Medicaid and food-assistance cuts that moved what families have left over.

There is one honest note in the whole collection, and it is Dan Sullivan's fundraising email. When he was talking to voters in February, things were headed in the right direction. When he was asking his donors for money in May, gas was expensive enough to itemize.

The short version

Twelve Republicans with report cards on this site — three sitting senators, four House members, four Senate nominees and a House candidate — publicly told voters that the cost-of-living crisis was overhyped, invented, worth it, or their own fault. A senator on the Agriculture Committee told people priced out of beef to choose another protein. A Senate nominee said gasoline was down 40 percent at a moment when the pump price had not fallen at all, and it is about a dollar a gallon higher now than when this administration started. And a senator who said things were going in the right direction in February asked donors three months later to help cover his gas.

Source

Dana Milbank, NOTUS: "The Republican Midterm Message on Inflation? Stop Whining!". Photo by Mark Schiefelbein/AP.

Five Republicans Took the AI Industry's Money or Bought Its Stock. One of Them Wrote the Bill That Would End Your Town's Say.

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:40:22 +0000

All over the country right now, ordinary people are showing up at city council meetings to ask the same three questions about the data center somebody wants to build near them.

How much of our water will it drink? What happens to our electric bill? And who decided this?

In Luther, Oklahoma, so many people came to that meeting it needed armed security and metal detectors. The town voted for a six-month moratorium. So did Oklahoma City, Edmond and Broken Arrow. California passed the country's first frontier AI safety law. Oklahoma passed a law making the giant power users pay for their own infrastructure instead of putting it on everyone's rates.

That is democracy working exactly the way it's supposed to. People noticed something, went to a meeting, and got a rule written.

The industry's biggest political spender has decided to make those rules impossible.

Its main political vehicle, a super PAC called Leading the Future, raised $125 million in 2025 and opened 2026 with $70 million on hand, CNBC reported. Its funders are Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, SV Angel founder Ron Conway and the AI company Perplexity. Its purpose, as CNBC described it, is backing candidates who support national AI regulations rather than state-by-state rules.

Strip the phrasing out and that means: one set of rules, written in Washington, that cancels the ones Luther and Edmond and Sacramento just wrote.

There is a second AI network in this election, and it wants the opposite thing. Public First Action — a nonprofit the AI company Anthropic gave a self-reported $20 million — bankrolls super PACs whose stated priorities include preserving state authority over AI rather than preempting it. It has spent millions of its own on congressional races. Both networks run their money through blandly named vehicles, and both are writing checks to Republicans. The industry is split on what the rules should say and united on paying the people who will write them.

Here are five Republicans on the receiving end of that money — or holding the stock.

Jay Obernolte wrote the bill that does the preempting

Jay Obernolte of California is the most powerful voice on AI in the House. He chairs the Science Committee's research and technology subcommittee, chaired the House AI Task Force, sits on Energy and Commerce, and is now chair of the House Republican Policy Committee.

On July 23, 2026 he introduced the FRONTIER Act. Section 9 says no state "may adopt or enforce any law, regulation, order, or other requirement that imposes new substantive obligations on artificial intelligence developers" in the covered areas — risk transparency, outside auditing, and incident reporting. There is no sunset date. As written, it is permanent.

Two of those three are things California's own SB 53 requires. The congressman from California wrote a bill that would preempt the core of the AI safety law his own state just passed.

And in October 2025, an AI conference company and a venture fund tapped Obernolte to launch a nonprofit called the AI Coalition, which sells early-stage AI companies — in its own words — "meaningful access to policymakers and influence over the regulations." Membership runs $1,750 to $3,500 a month. We laid out that arrangement in full in August.

At the top of his own contributor list: employees of the AI company Anthropic, at $71,862 on OpenSecrets' current count, with Andreessen Horowitz third.

Kevin Hern got $850,000 in a race he had already won

On June 2, 2026, Leading the Future told the Washington Reporter it would spend $850,000 backing Kevin Hern in his Oklahoma Senate race.

The Reporter's own words for that race: Hern "is on a glide path to the Senate." He had Trump's endorsement, in a state where the Republican nominee wins. He did not need the money.

That is what makes it worth looking at. In a close race, money is trying to win. In a race nobody can lose, money is buying something else — and Hern will spend six years voting on exactly the question Leading the Future was formed to settle. He sits on Ways and Means, which writes the tax treatment that decides how profitable a data center is to build.

Meanwhile four Oklahoma cities were pausing data centers and Gov. Kevin Stitt was signing a law to keep the industry's power costs off residential bills. Only 1% of Hern's money comes from small grassroots donors, ranking him #434 out of 440 House members.

Carlos De La Cruz was outspent by his own backers

Carlos De La Cruz has never held office. He's an Air Force veteran running in Texas's 35th District, a seat the Legislature redrew in 2025 to make winnable for a Republican.

His campaign has raised about $1.05 million. Outside groups have spent about $2.35 million on his behalf — per the FEC's own independent expenditure records. The two biggest: $1,492,321 from an AI-industry super PAC and $615,885 from a crypto one.

The AI group is called Defending Our Values PAC — a name that tells a voter nothing. That is deliberate. The Texas Tribune found AI-linked super PACs behind at least seven Texas congressional candidates, going by "generic-sounding names" and running ads that don't mention the technology — because polling shows most voters don't want data centers near them.

But this is the industry's other side. FEC records show that almost every dollar Defending Our Values has raised this cycle — about $8.2 million — came from Public First Action, the Anthropic-backed nonprofit that wants state AI authority kept, not cancelled. De La Cruz is not being carried by the preemption campaign. He is being carried by the people fighting it — and if he wins in November, he arrives owing them just the same.

Defending Our Values also put $808,341 behind Kevin Hern, who is already getting Leading the Future's money. Both AI camps, the same Oklahoma Republican. We traced the whole $2.1 million in De La Cruz's race in August.

Julia Letlow signed a gag order with Meta, then bought Meta stock

Julia Letlow of Louisiana signed a nondisclosure agreement on June 29, 2024 with Laidley LLC — a shell company belonging to Meta. It gave her confidential details of a $50 billion data center in her own district.

The agreement barred her from even acknowledging that the agreement existed. A member of Congress signed a contract legally preventing her from telling her constituents she was discussing a $50 billion project on their land.

Then, as WWNO and the Gulf States Newsroom reported, she started buying Meta stock — and Nvidia, whose chips run Meta's data centers. Her broker notified her on August 11, 2025, more than a month after she sold her last Meta shares. She did not disclose the trades until January 13, 2026, in the report that carried 210 late-filed trades from the previous two years — 100 of them, the Meta and Nvidia stock included, more than a year late, worth between $225,000 and $3.19 million. The penalty for that is $200, and it is often waived. Her office says she doesn't direct her own trades. We walked through the full record in August.

She is now her party's nominee for the U.S. Senate.

Lisa McClain's family bought into xAI a week before the Pentagon wired it into the military

Lisa McClain of Michigan is the No. 4 Republican in the House. On December 15, 2025 her husband bought between $100,001 and $250,000 of private stock in Elon Musk's AI company, xAI.

Seven days later, the Pentagon announced it was integrating xAI's Grok into its platform for military personnel. Three weeks after that it expanded the deal to classified defense networks. Musk later folded xAI into SpaceX, and when SpaceX went public in June, CNBC reported the family could be sitting on a paper gain of as much as $150,000.

There is no evidence she knew what the Pentagon was planning. What there is: a household with 1,443 trades in three years, two separate late-disclosure violations in a single year, and a seat on the Financial Services Committee. The details are here.

What it looks like where you live

None of this stays in Washington.

In southwest Missouri, hundreds of residents packed meetings to oppose a data center on the west side of Joplin, and most of the letters their city council received said no. One letter said yes. It came from their congressman, Eric Burlison, who told a forum in Carthage that "what the business is doing doesn't matter" and suggested the people asking about the water table were afraid of the unknown.

In Pennsylvania, all ten of the state's Republicans in the U.S. House voted for a ten-year ban on states enforcing their own AI rules, while their constituents absorbed the electricity costs.

And this week, Trump's EPA moved to scrap the federal rule requiring states to tell the public when a facility applies for an air pollution permit at all — so you may not learn a data center is coming until the permit is approved or the concrete is poured.

Every one of those is the same move at a different altitude: take the decision away from the people who live there.

What the money shows

An AI super PAC funded by Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI's president and Palantir's co-founder raised $125 million to elect candidates who will replace state and local AI rules with a single federal one. It committed $850,000 to Kevin Hern in a race he had already won. The industry's rival network — the one that wants states to keep their AI authority — put $1.5 million of the $2.35 million behind first-time candidate Carlos De La Cruz, more than twice what his own campaign raised, and another $808,341 behind Hern. Jay Obernolte, who wrote the bill that would permanently preempt state AI laws, helped launch a nonprofit charging AI startups up to $3,500 a month for "influence over the regulations." Julia Letlow signed a secrecy agreement with Meta and then bought Meta and Nvidia stock she disclosed over a year late, and Lisa McClain's family bought a private stake in xAI a week before the Pentagon wired its product into military systems.

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

Young Kim Chairs the House's East Asia Panel and Sits on Its China Committee. She Kept $5,200 From a Chinese Media Mogul Until the FBI Raided Him.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:51:24 +0000

Young Kim chairs the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on East Asia and the Pacific, whose remit covers China, Taiwan and the South China Sea. She also sits on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. Her campaign describes her as "one of the leading critics of the Chinese Communist Party."

On August 18, her campaign announced it was giving away $5,200 it had accepted from James Su, a Southern California media executive whose radio network Reuters exposed as Chinese state-backed, and whose company later registered as a foreign agent.

It made that announcement three weeks after the FBI searched his house.

The timeline

Su is the founder and president of EDI Media Inc., a major Chinese-language media company in the U.S.
In November 2015, a Reuters investigation reported that another Su company, G&E Studio Inc., was 60 percent owned by a subsidiary of China Radio International, the Chinese state broadcaster. The FCC and the Justice Department opened investigations within days.
Su gave Kim $2,700 in 2018 and $2,500 in 2021, per Federal Election Commission records first reported by Politico's California Playbook. He was photographed with Kim at a 2018 event.
On March 2, 2022, EDI Media registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, naming XinMin International, Inc. as its foreign principal and describing the work as coordinating the printing of the U.S. edition of Shanghai's Xinmin Evening News until 2018.
On July 28, 2026, FBI agents searched Su's West Covina home and his office in a reported federal investigation into possible foreign influence.
On August 18 — after the searches were reported and reporters started asking — Kim's campaign said it would give the money away.

Su has not been charged in connection with the investigation, and that matters. This isn't a story about a donor's guilt.

It's a story about what the chairwoman of the East Asia panel did with money from a man whose ties to Chinese state media had been public for a decade, and when.

The defense, and the problem with it

Kim's campaign spokesman, Chris Pack, made two arguments.

The first: scale. "Since 2018, Young has raised more than $30 million from nearly 200,000 donors," he said, noting the $5,200 came in years ago and that the campaign "had no knowledge of the allegations now being reported against him."

That's fair as far as it goes. No campaign vets 200,000 donors personally, and the specific FBI investigation is new.

But Su's ties to Chinese state media are not new. Reuters laid them out in November 2015, and the FCC and the Justice Department opened investigations the same week. The 2021 donation arrived six years after all of that was on the record — and it went to a member of Congress who sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee and would go on to chair its East Asia and Pacific panel. Her campaign then held the money for more than four years after EDI Media registered as a foreign agent in March 2022.

Kim's second defense is that she's a hawk: she has "even been targeted by the CCP and threatened with arrest."

That's true, and it's to her credit. It also cuts the other way. A member who built her national profile on confronting Beijing is precisely the member who should have noticed a donor whose radio network Reuters had already exposed as Chinese state-backed — and precisely the member for whom "we didn't know" is the least comfortable answer available.

Her own party's candidate said it plainest

Because of California's redistricting, Kim is now running against fellow Republican incumbent Ken Calvert in the redrawn 40th District. His spokesman, Calvin Moore, put the criticism in terms no Democrat needed to supply:

"She didn't return the money because it was the right thing to do but because she got caught and the media started asking questions about her ties to Su."

Moore added that voters "deserve an explanation as to why she turned a blind eye to foreign influence for years."

We'd note the source: Calvert is trying to beat her, and he finished first in the June all-party primary with 34.9% to Kim's 20.6%. He is not a neutral observer.

But the factual core of what he said isn't in dispute. The money sat there for five years. It moved when the story broke.

And then there's how she gave it away

This is the detail that says the most about the campaign's instincts.

Kim's campaign chose to donate the $5,200 to organizations supporting victims of human trafficking and prostitution. A worthy cause. But Pack couldn't announce it without turning it into an attack, describing the recipients as helping "women like those Congressman Calvert solicited while serving in Congress."

Read that again. Confronted with questions about foreign-influence money, the campaign's response was to convert its own ethics cleanup into an opposition-research hit.

That is not what accountability looks like. It's what a campaign looks like when it has decided the only real question is who wins the news cycle.

The pattern

Kim bills herself as a moderate. Her record keeps landing somewhere else:

She promised she wouldn't vote for a budget that cut Medicaid, and did it four times.
Her "Stop DEI Act" is one sentence long and bans something that's already illegal.
She introduced an SEC bill about "commonsense" reform that was already a title of the bill gutting the accounting watchdog created after Enron.
And by the count of the constituents who track it on a website, she has not held a single in-person town hall since taking office in January 2021 — more than five years — prompting a #WhereIsYoungKim campaign just to get her to appear.

Meanwhile, more than $5.5 million has been spent on her behalf by super PACs, and finance, insurance and real estate have put $1.68 million into her campaign this cycle — while she sits on the Financial Services Committee that writes their rules.

The through-line is a member who takes the money, holds the gavel, and explains later.

What CA-40 should ask

Young Kim's answer to this is that she didn't know. Fine. Then the follow-up questions are simple:

Who else in her donor file has registered as a foreign agent? Does the chairwoman of the East Asia panel screen her contributions against the public foreign-agent registry? And if she does not — why not?

Voters in California's 40th District are entitled to a member of Congress who checks before the FBI does.

Source

Rep. Young Kim donates campaign contributions from Chinese-American media mogul under FBI investigation — Zain Khan, New York Post, August 18, 2026. Contribution records first reported by Politico's California Playbook. Kim's subcommittee chairmanship per her own office's announcement, "Rep. Young Kim to Serve as East Asia & Pacific Subcommittee Chairwoman in 119th Congress."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is actually being taken away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And TSA screeners got the same treatment

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

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

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

The House had a bill to end it permanently

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

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

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

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

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

The 20 Republicans who voted yes

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

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

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

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

The 195 who voted no

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

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

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

Colorado — Lauren Boebert, Jeff Crank, Jeff Hurd

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

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

Idaho — Russ Fulcher, Mike Simpson

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mary Miller

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

Iowa — Ashley Hinson

Kansas — Ron Estes, Tracey Mann, Derek Schmidt

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

Minnesota — Tom Emmer, Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach

Mississippi — Mike Ezell, Michael Guest, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Mike Flood, Adrian Smith

New York — Nick Langworthy, Claudia Tenney

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Mike Kennedy, Celeste Maloy, Blake Moore

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

The Senate has done nothing for eight months

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

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

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

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

This is not a fringe position they're protecting

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

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

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

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

We deserve better.

How they voted

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two of them were sworn in before Reagan was inaugurated

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

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

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

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

Here is the part that should end the argument.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why they don't leave: eleven of thirteen gavels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ones who won't even stand in a room

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

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

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

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

And then there's Grassley

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

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

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

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

This was supposed to be a job you leave

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

Twelve Members of Congress Posed for Photos With a Group That Wants to Privatize Social Security. They're Calling It an Endorsement.

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 07:49:54 +0000

There is a simple test for whether a politician is on your side about Social Security. Look at who is handing them awards.

American Journal News reported on August 13, 2026 that a dozen House members — eleven Republicans and an independent who caucuses with them, nearly all in races they could lose — have been collecting an award from the 60 Plus Association and posting the photos.

The 60 Plus Association is not a seniors group in the way most people mean it. It is a group that has spent three decades trying to take Social Security apart.

What the 60 Plus Association actually wants

It was created in 1992 to be a conservative alternative to AARP, with seed money from the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.

In 1997, it boasted that it was "the first national senior citizens group to endorse privatization of the Social Security program." That is its own description of itself, not an attack from an opponent. It has pushed that position since the 1990s, and its leaders have called private retirement accounts "the only real answer" for the program.

Privatizing Social Security means taking the money you paid in over a working lifetime and putting it into the stock market. When the market goes up, you do fine. When it goes down — 2008, say — you do not. The guarantee is the whole point of the program, and privatization is the thing that removes the guarantee.

The group did not stop at Social Security. It also endorsed the 2011 Republican budget that would have turned Medicare into a voucher system, then ran radio ads telling seniors the plan "protects and preserves Medicare for years to come." As Politico noted at the time, the word "voucher" did not make the ad — and the group's own audience would be held harmless, because the change fell on everyone younger. Instead of Medicare paying your medical bills, you would get a fixed check to go buy insurance yourself. If the check doesn't cover the premium, that's your problem.

None of this is a secret, and none of it is old news the group has walked away from. Its president, Saul Anuzis, has also argued for repealing the Affordable Care Act.

The money behind it has never been public. 60 Plus is organized as a 501(c)(4), which means it never has to say who funds it. DeSmog's accounting found the group took in more than $42 million between 2010 and 2012 from organizations, many of them tied to the Koch network.

Who took the award

The award is called, in the group's own words, the "Guardian of Seniors' Rights Award," and the group says it is "now sought after by many looking for the endorsement of the 60 Plus Association." The lawmakers who received it treated it that way, posing for photographs with Anuzis.

Taking it this year:

Kevin Kiley, California — an independent who caucuses with House Republicans, and who took the award in both 2025 and 2026
Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Iowa
Zach Nunn, Iowa
Bill Huizenga, Michigan
Tom Barrett, Michigan
Mike Lawler, New York
Ryan Mackenzie, Pennsylvania
Scott Perry, Pennsylvania

Past recipients include Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, and Monica De La Cruz of Texas. Rob Wittman of Virginia got it in 2025.

Eleven of the twelve are on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's list of Republican-held seats it is targeting this November. That is not a coincidence — it is the point. These are the members who most need to look like protectors of seniors, and they went and got a certificate from the people who want the program privatized.

The vote that already happened

An award is a photo. A roll call is a record.

On July 3, 2025, the House passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act by 218 to 214. Eleven of these twelve voted yes: Kiley, Miller-Meeks, Nunn, Huizenga, Barrett, Lawler, Mackenzie, Perry, Kean, De La Cruz and Wittman. Fitzpatrick was the one who voted no.

That bill cuts roughly $1 trillion from Medicaid over ten years. And because of a budget law called Statutory PAYGO — a rule that forces automatic spending cuts when Congress passes something that adds this much to the deficit — the Congressional Budget Office found the bill will trigger $490 billion in cuts to Medicare from 2027 to 2034 unless Congress acts to stop it.

So the sequence is: vote for a bill that sets off automatic Medicare cuts, then accept an award from a group that backed replacing Medicare with vouchers anyway, then put the photo online.

The one who wouldn't answer the question

The most useful thing about this list is that we already know how some of these members behave when a real person asks them about Social Security.

In June 2026, a reporter asked Rob Wittman about Republican proposals to cut Social Security and Medicare. Wittman put a phone to his ear and pretended to be on a call for 90 seconds. The camera could see his screen. There was no call.

Bill Huizenga's approach was different but no more honest. When a poll showed him trailing, he deleted whole sections of his own campaign website — including the page about the national debt and the page about health care. He didn't change a single vote. He just stopped telling voters about them.

Monica De La Cruz has never held an in-person town hall since taking office. Tom Kean Jr. skipped more than 100 votes in nearly four months while a New York Times reporter went looking for him at his house.

These are not people eager to explain a Social Security position to their constituents. They are people who found a group willing to certify one for them.

This is a pattern, not an accident

The 60 Plus award is one piece of a larger push that has been running all year.

Ron Estes, the congressman who chairs the House subcommittee that oversees Social Security, went on Newsmax to say he was looking forward to what DOGE would find at the agency he is supposed to be protecting. The agency lost 6,645 employees between January and November 2025.

Tom Cole has pushed a bill for seven Congresses that would hand Social Security to 13 appointees and then force Congress to vote yes or no on whatever they write — no amendments allowed, four hours of House debate, no filibuster. It is a machine for passing cuts that no member would have to sponsor by name.

That is what makes the photographs matter. Nobody in Congress is going to introduce a bill titled "The Privatize Social Security Act." What happens instead is quieter: a commission with no amendments, a budget rule that fires automatically, a staff cut here, an award ceremony there.

You get 65 once. There is no second try if the money isn't there. When twelve members of Congress in tough races decide the safest thing to be seen with is a group that spent thirty years trying to privatize the program, that tells you something they would rather explain in a press release than at a town hall.

Source

House Republicans embrace group that wants to privatize Social Security — Jesse Valentine, American Journal News, August 13, 2026. Photo: American Journal News.

Max Miller's PAC Gave $70,000 to 16 Republicans in Tight Races. Exactly One Gave It Back.

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

There is a simple test in politics for whether a scandal is real to a party or just inconvenient. It's the money.

Max Miller runs a leadership PAC called Dependable Conservative Leadership. According to FEC records reviewed by POLITICO, that PAC has given more than $70,000 to 16 Republican incumbents in the toughest races on the 2026 map — mostly in chunks of $1,000, $2,500 and $5,000, with maxed-out $10,000 donations to some of them.

Miller's ex-wife, Emily Moreno, has accused him of assaulting her and their young child. She is also the daughter of Ohio Republican Senator Bernie Moreno. Miller denies the accusations. He refused to leave the race before Ohio's deadline to replace him on the ballot, which means his party is stuck with him.

This week POLITICO went to all 16 recipients and asked a single question: are you giving the money back?

One said yes.

The tally

Brad Finstad (Minnesota) — returned the $5,000. That's it. That's the entire list of Republicans who gave it back.
Mike Lawler (New York) — took $10,000 and is keeping it. His spokesman's justification was that Lawler's Democratic opponent attended a fundraiser hosted by former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who resigned in 2008 in a prostitution scandal.
Derrick Van Orden (Wisconsin) — took $2,500. Asked about it Tuesday night, he refused to discuss it, describing the accusations against Miller as "allegations" he had heard about "the day before yesterday."
The other 13 said nothing at all. Their offices and campaigns did not return POLITICO's requests for comment.

Those 13: Jon Husted of Ohio, Rob Bresnahan, Ryan Mackenzie and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, Nick Begich of Alaska, Tom Barrett of Michigan, Juan Ciscomani of Arizona, Gabe Evans of Colorado, Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey, Jen Kiggans of Virginia, and David Valadao of California.

Husted is the one to look at

Jon Husted publicly said Max Miller should not run for reelection.

Husted also took a maxed-out $10,000 from Miller's PAC and, when asked this week whether he'd return it, said nothing.

That is the whole story in one man. He'll say the words. He won't write the check.

Husted is running against former Senator Sherrod Brown in what is expected to be one of the closest Senate races in the country. Ten thousand dollars is not what decides that race. Which is exactly why keeping it is a choice about something other than money.

What Van Orden said

Van Orden's answer deserves its own look, because he gave one.

He called the accusations "allegations" he'd heard about "the day before yesterday."

The allegations against Max Miller have been public and heavily reported for months. We wrote about the domestic violence lawsuits and about the House Ethics Committee opening a probe. Ohio's two Republican senators had already called on him to quit. Republicans have been openly worried about the seat since at least early August.

"The day before yesterday" is not a timeline. It's a way of not answering.

The pattern, not the exception

None of this is new behavior around Max Miller.

Popular Information found — and we checked the FEC filings ourselves — that dozens of major corporations are funding Miller's own campaign this cycle, several of them with checks that arrived after the allegations were published. Stanley Black & Decker gave $10,000. Elevance gave $7,000. Kroger, an Ohio company, gave $3,500.

Meanwhile Trump's political team urged Ohio Republicans to hold off on publicly pressuring Miller to drop out, so the party wouldn't look divided.

So: corporations keep paying him, the White House told his own state party to keep quiet, and 15 of the 16 colleagues who took his money won't say whether they'll give it back.

The one consistent principle is that nobody wants to give up anything.

Why it matters where you live

If you vote in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Alaska, Michigan, Arizona, Colorado, New Jersey, Virginia, California, Wisconsin or New York — or in Ohio's Senate race — there is a good chance one of the people on that list is on your ballot.

They were each asked a yes-or-no question about money from a man accused of assaulting his wife and small child. Fifteen of them declined to say yes.

Brad Finstad managed it. It took a $5,000 check and about one sentence.

Source

Eli Okun and Mia McCarthy, "Republicans stay mum on whether they'll return campaign cash from embattled Max Miller", POLITICO, August 12, 2026.

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

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

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

Here they are, straight off the congressional record:

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

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

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

What a "waiver" actually is

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The tool they picked

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

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

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

What's on the list is not abstract

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

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

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

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

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

Who filed them

This is the part that makes the package legible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three of them represent California

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

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

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

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

Where it stands

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

On Monday, the Department of Homeland Security published a purchase notice. By Tuesday the Associated Press had read it and written it up: Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to spend up to $20 million on thousands of gloves that deliver painful electric shocks, and it wants them in agents' hands by March.

The notice said the solicitation for a no-bid contract could go out as soon as Friday.

That is the whole story of what a blank check does. Two months ago Congress handed ICE roughly $70 billion and declined to write a single rule about how its agents may treat people. This is one of the things the agency decided to buy with a budget nobody attached conditions to.

What the gloves are

The device is called the G.L.O.V.E. — Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter — made by Compliant Technologies LLC of Lexington, Kentucky. In the DHS notice they are described, without apparent irony, as "conductive distraction and de-escalation devices."

They look and work like ordinary patrol gloves until the officer flips a switch. Then the officer has to touch bare skin to deliver the shock. The company's pitch is speed: it advertises "3 seconds or less" as the typical time to compliance in reported field use, promises to bring "resisting subjects into compliance in seconds, without lasting harm to anyone involved," and bills the product as the best hands-on de-escalation tool on the market.

John Peters, who runs the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths and is studying how the device gets used, described the sensation to the AP:

"It's immediate and sharp, and it will distract you. I call it like a bee sting."

Peters said he believed the order would likely be the largest the company has ever received, and that he could picture officers using the gloves to pull uncooperative people out of cars and houses and in and out of detention facilities.

The warnings come from the company that sells them

Here is the part worth slowing down for. The manufacturer itself warns that the device should not be used as punishment, should not be used on people who are merely showing "verbal defiance or belligerence," and should not be used on high-risk populations — children, pregnant women, elderly people, disabled people.

Those are not rules. They are a vendor's recommendations. Nothing in the law that paid for these gloves requires ICE to follow any of them, because that law does not contain rules about agent conduct at all.

Jenn Rolnick Borchetta of the ACLU put the practical problem plainly:

"ICE spent the last year showing this country they are too quick to use force. Now they will be able to deploy electric shocks with the slight push of a button that maybe nobody else can see them do."

Kica Matos of the National Immigration Law Center told Common Dreams the same thing in fewer words: Congress must end the blank check to ICE.

The guardrail she points to is $2 million for de-escalation training

Of the 52 Republican senators who voted for the money, the one taking the most heat for it right now is Susan Collins, who is in a tough reelection fight in a state where an ICE officer shot and killed a young father last month.

When Democratic Governor Janet Mills wrote to her about that killing, Collins wrote back on July 16 with a list of what she had secured in this year's Homeland Security spending bill. Three items:

$20 million for body-worn cameras
$2 million for de-escalation training, plus new de-escalation training requirements for ICE and CBP officers
a 17 percent increase for the DHS Inspector General

Set that against Monday's notice. ICE is prepared to spend $20 million on shock gloves — ten times the entire de-escalation training budget Collins points to, and dollar for dollar the same amount she secured for the cameras.

Both purchases are filed under the same word. One of them trains officers to talk someone down. The other lets an officer end the conversation with a button. ICE is spending ten times more on the button.

Collins' office did not immediately respond when Common Dreams asked whether she considers electric shock gloves a good form of de-escalation. Asked after the Biddeford shooting whether she regretted her vote for the funding, she declined to say she did.

The pain tool takes seven months. The accountability tool took five years.

Compare the two timelines, because the contrast is the argument.

The gloves: notice published Monday, no-bid solicitation possibly by Friday, thousands of units by March. Seven months, no competitive bidding.

The body cameras: ICE started testing them in 2021 and had distributed 1,400 by 2024. Returning to office in 2025, Trump cancelled the Biden order requiring federal law enforcement agencies to use them. The agency did not buy cameras even after receiving a $75 billion infusion in 2025 and hiring thousands of new officers. It finally spent $30.9 million on Axon equipment in July — the spending beginning one day after an ICE officer shot and killed a 25-year-old motorist in Maine. Days before that, another ICE officer shot and killed a Houston homebuilder driving to work. Neither shooting was recorded, because neither officer had a camera.

Jason Houser, who was ICE chief of staff under Biden and helped implement the camera pilot program, told the AP the delay was a choice: "This is not hard to deploy, but they've slow-rolled it."

And the cameras Congress paid for come with a policy that decides for itself what the public sees. ICE will promptly release video of a shooting or a death only after determining "it is in the best interests of the agency" to do so, and the director can block or indefinitely delay any release by finding "specific and compelling circumstances." Even when footage does come out, every officer's face, name and badge number gets redacted.

Katherine Hawkins of the Project On Government Oversight said the policy makes the recordings "virtually useless": "Without any clear way for the public to get access to it, it doesn't do much good."

One more detail on the reform Collins has been promoting. On July 31 she announced that body cameras would be deployed nationwide by the end of August, and added that the acting ICE director had agreed to prioritize delivery to Maine "at my request". That was eight weeks after she voted, on June 5, against Senator Alex Padilla's amendment to this same bill, which would have set aside at least $300 million to deploy body cameras and to store the footage and make it accessible to Congress and to the people filmed. It was rejected 46 to 53. A week later, ICE told the AP the rest of its field officers would get cameras by the end of September, a timeline the AP noted pushes back the agency's earlier public statements.

Congress wrote guardrails. They were about equipment.

This is not a case where lawmakers tried to attach conditions and lost. They wrote restrictions into the $70 billion law — the restrictions were just about procurement. No money for surveillance towers that haven't passed acceptance testing. No hiring processing coordinators after October 2028.

As we found reading the bill, that is the entire list. Congress found time to specify what gear CBP is allowed to buy, and no time to specify what agents may do with the gear. No conduct rules. No requirement that agents be identifiable. No mandatory reporting on who is detained, where, or for how long.

Which is why there is no provision anyone can point to now that says a federal officer may not press a shock button against a child, or against someone who talked back. The vendor says don't. The law says nothing.

We've also written about the ICE record arrest month that followed — 51,000 arrests in July, with fewer than a third of people in detention holding a criminal conviction — and about the House Homeland Security chairman who held the hearing on body cameras, funded them, and voted for the three more years of money anyway.

Two votes made this possible

The money came through in two roll calls, days apart.

The Senate, 52 to 47, at 4:42 in the morning on June 5. Every Republican voted yes except Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Not one Democrat voted for it. Our writeup of that vote is here.

The House, 214 to 212, on June 9 — a two-vote margin, meaning every Republican yes was a deciding vote. Zero Republicans voted no. The bill became law the next day.

That is the chain. Two roll calls, no conduct rules, and eight weeks later a no-bid order for thousands of devices designed to hurt people into compliance.

The 201 with report cards on this site

Two hundred sixty-six Republicans in the two chambers voted for this money. These are the ones with a report card here, by state — senators marked, everyone else voted in the House:

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

None of them wrote the shock-glove order. That's the point. They wrote a check with no conditions on it and handed it to an agency, and now the agency is deciding what to buy with it — quickly, without competitive bidding, and with the only limits on use coming from the vendor's brochure.

If your senator or representative is on that list and tells you they have concerns about how ICE is behaving, the question to ask is simple: which rule did you write?

Source

Stephen Prager, "ICE Funding Approved by Susan Collins and Trump GOP to Deliver Electric Shock Gloves to Agents Nationwide," Common Dreams, August 12, 2026. The underlying reporting on the purchase notice is by Ryan J. Foley of the Associated Press. Photo: a federal agent walks near tear gas used on protesters in Minneapolis, January 14, 2026, by Seth Herald/Reuters.

Kevin Kiley Voted for the Law That Broke California's Medi-Cal Tax. Now He's Asking RFK Jr. to Block California's Fix.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:40:39 +0000

On July 24, 2026, Kevin Kiley signed a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Medicare and Medicaid administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz. It asked them to kill a California law.

The law is California's Managed Care Organization tax — the MCO tax. It is one of the biggest single pieces of financing behind Medi-Cal, the program that covers more than 14 million Californians.

To understand why this is Kiley's problem and not Gavin Newsom's, you have to start a year earlier.

Step one: he voted for the law that outlawed the old tax

On July 3, 2025, the House passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — H.R. 1, Trump's budget bill — by 218 to 214.

Kiley voted aye.

Buried in that law were new restrictions on how states can tax health providers to help pay for Medicaid. Georgetown's Center for Children and Families, walking through the federal guidance, says the law closes off the uniformity waiver for any tax that effectively charges "lower rates to providers and managed care organizations with less Medicaid revenues" and higher rates to those with more — and that the prohibition is "largely targeted at certain taxes on managed care organizations."

California's MCO tax was exactly that kind of tax — the Legislative Analyst says the Medi-Cal rate was more than 150 times higher than the commercial rate — and California is on Georgetown's list of the states it understands CMS to have in view.

So the bill Kiley voted for is what made the old tax illegal.

Step two: California rewrote it to comply

Faced with losing the financing, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 125 as part of the 2026–27 budget. It replaces the old structure with a flat, uniform tax — $8.85 per enrollee per month, applied the same way to commercial health plans, Medi-Cal managed care plans and ACA marketplace plans, for 2027 through 2029.

Uniform is the whole point. Uniformity is what H.R. 1 demanded.

The money it replaces is not small. The state's nonpartisan Legislative Analyst says the MCO tax "currently generates more than $12 billion in gross revenue annually, but less than $8 billion in net revenue is available to the state to spend" — money that, under Proposition 35, is committed to raising what Medi-Cal pays doctors, hospitals, clinics, ambulances and behavioral health providers — from 2027 on, 92 percent of the first $4.3 billion of net revenue has to go to those increases.

California voters passed Proposition 35 in November 2024 by 10,124,174 to 4,783,434 — 67.91% yes. They voted to make this tax permanent and to lock its revenue to Medi-Cal.

Step three: he asked two Trump appointees to veto it

The MCO tax only works if the federal government signs off. That is the leverage, and Kiley used it.

His letter, published in full with his office's release, asks Kennedy and Oz to "deny federal approval of California's Managed Care Organization (MCO) tax proposal," calling it a plan that "would dramatically increase costs on commercial health plans to preserve state revenue rather than make health care more affordable."

He was joined by five California Republicans — Jay Obernolte, James Gallagher, Ken Calvert, Vince Fong and Young Kim.

Then read the letter's own justification:

"The Working Families Tax Cut (H.R.1) took an important step toward ensuring that states use the MCO tax responsibly to support their Medicaid programs."

That is H.R. 1. That is the bill he voted for on July 3, 2025. He is citing the law that created the problem as the reason to block the state's compliance with it.

The premium argument, fairly stated

Kiley's stated objection is real and worth taking seriously.

Because the new tax is uniform, it lands on commercially insured people who were barely touched before. Kiley's release says the Legislative Analyst estimates it will raise premiums by $100 a year for an individual and $400 a year for a family of four. His letter argues small businesses may drop coverage rather than absorb it, and notes that the California Medical Association, the California Hospital Association, the California Primary Care Association, the California Association of Health Plans and the state Chamber of Commerce all oppose the design.

Nobody should want a $400 premium increase. That is a fair thing for a member of Congress to fight.

But look at what the letter asks for, and what it doesn't

The letter's remedy is one sentence: California "should now reprioritize its budget and put forward a proposal that complies with the uniformity standards while avoiding unnecessary increases in health care costs."

That's it. No alternative financing. No federal money to replace what H.R. 1 took away. No bill of his own. Reprioritize your budget.

And if Kennedy and Oz do what he asks, here is what actually happens: California doesn't get the new tax, and it can't go back to the old one, because H.R. 1 banned that. The hole isn't $400 a family. It's billions of dollars a year out of the program covering 14 million people — and under Proposition 35, most of the first $4.3 billion of it was committed to provider rates, which is the difference between a Medi-Cal card and a doctor who will actually see you.

Kiley has an answer for the premium increase. He does not have an answer for that.

He has done this before

In February 2026, when California progressives put a one-time tax on the state's billionaires on the ballot to help backfill federal health care cuts, Kiley wrote federal legislation to block it and told the House floor a wealth tax is "the confiscation of assets."

Same shape, five months apart. California tries to pay for health care. Kiley goes to Washington to stop it.

There is one more thing worth noticing about the venue. Kiley is now the only independent in the House — he dropped the "R" in March 2026 after redistricting made his seat harder, and told NPR that none of his positions were changing.

He did not take this fight to Sacramento, where the tax was written and where he spent six years in the state Assembly. He took it to two Trump appointees, and asked them to overrule a bill signed by the governor of his own state and a ballot measure more than two-thirds of his own state's voters approved.

We deserve better.

Sources

Kiley's letter and statement are published in full via his office, July 27, 2026. Signatories, the SB 125 structure and Kiley's post on X are from "Kiley, GOP Lawmakers Urge HHS to Block Newsom's Healthcare Tax," Megan Barth, California Globe, July 27, 2026. The House vote on H.R. 1 is Roll Call 190, July 3, 2025. MCO tax revenue figures are from the Legislative Analyst's Office; Medi-Cal enrollment from the Department of Health Care Services. Photo: official congressional portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

Vince Fong Wrote a Bill Ordering the FAA to Waive Its Rocket Safety Rule. SpaceX and Blue Origin Gave Him $15,000 the Year Before.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:38:29 +0000

On April 6, 2026, while the Artemis II astronauts were still in the middle of their mission to the moon, Vince Fong introduced a bill with a name built for a press release: the OUTPACE in Space Act. It stands for "Optimizing United States Technology to Preempt Adversarial Communist Expansion in Space."

The pitch is China. A spokesperson in Fong's Washington office told KGET the congressman has a "big focus" on winning the space race, and that China's "unified" and "centralized" approach is letting it "get the upper hand."

That is the bill's cover story. Here is what the bill actually does.

"The Administrator shall issue a blanket waiver"

You can read the whole thing — it is eight pages. The core of it is Section 2, and the sharpest line in Section 2 is this one:

"Upon enactment of this Act, the Administrator shall issue a blanket waiver of 450.101(c) for all reentry vehicles until a final rule is published."

That citation is to 14 CFR 450.101, the Federal Aviation Administration's safety criteria for launch and reentry licenses. Paragraph (c) is titled "High consequence event protection." It is the rule that says a company bringing a vehicle back through the atmosphere has to protect the people underneath it.

It gives operators three ways to do that: build in flight abort, or show that any reasonably foreseeable failure would produce no more than one one-thousandth of an expected casualty, or demonstrate the vehicle is reliable enough that the FAA signs off.

Fong's bill orders the FAA to waive all three. Not to study waiving them. Not to consider a petition from a company that wants one. A blanket waiver, for all reentry vehicles, the day the bill becomes law — with the replacement rule not due for a full year afterward.

And the direction of that replacement rule is written into the bill too. Two separate subsections instruct the FAA that risk considerations must "support the development and authorization of overland launch and reentry operations."

Overland. Not over the ocean, the way reentry has mostly been done, for the obvious reason. Over land, which is where people live.

The bill also tells the Transportation Secretary to "maximize use of performance-based requirements" instead of prescriptive ones, to enable "high cadence" launches and reentries, and hands the FAA power to hire aerospace engineers into its commercial space office within 30 days "without regard to competitive service requirements, examinations, or public notice."

None of that is about China. China does not care what 14 CFR 450.101(c) says. The only entities that rule applies to are American companies that want to bring hardware back down faster, cheaper, and closer to where people are.

Who those companies are, and what they gave him

Fong sits on the House Committee on Science, Space & Technology — and specifically on its Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, the panel with jurisdiction over exactly this. He is also a member of the Hypersonics Caucus. His bill's opening section is a "sense of Congress" about the commercial space industry and "the emerging hypersonic industry."

His bill went to the committee he sits on. It has no cosponsors. It is his.

Now look at his campaign account. These are contributions to Vince Fong for Congress in calendar year 2025, from the Federal Election Commission's own records:

Space Exploration Technologies Corp PAC — $10,000 (Elon Musk's SpaceX: $5,000 in March, $5,000 in October)
Blue Origin, LLC PAC — $5,000 (Jeff Bezos's rocket company: $1,000 in February, $2,500 in June, $1,500 in October)

Fifteen thousand dollars, in one year, from the two American companies with the most to gain from the FAA waiving its reentry safety rule.

KGET first reported those figures in April. We pulled the FEC records independently and they match to the dollar.

The aviation money is there too — the PACs of Boeing, United Airlines and Alaska Air Group all gave Fong between $1,000 and $5,000 apiece in 2025. Boeing, as KGET noted, is scaling up production to meet demand for more space exploration.

"A separate issue"

KGET asked Fong's office about the timing — a bill deregulating commercial space, introduced by a congressman whose campaign is funded by commercial space companies.

The answer:

"This bill here is really addressing the overall scope of the space race and trying to outcompete and give us the tools to win the space race with China. Anything kind of along those lines would be a separate issue and that isn't really at play here."

That is not a denial. It is a subject change. Nobody asked whether the bill is about China. The question was why the people who profit from it are paying him.

The office also said the bill is "completely separate from anything regarding commercial airlines" — which is a curious thing to volunteer about a bill whose Section 2 is largely about the FAA, the national airspace system, and how to fit more rocket traffic into the sky that airliners use.

This is the going rate in this corner of Congress

Fong is not an outlier here. He is a junior member of a committee where this is simply how it works.

We wrote yesterday about Brian Babin, who chairs the full Science, Space and Technology Committee and has taken $261,250 from six space and defense contractors — including SpaceX and Blue Origin — while writing a NASA bill that hands statutory authority to a contract SpaceX already holds.

And we wrote about Mike Haridopolos, who chairs the Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee Fong sits on. When Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket exploded on the pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in May, the chairman with oversight responsibility issued a statement offering gratitude and prayers, and not one question. Blue Origin's PAC has given him $10,000. SpaceX's has given him $20,000.

Chairman, subcommittee chairman, and now the member writing the deregulation bill. Same donors, all the way down.

What Bakersfield gets out of it

Fong's district runs from Bakersfield across the southern Central Valley, and Kern County has real aerospace and defense employment. A congressman fighting for those jobs would be doing his job.

But that is not what this bill's most consequential provision does. Waiving the FAA's high-consequence-event rule for every reentry vehicle in the country, immediately, before any replacement rule exists, does not create a single job in Kern County. It removes a federal check that stands between a falling rocket stage and the people underneath it — and the bill's own language is that reentry should be authorized over land.

It is the same instinct that produced his amendment to the House highway bill giving Uber and Lyft immunity when their drivers kill someone: find the rule that costs a large company money, delete it, and describe the deletion as competitiveness.

According to FEC-derived donor records, just 1% of Fong's money comes from small grassroots donors. Ninety-six percent comes from PACs, super PACs and large donors. When almost none of your funding comes from small donors, the people it does come from are the ones who get bills written.

Source

"Fong aerospace bill benefits aerospace industry, among campaign donors," KGET 17 News, April 17, 2026. Photo via KGET/Getty Images.

At 2 A.M., Vince Fong Wrote Uber Out of Every Crash and Assault Lawsuit in America. A Week Later, Uber's PAC Wrote Him a Check.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:33:17 +0000

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee spent fifteen hours marking up the big five-year highway bill. Sometime in the small hours of May 22, 2026, with the room mostly empty and the cameras mostly off, Vince Fong offered his amendment.

It was adopted 35 to 30. When the sun came up, the biggest rideshare companies in America had something they had been paying lobbyists for years to get: a rule saying they cannot be sued when their drivers hurt someone.

Consumer Watchdog, the Los Angeles group that has tracked Uber's liability fights for years, headlined its response with the time on the clock: "House Committee Votes at 2 AM to Give Uber Immunity."

What the amendment actually says

The bill is H.R. 8870, the BUILD America 250 Act — a $580 billion, five-year reauthorization of federal highway, transit, rail and safety programs. It is the kind of bill that has to pass. That is exactly what makes it a good place to put something that couldn't pass on its own.

Thirty-four members of California's congressional delegation later wrote to House leadership asking them to strip Fong's language out. Lofgren's office, announcing the letter, quoted the provision directly. A rideshare company, it says,

"shall not be liable under the law of any State or political subdivision thereof [...] for any harm to persons or property that results or arises out of the use, operation, or possession of a motor vehicle by an app-based driver."

The words "any harm" are doing an enormous amount of work there.

The members spelled out what it means in practice: the company would have immunity "no matter the red flags from any criminal background check, motor vehicle background check, customer complaint, safety test, or internal complaint."

So a company could run the background check the law requires, see a red flag in it, put the driver on the road anyway, and be immune when that driver kills someone. As the letter puts it: "Though a rideshare company would still have to follow local laws regarding background checks, it would be immune from liability if it chose to ignore red flags in the background check."

That is not a technical fix. That deletes the reason a company screens its drivers at all.

Mechanically, the change reclassifies Uber and Lyft as operators of a "digital network" rather than common carriers — the legal category bus companies fall into, which is what makes them answerable for their drivers' conduct. It also overrides any state law that says otherwise. After that, a passenger would have to prove the company itself was criminal or "grossly negligent," a far higher bar than the one that exists now.

The case that shows what this means

Consumer Watchdog pointed to a Santa Barbara crash it documented in a report called "A License To Kill".

An Uber driver who was on probation for his second DUI conviction went on a drunken rampage and killed two people — Gilberto Arteaga-Gutierrez and Silvia Velasco. He was allegedly driving as fast as 120 mph in a 40 mph zone with a blood alcohol level more than twice the legal limit. Used nitrous containers were found in his car, according to a civil suit. He was sentenced to 15 years to life.

Uber had run a background check and hired him anyway. The company is still fighting its liability in that case.

Under Fong's language, it wouldn't have to fight. It would simply be immune.

"Representative Fong should be ashamed of himself for putting Uber riders in his district in jeopardy," said Jamie Court, Consumer Watchdog's president, "because a limited liability system will allow Uber to continue to do inadequate background checks so it can have more drivers on the road."

Who this is for

The numbers explain why Uber wanted this so badly.

According to the California delegation's letter, Uber faces more than 3,000 sexual assault claims in federal court nationwide over allegedly failing to put adequate safety protections, driver screening, or rider safeguards in place. In California alone, the company faces roughly 550 cases over its alleged failure to protect female drivers from sexual assault, stalking, kidnapping or false imprisonment.

Between 2017 and 2022, Streetsblog reports, Uber received a report of sexual assault or misconduct once every eight minutes.

Fong's amendment does not make any of that safer. It makes it uncollectable.

Nearly 1,900 survivors of assault or abuse by Uber drivers signed a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries asking them to pull the language:

"No court case can take away the pain and trauma we have endured — that will stay with us forever. But we are worthy of the right to try and hold these rideshare platforms legally accountable for failing to protect us when they told us to trust them to get home safely."

On June 10, 128 members of the Democratic Women's Caucus sent their own letter, warning the amendment would "disproportionately harm women and girls."

Fong did not respond to Streetsblog's request for comment.

The lobbying, and then the check

This did not come out of nowhere. Uber spent almost $1 million lobbying Congress on the surface transportation bill, and Lyft spent about $250,000. Uber's political action committee also put $14,500 into the re-election campaigns of seven members of the House transportation committee.

Then there is Fong's own campaign account.

Search the Federal Election Commission's records for contributions from the Uber Technologies, Inc. Separate Segregated Fund to Vince Fong for Congress and you get exactly one result. It is dated May 29, 2026 — $1,000, reported on his second-quarter filing.

Fong's amendment cleared committee on May 22. Uber's PAC's first check to him ever landed seven days later.

A thousand dollars is not much money, and we are not going to pretend it bought anything. That is rather the point. The lobbying is where the real money went. The check is the receipt — the moment a company that had never given this congressman a dollar decided he was worth being on file with, one week after he did them the biggest favor of the session.

He is proud of it

Fong is not hiding this. The day the bill cleared committee, his own office listed it as a win, under the heading "Rep. Fong's amendment limiting vicarious liability for ride-share companies."

His justification, in his office's words:

"Roughly one-third of a ride-share fare in California, and nearly one-half in Los Angeles, goes toward government-mandated insurance costs. This amendment helps reduce transportation costs by curbing limitless, frivolous litigation against ride-share companies."

Notice the frame. Lawsuits brought by people who were injured or assaulted become "frivolous litigation." The insurance that pays those people becomes a "cost." And the fix is not cheaper insurance — it is making sure there is nothing left to insure against.

Uber says the same thing in the same words. Its spokesperson told Streetsblog the change is needed because rideshare companies "are too often sued simply because of their high insurance coverage."

Joanne Doroshow, who runs the Center for Justice & Democracy at New York Law School, had the short answer to that: "Of course they're at fault. It's their platform. They are the ones connecting drivers to passengers."

If Fong's real concern were the price of a ride in Bakersfield, there are a dozen ways to go at that. He picked the one that ends with survivors having no case.

We have seen this move before

Earlier today we wrote about how Roger Williams slipped an exemption for car dealers into a rental-car safety law — a law that existed because two sisters died in a rented car under an active safety recall. He offered the amendment on the House floor before midnight, on a voice vote, telling his colleagues in the same breath, "I am a second-generation auto dealer." It got him an ethics investigation and was stripped out of the final law.

The template is the same: a big bipartisan bill nobody wants to blow up, a late-night vote, a short amendment that reads like plumbing, and an industry that walks away immune. The only thing that changes is which industry.

What this costs the Central Valley

Fong represents Bakersfield and a long stretch of the southern Central Valley — a district where a lot of people drive for a living and a lot of people have no other way to get to a shift, a clinic, or the airport.

Those are the people on both ends of this. The drivers who get assaulted on the job. The riders who get hurt. Under his amendment, both lose the same thing: any way to make the company that put them in the same car pay for what it knew and ignored.

It fits how he has handled the rest of the job. He voted for the federal law that cut Medicaid in California, then went on television to blame Sacramento for the premium increases that followed. As of March 2025, local news reported he had not held a town hall for his constituents — which is the sort of place someone might have gotten to ask him about any of it.

H.R. 8870 is now waiting on the House Rules Committee with the provision still in it. Thirty-four California members — Fong's own delegation — have asked the Speaker to take it out.

Fong is the reason it is there.

Source

"Uber and Lyft Want Congress to Let Them Off the Hook," Aaron Short, Streetsblog USA, June 24, 2026. Photo: Adam Fagen, via Streetsblog USA.

Border Patrol Swept His Valley and a Grower's 30-Person Harvest Crew Came In at Five. David Valadao Asked for Better Communication.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:14:07 +0000

In the first week of January 2025 — before Donald Trump had even been sworn in — Border Patrol agents from the El Centro sector drove several hundred miles north into California's San Joaquin Valley and spent three days making arrests.

They called it Operation Return to Sender. Agents in unmarked SUVs picked people up outside a Home Depot in Bakersfield and at a gas station where field workers eat breakfast. The agency said it made 78 arrests and touted the capture of two alleged child rapists and more than 30 pounds of marijuana. Community groups disputed the number.

Border Patrol usually works within 100 miles of a border, and the interior is normally ICE's job. Customs and Border Protection told Valley Public Radio that its jurisdiction runs all the way to the Oregon border. As Bruno Huizar of the California Immigrant Policy Center told the station, "The border patrol often ignores that 100-mile boundary and rejects any geographic limitation on the agency's authority."

The effect on the farms was immediate. Peter Belluomini, who grows lemons, mandarins and navel oranges east of Bakersfield and was mid-harvest on all three, watched his contracted crew evaporate. "Instead of 30 people, there were like five," he said. "The rest were hiding at home."

A landscaper named Ernesto Campos was detained for four hours. Video shared by KGET shows an agent threatening to break his truck window — "I'm going to have to break the window. It's your fault." Campos is a U.S. citizen. He was held until agents confirmed it.

The United Farm Workers said two of its members were detained, neither with a criminal record.

What the congressman said

David Valadao represents parts of Kern, Tulare, and Kings counties. He put out a statement that week:

"I think we can all agree known criminals should be expelled from the United States, but it is crucial that future operations are communicated clearly to avoid causing any further alarm among our farmworkers."

Read the ask. It is not that the raids stop. It is not that agents identify themselves, or carry warrants, or stay out of the parking lots where people wait for work. It is that future operations are communicated clearly — that somebody give the district a heads-up.

He calls them "our farmworkers." He asked for a better-run version of the thing that scared them.

Who he is, and why this is his fight if it's anyone's

Valadao is not a generic Republican on immigration. He is, by his own description, the only dairyman in Congress, and his own family's story is an immigration story.

His father Eduardo grew up in the Portuguese Azores, the youngest of eight, working his family's dairy. A few years after immigrating to California, Eduardo and his wife Maria bought their first cows, and later their own land in Hanford. David grew up bucking hay and feeding the cows before school.

More than 65% of his district is Latino, according to the California Target Book. His district's economy is farm labor. His first television ad this year shows him walking through a tree-nut farm under the words "David Valadao is on our side."

The people who milk the cows and pick the mandarins are the people Border Patrol was loading into vans.

The bill he signed

To his credit, Valadao has never joined the deport-everyone caucus. He has put his name on the bills that would actually fix this. Two of them, in this Congress alone.

On May 7, 2025, he cosponsored H.R. 3227, the Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2025 — the bill that would give farmworkers already doing the work a legal way to keep doing it.

On July 15, 2025, he cosponsored H.R. 4393, the DIGNIDAD Act — a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants who've been here for years, paired with tougher border enforcement and work requirements.

Now look at what has happened to them.

The Farm Workforce Modernization Act was referred to committee on the day it was introduced. Congress.gov shows no action since. Fifteen months. It has 11 cosponsors.

The Dignity Act went to the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement on July 16, 2025. Nothing has happened to it since — no hearing, no markup, no vote, in thirteen months, in a chamber his own party controls. It has 39 cosponsors out of 435.

Cosponsoring a bill costs nothing. It is a signature on a list. Neither of these bills has ever been scheduled for so much as a hearing by the Republicans who run the committees.

The bill he passed

Eleven months later, a different immigration bill moved.

On June 9, 2026, the House passed S. 2, the Secure America Act — roughly $70 billion for Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection and ICE, available through September 30, 2029. The two biggest lines in it are $31 billion for ICE and $13 billion for CBP, both written for immigration enforcement.

It passed 214 to 212. Not one Republican voted no. At that margin every single Republican yes was a deciding vote — including Valadao's. The next day it became Public Law 119-98.

That is the whole comparison. The bill that would legalize the people who work his valley's fields has sat in a drawer for over a year. The bill that pays for the agents who raid them took one afternoon and passed by two, with his vote.

"Communicated clearly"

Go back to what he asked for in January 2025 and measure it against what came after.

He wanted advance notice of enforcement operations. What Congress funded instead was a much larger version of the operation, with money that runs to the end of fiscal 2029. The same agency is already paying contractors to scan what people post.

None of that comes with a phone call to the Kern County Farm Bureau.

Valadao's Democratic opponent this year, Randy Villegas, is the son of Mexican immigrant farm laborers. He put the argument this way: "Everybody and anybody knows somebody who works in agriculture in the valley. And anybody in the valley will tell you that workers and agriculture are struggling right now because of Valadao and this administration."

Valadao has consistently declined CalMatters' interview requests, and his spokesperson said he was not available to answer questions for its July 2026 story on his race.

He is not the loudest Republican on immigration. He may be the most consequential one, because in a district where more than two in three people are Latino and the economy runs on farm labor, he keeps casting the vote that decides.

Source

Joshua Yeager and Cresencio Rodriguez-Delgado, "In wake of border patrol raids in California's Central Valley, a clearer picture emerges," Valley Public Radio (KVPR), January 16, 2025 — the source of Valadao's statement and the arrest figures. Raid tactics from Sergio Olmos, "A surprising immigration raid in Kern County foreshadows what awaits farmworkers and businesses," CalMatters, January 10, 2025. Harvest impacts from Caleb Hampton, "Kern County immigration sweep halts citrus harvest," Ag Alert, republished by Valley Voice, January 16, 2025.

David Valadao Cast a Deciding Vote to Cut Medicaid. Now He's Running Ads Promising to Protect It.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:11:28 +0000

NPR went through the campaign ads Republicans are running on YouTube this midterm cycle. In a story published July 31, 2026, it reported what it found in California's 22nd District:

"In California, Rep. Valadao ran ads promising to lower costs and protect Medicare and Medicaid. Valadao voted for the OBBBA."

That's the whole story in two sentences, and it's worth slowing down on both of them.

David Valadao represents the Central Valley. His district has the highest Medicaid enrollment rate of any Republican-held seat in the country — about 527,000 people on Medi-Cal, roughly 64% of everyone he represents.

The "OBBBA" is the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Trump's budget bill. Valadao voted for it.

He didn't just vote for it. He was the vote.

When the bill first cleared the House on May 22, 2025, the roll call was 215 to 214.

One vote.

There were 220 Republicans in the House that morning, and 215 of them voted yes. Any one of those 215 could have killed the bill by voting no. Valadao voted yes — and he backed it at each procedural step along the way, not just on final passage.

The law slashed an estimated $28.4 billion from California's Medi-Cal program, and stripped health insurance from an estimated 3.4 million Californians statewide. In his district alone, nearly 57,000 people could lose coverage once the new eligibility checks and work requirements take effect, according to Joint Economic Committee Democrats' analysis of Congressional Budget Office data.

He knew. He wrote it down.

This is not a case of a congressman being surprised by what was in a bill.

In April 2025, Valadao was one of a dozen Republicans who signed a letter opposing Medicaid cuts. His name is first on it. The letter said:

"Balancing the federal budget must not come at the expense of those who depend on these benefits for their health and economic security."

He put his name on that in April. He voted for the cuts in May.

When the Senate's version came back and he voted for it again on July 3, 2025, he put out a statement that opened: "It was not an easy decision for me, but I voted yes on the budget reconciliation bill."

The rest of the statement is a list of things he says he stopped and things he says he won. He says he prevented a change to California's federal match rate and per-capita caps on the expansion population. He says another $25 billion was added to the new Rural Health Transformation Program, bringing it to $50 billion, and that the administration assured him it would be structured to benefit Valley providers.

He also conceded, in the same statement, that he "still ha[s] concerns with the implementation of the provider tax and state directed payment provisions of H.R. 1."

About that $50 billion. KFF's analysis, cited by NPR, found the rural health fund does not offset the $137 billion in Medicaid cuts that would directly affect rural areas — and the money comes with the threat of clawbacks if states miss outcome targets, which is making states slow to roll it out.

So the concession he claims is worth about a third of the damage, arrives late, and may get taken back.

Why the ads work right now

Here is the part that makes the advertising a strategy rather than a coincidence.

Most of the pain hasn't arrived yet.

As NPR put it in that same story: "Key changes, like the reduction of Medicaid funding, don't occur until after this year's midterms." Frequent eligibility redeterminations and work requirements start next year. The Medicaid funding reduction lands after November.

So a congressman can run an ad in August 2026 saying he'll protect Medicaid, and most voters won't have lost their coverage yet. The bill is written. The check just hasn't cleared.

Daniel Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, told NPR why Republicans are advertising on health care so early: "[Congressional Republicans] know that that's going to be a potent line of attack from their challengers and they have to get in front of it and defend it."

The costs part of the ad

Valadao's ads also promise to lower costs. Health care costs went the other way.

ACA premiums rose 21.7% nationwide between 2025 and 2026, according to an Urban Institute report cited in the NPR piece. About 3 million fewer people were enrolled through the health insurance exchanges in early 2026 than when the bill passed, per the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The Congressional Budget Office expects about 10 million fewer people to have insurance in 2034.

Jonathan Oberlander, a health policy expert at the University of North Carolina, connected those numbers directly to what Congress did:

"[Republican] policy, both on the One Big Beautiful Bill and not renewing the enhanced subsidies and rules and regulations, has been to make it harder for people to get health insurance coverage through the Affordable Care Act and through Medicaid. When you take Medicaid away from people, when you take those enhanced subsidies away, it really increases the costs that they face."

The premium spike wasn't only the budget bill. Congress also let the enhanced ACA tax credits expire. Senate Republicans filibustered the bill that would have extended them, and then the House passed a substitute — H.R. 6703, the "Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act" — that loosens the rules on skimpier association health plans and leaves the price increase in place. We went through both votes here. On December 17, 2025, Valadao voted yes on the substitute.

The same answer he gave on food stamps

This is the second time this year Valadao has been asked about a program he cut and had an answer ready.

More than a quarter of the households in his district get food assistance. When HuffPost asked him whether the sharp drop in SNAP enrollment might be a problem for him in November, he said he wasn't worried about it — the people leaving the rolls, in his telling, were people who could work and chose not to.

Same bill. Same deciding vote. Same message: this is fine.

What he won't do

Valadao has not held an in-person town hall in years. He does telephone town halls, and told a Bakersfield station in April 2025 that constituents prefer it: "We started off a few years back doing town halls in person, but the feedback we were getting from actual constituents and people in the district, 70-80% told us we prefer the tele Town Hall."

He said that while people in his district were protesting the very cuts he would vote for weeks later.

He also isn't taking questions from reporters about it. CalMatters, working on a long profile of his race in July 2026, noted that Valadao "has consistently declined CalMatters' interview requests," and that his spokesperson said he "was not available to answer questions for this story."

So the ads are doing the talking.

An ad is a message you pay for and control. A town hall is a room full of people who have your voting record and want to know why 57,000 of their neighbors are about to lose their health insurance.

He's buying the first one.

Source

Rahul Mukherjee, "Ahead of midterms, Republicans run ads after cutting healthcare funds," NPR, July 31, 2026. Photo: Andrew Harnik / Getty Images.

Ken Calvert Wrote an Op-Ed Cheering DOGE. Then His Constituents Set Out an Empty Chair for Him, Two Weeks Running.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:22:35 +0000

There is a particular way of holding office that goes like this: take the loudest possible public position, then arrange your calendar so that nobody can ask you about it.

Ken Calvert has been representing part of Riverside County since 1993. In February 2025, as Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency was firing federal workers by the thousands and cancelling grants across the country, Calvert sat down and wrote an opinion piece for the Orange County Register. The headline was not subtle:

"DOGE is doing what must be done to protect taxpayers"

It ran on February 12, 2025. He closed by predicting that "the hyperbole and dramatics from the left will only grow more frantic" as DOGE kept working.

Eight days later, on February 20, his own constituents showed up outside his Palm Desert district office. "Some demonstrators tried to speak with Congressman Ken Calvert at his Palm Desert office," KESQ reported that afternoon, "but it appeared he wasn't there."

"It's just another day in paradise"

That week, across the country, Republican members of Congress were getting an earful. Politico reported on February 24, 2025 that town halls in red districts had turned into shouting matches over Musk and the firings — and that almost none of the Republicans involved had changed their minds.

Calvert was among them. Politico reported that he saw protesters gather at his Palm Desert office and said it didn't change his support for Musk:

"I'm used to it. It's just another day in paradise."

That is a genuinely remarkable thing to say about people who drove to your office to tell you they're frightened about their health care and their jobs. Not "I hear them." Not "I disagree, and here's why." Just: I'm used to it.

The empty chair

The protests didn't stop. By late March, constituents in Palm Desert had started holding what they called "empty chair" town halls — a public forum with a chair set out for the congressman who wouldn't come.

On March 23, 2025, KESQ News Channel 3 covered the second straight week of them. The organizer, Jared Milrad, who lives in Calvert's district, said he was worried about what was coming for Social Security, Medicaid and Medi-Cal.

"We organize an empty chair town hall to encourage our Congressman to come forward and hear from his constituents," Milrad said. "Unfortunately, it's our second week doing this event. He hasn't come to our town hall yet."

The station asked Calvert's office for a response. Here is the full list of things his team offered instead of an in-person town hall:

telephone town hall meetings held "last year"
a Veterans Service Organization Roundtable
a Senior Resource Fair
visits with city leaders in the Coachella Valley about "their federal priorities"
a roundtable with Riverside County healthcare leaders
campaign-season telephone town halls and "events throughout the district regularly"
a promise of "additional telephone town halls and other events with constituents"

Every single item on that list is an event where Calvert controls who is in the room, or where there is no room at all.

A telephone town hall is not a town hall. Nobody can see how many people are waiting to speak or who got skipped. Nobody can stand up. Nobody can follow up when the answer doesn't answer the question. The person running the call decides which callers get on the air, and no one outside can ever know what was screened out. That is the entire appeal of the format — and Calvert is far from the only one who has figured that out. In Arkansas, a 90-year-old woman stood outside French Hill's office every Thursday for 52 straight weeks asking for the same thing, and got telephone town halls instead.

Who he wasn't in the room with

It's worth being specific about who was on the other side of that empty chair, because "constituents are upset" is easy to wave off.

In the district Calvert represented at the time, according to the California Budget & Policy Center's February 2025 fact sheet:

84,800 residents relied on CalFresh — California's food assistance program — bringing $195 million a year in grocery money into the district
93,916 children — about 70.6% of the kids in the district — were eligible for free or reduced-price meals at school
96,330 tax filers claimed the Child Tax Credit, worth $220 million to families there
46,200 filers claimed the Earned Income Tax Credit, worth another $106 million
60.3% of renters were paying more for housing than they could afford

Those are the households on the receiving end of "waste, fraud and abuse." They are the ones who wanted twenty minutes and a microphone.

The appropriator who cheered on the people taking away his own power

Here is the part that should bother even people who liked DOGE.

Calvert doesn't just sit on the House Appropriations Committee. He chairs its defense subcommittee — one of the most powerful spending jobs in Congress. Appropriating money is the specific constitutional power the House holds over the executive branch. It is, quite literally, his job.

DOGE's whole method was to stop spending money that Congress had already voted to spend, without asking Congress. And Calvert, the appropriator, wrote a newspaper column saying he was "pleased that President Trump is empowering people to audit these organizations."

He then backed it with votes. On June 12, 2025 and again on July 18, 2025, Calvert voted for the Rescissions Act of 2025 — a bill the House first passed at $9.4 billion, and which became law cancelling $9 billion Congress had already approved for foreign aid and public broadcasting. He voted to take back money his own committee had appropriated, at the request of a White House that had simply decided not to spend it.

An institution's power doesn't get taken from it. It gets handed over, by people like Calvert, who found it more convenient to be on the winning team than to defend the job they hold.

He's got a new district now, and still no room to stand in

In 2026, California's new congressional map drew Calvert into the same district as fellow Republican Young Kim, forcing two sitting incumbents to run against each other in a redrawn 40th District that sweeps from Orange County suburbs into Riverside County.

Which means a very large number of people who will be represented by Ken Calvert if he wins have never had a chance to ask him anything at all.

They can watch his television ads. They can read his op-eds. They can call a phone number and hope they get picked.

What they can't do — what people in his district have been asking to do since February 2025 — is stand up in a room, in front of their neighbors, and make him answer out loud.

Thirty-three years in Congress. The chair is still empty.

Sources

Ken Calvert: DOGE is doing what must be done to protect taxpayers — Orange County Register, February 12, 2025
'Congress works for us' – Protest in Palm Desert over Elon Musk — Luis Avila, KESQ News Channel 3, February 20, 2025
House Republicans unfazed by protests: 'We're moving forward with the cuts' — Ally Mutnick and Lisa Kashinsky, Politico, February 24, 2025
Community demands answers from Rep. Calvert at town hall — Shay Lawson, KESQ News Channel 3, March 23, 2025. Lead photo: KESQ.

Ken Calvert's Best Campaign Line Is That He Brings Home More Federal Money Than Anyone. For 20 Years, Some of It Has Landed Next to Property He Owns.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:20:40 +0000

In June 2026, in the middle of a bitter fight against another Republican for a redrawn Southern California seat, Ken Calvert made his case to the Washington Examiner. It came down to one sentence.

"I'm the only real, true Trump conservative. I've been endorsed twice by the president. I work with him, and not only that, I've done more in bringing federal dollars back to California than any member of Congress, I think, in history."

That is his pitch. He moves money. He has been doing it since 1993, longer than any other Republican in California's congressional delegation, and he is very good at it.

He is also, according to two decades of reporting by the Los Angeles Times, a man whose federal projects keep turning up near real estate he happens to own — and who has twice been caught not telling anyone he owned it.

2005: the four-acre lot

In 2005, Calvert and a business partner named Woodrow Harpole Jr. paid $550,000 for a dusty four-acre parcel just south of March Air Reserve Base in Riverside County.

While he owned that land, Calvert used earmarking to secure $8 million for a planned freeway interchange improvement 16 miles away on the same Cajalco Road corridor, plus another $1.5 million to support commercial development of the area around the airfield. President Bush signed the highway bill carrying the $8 million on August 10, 2005.

Less than a year after buying the lot, without cutting the weeds or hauling off the old septic tank parts scattered on it, Calvert and his partner sold it for $985,000.

A 79% profit. On weeds.

The Times noted that a map of Calvert's real estate holdings and his partner's showed many of them near transportation projects he had backed with federal money — and that better roads had helped drive the region's explosive growth. It also noted something else: his financial disclosure for 2005, the year he bought the land, had not been filed when the story ran.

Calvert's answer then is worth reading twice.

"Because of the political atmosphere in Washington, D.C., people are trying to manufacture controversy, even where there isn't any."

And:

"They haven't passed a law against investing yet."

And:

"All my life in public service, I've never done anything to enrich myself, using the position I hold."

Ethics lawyers quoted in that same story did not agree that there was nothing here. Stanley Brand, a former general counsel to the House of Representatives, said members in Calvert's position should "either sell their property interests in the immediate area or recuse themselves from any related earmarks." Brett Kappel, another ethics lawyer, said an earmark like this "could be perfectly legitimate, but it raises an appearance issue when you have a member who is a property owner, and he or she earmarks funds to benefit development in an area in which the member has an ownership interest." Kappel named two things that would help a lawmaker in that position: that the project had been requested by a local government agency, which the Times says both of these were, and that the member disclose the earmark and the property holding.

The FBI apparently agreed it was worth a look. In November 2007, Roll Call reported that agents had examined Calvert's personal financial records that July, and that Calvert had "sparked investigators' interest last year by sponsoring a transportation earmark near property he owned." He was never charged with anything.

2024: the same story, nineteen years later

Congress banned earmarks in 2011, partly because of scandals exactly like this one. Congress brought them back in 2022.

Calvert got right back to work. Since the practice returned, he has funneled more than $100 million into projects in his Riverside County district, the Los Angeles Times reported in July 2024 — including $9 million for bottlenecks and toll lanes on Interstate 15, $2 million to widen a traffic-choked bridge in Corona, and $5 million for a planned rail line between Los Angeles and Palm Springs.

About $16 million of those planned improvements fall within several miles of rental properties Calvert owns.

His portfolio, per his own disclosures: 10 commercial rental properties around Corona, 20 acres of land in Riverside County, two properties in Arizona, and homes in Corona and Washington. The California properties are valued at as much as $26 million and produced between $320,000 and $805,000 in rental income in a single year. They include an automotive repair center, self-storage facilities, and strip malls. He owns most of them jointly with business partners.

And then the part that is hardest to explain away. The Times found that Calvert had failed to disclose the purchase of a commercial rental property in Corona in 2016 — a building on East 6th Street housing auto-body shops and smog-check stations, from which he had been reporting $15,000 to $50,000 a year in income since 2021.

That building sits about a mile from the bridge that got $2 million in earmarked funds through his office.

His spokesman confirmed the building was bought for $2.25 million in September 2016 and that Calvert's 11% stake was worth $247,000. Calvert said the building was in bad shape and wasn't rentable for years. Asked about it by reporters, he said he would file an amended disclosure.

The watchdog group End Citizens United then filed an ethics complaint over the undisclosed properties — with the Office of Congressional Ethics, according to the group's own announcement. Calvert filed six years' worth of amended financial disclosures.

Six years.

"If I wanted to make money, I wouldn't have ran for Congress"

That is what Calvert told the Times in 2024. He also said this:

"I enjoy investing. They haven't made it illegal to invest. Real estate is something I know, and I get a little bit of income. ... I don't think there's anything wrong with that."

He is right that it isn't illegal. That is the whole point, and it's the same defense he gave in 2006, nearly word for word — they haven't passed a law against investing yet.

Noah Bookbinder, who runs the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told the Times it seemed "pretty unlikely" Calvert broke Congress's conflict-of-interest rules, which he described as "pretty loose, and pretty permissive." Then he said the thing that actually matters:

"It gets tougher when you think about the appearance of a conflict. If you have significant income coming from rental properties which could be affected by your decisions, it raises a question of what's motivating you."

That's it. Nobody has to prove Calvert sat down with a map and drew a circle around his own buildings. The question is simpler and worse: when a congressman with a real estate portfolio worth as much as $26 million in his own district decides which roads and bridges get federal money, how would anyone — including him — ever know for sure what he was thinking?

This isn't a one-off in Congress, either. We've written about a Michigan Republican whose campaign paid his half-brother's business more than $400,000 while that brother helped sell the congressman's luxury condos. The rules are permissive enough that this keeps happening in plain view.

What it costs the rest of us

Here is the part that gets lost in the ethics-lawyer language.

Calvert sits on the House Appropriations Committee and chairs its defense subcommittee, which means he is one of a small number of people who decide where federal money goes. He has been in that world for 33 years. When he tells voters he brings home more federal dollars than anyone in history, he is describing real power over real money.

The people of Riverside and Orange counties are entitled to have that power used on their behalf — on their hospitals, their roads, their schools, their water. What they are not entitled to know, under the current rules, is whether the reason a particular bridge got widened was that it needed widening, or that it happened to sit a mile from a building the congressman quietly owned and hadn't reported.

He was asked about this in 2006, and again in 2024. The answer never changed and it was never really an answer. It's just: they haven't passed a law against it. In the campaign he is running right now, the money is his opening pitch.

Thirty-three years is long enough to have learned why people keep asking.

Sources

Rep. Calvert's Land of Plenty — Tom Hamburger, Lance Pugmire and Richard Simon, Los Angeles Times, May 15, 2006
Rep. Ken Calvert has secured millions for his Riverside County district. Do his own properties benefit? — Laura J. Nelson, Los Angeles Times, July 22, 2024. Lead photo: J. Scott Applewhite / Associated Press.

Ken Calvert Writes the Pentagon's Budget. Defense Contractors Sent Him More Than $200,000 in Three Months While the Iran War Was On.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:15:12 +0000

There is one member of the House of Representatives who holds the pen on the Pentagon's budget. He decides which line items live and which ones die. He decides which contractors get paid.

His name is Ken Calvert, and he has represented part of Riverside County since 1993.

On May 1, 2026, the news outlet NOTUS published an analysis of hundreds of Federal Election Commission filings covering the first three months of the year — January 1 through March 31, the exact stretch when American troops were fighting and dying in Trump's war with Iran. It found that the defense industry poured money into the campaign accounts of the people who decide how much the defense industry gets paid.

Calvert was near the top of the list.

"Rep. Ken Calvert chairs the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which is charged with drafting the Defense Department's budget. The Republican is running in a competitive race after California Democrats gerrymandered his district, and his campaign committee received more than $200,000 during the first three months of 2026 from defense contractor PACs and direct contributions from top defense executives, according to FEC records."

More than $200,000. In three months. From the industry whose budget he writes.

The checks arrived while the shooting was going on

The war with Iran started in February 2026. Congress never voted to authorize it. By late July, the Pentagon's own count showed at least 624 American service members wounded in a war nobody in Washington was ever made to put their name to.

Here is what was landing in Calvert's campaign account during those same weeks, according to the FEC's own database:

Lockheed Martin's employee PAC — $5,000, on March 9
RTX, the parent company of Raytheon — $5,000, on March 4
General Dynamics — $5,000
General Atomics, the drone maker — $5,000
BAE Systems — $5,000
Leonardo DRS — $5,000
AM General, which builds military vehicles — $5,000
Booz Allen Hamilton — $5,000
AeroVironment, Sierra Nevada, Parsons, GE Aerospace, BWX Technologies, Blue Origin, Airbus America, Hermeus, Ursa Major, Applied Research Associates, Applied Intuition, ES3 — $5,000 each

That is not the whole list. It is just the ones who gave $5,000 — the most a PAC may give a candidate for a single election.

All told, FEC records show that at least three dozen PACs tied to defense, aerospace and military-technology companies sent roughly $146,000 to Calvert's campaign committee in those three months — before you count a dollar of what the executives gave personally. Anduril, Leidos, Viasat, KBR, Thales, Parker Hannifin, HawkEye 360, Second Front Systems, AEVEX, Fuse Integration, Pacific Defense Strategies, Air Space Intelligence, Robotic Research, K2 Space, Reliable Robotics — the list reads like an exhibitor floor plan.

NOTUS also found the personal checks. On March 2 and March 3 — which the outlet notes was "days after the Iran war began" — Calvert took two $1,000 donations from executives at AM General: Darrell Duckworth, an executive director, and Ryan DuRussel, the chief financial officer.

Calvert's office did not dispute any of it. His senior congressional adviser, Jason Gagnon, told NOTUS:

"Rep. Calvert appreciates the support he receives from a wide variety of Americans. His votes and actions are always based on what he believes is in the best interest of the constituents he represents and all Americans."

"A wide variety of Americans" is doing a great deal of work in that sentence.

What that money is buying a seat at the table for

This is not abstract. The Pentagon has asked Congress for a $1.5 trillion budget for 2027 — a jump of nearly $500 billion over what Congress approved the year before, and the highest ever, surpassing the inflation-adjusted peak of World War II. The request asks lawmakers to approve about $1.15 trillion the normal way and to push another $350 billion through a fast-track budget process that needs only a simple majority in the Senate.

The subcommittee Calvert chairs is the body that writes the bill deciding how that money is carved up.

Every company on the list above has a direct financial stake in that decision. They are not donating to Ken Calvert because they admire his views on Riverside County traffic. They are donating to the man holding the pen.

And this isn't a one-quarter blip. Across this election cycle, Calvert has taken $366,000 in defense PAC money against a House average of $29,408 — more than twelve times what the typical member of Congress receives. Only about 6% of his money came from small grassroots donors. Roughly 75% came from PACs, super PACs and large donors.

He also voted to keep the war going

Here is where the money and the votes meet.

On July 23, 2026, the House voted 214 to 208 to order the president to pull U.S. forces out of the fighting in Iran. Calvert was one of 182 Republicans we track who voted no — voting to keep American troops in a war Congress had never authorized in the first place.

He is not the only member of Congress whose donors do well out of this war. We've documented an Iowa Republican who privately called the Iran war a "political liability" to a voter at a campaign stop, then voted six times to keep it going while taking $64,500 from oil and gas. The pattern repeats because the incentives repeat.

But Calvert's case is sharper than most, for a simple reason: most members vote on the defense budget. He writes it.

And he is fighting to keep the gavel

There is one more piece, and it explains why the industry's money got so urgent this spring.

House Republican conference rules bar a subcommittee chair from holding the job for more than three consecutive terms. Calvert has already blown through that limit — he is already serving under a waiver, Roll Call reported in April. His gavel, the outlet noted, "is the most sought-after on the Republican side." If he's reelected in November, he'll need another waiver to keep it.

That is the situation the defense industry was writing checks into. The chairman who signs off on their contracts is in the fight of his political life — California's new congressional map drew him into the same district as fellow Republican Young Kim, so two sitting incumbents are running against each other — and he needs a favor from his own party leadership to keep the job that makes him valuable to them.

Money flows toward exactly that kind of insecurity.

What we're owed

Nobody is alleging a crime here. The donations are legal, they're disclosed, and that is precisely the problem. This is what the system looks like when it's working the way it was designed to work.

A person who spends his working hours deciding how to spend $1.5 trillion of our money on weapons should not spend his evenings collecting checks from the people who sell the weapons. Not while the war is on. Not while Americans are getting hurt in it. Not while he is fighting to hang on to the gavel that makes those checks worth writing.

Calvert says his votes "are always based on what he believes is in the best interest of the constituents he represents." His constituents in Riverside and Orange counties did not ask for a $500 billion increase in the Pentagon budget. Many of them are among the people whose monthly payment for their own health insurance rose 58% on average after he and 196 other Republicans voted to let the tax credits that made coverage affordable expire.

Somebody got taken care of in all this. It wasn't them.

Source

Defense Contractors Pump Big Money Into Congressional Campaign Accounts Amid Iran War — Samuel Larreal, NOTUS, May 1, 2026. Lead photo: Associated Press.

$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.

Jay Obernolte Traded His Tariff Vote for a Promise. When Leadership Broke It, He Voted Yes Again.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:35:11 +0000

For about ten minutes on the House floor in September 2025, Jay Obernolte had real power.

He used it to get a promise. Five months later, House leadership broke that promise in front of him — and he voted for the thing that broke it.

The Switch

Here's the setup. Under federal law, when a president declares a national emergency, any member of Congress can force a privileged floor vote on ending it. That's the check. Trump's sweeping tariffs run on an emergency declaration, so that check applies to them.

House Republican leaders didn't want those votes to happen. So they started burying language in ordinary procedural "rules" — the resolutions that set the terms of debate for unrelated bills — that switches the clock off, making it procedurally impossible to force a tariff vote for a set period.

On September 16, 2025, one of those rules came to the floor. It covered seven unrelated bills, and it extended the block on tariff votes.

Six Republicans initially voted against it — enough, with the GOP's paper-thin majority, to sink the rule and blow up the leadership's whole week.

Then three of them changed their minds. As Roll Call reported, Don Bacon of Nebraska switched, and so did Tom McClintock and Jay Obernolte, "both of California," who changed their votes "after a pledge from Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., to make Jan. 31, 2026, the end date for the prohibition."

The rule passed, 213 to 211. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Victoria Spartz of Indiana and Kevin Kiley of California held their no votes. Obernolte's switch was part of what made the difference.

That was the deal. He gave up his leverage and got a date.

The Date Came and Went

January 31, 2026 arrived. Nine days later, the House Rules Committee took up a new rule with new tariff language in it.

The new end date was July 31, 2026 — six more months.

Rules Chairwoman Virginia Foxx said the extension would give the Supreme Court time to weigh in on the president's tariffs. Kiley, who never switched in the first place, had already objected in January, when leadership tried to attach an extension to the spending law enacted at the end of that month: "I don't think that's a good thing to do. I was against it before. I also think it's not a good thing to make these changes through unrelated goals."

The rule came to the floor on February 10, 2026. Obernolte voted for it.

Not "expressed concerns." Not "voted no and lost." He voted yes on extending the exact prohibition he had been promised would expire.

The rule failed anyway — 214 to 217. Only three Republicans voted no: Don Bacon of Nebraska, Kiley, and Massie. Obernolte was on the other side, with leadership.

What He Did the Very Next Day

Because that rule failed, the new block never went on. And on February 11, 2026, the House finally got to vote on the underlying question: whether to end the national emergency behind Trump's tariffs on Canada.

It passed, 219 to 211. Six Republicans voted yes: Bacon, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Jeff Hurd of Colorado, Kiley, Massie, and Dan Newhouse of Washington.

Obernolte voted no.

That's the whole arc in five months. He voted to keep the House from voting on tariffs. He got a promise the block would end. The promise was broken. He voted to extend the block anyway. And when the vote he had twice voted to prevent finally happened, he voted against ending the tariffs.

The September switch is often described as a moment of independence. Looked at across the full sequence, it was the opposite: the one time he had leverage, he spent it, and got nothing.

This Lands Hard in the 23rd District

Obernolte's district covers the High Desert and part of the Inland Empire, and the Inland Empire is a logistics economy. Warehousing accounted for more than 16% of all jobs in San Bernardino County in 2021-22, according to UC Riverside research cited by CalMatters.

Tariffs are a tax on imported goods, and imported goods are what moves through those warehouses. When the cost of moving containers goes up, it reaches his constituents twice: once at the register, and once in the job market.

His constituents also never got to weigh in. Tariff policy is set by executive proclamation. The one place their representative could have registered an objection on their behalf was the House floor — and he voted, repeatedly, to keep that door shut.

The Bigger Problem

Set aside tariffs for a second and look at the machinery.

Congress wrote itself a safety valve: if a president declares an emergency, any member can force a vote on it. That's not a partisan tool. It exists so that emergency powers stay temporary and answerable.

What House leadership has done — and what Obernolte voted for — is disable that valve on a rolling basis, six months at a time, tucked inside rules about unrelated bills. Nobody has to cast a vote called "protecting the tariffs." They cast a vote on the procedure for debating the Law-Enforcement Innovate to De-Escalate Act, and the tariff shield rides along inside it.

That is a design meant to keep constituents from noticing. Which is why it's worth writing the roll-call numbers down: 2025-268, 2026-060, 2026-065.

Obernolte's votes: yes, yes, no.

Source

Roll Call, "House Rules Committee moves to protect Trump's tariffs from congressional disapproval" (February 10, 2026), and the roll-call records of the House Clerk. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call.

"No One Is Being Forced Off Medicaid," Jay Obernolte Told His District. California Now Projects 1.1 Million People Will Lose Coverage.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:32:00 +0000

There is a statement sitting on Jay Obernolte's official congressional website right now, under the heading "Statement from Rep. Jay Obernolte on Medicaid Reforms in H.R. 1."

Partway through it, he writes:

"Let me be clear: no one is being forced off Medicaid because of these changes."

That sentence is about to be tested, in his own district, on a specific date.

What Is Actually Coming

California's Medicaid program is called Medi-Cal. The work requirement in H.R. 1 — the law Obernolte voted for on July 3, 2025 — takes effect in California on January 1, 2027.

Here is what the state agency that runs the program projects, as of May 2026:

4.8 million Medi-Cal enrollees fall into the category subject to the requirement.
2.2 million of them are expected to qualify for an exemption.
1.1 million Medi-Cal enrollees are projected to lose coverage by 2029–30 because of the work requirement.

Those are the Department of Health Care Services' own numbers, not an advocacy group's. And the California Health Care Foundation flags that they were calculated before federal guidance came out on June 1 — guidance that will likely decrease how many people qualify for an exemption and increase how many lose coverage.

So one million-plus Californians, on the state's own math, from the one provision Obernolte's statement devotes a single paragraph to and describes as "very modest and flexible."

Forty-Eight Percent of His District

This is not an abstract statewide number for Obernolte. It's a local one.

48% of the people in California's 23rd District are covered by Medicaid, according to CalMatters, which names his district and Doug LaMalfa's when it writes that "some of the state's most conservative areas benefit disproportionately from Medicaid." Nearly half the people he represents are in the program he voted to cut.

The bill he voted for reduces federal Medicaid spending by $911 billion over ten years, according to CBO estimates compiled by KFF — and more than three-quarters of that reduction lands in the second five years, which is exactly why the pain shows up on a delay.

The "Spending Will Still Increase" Trick

Obernolte's statement has a second claim worth pausing on:

"In fact, spending in the Medicaid program will continue to increase even after these changes."

This is technically true and functionally meaningless. Medicaid spending rises over time because medical prices rise and the population ages. Saying spending will still go up doesn't tell you whether people keep their coverage — it tells you that health care gets more expensive.

The $911 billion is the gap between what the program was set to spend and what it will now spend. You can shrink a program by nearly a trillion dollars against where it was headed and still describe the remaining line as "increasing." That is what happened here, and describing it the other way is the point of describing it that way.

Why People Lose Coverage Under Work Rules

Obernolte's defense of the work requirement rests on how reasonable it sounds. His statement lists the ways to comply — "working part-time, going to school, volunteering, or caring for a family member" — and notes the "broad exemptions."

The exemptions are real. That is exactly why the record from the first state to try it is so damning.

Arkansas imposed a Medicaid work requirement in 2018. It disenrolled more than 18,000 adults in four months before a federal court halted it — and researchers found no evidence of a positive effect on employment. Urban Institute researchers reexamined it with national Census data in 2025 and reached the same conclusion as an earlier Harvard study: uninsurance went up in the targeted age group, and work didn't.

People didn't lose coverage because they refused to work. They lost it because of the reporting — the portal, the deadline, the notice that went to an old address, the exemption they qualified for but didn't know how to document.

That's the mechanism Obernolte's sentence steps around. Nobody is "forced off Medicaid" by a rule. They're dropped by a form.

He Has Been Told, Repeatedly

None of this is information Obernolte lacked.

Constituents in California's Republican districts told CalMatters they felt "betrayed" by the coming cuts — one, whose 7-year-old grandson needs Medicaid to manage his cerebral palsy, said: "Some people will die without it." In February 2025, some 200 people packed a town hall in Yucca Valley and shouted him down over federal cuts; his office's response was to tell the San Bernardino Sun that many attendees "were from outside the district and attended with the intent to disrupt rather than engage in a productive conversation" and to call the night an "anomaly."

And Medicaid isn't the only place he's landed on the side of higher costs. He voted against the $35 monthly cap on insulin, voted against the law that finally let Medicare negotiate drug prices, and in December 2025 dismissed extending the ACA premium tax credits — the ones keeping marketplace premiums down — as "temporary taxpayer subsidies to health insurance companies" in an op-ed.

What Happens Next

January 1, 2027 is about five months away. After that, California starts checking, and the state's own projection says the number of people who fall out of Medi-Cal will start climbing.

When it does, there is a statement on Obernolte's website that his constituents can hold up. It's still there. He wrote it himself.

"Let me be clear: no one is being forced off Medicaid because of these changes."

Roughly half his district is on this program. They deserve to know whether their congressman believed that when he wrote it — and what he plans to do when the number comes in.

Sources

Statement from Rep. Jay Obernolte on Medicaid Reforms in H.R. 1 (his own office), and the California Health Care Foundation, "What is the H.R. 1 Work Requirement and How will it Affect Californians with Medi-Cal?". Photo: Larry Valenzuela, CalMatters/CatchLight Local.

A Group Sells AI Startups "Meaningful Access to Policymakers" for $3,500 a Month. Jay Obernolte Helped Launch It — and He's the Policymaker.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:29:05 +0000

Jay Obernolte is the most powerful voice on artificial intelligence in the House of Representatives.

He chairs the Science Committee's Subcommittee on Research and Technology. He chaired the House's bipartisan AI Task Force. He sits on Energy and Commerce, including its Communications and Technology subcommittee. In April 2026 his colleagues elected him chair of the House Republican Policy Committee, a leadership job. He is, by his own office's description, "the only serving member of Congress with a graduate-level degree in AI."

He is also the author of the bill that would decide how — and whether — America regulates the most powerful AI systems ever built.

And in October 2025, an AI conference company and a venture capital fund launched a nonprofit that sells AI startups access to people exactly like him. Obernolte helped launch it.

What the AI Coalition Sells

The group is called the AI Coalition. HumanX, which runs a large AI industry conference, and the venture fund Humanrace Capital tapped Obernolte to launch it, Axios reported.

Here is how the coalition describes itself, in its own words:

"the first nonprofit specifically designed to provide early-stage AI companies, from pre-seed through Series B, with meaningful access to policymakers and influence over the regulations that will define the next decade of innovation"

Read that phrase again — not "a voice," not "education." Meaningful access to policymakers and influence over the regulations.

It is to be registered as both a 501(c)(3) and a 501(c)(6), HumanX CEO Stefan Weitz told Axios, so it can do education and lobbying. Membership runs $1,750 to $3,500 a month. The plan includes Washington fly-ins, collective advocacy, and business development events, according to an AI policy newsletter's account of the launch.

That's up to $42,000 a year, from a pre-seed startup, for access.

Obernolte's stated reason is sympathetic on its face: at AI hearings on Capitol Hill, he said, the voices of smaller companies and entrepreneurs were missing. That's a real problem. Big AI firms have armies of lobbyists and small ones don't.

But look at what the fix actually is. The problem is that access to Congress is bought. The solution on offer is a cheaper subscription to the same thing — sold with the endorsement of the congressman writing the rules.

If access to your own government has a monthly price, the answer isn't a discount tier. It's that access shouldn't have a price.

The Regulations He's Selling Influence Over

This isn't abstract. Nine months after the coalition launched, Obernolte introduced the bill.

On July 23, 2026, he introduced the FRONTIER Act (H.R. 9925) with five original cosponsors, among them Rep. Lori Trahan — the first serious attempt at a federal framework for frontier AI. It requires the biggest developers to publish risk frameworks, hire outside auditors, and report safety incidents to the Commerce Department.

Then there's Section 9. In the bill's own text:

"Except as provided in subsection (c), no State or political subdivision of a State may adopt or enforce any law, regulation, order, or other requirement that imposes new substantive obligations on artificial intelligence developers with respect to any Covered Subject Area."

The "Covered Subject Areas" are frontier AI risk transparency, third-party auditing and independent verification, and incident reporting. Those are precisely the three things states have started regulating.

Subsection (c) leaves states four lanes: generally applicable laws that don't target developers, rules on how AI is used or deployed, rules protecting minors, and rules on what state governments themselves buy. What it does not leave them is any power to put a safety obligation on the companies building the models.

There is no sunset date in Section 9, or anywhere else in the bill. As written, that preemption is permanent.

It Would Override His Own State

Obernolte represents California's 23rd District. California passed the country's first frontier AI safety law.

Governor Newsom signed SB 53 on September 29, 2025. It requires large frontier developers to publish a safety framework, sets up a channel for companies and the public to report critical safety incidents to the state's Office of Emergency Services, and protects whistleblowers who disclose significant health and safety risks. Noncompliance carries a civil penalty enforceable by California's attorney general.

Transparency. Incident reporting. Those are two of the three Covered Subject Areas his bill takes away from states.

So the congressman from California wrote a bill that would preempt the core of the AI safety law California just passed — and helped launch a group that charges AI companies a monthly fee for "influence over the regulations."

Who Already Funds Him

Obernolte doesn't need the coalition to hear from AI money. It's already in his campaign account.

At the top of his contributor list sits Anthropic PBC — not the company, whose PAC has given him nothing, but its employees and their households, at $71,862 on OpenSecrets' current count — alongside the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. The PACs of Google, SpaceX, Comcast, AT&T, and Charter are writing him checks too — companies regulated by the committees he sits on.

Only 4% of his money comes from small grassroots donors. Sixty-nine percent comes from PACs, super PACs and large donors, and he ranks #361 out of 440 House members in grassroots funding.

He is not a congressman who has to go looking for the tech industry's opinion. It arrives.

The Rest of Us Don't Get a Subscription

Here's what the $3,500-a-month tier buys that Obernolte's actual constituents don't get.

In February 2025, about 200 people packed the Yucca Valley Community Center to ask him about DOGE firing staff at Joshua Tree National Park. He defended the cuts, said of Elon Musk that "I'm very glad there is someone looking at all of the waste," and the room shouted him down. His office's response afterward was to tell the paper that many in the crowd "were from outside the district and attended with the intent to disrupt rather than engage in a productive conversation," and to call the event an "anomaly."

That's the difference. A pre-seed AI startup in another state pays a monthly fee and gets a fly-in. A grandmother in Twentynine Palms gets a night in a community center and a press statement calling her an outside agitator.

We've seen what the AI industry's money buys when it's spent directly: in Texas, the AI and crypto industries spent $2.1 million electing Carlos De La Cruz — twice what his own campaign raised. And we've seen what preemption does downstream: in Pennsylvania, all ten of the state's Republicans in the U.S. House voted for a ten-year ban on states writing AI rules while their constituents absorbed the electricity costs of the data centers.

Obernolte is further upstream than any of them. He's the one drafting the language.

What We Deserve

None of this requires believing Obernolte is corrupt in a criminal sense. There's no allegation that he broke a law.

The problem is the arrangement itself, and it's simple enough to state in one sentence: the member of Congress writing the country's AI rules lent his name to a business that sells companies influence over those rules, by the month.

He is also, by his own office's description, "a video game developer and business owner" — still in the industry he regulates.

When a lawmaker's name becomes part of a product other people sell, the public is entitled to ask who he works for. AI is going to reshape jobs, elections, schools, and safety in the High Desert the same as everywhere else. The people who live there are not pre-seed through Series B. They can't buy a tier.

They just get to vote.

Sources

Benton Institute for Broadband & Society summarizing Axios, "AI startups find a D.C. advocate in Rep. Obernolte" (October 2025), and the text of the FRONTIER Act, H.R. 9925 (introduced July 23, 2026).

Tom McClintock Won't Meet His Own Constituents. He's Demanding Six Years of Records From Philadelphia's Sheriff.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:16:00 +0000

Tom McClintock chairs the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement. It is one of the most powerful immigration posts in Congress, and he has spent 2026 using it the same way over and over: sending letters to city and county officials across the country demanding their records.

Philadelphia. Boston. New York City. Denver. Arlington County, Virginia. California.

None of them are in his district. His district is in the Sierra Nevada foothills and the Central Valley.

What the Philadelphia letters asked for

On May 4, 2026, McClintock and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan sent letters to three Philadelphia officials: District Attorney Larry Krasner, Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel and Sheriff Rochelle Bilal.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported what they wanted: up to six years of immigration communications between those agencies and federal immigration officials, due back by May 18 — fourteen days later.

That part is at least about government. This part isn't.

From the sheriff specifically, the committee also demanded her correspondence with a list of named private organizations:

No ICE Philly
Juntos
CAIR Philadelphia
Asian Americans United
the Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition
New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia

Read that list again. These are immigrant-rights groups, a civil-rights organization, an Asian American community group and a faith-based coalition. A congressional committee asked an elected sheriff to hand over everything she has ever written to them.

The committee's stated justification, in its own words: "The shielding of criminal aliens from immigration enforcement in Philadelphia undermines public safety and thwarts the efficient enforcement of federal law."

Bilal's office declined to comment. Krasner, Bethel and the mayor's office could not immediately be reached.

The same letter, city after city

The same day, McClintock and Jordan sent the same kind of demand to Arlington County, Virginia — to Commonwealth's Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, Police Chief Charles Penn and Sheriff Jose Quiroz.

On May 27, they gave Boston officials two weeks. The Washington Times reported that Jordan and McClintock demanded Police Commissioner Michael Cox turn over, by June 10, all Boston Police Department communications touching on immigration from January 2022 forward — plus detainer counts, criminal histories, and his communications with the district attorney, the sheriff and the mayor's office. They called the city's approach "pro-crime sanctuary policies."

To be fair to the letters, they aren't argument-free. The Boston letter cites three cases from the previous two years in which people released by the Suffolk County sheriff were later arrested by ICE and charged with serious crimes against children. That is a real thing to raise. It does not require four years of every email a police department wrote about immigration.

They have also gone after New York City officials, Denver officials with Rep. Gabe Evans, and, with Rep. Darrell Issa, California officials.

The pattern is the point. This is not oversight of a federal agency, which is what a congressional committee is built for. It is a standing federal investigation into the internal communications of local prosecutors, police chiefs and sheriffs — the same local law enforcement officials the party running the committee spends most of its time promising to back.

It's a fight he's been building toward

McClintock isn't just sending letters. He wrote the Shut Down Sanctuary Policies Act (H.R. 7640), which cleared his committee in March 2026. By his own description, it pre-empts sanctuary jurisdictions from interfering with immigration enforcement and redirects federal law enforcement funding away from them and toward jurisdictions that cooperate with ICE.

So: a bill to defund them, and a document campaign to investigate them.

There is a broader version of this move going on right now. Claudia Tenney's bill to let one federal official strip any nonprofit's tax-exempt status — without showing it the evidence — was quietly reintroduced in December 2025. Greg Abbott declared Texas's largest Muslim civil-rights group a terrorist organization on reasoning that Texas Monthly traced to an anti-Muslim think tank's report. The common thread is government power pointed at the organizations that represent immigrants and Muslims, and at the local officials who work with them.

McClintock's letters put a congressional subpoena power's worth of pressure behind the same idea, without a subpoena.

Meanwhile, in his district

Here is the contrast that ought to bother the people who elected him.

McClintock has time to write to a sheriff in Philadelphia about her emails. He did not have time for his own constituents.

When people in his district organized their own town hall in Modesto in March 2025, nearly 200 of them showed up and he declined the invitations. They put their questions to a cardboard cutout of him instead. His office dismissed the whole event as "a nationally coordinated campaign by a group called Indivisible."

He has been in Congress since 2009. In that time the things his constituents have actually asked him about — 56% of adult Medi-Cal enrollees in his district at risk of losing coverage under the Medi-Cal work requirements in the budget framework he voted for in February 2025, the Caldor Fire that burned 221,835 acres across three counties — have not produced this kind of energy.

Six years of records from a sheriff 2,700 miles away did.

Source

House Judiciary committee criticizes Philly law enforcement over sanctuary policies, demands immigration records and correspondence — Jeff Gammage and Sam Janesch, The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 6, 2026. Committee letters and dates from judiciary.house.gov and the Washington Times. Photo: Alejandro A. Alvarez / The Philadelphia Inquirer.