MAGA Report Cards — Colorado

Gabe Evans' New Ad Says He's Spent 15 Years 'Ranching.' His Own Disclosure Shows $345 in Farm Profits From Livestock — Below the Rancher Standard His Spokeswoman Named.

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:53:23 +0000

There is a new campaign ad running in Colorado's 8th Congressional District. It shows a congressman hauling hay, dropping a bale into a trough, and talking straight to camera with cows shifting around behind him.

"They say my boots don't fit my suit. They are probably right. But I've worn these for 15 years, ranching here on my place in Weld, on patrol in Adams, in a Black Hawk over Colorado wildfires. … The last thing Washington needs is another suit."

The congressman is Gabe Evans. He owns three cows.

The standard his own campaign chose

Evans has called himself a "rancher" and a "beef producer" for his entire political career. When the Colorado Times Recorder pressed him on it last year, his campaign gave a specific defense: the U.S. Department of Agriculture counts people who earn more than $1,000 from agricultural products as ranchers or farmers. By that measure, his spokeswoman said, he qualifies.

That is a useful thing to have on the record, because it turns a vague argument about identity into a number anyone can check.

Evans' latest financial disclosure reports one line of earned income from agriculture: $345 in "Farm Profits (livestock and beef sales)" for last year.

That is $655 short of the line his own campaign drew. He did not meet the test he asked to be judged by.

Fifteen years of it

This is not a slip in one ad. It is the whole brand, and it goes back to before he was in Congress.

In his first legislative race in 2022, Evans put photos of himself with a Long Horn cow on his campaign website. Supporters of his opponent that year, Terry DeGroot — who manages his family's dairy operation, Colorado Cow — reportedly mocked him for owning pet cows rather than running an actual ranch.

It did not slow him down. During his 2024 congressional run and after he won, Evans posted a steady run of images across social media and his official congressional website: gazing at cows, in the dirt with his family and some cows, standing with cows over his shoulder, leaning on a cow pen gate.

Former Congressman John Salazar, a Democrat who had roughly 500 head of cattle when Colorado elected him in 2004, gave the Colorado Times Recorder the assessment that stuck last year: Evans is "all hat and no cattle."

Where the three cows actually went

The detail that matters most is what happened to the animals when Evans got to Washington.

When he entered Congress last year, Evans handed his three cows to a friend to look after. The cows now appear to be back on his Weld County property — which lets him keep claiming an agricultural tax break on the land.

So the herd left when he did not have time for it, appears to be back on land that carries an agricultural tax break, and features prominently in a campaign ad about how he is not a suit.

Evans' response to this line of questioning has been to call it a distraction. "While the Left wastes time and taxpayer dollars questioning the validity of the Evans' family farm, Congressman Gabe Evans is fighting serious battles to make Colorado a better place to live, work, and raise a family," his spokeswoman said last year.

What he does when agriculture is actually on the line

The 8th District is farm and ranch country north of Denver. Evans' record there is not the record of the man in the ad.

When 3,800 meatpackers at a JBS plant went on strike, Evans told their union he would stand with them — a month after cashing a $5,000 check from the company. Ninety thousand people in his district get food stamps; he voted to cut them and would not say how many of his own constituents lose out. He keeps posing for photos at Colorado businesses while voting eight times to protect the tariffs that are squeezing them.

He also spent more than $320,000 of taxpayer money advertising himself, $225,000 of it routed to his own campaign consultant. The image is the product. The record is the thing the image is covering.

His seat is one of the closest in the country — he won it in 2024 by about 2,500 votes — and Elon Musk's America PAC is now spending on his behalf, one of eighteen Republicans on this site getting that money. His opponent this year is Democrat Manny Rutinel.

What the filings show

Gabe Evans owns three cows and reported $345 in farm profits from "livestock and beef sales" on his most recent financial disclosure. His own spokeswoman said the federal standard for calling yourself a rancher is $1,000 in agricultural earnings, which puts him $655 below it. He is running an ad that says he has spent 15 years "ranching," and the cows he gave away when he went to Congress appear to be back on his Weld County land, where they support an agricultural tax break.

Source

Colorado Times Recorder, Gabe Evans Raises 3 Cows, But in a New Campaign Ad He Says He's 'Ranching' in Colorado, by Jason Salzman, September 8, 2026. Image via Colorado Times Recorder.

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.

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

Gabe Evans Spent More Than $320,000 of Your Money Advertising Himself. He Sent $225,000 of It to His Own Campaign Consultant.

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 06:38:35 +0000

Every member of Congress gets a pot of taxpayer money to communicate with the people they represent. It pays for newsletters, town hall notices, and mailers explaining how to get help with a passport or a Social Security check. It is not a campaign budget. The rules say so in writing.

Axios Denver reported on September 2 that Gabe Evans spent more than $320,000 of that money on advertising in his first term in Congress — radio spots, mailers, web ads, and text messages. Out of all House members, Axios found he ranked sixth through late July. His total nearly topped what Colorado's whole congressional delegation spent put together.

And more than $225,000 of it went to a political consulting firm called Breakpoint Media.

The same firm his campaign pays

Breakpoint Media is not a neutral vendor Evans found in a phone book. Over the past two years, the same firm collected roughly $170,000 from Evans' reelection campaign.

So the operation that builds his campaign ads also built the ads his congressional office paid for with public money. That is the whole reason the rules exist. The House's own Communications Standards Manual bars official communications from containing campaign content, from using "content developed using campaign resources," and from carrying "content laudatory of a Member on a personal or political basis." It does permit biographical information related to a member's official duties.

Evans' office cleared the process. Staff at the bipartisan House Communication Standards Commission signed off on all of the messages as official. That is not the same thing as the messages being about official business.

What the ads actually said

Judge them yourself. Axios reviewed the messages. Among them:

A Spanish-language radio ad in which Evans says, "I am Gabe Evans and I work hard in Congress to help families like yours."
Text messages attacking Democratic senators over the 2025 government shutdown.
Another text message calling Colorado "the second most dangerous state in the country" — a swipe at the state's Democratic leaders.
Social media posts crediting his own vote on the Working Families Tax Cuts with "putting real money back into household budgets."

Read those four as a stranger. Not one of them is about how to reach his casework staff or where the next town hall is. Axios reports that some of Evans' other ads did list the services his office can provide, and that his messages typically carried a pitch to sign up for his congressional newsletter. These four are the lines a candidate uses on the stump, mailed and broadcast on the public's tab.

The Spanish-language push is the tell. Evans' district north of Denver is 40% Latino, and he won it in 2024 by fewer than 2,500 votes. A first-term member with a razor-thin margin needs name recognition with exactly those voters. His office bought it for him.

His spokesperson, Alexandria Cullen, told Axios that "Congressman Evans is proud of the proactive outreach he conducts to serve constituents across Northern Colorado."

He advertised the vote that cost his district

The most expensive part of this is not the money. It is what the money was used to sell.

The ads touted his vote for H.R. 1 — Trump's 2025 budget bill — and the tax provisions inside it. Evans has been telling his district that bill was good for them. He told constituents it protected "the people who need it most" and called the warnings about Medicaid cuts "fear mongering." Nurses have since named 12 Colorado hospitals at risk because of it, including hospitals in his own district.

The same law rewrote the rules for food assistance. About 90,000 people in Evans' district get food stamps, and asked twice how many of them would lose benefits under the rules he voted for, he changed the subject.

So the sequence runs like this. He voted for a bill that took health coverage and food help away from people in his district. Then he used their tax money to advertise the vote to them.

He is not the only one doing it

This has become a pattern among House Republicans, and we have documented it repeatedly:

Mike Collins, running for Senate in Georgia, spent more than $400,000 in official funds on TV ads built around Trump praising him by name — then reused the exact same Trump quote and footage in his campaign ad.
Michelle Fischbach spent $51,000 in three months mailing her Minnesota constituents while refusing to hold a town hall or answer a reporter.
Mark Messmer raised $1.4 million in political money and paid for his ad with public funds instead.
Rob Bresnahan's taxpayer-funded video turned up in Google's political ad library filed under "Rob for PA," and a constituent filed an ethics complaint over it.
Blake Moore's office sent mass mailers in batches of 499 to stay under the threshold that triggers pre-election restrictions.

The dollar amounts differ. The move is identical: a member facing voters uses the account meant for constituent service to raise his own profile, and the bill goes to the constituents.

What the record shows

Gabe Evans spent more than $320,000 in taxpayer money on advertising in a single term, the sixth-highest total in the House through late July, and nearly as much as Colorado's whole congressional delegation combined. More than $225,000 of it went to Breakpoint Media, the same firm his campaign paid about $170,000. The ads promoted his vote for a budget bill that put 12 Colorado hospitals at risk and rewrote food assistance for 90,000 people in his own district.

Source

John Frank, "Colorado's Gabe Evans spent big on taxpayer-funded 'franking'", Axios Denver, September 2, 2026. Photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images.

Gabe Evans Told the Union He Would Stand With 3,800 Striking Meatpackers. A Month Earlier He Had Cashed a $5,000 Check From the Company.

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 07:04:06 +0000

On March 16, 2026, at 5:30 in the morning, workers walked out of the JBS beef plant in Greeley, Colorado. By that afternoon more than 2,700 of them were on the picket line. The plant employs 3,800 people and turns out roughly 5% of the beef in the United States. It sits in Colorado's 8th Congressional District.

A week into the strike, on March 23, their congressman called the union.

Gabe Evans phoned Kim Cordova, the president of UFCW Local 7, and told her he was with the workers. "He had committed that he was going to stand with the workers who are actually the constituents in Greeley," Cordova told the Colorado Times Recorder. The union asked him for two specific things: come stand on the picket line, and send a letter to JBS telling management to come back to the bargaining table.

He did neither. For the full three weeks his constituents were out, Evans never walked the line, never sent the letter, and never said anything about the strike in public.

What the FEC records show

A month before that phone call, Evans's campaign took a check from the company his constituents were striking against.

Federal Election Commission records show JBS USA Food Company PAC gave Evans's campaign committee $5,000 on February 23, 2026. That was weeks after Local 7 members had already voted 99% to authorize the strike. It was the second such check — the same PAC gave him another $5,000 on May 12, 2025.

The money did not stop at the company's own PAC. Senior employees at Cornerstone Government Affairs, the firm registered to lobby Washington for JBS at the time, gave Evans's campaign more than $10,000 across 2024 and 2025 — a dozen separate contributions, which we confirmed line by line in the FEC's own database.

Evans's campaign did not respond to questions about any of it.

What the workers were striking over

This was not a dispute about a rounding error in a benefits package.

Deborah Rodarte, a worker at the plant, told the Colorado Sun that when her knives went dull she couldn't get them switched out, and that a coworker's protective mesh tunic had a ripped section over her chest for "a year, maybe two" because the company said her size wasn't available. Dull knives take 25% to 63% more force to cut, which is how blades slip. The plant processes about 420 cattle an hour.

Cordova said JBS was insisting on poverty-level wages — average annual raises under 2%, well below Colorado inflation — while pushing rising health care costs onto workers. JBS disputed the workers' account of conditions, saying employees can leave the line for approved reasons and that the company hands out newly sharpened knives frequently.

The strike ended after three weeks. Workers ratified a contract on April 12 with 93% approval, winning raises, a one-time $750 bonus, and a requirement that the company pay for protective equipment — the same things they'd walked out over.

The photo he didn't get

Evans did finally set foot in the plant, on April 2 — after weeks of silence, and two days before negotiations resumed. He met with union members. According to Cordova, his team wanted pictures.

"They wanted to do a photo op with our members, and I said, 'No, we want to see what you're going to do first, but you're not here to take a photo op as if you stood side by side with us.' We told him about all of the human rights violations, the allegations of human trafficking, what was going on with wage theft. … He just never did anything about it; he stood on the side of the company."

Workers learned their congressman was in the building the way anyone else would have: JBS put a screen up in the plant lobby welcoming "Congressman Gabe Evans," next to a photo of a staffer from his office. The company announced the visit. The union didn't.

This is a familiar shape for Evans. We've written before about how he keeps posing for photos at Colorado businesses while voting eight times to protect the tariffs squeezing them. The pattern is the same here: show up, get the picture, change nothing.

Who he actually works for

Evans's ties to JBS predate the strike. On February 4, 2025, he was one of two members of Congress quoted in JBS's own press release announcing $200 million in U.S. beef investments — $50 million of it a new distribution center in Greeley. "This announcement ensures that the cattle producers and the local businesses that support the facility will continue to thrive and prosper," Evans said. He has also posted photos of himself touring the plant and meeting JBS executives.

That fits the rest of his funding. Only 10% of Evans's money comes from small grassroots donors, while 63% comes from PACs, super PACs and large donors — ranking him #358 out of 440 House members in grassroots support. The Koch network's super PAC alone spent $1,243,948 to put him in office.

It is also consistent with how he has voted on the things his constituents need. Evans said his vote for the Republican budget law would protect "the people who need it most" — and 12 Colorado hospitals are now at risk. About 90,000 people in his district get food assistance, and he voted to cut it.

Cordova, who has dealt with plenty of politicians, put the standard plainly:

"I don't like any politician to just show up at a picket line for a photo op. We really want to see real advocacy for workers, for human beings. We don't want to hear from you every four years, right? We need to see you every day."

Colorado's 8th District is one of the most competitive in the country. Evans faces Democratic state Rep. Manny Rutinel in November.

What the record shows

Gabe Evans told the president of UFCW Local 7 he would stand with 3,800 striking meatpackers in his own district. He never walked the picket line, never sent the letter the union asked for, and said nothing publicly across all three weeks of the strike. One month before he made that promise, his campaign accepted $5,000 from the striking workers' employer — the second $5,000 check from that PAC — on top of more than $10,000 from the company's lobbyists. The one time he entered the plant, it was the company that announced he was there.

Source

Rep. Gabe Evans promised striking workers solidarity. He took a check instead — Cooper Baldwin, Courier Colorado, August 28, 2026, building on original reporting by the Colorado Times Recorder. Contribution figures independently verified against Federal Election Commission records. Photo provided by UFCW Local 7.

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.

Seven Republicans Are Running on 'Local Control' of Data Centers. All Seven Voted to Take It Away for Ten Years.

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 18:21:04 +0000

A data center is a warehouse full of computers that run artificial intelligence. It drinks electricity and water on a scale most towns have never had to plan for, and somebody has to pay for the power plants and the pipes. Across the country, towns and counties have started saying no — or at least not like this.

So this year, a lot of Republicans started saying the same thing. Let the community decide. Local control. Your town, your call.

There is a problem with that. On May 22, 2025, almost every Republican in the U.S. House voted for a bill that would have made local control over data centers illegal for the next ten years.

That is the finding of a report published August 24, 2026 by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, written by its vice president of technology policy, Adam Conner. We pulled the roll calls ourselves. They are exactly what the report says they are.

The vote

Buried in the House version of Trump's budget bill was a section called the "Artificial Intelligence and Information Technology Modernization Initiative." One paragraph of it said that for ten years, no state and no city or county could enforce any law limiting, restricting, or otherwise regulating artificial intelligence models or systems.

That word "systems" is the whole ballgame. The bill did not define an AI system as software. It defined it as "any data system, hardware, tool, or utility that operates, in whole or in part, using artificial intelligence" — the buildings, the chips, the cooling, the power hookups. A data center is all of those things in one place.

The National Conference of State Legislatures, which exists to advise state lawmakers, read the language and wrote to the House Energy and Commerce Committee in May 2025 to warn exactly what would happen. Restricting states this way, the group told the committee, would "circumvent their authority to regulate the permitting, construction and operation of data centers within their borders" — "raising costs for ratepayers, jeopardizing zoning decisions that protect our mutual constituents and impacting existing infrastructure such as power grids and generating facilities."

The bill was not neutral about which direction the rules could run, either. It carved out an exception for state and local laws whose purpose was to "remove legal impediments to" AI or to "streamline licensing, permitting, routing, zoning, procurement, or reporting procedures" for it. Rules that made it easier to build a data center were fine. Rules that made it harder were banned.

The House passed the bill anyway. The roll call records 215 Republicans voting yes and two voting no — Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio. Every Democrat voted no.

The provision never became law. The Senate stripped it out at 4:08 in the morning on July 1, 2025, on a 99–1 vote. Ninety-nine senators, both parties, agreed it had to go.

But the House vote happened. It is on the record, and it belongs to everyone who cast it.

Four of them voted for it four separate times

The floor vote is the one a member can shrug off as a vote on a thousand-page bill. Four of the members named here cannot use that excuse, because they sat on the committee where the provision was written and had to vote on it by itself.

Gabe Evans of Colorado, John James of Michigan, Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey and Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa all serve on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The committee's markup ran through the night of May 13, 2025; Politico reported that the panel cleared the communications section — the one that "would most notably institute a 10-year moratorium on state AI legislation" — shortly after midnight. Three recorded votes touched it:

The committee's ranking Democrat offered an amendment, COMM19, to delete the ten-year ban from the bill entirely. It failed, 24 yeas to 29 nays. Evans, James, Kean and Miller-Meeks all voted no — they voted to keep it in.
The committee then voted 29–24 to send the section containing the ban to the Budget Committee. All four voted yes.
The committee voted 30–24 to transmit its full recommendations, ban included. All four voted yes.

Then they voted for it again on the House floor nine days later. Four votes. One of them was a straight up-or-down question — should this ban be in the bill, yes or no? — and they answered it.

Arizona, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin: the promises

Andy Biggs is the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona. Asked in a July 2026 interview how he would handle the state's data center boom, he told KTAR News that "it becomes a local jurisdiction issue and the state's just got to make sure we take care of the water and the power situation." The bill he voted for would likely have made a state water-or-power requirement aimed at data centers unenforceable.

Ashley Hinson is the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Iowa. In an August 10, 2026 interview, she told Iowa's News Now that "these decisions are best decided at the local level," and that Iowans "want to know that their utility rates are not going to go skyrocketing" and that when they "turn on the faucet, not only is there going to be water that comes out, but that it's going to be safe to drink." She did not mention her vote.

Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who voted for the ban four times, told the same station in July that "people are rightly concerned about water usage and electricity rates going up," and that AI growth "needs to be done transparently. You need to have community involvement in this." Transparency rules and community sign-off are precisely the kind of documentation and permitting obligations that the ban she voted for four times would likely have blocked.

John James, also a four-time yes vote, is the Republican nominee for governor of Michigan. Asked in June 2026 for his data center position, he gave Spectrum News a five-part answer and led with it: "Local control. Don't increase my bills. Take care of my water. No pollution. Prioritize brownfields over productive farmland." Every item after the first would have to be written into a state or local rule to mean anything, and the ban James voted for four times is a ban on writing exactly those rules.

Tom Barrett of Michigan's 7th District is running ads on this. We covered one of them: a spot in which he says he "stood up to my own party" on data centers, built on a 2015 state legislative vote about a single building in Grand Rapids. On August 19, 2026, Semafor's Dave Weigel posted a clip from Barrett's virtual town hall in which Barrett denounces "proposals to nationalize decisions that would override local communities about their decisions around data centers." He had voted for one.

Tom Tiffany is the Republican nominee for governor of Wisconsin. "Data Centers" is the only page under the solutions section of his campaign site, and the second of his five standards is titled "Give local communities the final say." Under it: "No data center should be forced on a community that doesn't want it. Local residents should have the final say over what gets built in their backyard." His other four standards — ending tax breaks, protecting farmland, making data centers pay their own energy costs, banning secret nondisclosure agreements — are each a tax, a zoning rule, a fee or a documentation requirement aimed at data centers. Those are the words the bill he voted for used: a "substantive design, performance, data-handling, documentation, civil liability, taxation, fee, or other requirement" on an AI system. We have also written about the $5,000 Tiffany took from the only registered lobbyist for Wisconsin's data center coalition.

Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin's 3rd District posted on August 7, 2026: "My conditions for data centers have not changed and are not negotiable: 1) must have local buy in 2) cannot cover our farm land 3) zero increase in electric rates 4) must utilize a closed loop cooling system." Three of those four conditions are rules a state or a town would have to write and enforce, which is the thing he voted to ban. Van Orden is also one of seven Republicans who suggested the people opposing data centers might be working for China.

The other seven, and what their states are doing right now

The remaining members named in the report are not quoted promising local control. Three of their states have simply been exercising it — and every one of those actions is the kind of thing the ban would likely have stopped.

New Jersey. In July 2026, Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed a law putting large data centers in their own ratepayer class and making them pay for the grid upgrades they cause, so that everyone else's bills don't absorb the cost. The bill's own summary describes it as requiring utilities to "develop and apply special rules for certain data centers." A law that singles out data centers for special treatment is close to a textbook example of what the moratorium barred. Tom Kean Jr. voted for that moratorium four separate times.

New York. On July 14, 2026, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order holding in abeyance permit applications for data centers of 50 megawatts and up while the state develops statewide standards. Mike Lawler has attacked her for it. In an August 18, 2026 Fox Business interview, he said the message the policy sends businesses is "don't come here. Go do your business elsewhere." It was not his first. On July 17, 2026 — nine days after a planning board in his own district halted a data center expansion beside a reservoir that supplies drinking water across the New Jersey line — he went on the same network to argue that limits like New York's hurt innovation and push the industry toward China. Lawler at least isn't claiming to want local control. He had simply already voted for the ban that would likely have made New York's pause impossible.

Pennsylvania. The legislature passed an energy-and-water reporting requirement for data centers in July 2026, and on August 18, 2026 Gov. Josh Shapiro signed an executive order requiring developers to make legally binding commitments: pay the full cost of the electricity infrastructure they need "without shifting costs to Pennsylvania households and businesses," meet "strict water conservation requirements," drop nondisclosure agreements — and get local community approval before a permit issues. Brian Fitzpatrick, Ryan Mackenzie, Rob Bresnahan and Scott Perry all voted for the ban that would likely have made those requirements unenforceable. We wrote about that vote when all ten of Pennsylvania's House Republicans cast it.

Colorado. Gabe Evans is the fourth Energy and Commerce Republican. He voted four times.

Why "local control" is such a useful thing to say

Somebody pays for a data center, and it is not the company that builds it. It's the household on the same grid. We have laid out what that looks like in five states where the bills are already climbing, and what happened in one Kentucky district where three counties voted to slow the buildout.

The repositioning is not subtle, and it is not confined to these fourteen. A year ago Americans were split on data centers; now three out of four oppose one near their home, and we have already documented eight Republicans who spent that year banking checks from the industry and then discovered concerns.

Saying "let the community decide" in 2026 costs a candidate nothing. The vote that would have actually settled the question came 15 months earlier, when almost nobody was watching and the pressure inside the party ran entirely the other way. Since then the Trump administration has made preempting state AI laws an explicit goal — and, as the CAP Action report notes, its own proposals now claim to carve out local control of data centers specifically, which the report suggests is because the White House has noticed how unpopular the issue has become.

What the record shows

Two hundred and fifteen House Republicans voted for a ten-year ban on states and towns enforcing any law that limits AI systems, data centers included. Four of the fourteen named here — Gabe Evans, John James, Tom Kean Jr. and Mariannette Miller-Meeks — voted for it four separate times, including one straight up-or-down vote on whether to strike it from the bill. Seven of the members named here are now campaigning on giving communities the final say over data centers. The rules their own states have written this summer — New Jersey's ratepayer protections, New York's permit pause, Pennsylvania's requirement that a developer get local approval first — are the kind of rules that vote would likely have made unenforceable for a decade.

Source

Adam Conner, "Almost Every House Republican Voted To Block State and Local Governments' Ability To Protect Residents From AI Data Centers," Center for American Progress Action Fund, August 24, 2026. Photo: the Meta El Paso Data Center seen from above on August 13, 2026, in El Paso, Texas, by Brandon Bell / Getty Images, via CAP Action.

One Co-Chairs the Hunger Caucus. One Chairs the Subcommittee That Writes SNAP Policy. Both Voted for the Biggest Food-Aid Cut in History.

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 08:13:00 +0000

SNAP is what most people still call food stamps. It is the program that stands between a bad year and an empty refrigerator.

In July 2025, Congress cut it by $187 billion through 2034 — roughly 20% of the program. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities called it the largest cut to SNAP in history, and that is not a figure of speech. Nothing bigger has ever been done to it.

Six of the eight Republicans below voted for that bill. A seventh wrote a bill to go further, and the eighth is a governor who never needed a vote in Congress at all. What makes them worth naming is not the vote. It is what each of them said about hunger alongside it.

Tracey Mann relaunched the Hunger Caucus, then voted for the deepest cut in the program's history

Tracey Mann is the Kansas congressman who led the relaunch of the bipartisan House Hunger Caucus and co-chairs it. Announcing the relaunch, he said "growing up on my family's farm in Kansas taught me the sacred responsibility of feeding people."

Then he voted to pass the House budget bill that the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities described as the deepest SNAP cut in the program's history, and voted for it again on final passage in July.

In his own district, 17,306 households rely on SNAP, according to USDA data — including 7,127 households with children and 7,424 with someone 60 or older.

A hunger caucus whose co-chairman votes for the deepest cut in the program's history is not a caucus. It's a letterhead.

Brad Finstad chairs the subcommittee that writes SNAP policy

Brad Finstad chairs the House Agriculture Subcommittee on Nutrition and Foreign Agriculture. That is the subcommittee that writes SNAP policy. Nutrition is the first word in its name.

He voted for the $187 billion cut anyway. 21,145 households in his Minnesota district count on that food assistance.

His stated philosophy is that lawmakers should offer "people a hand up, not just a handout."

"A hand up, not a handout" is a fine slogan. What the 2025 law actually added was not a ladder — it was new work requirements, tighter eligibility, and a lot more paperwork to sign up or renew.

Jim Pillen turned down $18 million to feed Nebraska kids, and said why out loud

Governor Jim Pillen didn't need a vote in Congress to take food away from children. He just declined to accept it.

In December 2023, the federal government offered Nebraska money for Summer EBT — grocery benefits for low-income kids during the months school meals aren't available. Pillen said no, turning down $18 million that advocates said would have fed 150,000 low-income Nebraska youths.

Defending the decision at a news conference, he gave the shortest possible answer:

"I don't believe in welfare."

He reversed himself in February 2024 — after Nebraska Appleseed delivered a petition with 6,144 signatures from 230 communities, and after, in his own words, "you sit down with kids who are living it."

The program he tried to block then delivered nearly $24 million in grocery benefits to 121,855 Nebraska families in its first summer alone.

It took hungry children in a room with him to change his mind. That is the standard of proof he required.

Gabe Evans told people a food bank agreed with him. The food bank said no.

Gabe Evans voted to cut SNAP and Medicaid, then told the public that the Weld Food Bank in his Colorado district had told him "we need to cut down on the line" of people needing food — the clear implication being that the food bank was on his side.

The food bank corrected him publicly. Their meeting with him had been "strictly informational," and the cuts, they said, "will make the line longer, not shorter."

By October 2025, the Weld Food Bank's emergency food program was running at about "30,000 visits a month, up about 230%", against a $700,000 shortfall. A regular visitor described the change to CBS Colorado: "It used to be, when you would pull up, there would be 10 to 15 people in line. Now, it just stretches all around the block."

More than 28,000 households in his district — better than one in ten — rely on SNAP.

Mike Lawler voted for the biggest cut, then introduced a bill about paperwork

Eight weeks. That is the gap.

On July 3, 2025, Mike Lawler voted for the bill — what CBPP called "the largest cut to SNAP in history."

Eight weeks later he introduced a bipartisan bill to make SNAP paperwork easier for seniors, on the grounds that they "shouldn't have to fight through mountains of paperwork just to put food on the table."

He is right about the paperwork. He is also describing the consequence of the law he had just voted for — the exact machinery that knocks eligible people off the rolls without anyone ever formally deciding they don't qualify.

More than 18,000 households in his New York district rely on SNAP.

Lauren Boebert's argument for work requirements was her own résumé

When Congress debated expanding SNAP work requirements, Lauren Boebert defended them by pointing at herself:

"I worked with a three-month-old. So I mean, I think work requirements should be there anyway."

She voted for the cuts. 19,715 households in her Colorado district rely on SNAP to buy groceries.

"I did it, so they can" is not a policy. It's an anecdote used to end the conversation.

Tom Cole called it "an extraordinary piece of legislation"

Tom Cole's Oklahoma district has 43,177 households on SNAP — about 13.5% of every household in it, including 22,770 households with children.

After voting for the cuts, he called the bill "an extraordinary piece of legislation."

Oklahoma Watch reported, in the same piece, that 25,000 households in his district alone are at risk of losing SNAP benefits.

Extraordinary is one word for it.

Clay Fuller wasn't there for the vote. He wrote a bill to go further.

Clay Fuller wasn't in Congress in 2025, so he didn't cast that vote. He introduced his own bill instead.

On July 14, 2026, Fuller introduced H.R. 9667, the SHIELD Citizens Act as lead sponsor, and announced that it "ensures that illegal aliens are ineligible for our welfare system."

In the very next sentence, he widened it: "Non-citizens should not have access to welfare programs funded by American tax dollars."

Three days later, only the wider version was left: "Taxpayer-funded benefits should not be available to non-citizens, period."

Those are not the same group of people. "Non-citizens" includes refugees, people with green cards, and people here entirely legally. The bill names SNAP by statute.

In his Georgia district, 27,395 households rely on SNAP, including 14,302 with children.

The pattern

Read those eight together and the common thread isn't cruelty. It's the belief that nobody is checking.

The hunger caucus co-chairman assumed his caucus title would be the thing people remembered, not his vote. The nutrition subcommittee chairman assumed the same about his gavel. Lawler assumed his paperwork bill would land as compassion rather than as an admission. Evans assumed the food bank wouldn't say anything.

They were all wrong, and the record is public in every case — the roll calls at clerk.house.gov, the USDA's household counts by district, the food banks' own numbers.

The cuts are not finished arriving, either. States begin picking up 75% of SNAP's administrative costs on October 1, and Medicaid work requirements land on January 1 on many of the same families. Pennsylvania has already lost about 220,000 people from its SNAP rolls in a single year, roughly half of it traced by the state to this law.

What the record shows

This November, these eight will be asking voters to send them back. All of them say they care about hunger, and two of them hold the titles to prove it — the House Hunger Caucus and the subcommittee that writes SNAP policy. Six voted for the largest cut the program has ever taken, one wrote a bill to narrow it further, and one turned down federal money to feed children — in districts and a state where hundreds of thousands of households depend on it.

Sources

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "By the Numbers: Harmful Republican Megabill Takes Food Assistance Away From Millions"
U.S. House Clerk, Roll Call 190, July 3, 2025
USDA, SNAP Community Characteristics — Congressional District Dashboard

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

Gabe Evans Keeps Posing for Photos at Colorado Businesses. He's Voted Eight Times to Protect the Tariffs Hurting Them.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:44:16 +0000

On August 3, Gabe Evans sent his constituents a newsletter about visiting the Five Rivers Kuner Feedlot in Weld County. There was a photo with the executives. There was a line about how "agriculture remains one of Colorado's greatest economic engines, and I'll continue fighting to keep it strong."

Six months earlier, on February 10, Evans had voted twice to keep the House of Representatives from voting on the tariffs driving up that feedlot's costs. Three Republicans broke ranks and killed the attempt. When the vote finally happened the next day, Evans voted against ending the tariffs.

The votes you can look up yourself

On February 10, 2026, Republican leadership put a provision at the end of a procedural rule, H.Res. 1042. Section 4 said that no day between February 10 and July 31, 2026 would count as a "calendar day" under the National Emergencies Act — the clock that forces the House to vote when a member moves to end one of Trump's tariff emergencies. It named four of them, including the February 1, 2025 emergency behind the tariffs on Canadian goods.

In plain terms, the rule would have switched off the House's obligation to vote on the tariffs until August.

Rep. Joe Neguse (D-CO) tried to strip it out. "If we defeat the previous question," he told the House, "I will offer an amendment to the rule to strike section 4, which would stop an attempt by Republican leadership to block the House from taking up-or-down votes on President Trump's disastrous tariff policies through the end of July."

The previous question is the parliamentary tool that shuts off any chance to amend a rule. It carried 216 to 214, according to the official House roll call. Two votes was the entire margin.

Gabe Evans voted yes.

Then Evans voted for the rule itself — and lost. It failed 214 to 217, because three Republicans refused to go along: Don Bacon of Nebraska, Kevin Kiley of California and Thomas Massie of Kentucky. Section 4 never took effect.

Minutes later, with the rule dead, Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Brian Mast asked unanimous consent to make the tariff resolution in order at any time. There was no objection.

So the House got its vote. On February 11 it passed the resolution ending the emergency behind the Canadian tariffs, 219 to 211, with six Republicans voting for it.

Gabe Evans voted no.

Eight votes, one direction

The Colorado Times Recorder went through Evans' record and counted eight votes since he entered Congress that supported Trump's tariffs or blocked Congress from touching them:

In February 2026, he voted against a symbolic resolution to end the national emergency used to justify tariffs on Canadian goods — a resolution that passed anyway, with six Republicans voting for it. Evans was not one of them.
He was on the losing side of a February vote to delay a vote on cancelling the tariffs.
He twice voted to block joint resolutions that would have terminated the tariffs.
He cast the February 10 previous-question vote above.
In 2025, he voted four times to stop Congress from challenging or even considering the tariffs.

Evans has never voted against a tariff measure, and has offered essentially no public criticism of the policy.

The businesses in the photos disagree with him

This is what makes the newsletters uncomfortable reading. Evans keeps showing up at businesses whose own leaders have said tariffs hurt them.

Queso Campesino, a cheese importer in his district, got a newsletter mention last year. Its owner, Gabriel Robles, told the Colorado Times Recorder at the time that Trump's tariffs were hurting his business — and that it made him question whether he'd support Republicans in the next election.

The Colorado Association of Home Builders got a June 16 newsletter, in which Evans wrote about making "the American Dream more attainable for Colorado families." Its national parent, the National Association of Home Builders, states flatly on its website that tariffs "act as a tax on American builders, home buyers, and consumers," and says more than 60% of builders it surveyed have reported higher costs because of them. NAHB wrote to Trump asking him not to raise tariffs on Canadian and Mexican building materials. He raised them anyway, more than once.

Leprino Foods in Greeley — the world's largest mozzarella producer — got two visits, in September 2025 and again on August 3. In 2022 congressional testimony, Leprino CEO Mike Durkin said the opposite of what Evans votes for:

"If we do not build our globally competitive market access now through reduced tariffs, competitive prices, and consistent shipping, our producers will be unable to grow. There is hardly a more critical priority for the U.S. dairy industry than trade."

The feedlot. Farmers, ranchers and feedlots have seen the price of fertilizer, machinery and feed pushed up by tariffs and by the uncertainty around them.

The pattern is the same every time: Evans arrives, poses, publishes a newsletter about fighting for them, and then votes to keep in place the policy they've said is hurting them.

"Absolutely confident"

In a telephone town hall with constituents last year, Evans was asked about the tariffs. His answer:

"It seems like everything's in flux, but at the end of the day, I am absolutely confident that by getting back to free and fair trade practices … that will ultimately bring down the prices of goods for all Americans."

That was the prediction. Here is the scoreboard since: about 100,000 American manufacturing jobs were lost during the first year of Trump's second term amid rising material costs and tariff uncertainty. Congressional Democrats estimate tariffs will cost the average American family $2,500 in 2026. Grocery prices have been widely blamed on them.

Evans' office did not respond to a message asking whether he still believes the tariffs will bring costs down.

Why this pattern matters in the 8th District

Paul Teske, a professor at the University of Colorado Denver, put the political problem plainly:

"These tariffs, contrary to Trump's assertions, are paid by American businesses and consumers, including those in CD8. So, for a candidate who wants to seem 'pro-business,' these tariffs and their impacts are an issue about which Democrats should be able to gain some traction."

But this isn't only a campaign problem. It's the same shape as the rest of Evans' record in a district that can't afford it:

He said his Medicaid vote would protect "the people who need it most" — and now 12 Colorado hospitals are at risk, with an estimated 29,262 people in his district projected to lose health coverage.
90,000 people in his district get food assistance. He voted to cut it and won't say how many lose out.
DOGE cut more than $15.7 million in federal programs from his own district, including $238,000 in school lunch funding from the Greeley-Evans School District. He called it "right-sizing government."

Each time, the press release faces one direction and the vote faces the other.

What the 8th District should ask

There is nothing wrong with a congressman visiting a feedlot or a cheese plant. That's the job.

The job is also to do something for them once you get back to Washington. In February, Evans had three chances in two days to side with the businesses in his newsletters.

He voted to shut off the tariff vote. He voted for the rule that would have kept it shut off until August. And when three of his own colleagues refused to go along and the vote happened anyway, he voted to leave the tariffs in place.

Three chances. Three votes the other way.

Colorado's 8th District deserves a representative whose votes match his photo captions.

Sources

Say Cheese: Evans Has Voted 8 Times for Trump Tariffs While Staging Photo Ops at Businesses Hurt by the Tariffs — Jason Salzman, Colorado Times Recorder, August 17, 2026.
House Roll Call 59, H.Res. 1042, February 10, 2026 — Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives. Ordering the previous question, 216–214.
House Roll Call 60, H.Res. 1042, February 10, 2026 — Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives. The rule itself, failed 214–217.
House Roll Call 65, H.J.Res. 72, February 11, 2026 — Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives. Ending the February 1, 2025 national emergency, passed 219–211.
Congressional Record, February 10, 2026 — Rep. Neguse on the blocked tariff votes; the text of section 4; and Chairman Mast's unanimous-consent request after the rule failed.

8 Million Americans Have Lost Their Health Coverage. Here Are More of the Republicans Who Did It.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:03:19 +0000

The advocacy group Protect Our Care released state-by-state fact sheets this week putting a number on what the past year of Republican health policy has actually done.

Roughly $900 billion in cuts to Medicaid, plus the decision to let the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expire at the end of 2025, has meant "stripping insurance coverage from around 8 million Americans total."

Eight million is a hard number to feel. So here is what it looks like at the level of the people who voted for it — seven Republicans, none of whom we featured the last time we did this.

They fall into four groups, and the groups are the story.

They wrote the rules: Aaron Bean and Ashley Hinson

The Medicaid work requirement — 80 hours a month or you lose coverage — didn't appear out of nowhere in the budget bill.

Aaron Bean filed it first, in December 2024, and again in February 2025, months before it became law. His version was broader than the one that ultimately passed.

Ashley Hinson defended the policy at the Plymouth County Fair with the line that always gets applause: "If you're going to take a taxpayer benefit, you should be working." She also suggested people here illegally are getting benefits — which federal law already bars.

Here is the number that makes both of these arguments collapse: 92% of the adults under 65 on Medicaid, setting aside those already on federal disability benefits, are working, caregiving, sick, disabled, or in school.

Work requirements don't move people into jobs they already have. They add paperwork, and people lose coverage when the paperwork fails. That is not a side effect. It's the mechanism.

He promised in writing: Jeff Hurd

In April 2025, Jeff Hurd signed a letter vowing he could not and would not support any bill that cut Medicaid coverage for vulnerable people.

Five weeks later he voted for it. Then he voted for it again.

More than 32,000 people in his district are projected to lose coverage.

A politician who never made the promise can at least claim you knew what you were getting. Hurd put it in writing, in a letter designed to reassure exactly the people who are now losing their insurance.

He told them they shouldn't have it: Russell Fry

At an April 2025 telephone town hall, Russell Fry called Medicaid vital, then said a lot of people on it "quite frankly shouldn't be."

Then he voted for the bill. 37,124 people in his district are projected to lose coverage — 33,500 off Affordable Care Act plans, 3,624 off Medicaid.

South Carolina's 7th District is projected to lose more health coverage than any other district in the state. Average marketplace premiums in the state are up 235% since 2025, by Protect Our Care's count.

Fry is not confused about what the bill does. He told his own constituents, on a call they had phoned in to, that too many of them were on it.

They voted for the damage, then backed bills to fix it: Mark Alford and Shelley Moore Capito

This is the pattern that shows up most, and it is the most cynical one.

Mark Alford voted in July 2025 for the budget law. In his own district, 27,243 people are projected to lose coverage — 14,043 off Medicaid, 13,200 off Affordable Care Act plans. Nearly eight months later, in February 2026, he introduced a bill to keep rural hospitals open. "It's very important that we keep our rural hospitals open for business," he told Missourinet a couple of weeks later.

That rescue bill has three cosponsors and has never moved.

Shelley Moore Capito cast one of the 50 votes for the budget bill — a 50–50 vote, meaning she personally could have stopped it. The head of the West Virginia Hospital Association says the state's hospitals will lose more than $1 billion a year once the law is fully in effect, and seven West Virginia rural hospitals are named most at risk of closing.

On July 29, 2026, she cosponsored legislation to prevent rural hospital closures.

Both of them are running the same play: cast the vote that does the damage, wait for the local coverage about hospitals closing, then sponsor the fix and issue the press release. The vote was binding. The rescue bill is optional, and it isn't moving.

He let the subsidies lapse: Jon Husted

Ohio just lost a bigger share of its Affordable Care Act enrollment than any state in America — nearly a third of its enrollees gone.

Jon Husted and Ohio's other senator let the enhanced health subsidies expire and voted for the budget bill.

The subsidy expiration is the quiet half of the 8 million. Medicaid cuts get argued about. Letting a tax credit lapse requires no vote at all in the public's mind — you just don't renew it, premiums jump, and people quietly stop paying for a plan they can no longer afford. Nobody has to stand up and say "I'm taking your insurance."

The pattern

Read those seven together and the defense falls apart.

They knew what the work requirements would do, because two of them wrote them. They were warned what the vote would do to districts like their own before they cast it — Hurd signed a letter saying so, five weeks out. And several of them knew immediately afterward, because they started filing rural hospital rescue bills that go nowhere.

Not one of these is a story about a member who was misled. It's a story about members who did the arithmetic, voted anyway, and then went looking for something to put in the newsletter.

Eight million people. Both bills to fix it are still sitting in committee.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

What the judge did

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

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

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

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

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

What the letter asks for

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

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

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

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

The man who led it sells the products

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

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

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

Who signed

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

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

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

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

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

What registration was actually doing

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

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

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

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

Source

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

90,000 People in Gabe Evans's District Get Food Stamps. He Voted to Cut Them and Won't Say How Many Lose Out.

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:58:22 +0000

On the morning of August 11, 2026, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins came to Henderson, Colorado, for a private roundtable with members of the state's agriculture community. It was the third time in six weeks that Gabe Evans had shared a stage with a member of Donald Trump's cabinet.

9NEWS reporter Marshall Zelinger was there, and he asked Evans a simple question.

"Congressman, you voted to make it harder for families to receive SNAP benefits, and those changes take effect in less than two months. There are about 90,000 people in your Congressional District who receive SNAP benefits. How many do you think, or do you expect to lose these food benefits? And why is that a positive for taxpayers?"

Evans did not answer. Rollins stepped back to the microphone — "I'm sorry, I know you wanted to talk to him first, but I live this every single day" — and took it in his place. As 9NEWS put it: "Before Evans could say whether he knew the number, Rollins explained the work requirement changes."

He was asked again. He still did not answer. The second time, he told the reporter: "If you want an answer from that, you'll have to answer the question that I asked you last year at the state Capitol first, thanks, Marshall."

That's it. That's the whole answer. Ninety thousand of his own constituents are two months out from a change he voted for, and the man who voted for it will not say — or does not know — how many of them lose their groceries.

The subject he changed it to

Instead of the number, Evans wanted to talk about something else.

"Let's look at the SNAP error rate. Under [John] Hickenlooper, as governor, it was about 5%, under [Jared] Polis, it's ballooned up to 10%."

He said that means about $12 million a month of Colorado's roughly $120 million monthly SNAP budget isn't reaching the people who need it — "because of mismanagement here in the state of Colorado."

Here is what he left out.

Colorado's payment error rate for fiscal year 2024 was 9.97%. The national rate that same year was 10.93%. Colorado isn't an outlier. Colorado is doing better than the country as a whole. Only eight states in America came in under 6%.

So the "ballooning" Evans is describing happened nearly everywhere, and Colorado ballooned less than most. Blaming one governor for it is like blaming your mayor for a heat wave.

And the second thing he left out is bigger: an error rate is not a fraud rate. The Congressional Research Service says it in plain words: "This rate is not a measure of fraud." It counts overpayments and underpayments — a caseworker misapplying a rule, a family reporting the wrong number on a form, a typo. Even the USDA describes it as program waste, not fraud.

We've walked through exactly how that formula works and the trap buried inside it. A state gets punished for paying a family a little too much. A state gets punished not at all for wrongly cutting an eligible family off. So the cheapest way for any state to drive its error rate down is to deny more people and process fewer of them.

Evans is holding up a number that rewards kicking people off food assistance, and using it as his reason for kicking people off food assistance.

What's actually coming to Colorado

About 612,700 Coloradans get SNAP every month — roughly one in ten people in the state. In Colorado, 1 in 6 kids already faces hunger.

Ninety thousand of those people live in Evans's district, Colorado's 8th. It is one of the most closely divided House seats in the country.

Nationally, the cuts Evans voted for are already showing up. More than 4 million Americans have dropped off SNAP in nine months — while unemployment stayed flat and grocery prices kept climbing. The researchers who study this say the pattern doesn't match a jobs story at all. It matches a program that got harder to get into.

And as the reporter noted, the new work requirement rules land in weeks, not years.

Evans could have said "I expect a few thousand people in my district to lose benefits, and here's why I think that's worth it." That's an argument. He didn't make it. He recited a statistic about paperwork.

He's done this before

The second time Zelinger pressed him, Evans referred back to a May 2025 news conference at the Colorado state Capitol. At that one, he was asked how taking people off Medicaid and pushing them into emergency rooms helps medical providers in his district.

His answer then: "Do you want illegal immigrants on Medicaid, Marshall?"

Between that day and this one — more than a year — Evans never said how many of his constituents were at risk of losing health coverage either.

He does keep making claims about it. He voted for Trump's budget bill and then told Colorado it wouldn't hurt anyone's health care, calling the warnings "fear mongering." A year later, nurses named 12 Colorado hospitals at risk, including ones in his own district.

The pattern is the same both times: vote for the cut, refuse to count the cost, attack the person asking.

Three cabinet secretaries. Zero open town halls.

Evans told 9NEWS he has personally done more than 300 in-person meetings, town halls, roundtables and site visits, that his staff has held roughly 2,500 more across Colorado, and about 200 in Washington.

When Zelinger asked why he can find time for Trump cabinet officials but hasn't held a general public town hall anyone can show up to, Evans said: "Incorrect. We had a text go out to everybody for a town hall that we did with the secretary of energy, just a couple of weeks ago."

9NEWS could not find a record of an in-person town hall open to the general public. What they did find was a June 29 event hosted by the America First Policy Institute — a conservative organization founded by Brooke Rollins, the same secretary standing next to him in Henderson. Evans's campaign did not answer a follow-up asking whether there was some other public town hall with Energy Secretary Chris Wright, or what "a text go out to everybody" meant.

None of this is new for him. Evans went his first three months in Congress without holding a town hall at all, and when he finally held a telephone-only one on April 2, 2025, it came "after weeks of calls from some voters in his district" — making him the last member of Colorado's entire congressional delegation to hold one.

Three weeks after that, more than 100 people gathered at a "People's Town Hall" in Thornton. Evans didn't come. So they put their questions to a cardboard cutout of him instead. A hospice nurse asked it: "Hey Gabe, did you know that 25% of your constituents … are on Medicaid?"

Who he's making time for

Three Trump cabinet members have come through Colorado's 8th District in six weeks: Energy Secretary Chris Wright, Homeland Security's Markwayne Mullin, and now Rollins. Evans is in one of the most competitive races in the country, facing Democrat Manny Rutinel in November.

He has time for the cabinet. He has time for a conservative think tank's event where the questions were moderated. He has time to lecture a reporter about a state error rate that is better than the national one.

He does not have an answer for the 90,000 people in his district who are about to find out whether they still get to eat.

Source

Marshall Zelinger, "After voting for SNAP benefit changes, does Rep. Gabe Evans know how many in his district will lose food assistance?", 9NEWS, August 11, 2026. Photo: 9NEWS/KUSA.

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.

Lauren Boebert Was Thrown Out of a Theater. She Said It Was for Singing Too Loud. The Security Camera Said Otherwise.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:13:36 +0000

The story people remember is that Lauren Boebert got kicked out of a musical. That part is funny and it's over.

The part that matters is what she said afterward, and how long she kept saying it.

On Sunday, September 10, 2023, Boebert and a guest were escorted out of a performance of Beetlejuice at Denver's Buell Theatre. Over the next five days she gave the public three different accounts of that evening. The first was a joke. The second was a denial. The third was an apology, issued only after a security camera made the first two impossible to hold.

What the theater wrote down

Denver7 and Scripps News obtained the surveillance video, and Denver7 published the venue's incident report. It is the ushers' own account, in their own words.

Boebert was accused of "vaping, singing, causing a disturbance" during the show. Ushers went to speak with her after complaints from people sitting nearby. She wasn't in her seat, so they waited for her to come back.

Here is the usher, in the report:

"I informed them that our usher team had noticed vaping and also they were causing a disturbance for the area with noise, singing, using their cell phone and they need to be respectful to their neighbors."

The report says Boebert was "argumentative," and that she and her guest were warned that another problem would get them removed. Several minutes into the second act, staff got another complaint: she was being loud and, at that moment, recording — which theaters do not allow.

A security manager was alerted. Denver police were called. An usher asked the pair to step outside and, the report says, they refused. Told they would be trespassing if they stayed, they refused again. When the usher said police would have to be brought in, the answer was "go get them."

According to a Denver police officer's own incident report, one of them said something along the lines of "do you know who I am" and "I will be contacting the mayor" before finally agreeing to go.

Version one: a joke

When the story surfaced two days later, Boebert posted about it — and left out essentially all of it.

"It's true, I did thoroughly enjoy the AMAZING Beetlejuice at the Buell Theatre and I plead guilty to laughing and singing too loud! Everyone should go see it if you get the chance this week and please let me know how it ends!"

She included a link to buy tickets.

"Laughing and singing too loud" is a description of the evening that quietly drops the vaping, the recording, the refusal to leave, the trespassing warning, and the police. It converts a member of Congress being removed by security into a charming story about somebody who loves musicals a bit too much.

Version two: the denial

This is the part that turned it from an embarrassment into a credibility problem.

Her campaign manager, Drew Sexton, told the Denver Post that Boebert had not vaped during the show. She and her staff held that line for most of the week. Everything else — the noise, the phone, the ejection — she was willing to laugh about. The vaping specifically, they said, did not happen.

Vaping is the one item on the list that a camera can settle.

Version three: the camera

On Friday, September 15, more surveillance footage came out, first reported by KUSA-TV. It shows Boebert in her seat before the show, with the house lights still up and people settling in around her. She reaches under her seat, brings something to her mouth, and blows out a cloud of vapor or smoke.

Her apology came that same day.

"The past few days have been difficult and humbling, and I'm truly sorry for the unwanted attention my Sunday evening in Denver has brought to the community."

She pointed to her divorce as part of the reason, and said, "I simply fell short of my values on Sunday. That's unacceptable and I'm sorry."

Then she explained the denial:

"Whether it was the excitement of seeing a much-anticipated production or the natural anxiety of being in a new environment, I genuinely did not recall vaping that evening when I discussed the night's events with my campaign team while confirming my enthusiasm for the musical. Regardless of my belief, it's clear now that was not accurate; it was not my or my campaign's intention to mislead, but we do understand the nature of how this looks."

Read that carefully. The claim is that she forgot. Not that she was misquoted, not that her staff got ahead of her — that for three days, while her campaign publicly disputed a specific factual allegation on her behalf, she genuinely could not remember doing the thing.

She said she and her team would have to earn back the public's trust.

This was not the first time she gave an account a recording contradicted

Three months earlier, Boebert missed the House vote on the deal to avoid a national default. It was one of the most consequential votes of that Congress; the bill passed the House 314-117 and prevented the government from running out of money to pay its bills. Her Colorado Republican colleague Ken Buck opposed the bill and voted no. Boebert criticized the bill and simply wasn't recorded.

In a video afterward, she described her absence as "a no-show protest" — a deliberate stand. But footage showed her rushing toward the House chamber for the vote, and the statement she filed for the record said she had been "unavoidably detained."

Those two explanations cannot both be true. A protest is a choice. Being unavoidably detained is an accident. She gave one version to her supporters and the other to the official record.

The pattern is the same both times: something happens, she describes it in whatever way flatters her most, and the description holds until a camera or a document makes it untenable.

Why any of this belongs on a report card

A congresswoman vaping at a musical is not a policy failure. Nobody in Colorado's 4th District lost health coverage over it.

What voters are entitled to weigh is whether her account of events is worth anything, because almost everything else she tells them cannot be checked against a security camera.

When she said the removal was about singing, that was checkable. When her campaign said she hadn't vaped, that was checkable. When she called a missed vote a protest, that was checkable. In all three cases the checkable version was not the one she offered first.

And this is not the only apology she has had to issue in office. In 2021, after a video surfaced of her telling a crowd a story that cast Rep. Ilhan Omar — one of the first Muslim women in Congress — as a terrorist, she apologized to the Muslim community. Omar said that when the two spoke by phone, Boebert refused to publicly acknowledge the remarks and "instead doubled down on her rhetoric," so Omar ended the call.

The apology, in each case, arrives after the denial stops working.

Boebert has told reporters she will not stand in a room with her constituents: "For me personally, it's just not safe to do an in-person town hall because I don't know what to expect." What they get instead is a telephone town hall and a press statement, neither of which anyone can film.

The Buell Theatre had a camera. Most of the time, the people she represents don't.

Source

Denver7's reporting on the venue incident report: Video shows Rep. Lauren Boebert escorted out of 'Beetlejuice' musical after alleged disturbance by Jeff Anastasio. Boebert's apology and the surveillance video: Rep. Boebert apologizes for behavior at 'Beetlejuice' performance, Megan Verlee and The Associated Press, Colorado Public Radio. Image: Denver7/Scripps News.

Gabe Evans Was a Cop for Over a Decade. Six Days Into Congress, He Signed On to the Gun Bill Police Unions Are Begging Congress to Kill.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:45:31 +0000

Gabe Evans spent more than a decade as a police officer with the Arvada Police Department before he ran for Congress. It is in every version of his biography, and he uses it constantly. He was a cop.

On January 9, 2025 — six days after he was sworn in — Evans put his name on H.R. 38, the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act.

The two largest police organizations in the United States have asked Congress to reject that bill.

What the cops actually said

In November 2025, the National Fraternal Order of Police and the International Association of Chiefs of Police — which by their own account "collectively represent a majority of rank-and-file officers and police executives" — sent Congress a joint call to action against H.R. 38.

Their objections were not abstract. As Breitbart reported on the letter, the groups warned the bill "exempts any person with a valid photographic identification from state or local firearms law who asserts that they are lawfully carrying a firearm under the laws of their own state of residence." An officer who stops someone would have no way to check.

And then the part that should matter most to a former patrol officer:

"The bill goes further and provides that any person 'who is deprived of any right, privilege, or immunity' may sue a law enforcement officer, who would not be afforded qualified immunity."

Qualified immunity is the doctrine that keeps an officer from being personally sued for a judgment call made in the field. H.R. 38 never uses the phrase; what it does is create a new right to sue "any other person" who deprives someone of the rights it grants. The two organizations read that and told Congress the bill "seems to cancel any qualified immunity for the officer," leaving their members in legal and physical danger: "Any action the officer may take in reaction to the knowledge that the person they have encountered is armed could place that officer in very real legal peril."

This is not new territory for the bill, either. When an earlier version came up, 473 law enforcement agencies from 39 states signed a letter opposing it. Their reasoning was the same then. That letter said there is "currently no system to verify the validity of concealed carry permits across state lines, which means that law enforcement could not confirm whether an individual is carrying a weapon legally." The 2025 call to action puts it the same way: officers "would be expected to interpret and apply laws from all 50 states in real time."

H.R. 38 was reported out of committee and placed on the House calendar on October 3, 2025. Evans's name is still on it.

What it would do to Colorado

Colorado requires a background check and a handgun training course before a sheriff will issue a concealed carry permit. H.R. 38 makes that optional in practice: anyone eligible to carry in their home state can carry here, including people from states that require no permit, no training, and no check at all.

Emma Brown, executive director of Giffords, put it bluntly at a Denver public safety roundtable in May 2026: Evans is "trying to let tourists carry concealed weapons with no training and without ever passing a background check."

"He's actively pushing a deadly agenda that makes it harder and more dangerous for law enforcement officers to do their jobs," Brown said. "As a former member of law enforcement, you would think he'd do better."

The roundtable was opened by Colorado State Sen. Tom Sullivan, whose son Alex was one of the 12 people murdered in the 2012 Aurora theater shooting. Sullivan has spent the years since at the state Capitol passing gun laws. His assessment of his congressman:

"Here in this district, with Gabe Evans, we are not getting that partnership. … We need someone who listens to the people who have been impacted on a day-to-day basis, to hear from them, and do something about it. He made it very clear where his priorities are when he cosponsored the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act."

About 15.3 out of every 100,000 Coloradans died from a gun-related injury in 2024 — 961 people, a rate 19.5% above the national one.

Guns in the classroom

Evans's record on this predates Congress.

Running for the Colorado state House in 2022, he posted on Facebook that "Large numbers of educators WANT to protect their classrooms by carrying concealed. They should be allowed, encouraged, provided resources, and trained!"

Once he got to the legislature, he went after the permit system itself. In 2023 he cosponsored HCR23-1003, a proposed amendment to the Colorado constitution that would have written concealed carry into the state bill of rights "in any area of Colorado except areas prohibited by state law." The list of places the legislature would still have been allowed to keep guns out of was three items long: federal gun-free zones, K-12 school grounds, and public buildings that screen every person at every entrance. Nothing else. It was postponed indefinitely in committee.

This is Colorado — Columbine, the Aurora theater, the Boulder King Soopers, Club Q. The answer Evans arrived at was more guns, carried by more people, in more places, with less checking.

He knows exactly who he's crossing

Plenty of members of Congress cosponsor H.R. 38 without ever having worn a badge. Evans is different, and he trades on the difference. His campaign is built on the Arvada patrol car and the Black Hawk cockpit.

That's what makes the January 9 signature worth pointing at. The Fraternal Order of Police is not a gun control group. The International Association of Chiefs of Police is not a gun control group. They are the organizations that speak for the job Evans used to do, and they told Congress this bill would get officers hurt and get officers sued.

He signed it anyway, in his first week.

Evans has been consistent about one thing across every issue: when his district's interests and his party's demands point in different directions, he goes with the party and hopes nobody reads the roll call. He did it on Medicaid, telling Colorado his vote wouldn't hurt anyone's health care while nurses named 12 hospitals at risk. He is doing it now on a 1,200-bed ICE detention center on his district's edge, where his office declined to discuss the issue at all.

On guns, he isn't even hiding it. He just expects the badge to cover for him.

Source

GIFFORDS, Rep. Pettersen and local officials call out Gabe Evans extreme record on gun safety — GIFFORDS, May 2, 2026, and Gun Control Advocates Criticize Evans for Past Calls to Arm Teachers — Colorado Times Recorder. Photo: Colorado Times Recorder.

A 1,200-Bed ICE Jail Is About to Open on the Edge of Gabe Evans's District. His Office Declined to Discuss It.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:41:51 +0000

Hudson, Colorado has 1,600 people, one stoplight, and no grocery store. It is about to get an immigration jail with room for 1,200 detainees.

The Big Horn detention center is going into an empty prison on the edge of town that has sat vacant for more than a decade. The GEO Group, one of the biggest private prison companies in the country, holds a $529 million contract to run it and is already hiring security officers at $35 an hour. It could open as early as September. When it does, it will nearly double Colorado's immigrant detention capacity.

It sits along the border of Colorado's 8th Congressional District, which is represented by Gabe Evans.

Asked about it by The New York Times this month, a spokesperson for Evans declined a request to discuss the issue.

He has been declining to discuss it for a while

This isn't new. On November 21, 2025, about 30 people gathered outside Evans's district office in Greeley with petitions and four questions about the Hudson facility and about ICE's tactics. The Colorado Times Recorder was there. The door was locked on a Friday morning; FedEx notices had been accumulating on it since Monday. The paper put the same four questions to Evans's office in writing afterward. It did not answer them, and did not explain why the office was closed.

Gina McAffee, who coordinates the Colorado Immigrant Partnership, read the questions to the locked door through a bullhorn. The first: "Do you agree with ICE targeting non-criminals?"

Around 1,500 people signed a petition against the facility. Evans supports it. Asked about the Hudson jail on KNUS on August 13, 2025, he answered: "That's right in my district. I know right where it's at." He went through ICE's numbers on immigrants with criminal convictions and concluded: "So we've got to have the facilities."

That's an answer. It's just not one he'll give to the people standing outside his office.

The 23 seconds

Here's the part that's hard to square.

In early February 2026, ahead of a House hearing on Homeland Security oversight, Evans told CBS Colorado he was going to press ICE hard on how its agents were running raids. He was specific about what bothered him:

"I do have a lot of heartburn over ICE saying that they don't need a judicial warrant to go into somebody's private home."

And he was specific about the law:

"I believe that you need a judicial warrant to go into people's private residences. And I think that's a pretty iron-clad standard that's been established through decades of Supreme Court law."

That was February 6, 2026. The hearing was February 10.

At the hearing, Evans spent his question time on sanctuary cities. Then, with 23 seconds left on the clock, he mentioned that he had "many questions about the memo saying you don't need a warrant to go into the house" — and asked the ICE director whether they could talk about it some other time.

The iron-clad standard established through decades of Supreme Court law got 23 seconds and a request for a follow-up meeting.

He funded all of it

Whatever heartburn Evans has, it has never once shown up in a vote.

He voted for Trump's budget bill, which paid for the mass deportation campaign. He voted for the $70 billion ICE funding package that passed the House by two votes — a bill that not one Republican opposed.

That money bought more than beds. ICE now runs a round-the-clock social media dragnet, subpoenaing the identities of Americans who post criticism of the agency, with nobody charged with a crime. Evans has not objected to that one either.

Every dollar behind the Big Horn detention center, and behind the agents who will fill it, came through votes Evans cast.

Who lives here

Evans's district is 40% Hispanic, and he tells reporters he has seen only targeted enforcement against criminals in it. It is a corner of Colorado where immigrants work the meatpacking plants and the fields. A 1,200-bed detention center 12 miles from the nearest hospital is not an abstraction to those families. It is the building they will drive past.

Some of the people most upset are the ones who put Trump in office. Diana and Ernesto Cruz, who live in Fort Lupton, voted Republican in 2024 because they were fed up with inflation and with the border. They told the Times the crackdown has gone too far and they don't want a detention center down the road. They're voting for Evans's opponent in November.

The town itself says it can't stop it. "We're very limited in our abilities to do anything," town manager Bryce Lange said. "It's already built." Opponents have sued Hudson, arguing the site isn't zoned for an immigration detention center and that housing as many as 1,200 detainees there could strain the town's water systems, roads and emergency services.

The pattern

This is the same move Evans has made on every issue where his district's interests and his party's demands point in opposite directions.

He voted for the Medicaid cuts, then told Colorado the bill wouldn't hurt anyone's health care and called the warnings "fear mongering" — and a year later nurses named 12 Colorado hospitals at risk. He said he'd grill ICE and used 23 seconds. He supports a detention center his constituents are protesting, and won't say so to a reporter who asks.

There is a version of this job where a member of Congress with genuine concerns about warrantless home entries writes a bill, forces a vote, or at minimum uses his five minutes. Evans has the seat. He has the microphone. He has, by his own account, the heartburn.

What he does not have is a single action to show for it.

Source

"Shame!": An ICE Facility Roils a Tiny Town, With a House Seat in Play — Jack Healy, The New York Times, August 7, 2026. Photo: Colorado Times Recorder, from the November 2025 rally outside Evans's Greeley office.

$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.

400 People Waited for Jeff Hurd. He Called It 'Political Theater' and Blamed George Soros.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:36:21 +0000

On Friday, February 21, 2025, about 400 people filled the First Congregational Church in Grand Junction. They had questions about rising child hunger, about cancer research being terminated, about Medicaid — which covers roughly 154,000 people in their congressional district. They had come to ask their brand-new congressman.

Jeff Hurd wasn't there. He never answered the invitation.

The four local Indivisible groups who organized it said they reached out to Hurd and his staff multiple times and never got a response. The local TV station that covered it asked Hurd's office for comment and didn't get one either. So the event went ahead without him, and the room did what rooms do when the chair is empty: they talked to each other about what was happening to them.

Hurd had been sworn in seven weeks earlier.

What he said when asked about it

Six days later, Colorado Public Radio's Ryan Warner asked him directly. Why didn't you respond, or attend?

Here is Hurd's full answer:

"Well, listen, I'm interested in hearing from my constituents. I am not interested in political theater and I want to have constructive dialogue. I think Indivisible, if you look at the funding sources for these sorts of organizations, left-wing pressure groups, George Soros, I think that they have an agenda that is not about communicating with the elected officials and helping to advance that constructive dialogue. So I certainly expect that I will be having town halls and hearing from my constituents. I would just rather do it in a politically productive way rather than political theater."

Four hundred of his own constituents drove into Grand Junction on a Friday to talk to him, and his explanation for standing them up was George Soros.

That's the tell. Not one word about the people who actually showed up — who they were, what they wanted to ask, whether any of them had a point. Just the organizers' funding, a billionaire's name, and a phrase — "political theater" — that does all the work of dismissing a room full of voters without engaging a single thing any of them said.

He also made a promise in that answer: "I certainly expect that I will be having town halls."

What happened next

He did hold town halls. By telephone.

Two weeks after the CPR interview, on March 11, 2025, Hurd held his first tele-town hall, taking questions on DOGE, energy policy and Ukraine.

This was not an improvised choice. The Colorado Sun's Jesse Paul reported on March 24, 2025 that the National Republican Congressional Committee had recommended telephone and virtual town halls to incumbents. His verdict on Hurd is four words: "Hurd heeded the advice."

The format stuck. In February 2026, a year later, Hurd held another telephone town hall — more than 12,000 constituents listening in, an hour of questions on voting laws, energy, immigration, tariffs and Colorado River water. He said he plans to keep hosting similar forums.

The difference between the two formats is not a technicality. In a room, anybody can stand up, and a follow-up question is just the next thing out of their mouth. On a phone line, someone in the congressman's office decides which callers get through, in what order, and when the hour is up. Twelve thousand people can "attend" and not one of them can insist.

By June 2026 it had become a campaign issue. The Aspen Times reported that both Democrats running for the seat "have also knocked Hurd for his lack of in-person town halls since being elected," and that his primary challenger says Hurd "has been largely absent when it comes to interacting with voters." His Republican challenger's line: "Jeff Hurd has hidden from the voters. We call him, 'never seen, never Hurd.'"

Meanwhile, people kept showing up anyway

The pattern of the empty church repeated all year, in smaller rooms.

In April 2025, dozens of protesters rallied outside his Pueblo office over the Medicaid cuts, and AFSCME members said he hadn't responded to any of their requests to meet. In May 2025, after he voted for that bill anyway, constituents came to his Grand Junction office to say so; his district director took notes and collected their letters, and afterward his office told the paper that Indivisible had never tried to arrange an official meeting.

The scheduling is the point. There is a version of this where a congressman schedules the meeting.

This is a playbook, not a personality

If Hurd's arrangement sounds familiar, it should. Arkansas's French Hill has a 90-year-old constituent who has stood outside his office every Thursday for a year asking for an in-person town hall — he does his by telephone too. Ohio's Mike Carey promised to post the call-in number for his telephone town hall and never did, then put out a press release celebrating that 12,000 people joined.

Same year, same party, same substitution: a number that can be reported to reporters, standing in for a room where anyone can raise a hand.

The standard

Nobody is entitled to a friendly audience. A member of Congress can walk into a hostile room, take the questions, disagree out loud, and leave — that happens, and it's how the job is supposed to work.

What Hurd did instead was decide in advance that the people who wanted to see him weren't really constituents, they were an "agenda." Once you believe that, you never have to be in the room.

Four hundred people came. He called it theater. Eighteen months later, they're still waiting.

Source

Interview: GOP Rep. Jeff Hurd speaks on DOGE, Medicaid and Nazi salutes — Kiara DeMare, Tom Hesse and Ryan Warner, Colorado Public Radio, February 27, 2025. Photo: Emily Hale / KVNF, via Aspen Public Radio.

Jeff Hurd Promised in Writing He Wouldn't Cut Medicaid. Then He Voted for It Twice.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:33:32 +0000

On April 14, 2025, twelve House Republicans sent a letter to their own leadership about Medicaid. Jeff Hurd signed it.

The letter wasn't hedged. As the American Hospital Association reported it, the signers said they were open to "targeted reforms," and then drew a hard line:

"We cannot and will not support a final reconciliation bill that includes any reduction in Medicaid coverage for vulnerable populations."

They explained exactly why, in language written for districts like Hurd's:

"Many hospitals — particularly in rural and underserved areas — rely heavily on Medicaid funding, with some receiving over half their revenue from the program alone. Providers in these areas are especially at risk of closure, with many unable to recover. When hospitals close, it affects all constituents, regardless of healthcare coverage."

Hurd represents Colorado's 3rd District — the western and southern third of the state. Rural hospitals, small towns, long drives to the next clinic. If that warning was written for anybody, it was written for him. The letter went to Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Majority Whip Tom Emmer and Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie.

Then he voted for the cuts. Twice.

The timeline

April 14, 2025 — Hurd signs the letter. "Cannot and will not."

April 23, 2025 — Dozens of members of AFSCME, the public employees union, gather outside his Pueblo office asking him to vote no on Medicaid cuts. KKTV reported that the union said Hurd had not responded to any of their requests to meet. One member, Betty Spinuzzi, put it this way: "If Hurd is worried about working people and he's walking our direction we'd be glad to walk with him, but we cannot walk with him if he won't talk with us."

Hurd's response added a caveat the letter didn't have. Medicaid, he said, "is an essential health benefit that we need to preserve" — but the program "should not be supporting able-bodied adults who are capable of working but choose not to."

May 22, 2025 — Hurd votes yes on H.R. 1, the bill his letter had been about.

May 30, 2025 — Constituents from western Colorado Indivisible groups show up at his Grand Junction office to tell him what they think of that vote. Hurd isn't there. His district director takes notes and collects their letters. Afterward his office tells the paper that Indivisible never tried to arrange an official meeting.

July 3, 2025 — The Senate sends its version back. Hurd votes yes again. It becomes law.

The promise said "any reduction in Medicaid coverage for vulnerable populations." The bill reduced Medicaid coverage. He voted for it. There is no third reading of those facts.

What he said afterward

A week after the final vote, Hurd sat down with Colorado Public Radio's Ryan Warner. He didn't deny people would lose coverage. He estimated that 4 percent of the people on Medicaid in his district could lose access to the program because of the law — and argued the reduction would improve it for everyone else.

Here is how he defended it:

"It's the individuals who are otherwise able-bodied, adults who are able to work and contribute that should, I think, be contributing towards Medicaid and it's not appropriate to take money from the most needy and give it to those who don't have that need."

Notice the move. The letter he signed drew the line at vulnerable populations. Afterward, he simply reclassified the people losing coverage as not vulnerable — able-bodied adults who ought to be working. That way the promise technically survives while the coverage doesn't.

Asked directly whether health care in western and southern Colorado would be better or worse off, he never said better or worse. He said the legislation "is consistent with protecting and supporting those vulnerable populations."

Warner had opened that stretch of the interview with the Congressional Budget Office's estimate — a trillion dollars in cuts over a decade, around 12 million people losing health insurance. He came back to the agency at the end, this time on the debt: $3.4 trillion over a decade. Hurd waved it off:

"I think we need to take with a grain of salt what the Congressional Budget Office is saying, particularly when it comes to dynamic scoring."

The number he didn't mention

Hurd's "4 percent" is a share of a share. Here's the count.

The Joint Economic Committee's House minority staff ran the projections district by district, out to 2034. For Colorado's 3rd, the figure is more than 32,000 people losing health coverage — 24,434 losing Medicaid and 7,900 losing Affordable Care Act coverage.

Thirty-two thousand people is not a rounding error. It's a mid-sized Colorado town, gone from the coverage rolls.

And losing coverage isn't only a problem for the person who loses it. That's the part the letter Hurd signed said better than we could: when Medicaid revenue drops, a rural hospital doesn't quietly serve fewer Medicaid patients. It cuts services, or closes a clinic, and everybody in the county drives farther — insured or not.

Paperwork requirements, which is what most of the Medicaid share of those losses comes down to, don't check whether you deserve care. They check whether you filed on time. A rancher who misses a re-enrollment notice and a person who "chooses not to work" come off the rolls exactly the same way.

He's not the only one who signed it

Eleven other Republicans put their names on that letter, and the pattern repeated. Virginia's Rob Wittman signed the same letter, told a columnist his constituents were protected, and voted yes — and clinics in his state started closing about two months after the bill was signed.

That's what makes this worth writing down. It isn't one member getting rolled. It's a play: state the concern loudly enough to get quoted, collect the credit for standing up to leadership, then vote with leadership and hope nobody keeps the letter.

We kept the letter. It has twelve names on it, and one of them is Jeff Hurd's.

Source

The American Hospital Association's April 16, 2025 report, A dozen House Republicans send letter opposing Medicaid cuts, and Colorado Public Radio's July 10, 2025 interview with Rep. Hurd by Ryan Warner. Photo: KKTV.

Colorado's Coal Bill Is $87 Million. Jeff Hurd Says It's Worth It — and Wants More.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:29:24 +0000

His hometown paper asked him a simple question. Keeping Colorado's worn-out coal plants running past their retirement dates is going to cost more than $87 million, and that money comes out of people's electric bills. Was it worth it?

Jeff Hurd said yes. Then he said the federal orders forcing one of those plants to stay open should last longer.

That exchange ran in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel on August 4, 2026, in a Q&A by reporter Nathan Deal. It is worth reading slowly, because the man answering represents the two Colorado towns that are paying most of the bill.

Where the $87 million goes

The number comes from a July 21, 2026 investigation by Mark Jaffe in the Colorado Sun, which added up what it costs to keep aging coal units running after they were supposed to shut down. Three pieces:

Comanche 2 in Pueblo. It was supposed to close at the end of 2025. When the newer Comanche 3 unit was damaged and went offline, Xcel Energy got permission from state regulators to keep Comanche 2 going. Running it through March 2028 costs nearly $65 million in capital, maintenance, and fuel.
Craig Unit 1 in Moffat County. The 45-year-old plant was set to shut down on December 31, 2025. One day before, the Trump administration's Department of Energy ordered it to stay open. That order has cost at least $6.5 million so far — about $1 million a month.
Hayden Station in Routt County. Repairing the pollution controls on one unit runs $9 to $10 million.

Pueblo and Craig are both in Hurd's district. So the people footing this bill are, in large part, his own constituents. Xcel customers pay for Comanche. Tri-State, the wholesale power supplier ordered to keep Craig running, said the costs would be passed along to its member co-ops — which means the rural electric customers across western Colorado who buy power from them.

Colorado's governor was blunt about it when the order came down. Jared Polis said it would "pass tens of millions in costs to Colorado rate payers, in order to keep a coal plant open that is broken and not needed." Attorney General Phil Weiser called the order "an unlawful abuse of the department's emergency authority," and the state took it to court.

The law being used here was written for wartime

The Craig order was issued under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act — an emergency power meant for genuine crises, war, and disasters. The Trump administration has used it to stop power plants from retiring on schedule at eight sites, from Florida to Washington state. That is not what the provision was written for; before this, the Sun reports, it "had never been used by DOE to stop plants from closing down."

Craig Unit 1 was closing on its owners' own schedule — "to comply with clean air regulations and for economic reasons," as Tri-State put it — at 45 years old, and a valve failure had already taken it offline on December 19. The federal government stepped in, overruled that plan, and handed the tab to Colorado families.

What Hurd actually said

Asked directly whether the cost was worth it, here is how Hurd answered:

"Certainly the dollar amounts that we're talking about here are significant, but the honest comparison is not $65 million or $87 million versus zero; it's the cost of keeping dependable generation available compared to the cost of replacing replacement power in a very tight market."

Then:

"If it means blackouts and brownouts, then I think all of us should look at the seriousness of the situation and recognize that keeping reliable generation online is critical."

And:

"I think what we're learning in Colorado is that reality has a vote."

Notice what's missing. Not one word about the people whose power bills go up. Not a dollar figure for what this adds to a household in Pueblo or Craig. Not a question about whether a federal agency should be able to override a state's own energy plan and send the invoice to that state's customers. Hurd's whole answer is about the utility system. The ratepayer never appears in it.

He didn't stop there. He went on to complain that the federal orders are "limited to only 90 days" — too short, he said, for utilities to plan around. He suggested longer-term arrangements with Colorado so plants like Craig could run more efficiently instead of "turning off and on so quickly." That is where ratepayers finally turn up — once, at the end of that answer, as people a longer runway would let the utility "recoup costs" from, rather than as people whose bills the order is raising.

Read that again. His criticism of a federal order that costs his constituents $1 million a month is that it doesn't last long enough.

This isn't a one-off

Hurd's record on this is not ambiguous. The League of Conservation Voters gives him a 3% score for 2025 — and a 3% lifetime score. He sits on the Natural Resources Committee's energy and minerals panel and on the Science Committee's energy panel, so these are the exact questions he was put in Congress to work on.

And on December 17, 2025 he was one of 218 Republicans who voted for the "Reliable Power Act," a bill that lets federal energy regulators stall EPA rules on power-plant pollution. Same instinct, same result: keep the old plants running, push the cost and the pollution onto everybody downwind.

To be fair where fairness is due, Hurd has broken with his party on public lands. He was "the lone Republican on the Natural Resources Committee to vote against the lands provision" that would have sold off federal acreage in the West. He is capable of telling his own side no. He just doesn't do it when the bill lands on a utility statement in Pueblo.

The question he didn't answer

"$87 million compared to what?" Hurd asked. Fine — here's a version of the question he might try answering next.

Compared to what a working family in Pueblo can absorb. Compared to what a household on a fixed income in Moffat County has left after groceries. Compared to the more than 32,000 people in his district projected to lose health coverage because of a bill he voted for — many of them the same people now paying more to run a broken coal plant.

Hurd is right that reality has a vote. Reality just doesn't get to vote on your electric bill. He does.

Source

Q&A: Hurd talks coal costs, budget framework and NDAA — Nathan Deal, The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel, August 4, 2026. Photo: The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel.

The Supreme Court Said Kids Born Here Are Citizens, 6–3. Jeff Crank Is "Very Disappointed."

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:45:54 +0000

On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Trump v. Barbara and struck down the executive order that would have ended birthright citizenship.

The vote was 6–3. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion. Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined it. Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed the order was invalid, though on statutory rather than constitutional grounds.

Roberts stated the holding, about children born in this country to parents here unlawfully or temporarily, plainly:

"Under the Constitution, they are citizens at birth."

He noted the precedent had been settled since 1898, when United States v. Wong Kim Ark established that "the Citizenship Clause incorporated the common law and granted citizenship to nearly all children born in the United States."

Justices Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch dissented.

Jeff Crank went on Newsmax and said he was disappointed.

What He Said

Crank's comment, as reported by the Colorado Times Recorder:

"[I'm] very disappointed in the Supreme Court's decision on birthright citizenship. I do think we live in an era where people are coming to the United States to take advantage of our kindness and our goodness. We do need to address this."

He added that he would be meeting with House leadership in the following week to figure out what the House could do about it.

The paper asked his office whether that meeting had actually been scheduled. His office didn't respond.

What "Address This" Would Actually Require

Here is the part that doesn't fit in a cable hit.

The Court did not say the executive order was poorly drafted, or that the President used the wrong procedure, or that a statute was missing. It said the order violates the Fourteenth Amendment — the text that says anyone "born … in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" is a citizen.

That means Congress can't fix it by passing a bill. Five justices just held that the Constitution itself decides this question. Changing it takes a constitutional amendment: two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, and ratification by 38 states.

There is no version of "meeting with House leadership" that gets around a constitutional holding by the Roberts Court.

There is a bill that pretends otherwise. The Birthright Citizenship Act of 2025 (H.R. 569) was introduced in January 2025 and has 93 cosponsors. Crank isn't one of them. He has been in Congress since January 2025 and hasn't signed it in nineteen months — including in the weeks since he said "we do need to address this."

So the record is: a statement of disappointment on television, a promised meeting his office wouldn't confirm, and no name on the one bill in the House that claims to do the thing.

Who This Is Actually About

Birthright citizenship is not primarily a rule about immigrants. It's a rule about how the United States proves anyone is a citizen.

Right now, if you were born here, your birth certificate is the whole answer. That's it. That's the system. It works for everybody — the fifth-generation rancher in El Paso County and the baby born down the hall from him last year — because the question the government asks is simply where were you born.

Take that away, and the question becomes what was your mother's immigration status on the day you were born — a fact most Americans have never had to document and many couldn't produce on demand. Every parent in the country would need paperwork proving their own status to establish their child's. Hospitals would be sorting newborns into categories.

The Fourteenth Amendment was written after the Civil War precisely to take that discretion away from politicians — so citizenship couldn't be handed out or withheld based on who your parents were. That's the design. It's not a loophole somebody found.

He Keeps Landing on the Same Side of Due Process

This is the second time in Crank's short congressional career that he's ended up arguing against a court that told the executive branch it had gone too far.

In April 2025, three weeks after the administration flew 238 people to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador without hearings, Crank was the lead sponsor of a House resolution endorsing the removals and affirming the President's authority to carry them out. Two federal courts later ruled otherwise — one finding the men had been removed unlawfully, without notice or a chance to be heard.

Both times, a court applied a constitutional limit to what a president could do to people. Both times, Crank's public position was that the President should have won.

That's a pattern, and it's worth naming for what it is: a member of the branch that is supposed to check executive power, using his platform to argue that the checks keep getting in the way.

Sources

Colorado Times Recorder, "Colorado Congressman 'Very Disappointed' Supreme Court Upheld Birthright Citizenship" (July 7, 2026), and the Supreme Court's opinion in Trump v. Barbara, No. 25-365 (June 30, 2026). Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images, via SCOTUSblog.

Two-Thirds of Active-Duty Suicides Involve a Firearm. Jeff Crank Wrote a Bill to Make It Easier to Bring Guns onto Base.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:43:22 +0000

In 2023, the Pentagon's own suicide-prevention committee looked at why so many service members were killing themselves and came back with a number that framed everything else.

66% of active-duty suicides involve a firearm. For reservists it's 72%. For the National Guard, 78%.

Those figures come from the Defense Department's Suicide Prevention and Response Independent Review Committee, which delivered its findings on February 24, 2023. Its recommendations followed directly from them: a seven-day waiting period on any firearm bought on Defense Department property and a four-day wait on ammunition, raising the minimum age for buying either to 25, and restricting privately owned firearms in barracks and dorms.

One of its members, Dr. Craig Bryan, put the goal to reporters as simply as it can be put: "the motive behind this really is to, in essence, slow down access to firearms."

On May 7, 2026, Jeff Crank introduced a bill to speed it up.

What the Bill Does

Crank's Armed Forces Carry Rights Protection Act of 2026 (H.R. 8680) amends the 2016 defense authorization law, which currently tells the Secretary of Defense to set up a process for deciding when a service member may carry a personal firearm on an installation.

Crank's bill adds this:

"there shall be a rebuttable presumption in favor of authorizing a member to carry a firearm owned by such member while the member — (1) is on the installation, center, or facility; and (2) is not performing duty at such installation, center, or facility."

And if a commander says no, the bill requires the denial to be "in writing" with "an objective, clearly describable, and individualized basis."

Flip that around and read it from a base commander's chair. Today, if you have concerns about a soldier carrying a personal weapon, you decline. Under Crank's bill, the default is yes, and saying no means putting your reasoning about a specific individual on paper — a document that soldier can then contest, and that will exist forever if you're wrong in either direction.

The bill doesn't ban commanders from saying no. It makes saying no cost something, every single time, in a system where the safest calls are often the quiet ones.

He Is Making a Temporary Policy Permanent

The bill didn't come out of nowhere. On April 2, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memo telling base commanders to allow personal firearms on installations "with the presumption that it is necessary for personal protection," with denials required in writing.

Before that, service members generally could not carry personal weapons on base without permission from a senior commander, and firearms were stored securely — typically checked out only for hunting or an authorized range.

A memo can be reversed by the next Secretary of Defense. A statute can't. Crank's bill takes Hegseth's month-old directive and welds it into permanent law.

Tanya Schardt, senior counsel at the gun violence prevention group Brady, noted that most active-duty service members who die by suicide do so with a weapon they own personally, not one military-issued, and argued that there would "undoubtedly be an increase in gun suicide and other gun violence."

He Sits on the Subcommittee That Handles This

Crank isn't a bystander to military suicide policy. He serves on the House Armed Services Committee, and specifically on its Subcommittee on Military Personnel — the panel whose published jurisdiction covers military health care and "Morale, Welfare and Recreation."

That's the subcommittee where the Pentagon's suicide report lands. It's where the recommendations either become law or don't.

Three years after the Defense Department's own experts recommended slowing access to firearms on base, the bill this member of that subcommittee chose to write does the reverse.

What This Means at Home

Crank represents Colorado Springs, a military town. The Pikes Peak region is home to roughly 45,000 active-duty, Guard, and Reserve members plus about 90,000 veterans and retirees, and the aerospace and defense sector makes up more than 40% of the local economy.

Those are the people this bill is about. The 66% figure isn't a national abstraction to CO-05 — it's a description of the risk profile of tens of thousands of Crank's own constituents.

Colorado already has a gun death rate of about 15.3 per 100,000 people, 19.5% above the national rate — 961 Coloradans died from gun-related injuries in 2024.

Why "Slow It Down" Is the Whole Strategy

The reason the Pentagon's committee focused on waiting periods and storage instead of counseling alone is that suicide is often a decision made in a very short window. Put time and a locked container between the impulse and the weapon, and a meaningful share of people never reach the second step.

That's not a political theory. It's why the Defense Department's own review — produced by outside experts the Pentagon brought in specifically to solve this problem — put access to firearms at the center of the answer.

You can support the Second Amendment and still think a barracks at 2 a.m. is a place where the default should be "secure the weapon." Those aren't in tension. Storage rules on a military installation aren't gun confiscation; they're the same logic as taking someone's keys.

Crank's bill sets the default the other way, permanently, and tells the officer who wants to intervene to write up his reasons first.

The Question He Won't Take in Person

If a Gold Star parent in Colorado Springs wanted to ask Crank why he wrote this bill, they'd have to find him first.

Crank held his first town hall online rather than in a room with constituents. "Why do they want to have an in-person town hall meeting?" he said on a Zoom call from the Capitol that morning. "So they can stand there and wave a cane in my face like Al Green did last night and steal the show? I'm not interested in doing that. I'm interested in having a civil discussion about the issues and taking questions from constituents." When Colorado Springs residents held one anyway, they set a cardboard cutout of him on the stage.

The families who would have the most to say about this bill are exactly the ones who never get the microphone.

Sources

The text of H.R. 8680, the Armed Forces Carry Rights Protection Act of 2026; the final report of the Suicide Prevention and Response Independent Review Committee, February 24, 2023; and CBS News, "Slowing down access to firearms could prevent more suicides in the military, panel finds".

The Day After 60 Minutes Reported It Could Find No Criminal Record for 75% of the Men Sent to El Salvador, Jeff Crank Wrote a Resolution Congratulating Trump for Sending Them

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:40:34 +0000

Most members of Congress, when a policy blows up, go quiet. Jeff Crank went the other way. He wrote a resolution.

On April 7, 2025, Crank introduced H. Res. 295, "Expressing Support for the President's Actions to Safeguard National Security and Eliminate Threats from Foreign Terrorist Organizations." He was the lead sponsor. Tom Tiffany, Lauren Boebert, Michael Guest, and Sheri Biggs signed on with him that day; Rich McCormick added his name the next.

To understand what that resolution was, you have to know what had happened in the three weeks before he wrote it — and what had been reported the day before.

What Happened on March 15, 2025

On March 15, 2025, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — a wartime law — and put people on planes.

238 Venezuelan migrants were flown to El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT — more than 130 of them, a federal court would later find, under the Alien Enemies Act.

They did not get hearings first.

What CBS Found on April 6

Three weeks later, CBS News obtained the internal government list of who was on those planes and cross-checked it against domestic and international court filings, news reports, and arrest records.

The 60 Minutes report aired April 6, 2025. Its central finding:

"But we could not find criminal records for 75% of the Venezuelans — 179 men — now sitting in prison."

Of the at least 22% who did have records, CBS reported, "the vast majority are for non-violent offenses like theft, shoplifting and trespassing." About a dozen faced accusations of murder, rape, assault, or kidnapping.

About a dozen, out of 238.

By then, the administration had also already admitted, in a court filing on March 31, that it had deported Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to El Salvador through what it called an "administrative error." An immigration judge had granted him protection from removal to El Salvador in October 2019; his lawyers said he had complied with that status by checking in with ICE yearly and had "neither been convicted nor charged with any crime." ICE sent him anyway, and he ended up in CECOT.

That is where things stood on the evening of Sunday, April 6, 2025.

What Crank Wrote on April 7

The next day, Crank introduced his resolution. Its text recites the flights approvingly — "on March 16, 2025, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele received these two flights and immediately transferred the SDGTs into El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) for detention" — and then resolves that the House:

"(1) supports the President's Action to remove foreign terrorists under the Alien Enemies Act… (2) affirms that, as Commander in Chief, the President has executive authority to detain, deport, or restrict non-citizens from a Foreign Terrorist Organization; and (3) endorses the complete elimination of these organizations from the United States…"

There is no hedge anywhere in it. No line about making sure the right people were on the planes. No mention of Abrego Garcia. No acknowledgment that the government's own list, as reviewed by CBS the previous night, showed three out of four of these men with nothing on their record.

The resolution simply describes every person on those flights as a foreign terrorist and asks the House to say so too.

Then a Federal Court Ruled

On June 4, 2025, Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled on the removals Crank's resolution had endorsed two months earlier.

He found that the more than 130 men were "unlawfully removed to CECOT before they had received constitutionally adequate notice" of the reason for their removal, and without "any meaningful opportunity to actually seek habeas relief." He ordered the administration to give them access to habeas corpus and to propose a process for it within a week.

On September 2, 2025, a Fifth Circuit panel went further. In a 2–1 ruling, it blocked the use of the Alien Enemies Act for these deportations, concluding that "the findings do not support that an invasion or a predatory incursion has occurred." A country's "encouraging its residents and citizens to enter this country illegally," the majority wrote, "is not the modern-day equivalent of sending an armed, organized force to occupy, to disrupt, or to otherwise harm the United States."

That panel opinion no longer stands. On September 30, 2025 the full Fifth Circuit agreed to rehear the case, and its order says so in one line: "the panel opinion in this case dated September 2, 2025, is VACATED." What has held the whole time is the Supreme Court's own order of May 16, 2025, which enjoins the government "from removing the named plaintiffs or putative class members in this action under the AEA pending order by the Fifth Circuit."

Crank's resolution asserted the President had the authority to do all of it. One federal judge held the removals it endorsed were unlawful, and a Fifth Circuit panel held the Act had been invoked improperly in the first place.

The Part Congress Was Supposed to Play

Here's what makes this more than a bad take on immigration.

The Alien Enemies Act is a wartime statute. It was written in 1798 for use against nationals of a country the United States is at war with, or that has launched an invasion or predatory incursion. Congress declares war. Congress wrote that law and set its limits.

When a president stretches a wartime power to cover peacetime immigration enforcement, the constitutional check is supposed to come from Congress — the branch that owns the war power in the first place.

Crank's response, as a member of that branch, was to write a resolution affirming that the President had the authority anyway.

That's not oversight. It's a permission slip. And he wrote it as a freshman, in his first four months in office, about a program whose own paperwork had been publicly discredited the day before.

Due Process Isn't a Technicality

The thing Boasberg found missing — notice, and a chance to be heard — is the entire machinery that separates "we deported a gang member" from "we deported a man with a tattoo."

That machinery is what caught Abrego Garcia's protected status in 2019. Skipping it is what sent him to CECOT in 2025.

Nobody has to sympathize with Tren de Aragua to see the problem. A hearing is how you find out who somebody actually is. When 179 of 238 men have no findable criminal record, the hearing wasn't a formality that got skipped — it was the only step that would have caught the error, and it got skipped on purpose.

Crank represents Colorado Springs, a military town. Every service member in his district took an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Due process is in that document. Twice.

He Doesn't Take These Questions in Person

If you live in Colorado's 5th District and want to ask Crank about H. Res. 295, good luck.

In March 2025 — the same month as the flights — Crank moved his first town hall online rather than face constituents in a room, and said of the people asking for an in-person event: "Why do they want to have an in-person town hall meeting?" — adding, "So they can stand there and wave a cane in my face like Al Green did last night and steal the show? I'm not interested in doing that."

Later that month, about 200 people filled a labor hall in Colorado Springs for a town hall organized by the local Indivisible chapter, the El Paso County Democrats, the Progressive Veterans and the local labor council. Crank was invited and didn't appear, so they put a cardboard cutout of him at the front of the room instead.

The cutout can't answer for the resolution either. But at least it never signed one.

Sources

Cecilia Vega, CBS News / 60 Minutes, "U.S. sent 238 migrants to Salvadoran mega-prison; documents indicate most have no apparent criminal records" (April 6, 2025), and the text of H. Res. 295 (April 7, 2025). Photo: Getty Images via CBS News.

Lauren Boebert's New Bill Would Repeal the 78-Year-Old Law That Keeps Handguns Out of the Mail

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 07:36:00 +0000

On July 30, 2026, Lauren Boebert introduced a bill with a friendly name and a very specific effect.

H.R. 9979, the "Freedom to Ship Act," runs five pages. Most of it is about shipping companies. The last line is the part worth reading. Section 2(c) of the bill says:

"Section 1715 of chapter 83 of title 18, United States Code (and the item relating to such section in the analysis of such chapter), is repealed."

That is a citation, not an argument, so here is what it means.

18 U.S.C. § 1715 is titled "Firearms as nonmailable; regulations." It says: "Pistols, revolvers, and other firearms capable of being concealed on the person are nonmailable and shall not be deposited in or carried by the mails or delivered by any officer or employee of the Postal Service." It carves out exceptions for police, the military, government watchmen, and gun manufacturers and dealers shipping to one another. And it says anyone who knowingly puts a handgun in the mail "shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."

That section has been on the books since 1948, and the ban it carried forward dates to 1927 — Boebert's own press release puts it at "nearly 100 years." Her bill deletes it — the ban and the penalty both.

She said so herself. Announcing the bill on X, Boebert wrote that her legislation "protects privacy, holds companies accountable and restores the ability to mail handguns through USPS."

Three other Republicans put their names on it as original cosponsors: Sheri Biggs of South Carolina, Michael Cloud of Texas, and Clay Higgins of Louisiana.

The other half: making it illegal for UPS to say no

The rest of the bill is aimed at private shipping companies.

It adds a new section to federal transportation law, "Interference with lawful transportation of arms." Under it, a motor carrier — UPS, FedEx, a freight company — may not "interfere" with a gun shipment, and the bill gives four specific examples of what that includes:

Declining to carry it. A carrier that says "we don't ship firearms" is in violation.
Imposing conditions beyond what federal gun law already requires, where they restrict the owner's ability to transfer or dispose of the gun.
Charging more for a gun than for another package of similar size, weight and hazard class.
Requiring the shipper's consent to disclose information as a condition of taking the shipment.

A fifth item sweeps in "any other like conduct" with the same effect.

The penalty is civil: $10,000 to the federal government for every violation, plus a private lawsuit from the shipper for "all compensatory and consequential damages."

Sit with that for a second. This is a bill that tells private companies they are legally forbidden from declining a category of business, on pain of a $10,000 federal fine per package and open-ended civil liability. From the party that says the federal government should not tell businesses what to sell or who to serve.

The rationale Boebert gave is that under the Biden administration, some carriers made licensed gun dealers sign take-it-or-leave-it contracts. Her remedy is not to give dealers more bargaining power. It is to remove the companies' ability to decide at all.

What Boebert is not working on

Colorado has about 15.3 gun deaths per 100,000 people — 19.5% higher than the national average. Roughly 1,000 Coloradans die from gun violence every year. That is a plane crash a month, in her own state.

Boebert has been in Congress since 2021. Here is her record when the House actually voted on gun policy:

She voted against the Bipartisan Background Checks Act, which would have required a background check on nearly all gun sales.
She voted against the Enhanced Background Checks Act, which would have closed the loophole that let the Charleston church shooter buy his gun.
She voted against the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — the first significant federal gun safety law in nearly 30 years, passed after Uvalde.

Against all three. And the bill she chose to write herself, in the summer of an election year, makes it easier to put a handgun in a mailbox.

This is not an isolated priority. It is what this group of Republicans does with their legislative time. Rep. Andrew Clyde, who owns two gun stores, spent this month demanding the ATF destroy the firearm transaction records police use to trace guns found at crime scenes. Rep. Barry Moore wrote a bill to make the AR-15 the national gun of the United States.

"Criminals still shipped guns through the mail"

The gun-media coverage of Boebert's bill is worth quoting, because it makes the argument more plainly than she does.

Writing at Bearing Arms, Tom Knighton argued the ban never worked anyway: "criminals still shipped guns through the mail if they wanted to. They just lied about what they were shipping, and there's no way the USPS can check every single box."

That is the case for repeal: the law is broken because people break it. It is not an argument anyone makes about laws they like.

Knighton also framed the timing honestly. He wrote that "Having a Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate allows pro-freedom lawmakers the leeway to introduce Second Amendment-friendly legislation that will actually be considered and likely voted on."

In other words: this is not a message bill. They think it can pass.

Where it stands

H.R. 9979 was referred to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the House Judiciary Committee on the day it was introduced. It has four Republican names on it and no Democrats.

Boebert co-chairs the Congressional Second Amendment Caucus. Repealing the mail ban is the kind of thing that caucus exists to do. The question for voters in Colorado's 4th District — and in the districts represented by Biggs, Cloud and Higgins — is whether that is what they sent someone to Washington for.

Source

Boebert Introduces Bill to Protect Right to Ship Guns — Bearing Arms, August 8, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/David Zalubowski.
Bill text and cosponsors: H.R. 9979 as introduced, 119th Congress.