MAGA Report Cards — Florida

Byron Donalds Promises Florida the 'Most Transparent' Government in America. He Won't Say Whether He Still Backs His Bill to Let Officials Meet in Secret.

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:57:20 +0000

Byron Donalds is the only candidate for governor of Florida who has already served in Florida's state government. That should make him the easiest candidate in the race to evaluate. There is a record. You can read it.

Axios Tampa Bay read it, and then asked him about it. He would not answer.

The bill that would have closed the meetings

Donalds has vowed to give Florida the "most transparent" government in America.

In 2017, as a freshman state representative, he filed a bill that would have let two members of a local board or commission meet privately to discuss official business — no public notice, no record of the meeting.

Florida's Sunshine Law is the reason those meetings are public in the first place. The First Amendment Foundation, which exists to defend that law, panned the bill. Critics said it would render the Sunshine Law "meaningless." It died in the Florida House.

Donalds' argument at the time was that local officials should get to operate under the same rules state legislators do.

Think about what that bill would mean in practice on a county commission of five people. Two of them are a bloc. Two more are another bloc. Under Donalds' bill, each pair could work out its position behind a closed door, and the public would see only the vote — never the deliberation, and never a record that the conversation happened.

The criminal justice bills he also won't discuss

Donalds' state record includes more than the records bill, and some of it is genuinely at odds with how his campaign presents him now.

In 2019 he championed legislation to raise Florida's felony theft threshold from $300 to $1,000. His Republican rivals later seized on it, calling it "pro-shoplifting." His bill went nowhere — but Florida later raised the threshold to $750 through legislation he co-introduced.

He also twice tried to let judges sentence drug trafficking defendants below the mandatory minimum, when those defendants had no serious criminal history and cooperated with prosecutors.

Those are defensible positions. Plenty of conservatives hold them. The problem is not the positions. The problem is that Axios asked Donalds whether he still stands by the public records bill or the criminal justice reforms he championed, and he did not answer.

What his campaign said instead came from communications director Gates McGavick, who told Axios that Donalds "will put affordability, accountability, and public safety front and center in his administration," and that he is "endorsed by 58 Florida sheriffs and the Florida Police Chiefs' Association."

That is a response about endorsements. The question was about his own bills.

Why the dodge is the story

A candidate who has changed his mind can say so. "I filed that bill nine years ago and I was wrong" takes four seconds and costs nothing. A candidate who still believes it can say that too.

Refusing to say either one means the record is available to voters but its owner will not stand behind it or disown it. Every Floridian who wants to know what a Donalds administration would do about open government is left guessing, and guessing is the point.

It also runs directly into the transparency promise. You cannot campaign on running the most transparent government in America and simultaneously decline to describe your own position on the state's open-meetings law.

The pattern with local officials and accountability

Donalds' instinct about who should be able to check whom is on the record elsewhere, too.

He has said he will remove elected local officials who cross him on immigration enforcement — over agreements the state's own lawyers told a judge cities are not required to sign. A lawsuit alleges he threatened to "crush" a school board member. And on the accountability rules that apply to him personally, he demanded "sanctions" for lawmakers who trade stocks improperly, then broke the same disclosure law 108 times.

The common thread is a preference for less scrutiny of himself and more leverage over everyone else.

What the record shows

Byron Donalds filed a bill in 2017 that would have let two members of a local board discuss official business in private with no notice and no record, which critics said would render Florida's Sunshine Law meaningless. He has since promised Florida the "most transparent" government in America. Asked by Axios whether he still stands behind that bill, or behind the criminal justice bills he championed in the Legislature, he did not answer, and his campaign replied by listing police endorsements. He is the only candidate in the race with a state-government record, and he will not discuss it.

Source

Axios Tampa Bay, Donalds won't say if he stands by his record in Legislature, by Yacob Reyes, September 9, 2026. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images via Axios.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Then it says the same thing again for the Pentagon.

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

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

What the rule they're trying to kill actually does

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

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

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

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

Trump's own administration looked at this and said no

This is the part that ought to end the argument.

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

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

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

What they say it's about

Bice frames it as fairness between states:

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

Womack frames it as thrift:

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

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

Who asked for this

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

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

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

This keeps happening

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

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

What the bill says

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

Sources

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

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

Laurel Lee and Ashley Moody Want Every Mail Ballot That Arrives After Election Day Thrown Out. Fifteen States Count Those Ballots Today, and Three of Them Are Republican-Run.

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 06:51:24 +0000

On September 3, 2026, Laurel Lee introduced the House version of a bill that would let the Postal Service decide whether your vote counts.

It is the companion to the Ballots by Election Day Act, which Ashley Moody introduced in the Senate on July 15, 2026. The bill amends the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require that every ballot in a federal election — including absentee and mail-in ballots — be in the hands of an election official by the time polls close on Election Day. States would be barred from counting anything that arrives later. Ballots from military and overseas voters are exempt. It would take effect for federal elections in 2027 and after.

Read that again, because the mechanism is the whole story. The bill does not change who may vote by mail. It changes what happens to a ballot that a voter filled out correctly, signed correctly, and mailed on time — and that the Postal Service delivered a day late.

Under current law in a good part of the country, that ballot counts. Under this bill, it is thrown away.

Who actually loses a vote

The National Conference of State Legislatures keeps the list. Fifteen states, plus Washington, D.C., Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, will count a mailed ballot that arrives after Election Day as long as it was postmarked on or before it.

This is not a blue-state list. Mississippi is on it. So are Texas and West Virginia — three states with Republican legislatures that looked at the same question and decided a postmark should be enough.

The people who benefit from a postmark deadline are the ones with the least control over the mail: rural voters on long delivery routes, people who move late in the cycle, anyone whose ballot reached them close to the deadline because their county mailed late. None of them did anything wrong. The bill takes their votes anyway.

What Lee says, and what it leaves out

Lee's defense of the bill is that it isn't a restriction at all.

"One thing that's important to understand about this bill is that it doesn't limit voting by mail. It simply says that for state who allow mail voting, ballots must be received by Election Day."

That is true and beside the point. Nobody's right to request a mail ballot is being touched. What is being touched is whether the ballot gets counted, and the thing that decides it is not the voter's conduct. It is delivery time.

She also offered Florida as the model. "Florida is proof-positive that this works, that it does not deny any voter the right to vote," she said. The received-by-Election-Day rule, she told The Floridian, is "a really effective way of making sure that elections stay organized and that we have timely election results."

Timely results are the actual argument here, and it is worth saying plainly: the benefit on offer is that we learn the winner sooner. The cost is that some number of ballots cast on time are destroyed. That is the trade, and "organized" is doing a lot of work to obscure it.

Lee is not a bystander to how this works. She was Florida's Secretary of State — the official who ran the state's elections — before she ran for Congress. She knows exactly how much of a mail ballot's journey is out of the voter's hands.

The timing, and the Postal Service

This lands in a year when mail delivery is the whole fight.

The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to reinstate restrictions on vote-by-mail — a Postal Service plan, filed with the high court weeks before ballots go out, under which mailed ballots that do not meet new federal envelope and barcode standards can be returned to election officials. The judge who blocked it found those requirements could stop eligible voters from receiving their ballots at all. A receipt deadline is a much sharper instrument when the mail is that uncertain. Every ballot the Postal Service sends back or delivers late is an on-time voter who misses the cutoff.

It is also part of a longer push. Republicans in Congress and in the states have spent this cycle working the same seam — the SAVE America Act's documentary proof-of-citizenship requirement, state bills to end vote-by-mail outright, and litigation over which mail ballots a state may count. Each piece is defended as administrative housekeeping. Together they subtract voters.

The exemption gives the game away

The bill carves out military and overseas voters, who keep the ability to have a late-arriving ballot counted.

That exemption is an admission. Congress understands perfectly well that a ballot can be cast on time and arrive late through no fault of the voter — that is precisely why service members get protected from the rule. Lee and Moody are not confused about the problem. They have decided which voters deserve a remedy for it.

What the bill does

Ashley Moody's Ballots by Election Day Act, and the House companion Laurel Lee introduced on September 3, 2026, would forbid states from counting any federal-election ballot that reaches an election official after polls close, no matter how early it was postmarked. Fifteen states plus Washington, D.C. and three territories count those ballots today, including Republican-run Mississippi, Texas and West Virginia. Military and overseas voters are exempt from the deadline; everyone else is not. Lee, a former Florida Secretary of State, says the bill "doesn't limit voting by mail," which is true of the right to request one and false of whether it gets counted.

Source

Laurel Lee Introduces Companion Ballots by Election Day Act — Joseph Quesada, The Floridian, September 3, 2026.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the SAVE America Act would actually do to voters

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

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

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

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

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

The emergency the resolution describes

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

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

It cites a federal investigation that charged four people.

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

What was actually in front of them that week

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

Outside the chamber:

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

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

In their own words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 189 who voted yes

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

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho — Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas — Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi — Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey — Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

The number nine is not in the Constitution

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

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

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

What they were actually voting on

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

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

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

The timing

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

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

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

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

Who pushed it

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who voted to freeze the Court

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey: Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

Then a second missile killed them.

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

Congress never voted to authorize any of it.

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

We do not know who most of these people were

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

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

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

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

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

What the Senate actually voted on

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

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

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

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

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

It failed, 48 to 51.

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

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

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

Two of them switching sides would have carried it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The legal case for all this is classified

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The House looked into it for ten days

The Senate is not the only chamber that folded.

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Source

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

Miami-Dade Ended Universal Free Meals at All But 121 of Its 500-Plus Schools. Free Meal Funding Is Tied to SNAP Enrollment, and All Three Republicans Who Represent the County Voted for the SNAP Cuts.

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:57:03 +0000

Miami-Dade County Public Schools is the largest school system in Florida. This summer it announced it would stop offering universal free meals at all but 121 of its 500-plus schools. At the rest, children have to apply individually.

The district did not say its families had gotten richer. What changed was a number in a federal funding formula.

How a food stamp cut reaches a cafeteria

Most people assume free school meals and food stamps are separate programs. They are wired together, in two ways.

Individually: a lot of students get free meals automatically because their household is on SNAP or Medicaid. Take the household off SNAP and the automatic qualification goes with it.

Institutionally: the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Community Eligibility Provision lets a whole school serve free meals to every student, and reimburses it based on the percentage of its students who qualify for SNAP and similar programs. Push SNAP enrollment down in a neighborhood and the school's reimbursement rate falls with it — even for the children who were never on SNAP at all.

That is Marion County, Kentucky, where nutrition director Jennifer Wheeler told Stateline that her district's current certification reimburses about 93% of its students at the maximum rate — but at today's SNAP enrollment, it would be about 75%.

"Which then is a huge financial impact on our program," she said. Her program is self-funded. Federal reimbursements pay for the food, the labor and the kitchen equipment for 3,000 students across seven schools.

"Cuts to SNAP are not going to stop at the grocery store," said Clarissa Hayes of the Food Research & Action Center. "They really are going to threaten children's access to school meals."

She added: "We are really only starting to see the beginning."

The numbers behind it

Between May 2025 and May 2026, more than 5.6 million people lost SNAP coverage — a 13.5% drop in a single year. That is faster than the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted when it analyzed the 2025 budget bill.

More than 1 million American children have lost SNAP under the law.

About 36.6 million people were still receiving SNAP in May, at an average of roughly $187 per person per month.

More cuts are queued up as the law is fully implemented, including billions in administrative costs and benefit spending pushed onto the states.

Who voted for it

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act added new eligibility rules and work requirements to SNAP and shifted costs to states. On July 3, 2025, the House passed it on final passage. The clerk's roll call records the three Republicans who represent Miami-Dade County all voting aye:

Carlos Gimenez
Mario Diaz-Balart
Maria Elvira Salazar

Their constituents' children are among the ones now filling out individual applications.

When Congress passed the bill, Republicans who supported the food stamp cuts said the changes would strip waste and fraud out of the program. Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, was among them.

Five point six million people is not a fraud rate. It is a program being taken away from people who qualify for it.

What it looks like from a kitchen table

Anthony Bonner is a 38-year-old campaign organizer and barber in Memphis. He and his 14-year-old son lost their $250 monthly SNAP benefit in March, when the federal change ended the work requirement exemption for parents of children 14 and over. His current contract job does not satisfy the work requirement.

He has cut back on fresh meat and produce and moved to frozen vegetables and ramen.

"It's one thing to cut me off, but I should have been able to get benefits for him," he said. "I still have yet to really have enough food that I feel comfortable with that me and my son can eat for the month."

The first day of school was a relief, because his son's school still serves free breakfast and lunch to everyone. That is the reimbursement formula holding — for now.

A survey by the nonprofit No Kid Hungry found more than two-thirds of low-income parents worried this back-to-school season that they would have to choose between paying bills and buying healthy food. More than half had already cut back on groceries.

This keeps happening, state by state

The pattern in this story is the one we have been tracking all year.

In Pennsylvania, SNAP rolls fell by 220,000 in a year, with the state attributing nearly half of it directly to the budget bill — and all nine Pennsylvania Republicans voted for it, including the Agriculture chairman who had promised "absolutely no reductions."

Nationally, 4 million people had come off food stamps between July 2025 and April 2026, and Republicans described the collapse as a sign the economy was improving — while unemployment held flat and grocery prices kept rising.

Now the same formula is reaching the lunch line.

What it adds up to

More than 5.6 million people, including over 1 million children, have lost SNAP in a year under the 2025 budget bill — faster than the Congressional Budget Office predicted. Federal free-school-meal funding is tied to rates of SNAP participation, which is why anti-hunger groups have spent the year warning that school meals are next. Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Florida's largest district, has already ended universal free meals at all but 121 of its 500-plus schools. The three Republicans who represent Miami-Dade all voted for the law, and House Speaker Mike Johnson told the country the changes were about waste and fraud.

Source

Kevin Hardy, "SNAP cuts could lead to kids losing free school breakfast and lunch", Stateline via Florida Phoenix, September 2, 2026. Vote record: U.S. House Clerk, Roll Call 190, July 3, 2025. Photo by Marcus Constantino for West Virginia Watch.

Byron Donalds Says the No. 1 Way to Stop Another 9/11 in Florida Is Blocking Sharia Law. Sharia Law Had Nothing to Do With 9/11.

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:51:01 +0000

Days before the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001, Byron Donalds stood at a town hall in The Villages and posed a question to the room about protecting Florida from another attack like it.

Donalds, the Republican nominee for governor of Florida, answered it himself:

"Now, how do you prepare Florida for the potential of another 9/11? The No. 1 thing I would say is we cannot have Sharia law take a foothold in our state. Absolutely not. Absolutely not."

Sharia law had nothing to do with September 11.

What actually caused the attacks, according to the people who investigated them

The 9/11 Commission spent twenty months on the question Donalds asked. Its answer is on the first page of the report's executive summary: the pain "was inflicted by 19 young Arabs acting at the behest of Islamist extremists headquartered in distant Afghanistan," and "the 9/11 attack was driven by Usama Bin Ladin."

That is a terrorist organization operating out of a foreign country. It is not a body of religious law, and no religious legal code let it into the United States.

The Commission was equally specific about what went wrong on this end. "Across the government, there were failures of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management." Four categories, named in a single sentence. Not one of them is a court doctrine, a statute, or a religious tradition. They are descriptions of what the federal government failed to do: it did not take the threat seriously enough, did not build the tools to counter it, and did not share what it knew across agencies.

Donalds knows this. He said it himself, at the same town hall, right after the Sharia line.

"A lot of 9/11 was really information flow, or lack thereof. We had agencies that were siloing information at the federal level. People were not talking."

That is, broadly, the Commission's actual conclusion. He put it second. First was a religious legal tradition that appears nowhere in the finding.

Florida's real connection to the attacks is documented, and it is not this

The hijackers did spend time in Florida, which is part of what makes the substitution so stark. The Commission's account of how the plot was assembled puts three of the four pilots in one small Gulf Coast town. Mohamed Atta "started flight instruction at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Florida," and Marwan al Shehhi enrolled there with him. Ziad Jarrah "had already arranged to attend the Florida Flight Training Center (FFTC) in Venice, Florida." When the muscle hijackers arrived in 2001, "the majority settled in Florida."

They learned to fly at Florida flight schools, on student and tourist visas, in plain view. What a governor of Florida might have to say about that is a real subject. Nothing in it runs through Sharia law.

The one genuine 9/11 fight a Florida politician led was about a foreign government, not a foreign legal code. Former Senator Bob Graham spent years pushing to release the "28 pages" withheld from the 2002 congressional Joint Inquiry into the attacks, which he co-chaired. He believed they would reveal America's "true relationship with Saudi Arabia." They came out in 2016. Donalds did not mention them.

Sharia law has never been law anywhere in the United States

The second half of the claim is as empty as the first. There is no American jurisdiction where Sharia law is or has been in force, and the last state that tried to ban it could not produce an example of the thing it was banning.

Oklahoma voters passed a constitutional amendment barring state courts from considering Sharia in 2010. A federal appeals court blocked it. As the American Civil Liberties Union recorded at the time, the court wrote that the state's lawyers "do not identify any actual problem the challenged amendment seeks to solve," and that they "admitted...that they did not know of even a single instance where an Oklahoma court had applied Sharia law."

So the top item on Donalds's counterterrorism list is a threat the last state to legislate against it could not find a single instance of, aimed at an attack it played no part in.

Florida passed its own version anyway. Governor Ron DeSantis signed HB 1471 on April 6, 2026, which the Governor's Office says "reinforces that Florida courts may not apply or enforce foreign or religious law if doing so would violate constitutional rights." Donalds is running to succeed DeSantis and is campaigning on stopping something his own party's governor already signed a bill about five months ago. That is embarrassing. It is also beside the point. A law against a thing that does not exist does not make the thing exist.

What he said next

Donalds did not stop at Florida law. He went after Democrats, who unlike Republicans, he said, are "playing footsie with the radical Islamists." Then he explained what he meant:

"We know what happens when you let radical Islam into your country. We have proof of it, looking at Western Europe today. Western Europe allowed radical Islam to take hold, and we're seeing, unfortunately, some things that are not working out for the European nations. We don't want that in Florida. We don't want that in America."

Strip out the softeners and the claim is that letting Muslims into a country is what causes terrorism, and that one American political party is on the terrorists' side. He offered no evidence for either, at a town hall, days before an anniversary that a lot of Americans mark by remembering people they lost.

This is a scripted party message, not one candidate's slip

Donalds is not improvising. He is reading from a message the Republican Party has spent real money building.

We documented the spending: Republicans put more than $10 million into making "Sharia" a campaign word, and a pollster found anti-Muslim sentiment in this country spikes during election cycles rather than after terrorist attacks.

The same message shows up all over this site's coverage. Oklahoma's Josh Brecheen warned a town hall about the Ottoman Empire, got laughed at, and then cosponsored a bill to bar anyone who adheres to Sharia from entering the country. Mike Rogers (MI) claimed his Muslim opponent "believes America deserved 9/11," a quote from a different person entirely; PolitiFact rated it Pants on Fire and noted the attack evokes anti-Muslim tropes.

Same word, same anniversary, same election year. The anniversary is the point. Attaching Sharia to September 11 is what gives the word its charge, and it is why the claim gets made in the first week of September rather than any other week of the year.

What the record shows

Days before the 25th anniversary of September 11, Byron Donalds told a town hall in The Villages that the number one way to protect Florida from another such attack is stopping Sharia law. The commission that investigated the attacks attributed them to al Qaeda and to four failures of the American government, none of which was a religious legal code. Three of the four hijacker pilots trained at flight schools in one Florida town, which Donalds did not mention. Sharia law has never been in force in any American state, and the last state to ban it could not name one case where a court had applied it. He then told the audience that Democrats are "playing footsie with the radical Islamists."

He is asking to run the state where the hijackers learned to fly, and his top counterterrorism priority is a thing that had no role in what they did.

Source

A.G. Gancarski, "Byron Donalds says the key to preventing another 9/11 is stopping Sharia law", Florida Politics, September 1, 2026. Photo: Florida Politics.

Byron Donalds Says Florida Can Replace Its Haitian Caregivers With High School Interns and Adult Retraining

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:01:12 +0000

Temporary Protected Status for Haitians has ended. More than 330,000 Haitian immigrants nationwide held that status. About 35,000 Haitian immigrants work in Florida's health care system — many as certified nursing assistants and registered nurses in long-term care — according to the Florida Health Care Association, the trade group for the state's nursing homes.

On August 23, 2026, CBS's Margaret Brennan asked Byron Donalds, the Republican nominee for governor of Florida, a direct question about it.

Brennan: "So, do you have a plan to replace the loss of 100,000 Haitians who work in healthcare in Florida if they are deported?"

Donalds: "Well, let's just be very clear. You're talking about the labor force in Florida. What we want to do is, the number one, we want to make sure that our kids coming out of high school are having internships and apprenticeships..."

That is his LaunchPad initiative — a program to connect high school juniors and seniors with internships so that, in his words, "by the time you graduate high school, you're walking directly into the job."

Brennan pressed him on the immediate shortage. Donalds added a second item — retraining adults. "We want to change adult re-education, adult education, career source," he said. "Have that really be supercharged so people can transition from one job or going into those fields." He named no target, no timeline and no cost for either half. Pressed a third time for a state plan, his answer was, "I just gave you the plan, Margaret."

The 100,000 figure in Brennan's question is not the Florida Health Care Association's. The Caribbean Television Network, reviewing the interview, called it out: the larger number "appears to describe Florida's overall healthcare staffing gap rather than the Haitian workforce specifically, and its basis was not explained."

The people he is talking about are already trained

The workers Florida is losing are not high school students who need a foot in the door. They are certified nursing assistants and registered nurses already working in long-term care. The certification is the thing that takes time, and they already have it.

Margarette Nerette is vice president of Long-Term Care South for 1199SEIU, the largest union of health care workers in Florida. She put the stakes plainly:

"This will have a devastating impact on the lives of thousands of healthcare workers and their families now facing possible deportation to a gravely dangerous situation in Haiti."

The people on the other end of that care are nursing home residents. Donalds' answer to losing tens of thousands of their caregivers is a pipeline that starts in eleventh grade, plus an unspecified expansion of adult retraining.

Florida was already running out of nurses

This is not a shortage that has room to absorb a shock.

The Florida Hospital Association estimates the state could be short 60,000 nurses by 2035. That projection was made before Haitian TPS ended. Donalds offered no number of workers his programs would produce, no timeline for producing them, and no cost.

An internship program that places graduating seniors into jobs may be a fine idea on its own terms. It is not a replacement plan for tens of thousands of licensed and certified adults being removed from the workforce this year.

He also defended taking the status away

Donalds is not a bystander to the shortage he was asked to solve.

Earlier in the same interview, he defended ending Haitian TPS directly. "TPS is a temporary program," he told Brennan. "The Biden administration, through enforcement, took the T off the program. They turned that into a permanent program... The Trump administration, in my view, making sure that it's a temporary program is correct." He pointed to Haiti's transitional government as evidence the country is stabilizing — the same country the union representing these workers describes as "a gravely dangerous situation."

So the position is complete, and both halves were stated in the same half-hour: end the legal status that lets these caregivers work, then answer the resulting shortage with a workforce-training pitch carrying no numbers. Both halves are his.

He has taken the employer's side against these workers before

This is a pattern with Donalds, not a one-off answer to a hard question on live television. It ran twice inside this one broadcast.

He co-sponsored a bill to block the first federal heat protections for Florida's outdoor workers. And this was the second Florida health question Brennan put to him in this one interview that came back as immigration: minutes earlier, asked whether his message to parents was to vaccinate their children against measles, he said no and blamed the outbreaks on "rampant illegal immigration." Florida had 141 measles cases by late July.

The through line is consistent. Asked about a health care problem in his own state, Donalds answers with immigration — and when Florida workers are on one side of a policy, he has not been on theirs.

What the record shows

Florida is losing roughly 35,000 Haitian health care workers who staff its nursing homes and long-term care facilities, in a state the Florida Hospital Association already expects to be 60,000 nurses short by 2035. Asked on national television how he would replace them, Byron Donalds named a high school internship program and a supercharged adult-education system, and gave no number, no timeline and no cost for either. Earlier in the same interview he defended ending the legal status that is removing those workers in the first place.

Source

Byron Donalds Says Florida Can Replace Its Haitian Caregivers; Nurses and Unions Push Back — Caribbean Television Network, August 30, 2026, and the CBS "Face the Nation" transcript of the August 23, 2026 interview. Photo: CBS News.

Randy Fine Asked Where the 'Moderate Muslims' in Our Political System Are. Four of Them Serve in the House With Him.

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 06:56:43 +0000

On Sunday, August 30, 2026, at the Republican Jewish Coalition's annual summit inside the Venetian resort in Las Vegas, Florida congressman Randy Fine told the room he wanted to talk about what he called "the elephant in the room: the rise of Islam in America."

Then he asked a question.

"We are constantly told that the problem is not mainstream Islam, but radical Islamism. But where are the so-called moderate Muslims in our political system?"

Four of them are in the House of Representatives, in the same chamber Fine sits in. According to the Pew Research Center's count of this Congress, the House has four Muslim members: André Carson of Indiana, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Lateefah Simon of California. Fine votes on the same floor as all four.

He was not asking a research question. He answered it himself, talking to reporters after the program:

"The fact that not all Muslims are bad does not mean that no Muslims are bad. People are unwilling to have that discussion, and if we don't have it we're going to have real problems in this country."

The second speaker said it more plainly

Texas congressman Brandon Gill spoke at the same summit and did not bother with the framing. Islam, he said, is "fundamentally incompatible with our way of life," and he warned about the "Islamization of Texas."

Gill then tied it to immigration: "If we want to fight antisemitism, we need to start with our immigration policy," he said, arguing that "importing people whose values are incompatible with our own" would weaken the country.

Fine's response to Gill, according to the Times of Israel: "I give him credit."

Neither man named a Muslim American who had done anything. They named politicians. The targets on stage were New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and streamer Hasan Piker — one elected official, one candidate, and one streamer.

This is not just what they say. It is what they have written.

A speech at a donor summit is easy to wave off as red meat. This one is not, because both men had already turned it into legislation.

On September 19, 2025, Fine introduced H.R. 5512, the "No Shari'a Act". Gill is one of its 33 cosponsors.

The bill claims to be about "foreign law" in general. Its definitions section reaches broadly: "foreign law" means "any law, legal code, or system derived from a jurisdiction outside the United States or its territories, including religious law when invoked as a substitute for State or Federal law."

But read the bill as introduced and one faith is the only one in it. Its stated purpose is to "prohibit the enforcement of Shari'a or any foreign law that infringes on constitutional rights." Section 5 is headed "APPLICATION OF SHARI'A." The word appears seven times across five pages. No other religion, and no other religion's law, is named anywhere in the text.

American courts already cannot enforce a foreign or religious code that violates the Constitution. That is what the Supremacy Clause does, and the bill's own findings section says so in its first sentence. What the bill would add is a federal statute with the name of one religion in the title. It was referred to the Judiciary Committee the day it was introduced and has had no action since.

A civil rights group calls their caucus a hate group

Fine and Gill both belong to the House "Sharia-Free America Caucus," launched on December 18, 2025 by Texas congressmen Keith Self and Chip Roy.

In February 2026, the Council on American-Islamic Relations designated that caucus an anti-Muslim hate group — the first time in the organization's 32-year history it had applied that label to a congressional caucus. At the time, the caucus had 40 members from 19 states, with Texas and Florida the two biggest delegations.

CAIR's analysis named Fine's bill directly, arguing that H.R. 5512 and two of Chip Roy's bills — the PAUSE Act of 2025 and the Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act — "would deny adherents of the world's second-largest faith basic civil rights such as free speech, freedom of religion and equal protection under the law using their choice of faith as the disfavored characteristic."

"Congressmen Randy Fine, Chip Roy, Keith Self, and other members of this so-called caucus have appointed themselves as religious police with the power to tell Americans how to worship," CAIR research and advocacy director Corey Saylor said. "Islam is an American faith, present for over 250 years."

There is no takeover to stop

The thing these bills are written against keeps turning out not to exist.

We traced the 2026 panic back to its origin. A hate group's blog post about a subdivision in Little Rock became a viral Facebook post on April 4, 2026, then a state bill, then a statement from Arkansas's governor in July. The caucus came first — Self and Roy launched it in December 2025, and NPR counted 50 members in it on March 14, 2026, seventeen days before the blog post ran. The subdivision is five houses that have been there for about two decades, and two of them are occupied by Christians.

The money tells the same story. Republicans spent more than $10 million on TV ads mentioning Sharia or Islam negatively heading into the 2026 midterms — roughly ten times what was spent in each of the last four cycles — and a pollster who studies it found anti-Muslim sentiment spikes during election cycles, not after terrorist attacks.

Las Vegas in August is an election cycle.

Both men have been here before

This is not a first offense for either of them.

Fine went on television in July and said "a Muslim terrorist runs the city of New York," blaming the mayor for a stabbing that police were investigating as a possible hate crime by a man they said may have had mental health issues. CAIR notes he has also "compared Muslims unfavorably to dogs," and the JTA reported he has said Gazans should "starve away" until the Israeli hostages were released.

Gill posted in July that "Calling us racist doesn't work anymore". Rep. Shri Thanedar, an Indian American Democrat, replied that people call him racist because he referred to Indian Americans as "7-Eleven workers." Gill never answered him — his position was that the word has lost its power, not that it was untrue.

What the record shows

Randy Fine asked a Republican donor audience where the moderate Muslims in American politics are, when four Muslims serve in the House with him. Brandon Gill told the same room that Islam is "fundamentally incompatible with our way of life." In September 2025, Fine had written a bill that would put one religion's name in federal law — seven times, including as a section heading — and Gill had signed onto it as one of 33 cosponsors. The caucus they both joined has been designated an anti-Muslim hate group by the country's largest Muslim civil rights organization — the first congressional caucus it has ever labeled that way in 32 years.

Source

Rep. Randy Fine blasts 'rise of Islam' and Muslim politicians at Jewish GOP confab — The Times of Israel, August 31, 2026. Photo: The Jerusalem Post.

Maria Elvira Salazar Said Trump's Venezuela Oil Deal Was Just Letting an 'Acting Dictator' Buy Time. An Hour Later She Deleted the Post and Called the Deal Great.

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:44:31 +0000

On Friday, August 28, 2026, President Trump announced that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had cut a deal with Venezuela's acting president, Delcy Rodríguez. American companies get access to what Trump called "65 BILLION BARRELS" of proven Venezuelan oil, "at no cost to the American Taxpayer." The Venezuelan government said the arrangement covers 17 oil fields and would bring roughly $100 billion in investment and more than $209 billion in tax revenue into the country.

The next day, Maria Elvira Salazar — who represents Miami's 27th District, home to one of the largest Venezuelan communities in the United States — went on X and said what she thought of it.

"Any oil 'deal' with Venezuela's interim regime has an expiration date: the day President Trump leaves the White House.

Venezuela's acting dictator is just buying time. The regime has stolen American investments before, and it will do it again the moment it can.

A lasting deal can only be made with a democratically elected government that respects the rule of law, protects private property, and is backed by strong democratic institutions.

No democracy. No lasting deal. Period."

She posted it in English and in Spanish. Then she deleted both.

About an hour later, according to the New York Post, she was back with a new one.

"The U.S.-Venezuela oil deal is a great deal for the United States and the Venezuelan people."

She added that "for years, China took advantage of Venezuela's weakness to buy its oil at deep discounts. Now America is stepping in, and American investment and influence offer Venezuela a path toward prosperity, stability, and security." She wrote, "We want this deal to last 100 years" — and kept the condition from the post she had just deleted: "Only an administration backed by strong democratic institutions and the rule of law can guarantee that. This will only be possible with free elections."

Nothing about the deal changed in that hour. Delcy Rodríguez was still the person on the other side of the table — Salazar said so herself in the second post, allowing that "Delcy is the wrong person to make this deal with." The regime that she said had "stolen American investments before" was the same regime. What changed was the verdict: a deal she had just given an expiration date became one she wanted to last a hundred years.

Nine months ago she said oil money was the problem

This is not a case of a member being caught out on a subject she has no record on. Salazar has built a large part of her political identity on Venezuela.

On December 10, 2025, she praised a Trump administration move against the regime in terms that could not be plainer:

"Maduro's illegitimate narco-terror regime is kept afloat by two things: DRUGS and OIL MONEY. If we want democracy restored in Venezuela, we have to choke BOTH of the Regime's life lines. Well done @POTUS!"

Oil money. Choke it. Well done.

Eight and a half months later, the same administration signed a deal that Venezuela's own government projects will send it more than $209 billion in tax revenue, and her objection lasted about sixty minutes.

Salazar also posted on January 3, 2026, after U.S. Special Forces captured Nicolás Maduro and his wife, that "the narco-terror imposed by the Maduro regime is over" and that it was "time for the rightful leaders of Venezuela to restore freedom." Rodríguez, the person now running the country and signing oil contracts with Washington, was Maduro's own vice president. She is not one of the rightful leaders Salazar had in mind. Salazar has said publicly that opposition leader María Corina Machado "does not need Delcy Rodríguez's permission" to return to her own country.

Her deleted post said there could be no deal without democracy first. Her replacement post said the deal was great, and democracy was what would make it last.

Her district is not an abstraction here

Salazar's district is Miami. Venezuelan exiles who left because of that regime live there, work there, and vote there. In February 2025 the same administration she is now praising moved to strip Temporary Protected Status from more than 300,000 Venezuelans nationwide, and Salazar was one of the three Miami Republicans who put out a statement when the Supreme Court let it happen.

She has been down this road before. Her neighbor in the Miami delegation, Mario Diaz-Balart, wrote letters defending the Venezuelans in his district and then voted to give ICE $38 billion. And Salazar's own record already includes a habit of announcing a principle in public and then not carrying it: she has toured the country for a year promoting an immigration bill that has never gotten a hearing, and she handed a children's hospital a ceremonial check for money she had voted against.

The New York Post asked her for comment. She did not respond.

The bottom line

In December 2025, Maria Elvira Salazar said the Venezuelan regime was kept alive by "DRUGS and OIL MONEY" and that America had to choke both. On August 29, 2026, the day after Trump announced an oil deal that Venezuela's own government projects will send that regime more than $209 billion in tax revenue, she posted — in two languages — that Venezuela's "acting dictator is just buying time" and that there could be "no democracy, no lasting deal." She deleted both posts within the hour and replaced them with a statement calling the deal "great," keeping her condition about free elections and dropping her objection to the deal.

Source

Florida rep deletes X post blasting Trump's oil deal with Venezuela, then posts again to praise it — Adry Torres, New York Post, August 29, 2026. Image: the deleted post, captured six minutes after it was published (New York Post).

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.

Byron Donalds Won't Back the Voting Rights Bill Named for Two Florida Organizers Killed by a Bomb. His Objection Is Something the Bill Doesn't Do.

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:10:31 +0000

Byron Donalds is the Republican nominee for governor of Florida. If he wins in November, he will be the first Black governor in the state's history.

On August 26, 2026, a group called Equal Ground — which works to expand Black voting power in Florida — asked every candidate for governor where they stood on the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Florida Voting Rights Act. Donalds answered the same day, and the answer was no.

Who the bill is named for

Harry T. and Harriette Moore founded a chapter of the NAACP in Brevard County in 1934. Harry spent years driving Florida's back roads signing up Black voters; together they organized a Progressive Voters League, investigated lynchings, and fought for equal pay for Black and white teachers. Black registration in Florida climbed from 5% of those eligible to 31%.

On Christmas night 1951 — their 25th wedding anniversary — a bomb went off under their bedroom. Harry Moore died on the way to the hospital. Harriette died of her injuries nine days later. Despite a nationwide outcry and a massive FBI investigation, no one was ever arrested.

The bill carrying their names was written by the late state Senator Geraldine Thompson and is carried this year by Democratic Senator LaVon Bracy Davis and Representative RaShon Young.

What Donalds said

Here is his objection, in full:

"This proposal would make Florida's elections look more like California's, and it takes them a month to count ballots. Why would we do that?"

Florida Politics, which reported his statement, noted the problem with it two paragraphs later. The bill does not change the requirement that ballots be received by supervisors of elections by the time polls close on Election Day.

The Moore bill leaves Florida's Election Day deadline exactly where it is, so whatever California does, this bill does not import it.

The reason Donalds gave for opposing the bill describes a change the bill does not make.

What the bill actually does

The proposal makes several changes to Florida election law:

Makes vote-by-mail requests permanent. Under current law one request covers only the elections through the end of the next general-election year, so voters have to ask again every couple of years.
Creates a public database so people with past felony convictions can keep track of what they still have to do before their voting rights are restored.
Makes Election Day a paid holiday.
Eliminates the Office of Election Crimes and Security.

None of those touch the counting deadline. Three of the four are about making it easier for an eligible person to cast a ballot that gets counted.

"The best election laws in the country"

Donalds' other line was this: "Florida has the best election laws in the country, and we're going to make sure we keep our elections secure."

Equal Ground's founder, Jasmine Burney-Clark, framed the ask this way: "For generations, voters of color have fought against laws and systems that were intentionally designed to keep them from the ballot box."

The group said it sent its questions to every gubernatorial candidate. Democrat David Jolly signed a petition committing to pass and sign the bill if elected. Republicans hold supermajorities in both chambers of the Legislature. The bill does not move without Republican votes, and it does not become law without a governor willing to sign it, which is why the Republican nominee's answer is the one that counts.

The pattern on his record

This is not the first time Donalds has taken a position on who gets counted. He joined a lawsuit to overturn the 2020 census count; a federal court dismissed it twice. And he has said he would remove elected local officials who cross him on immigration enforcement — after Florida's own attorneys told a judge that cities are not required by law to sign the ICE agreements he would punish them for refusing.

What the record shows

Byron Donalds, running to become Florida's first Black governor, refused to support a voting rights bill named for two Black organizers, a husband and wife, killed by a bomb at their home in 1951 after years of registering Black voters. His stated reason was that the bill would make Florida take a month to count ballots like California. The bill does not change Florida's ballot deadline at all. What it would change is permanent vote-by-mail, a public database for people restoring their voting rights, a paid Election Day, and the elimination of the state's election crimes unit.

Source

Jacob Ogles, Florida Politics: "Citing election security, Byron Donalds says he won't support Florida Voting Rights Act" (August 26, 2026).

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

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

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

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

He told them it had nothing to do with vaccines.

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

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

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

What Kennedy did not tell the senators

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

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

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

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

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

The fourteen votes

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

Fourteen of those yes votes came from Republicans we track:

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

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

What Susan Collins was promised

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

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

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

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

What happened to the promises

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

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

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

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

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

The MMR vaccine is now the target

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who would have to investigate

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Source

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

Ashley Moody Authorized the Deal That Took $10 Million From Poor Kids' Health Care. Her Office Objected First, Then Settled for Taking Its Name Off the Paperwork.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:38:45 +0000

For seven months, Florida's Republican leaders refused to even acknowledge that a grand jury report existed. On Wednesday, August 26, 2026, CBS News Miami got a copy of it anyway.

The report is about $10 million that was supposed to pay for health insurance for poor Florida children. It says that money was "misappropriated" and that the transfer was "part of a sophisticated scheme to fund political activities."

We laid out the money trail a month ago, back when the report was still locked up. The new part is what the grand jury says about the person Florida just sent to the U.S. Senate.

Ashley Moody was Florida's attorney general when this happened. According to the grand jury, she knew about the plan to divert the $10 million, and she personally gave her top deputy the green light to sign.

What the grand jury actually found

Start with the finding itself, because it is blunt.

"Despite our finding that the money was misappropriated, we find insufficient evidence to charge anyone criminally."

Nobody was charged. That is not the same as nothing happened. The grand jury explained exactly why it couldn't charge anyone:

"Nobody will take responsibility for deciding the $10 million of taxpayer money would go to Hope Florida… or had any memory of who made it."

And then it said what it could see anyway:

"While we can't prove who is responsible, we can plainly see that taxpayer money was misused for political purposes and we would like to see changes made to prevent this from happening again."

Moody was never called to testify. Neither was Governor Ron DeSantis. Neither was James Uthmeier, the governor's chief of staff at the time, who is now Florida's attorney general and whose political committee ended up with most of the money.

The objection — and the fix

Here is the part that has never been public before.

The money came from a settlement with the health care giant Centene, which had been overbilling Florida for prescription drugs in a program that covers children. Florida was owed $67,048,611. In September 2024, state officials rewrote the deal so that only $57 million came back to taxpayers and $10 million went instead to the Hope Florida Foundation — the nonprofit built around First Lady Casey DeSantis' signature initiative.

Centene's own lawyers were uneasy. They wanted the settlement to say plainly that the Florida attorney general was the one directing them to send $10 million to a charity tied to the governor's wife.

Moody's office did not want that.

Her chief deputy, John Guard, told the grand jury he had "reservations" about the deal. He said that "esoterically" he agreed the $10 million was taxpayer money that "belonged to the state of Florida." He said "Florida Statutes require the legislature to decide how money is spent."

He also, according to the report, raised the political risk with his boss:

"[Guard] did have political concerns about the dedication of $10,000,000 to Hope Florida, which he raised with AG Moody, because he knew the deal would be viewed by the legislature as a constraint on their spending authority."

So Moody's chief deputy understood three things: the money belonged to taxpayers, the legislature is the branch that decides how taxpayer money gets spent, and lawmakers would be angry if they found out.

Now read what happened next, in the grand jury's words:

"His political concerns were resolved by the change to the agreement making the settlement AHCA's agreement rather than the AG's settlement agreement, as the problem would now be AHCA's problem rather than the AG's problem."

Nothing about the money changed. The $10 million still left the taxpayers. It still went to Hope Florida. The only thing that changed was whose name was on the paper. Instead of the attorney general directing Centene, it would now be the governor's health agency — the Agency for Health Care Administration — directing Centene.

That satisfied Guard. And then, the report says:

"after consulting AG Moody, she authorized Mr. Guard to sign the settlement agreement in its final form."

The grand jury added that Guard signed it "without conducting his due diligence to ensure the proper appropriation of taxpayer funds."

Why the rush

The grand jury was also unimpressed by the timing.

Florida sat on this case for three years. A draft settlement returning the full $67 million was sent to state officials on July 14, 2021. Ohio and Mississippi settled in 2021. Indiana, Massachusetts and California settled in 2023. Florida did nothing — and ignored Centene's own requests to wrap it up.

Then, in early September 2024, Florida suddenly wanted it done immediately. The grand jury did the arithmetic:

"The Centene settlement itself seems rushed as it materialized rapidly after years of inactivity. Then, once reached, it took a mere 7 days to fund. We believe the rush was due to the impending election which was just 45 days away."

The settlement gave Centene seven days to wire the $10 million to Hope Florida. It gave Centene more than a year to repay the $57 million owed to Florida taxpayers.

The grand jury also noticed what did not happen. There was no press release from the health agency or the governor's office bragging about recovering millions for taxpayers, the way other states did. And there was "no notification to the Legislature of the Centene settlement" at all.

Two of the officials who signed the agreement did so on September 27, 2024 — the day after Hurricane Helene made landfall. Cassandra Pasley, chief of staff at the Florida Department of Health, testified she was working at the state's Emergency Operations Center when she was pulled aside and asked to sign. She had never seen the document and did not know a settlement was in the works. She signed it that evening. She told the grand jury she was not aware any of the money would end up in a political action committee, and that she would not have signed if she had known.

Where the money went

Centene wired the $10 million on October 4, 2024. Within 25 days it was gone.

Two outside groups applied for $5 million grants each. Both got them, one within hours of applying. Both had written in their applications that the money would not be used for political purposes. A forensic accountant who analyzed the bank records for the grand jury traced $8.5 million of it into Uthmeier's political committee, Keep Florida Clean. From there, $7 million went to the Republican Party of Florida and $1.23 million to another committee Uthmeier chaired.

That money went into the campaign against Amendment 3, the marijuana legalization initiative. Amendment 3 got 5,950,589 votes — 55.90%. Florida requires 60%. It failed.

Moody had spent years trying to keep marijuana legalization away from Florida voters. In December 2019 she took an earlier initiative to the Florida Supreme Court, arguing its ballot summary was misleading, and in April 2021 the court kept that one off the 2022 ballot. Her office made the same case against Amendment 3, urging the court to reject it as misleading and not limited to a single subject — and lost, 5-2, in April 2024. Six months later, settlement money was paying for ads against it.

Two months after the amendment failed, DeSantis appointed her to the United States Senate.

Seven months of silence, and counting

The report was filed under seal with the Leon County Clerk's Office on January 28. One source familiar with the investigation told CBS News Miami that multiple people named in it, including Uthmeier, have spent the seven months since blocking its release through closed court proceedings. The Florida Center for Government Accountability asked the court to let it argue for release. That request is still pending.

She is not the only Republican attorney general whose record is sitting behind a seal. In Texas, the only two known occasions when Ken Paxton has had to answer questions about his own conduct under oath are two depositions sealed in a Collin County courthouse, which his Democratic opponent's campaign said it would ask a court to unseal on the same day this report surfaced.

Moody has refused repeated requests to talk about Hope Florida. Not to CBS Miami, which sent written questions to her Senate office and her campaign. And not to state Rep. Alex Andrade, the Republican who uncovered the diversion in the first place and who told CBS Miami in July that she has never responded to him either. Meanwhile the foundation at the center of it has kept moving further out of reach — its financial records now live at the office of a Republican compliance firm in Alabama — the same firm that keeps the books for the super PAC supporting her Senate campaign.

DeSantis was asked about Hope Florida at a news conference on Wednesday. "I wasn't involved in the settlement agreement, but I'm very happy with how everything was done," he said. He called the whole thing a hoax. Uthmeier has called it a "big nothingburger."

The grand jury that heard the testimony disagreed. Its closing line:

"As taxpayer money, it should have been treated as such instead of being allocated for partisan political purposes and without transparency."

What the record shows

A Florida grand jury found that $10 million owed to taxpayers — money that came from a company caught overbilling a health program for poor children — was misappropriated and spent on a political campaign. The report says Ashley Moody's chief deputy told the grand jury the money belonged to the state and that only the legislature decides how state money is spent, that he raised his political concerns about the deal with Moody directly, and that those concerns were resolved not by stopping the transfer but by rewriting the paperwork so another agency would carry the blame. Moody then authorized him to sign. Taxpayers got $57 million instead of $67 million, on a repayment schedule that gave Centene a year — while the $10 million bound for a political committee had to be wired in seven days. Moody is asking Floridians for a full Senate term in November and has not answered a single question about any of it.

Source

Jim DeFede, Grand jury finds DeSantis administration "misappropriated" $10 million in taxpayer money to Hope Florida, CBS News Miami, August 26, 2026. Photo: Getty Images.

Asked If Florida Parents Should Vaccinate Their Kids Against Measles, Byron Donalds Said No — and Blamed Immigrants

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 10:03:47 +0000

Byron Donalds is the Republican nominee for governor of Florida. On Sunday, August 23, he sat down with Margaret Brennan on CBS's Face the Nation.

She asked him a simple question about a disease that is spreading in his own backyard. Here is what he said.

The exchange

MARGARET BRENNAN: …nearly all of Florida is below the 95% immunization rate for herd immunity for measles. So, is your message to Florida parents, get your kids vaccinated against that one?

REP. BYRON DONALDS: No, actually, my message to Floridians and, quite frankly, to Americans is the reason why we have seen a measles outbreak in certain parts of the country is because of rampant illegal immigration into the United States from the previous administration.

MARGARET BRENNAN: What evidence do you have of that?

REP. BYRON DONALDS: …we've seen the outbreaks in El Paso, Texas, in Southwest Florida, where I live, and many other parts where you know that you have a situation. People have come into the country illegally, have not had that vaccination schedule…

The question was whether parents should vaccinate their children. The answer was "No."

Brennan asked him for evidence. He named two places where outbreaks have happened. That is not evidence that immigrants caused them — it is a list of places measles is spreading.

What is actually happening in Florida

Measles is not an abstraction in Florida this year.

By the end of July, the CDC had recorded 141 measles cases in Florida, putting the state fifth in the country for the most cases. One of the outbreaks Florida's surgeon general has publicly discussed is in Collier County — part of the 19th Congressional District Donalds has represented since January 2021, and the "Southwest Florida, where I live" he pointed to on national television.

And Brennan's premise was correct. Just 88.9% of Florida's kindergarteners had completed their required vaccinations before the 2025-26 school year, according to WLRN, and nearly all of the state is below the roughly 95% measles immunization rate public health officials say is needed to stop the disease spreading through a community. Vaccine exemptions in Florida are at their highest level in a decade.

Measles is one of the most contagious diseases known. When enough children in a community are unvaccinated, it spreads. That is the mechanism. It does not require anyone to have crossed a border.

The state's own health department has been trying to make it worse

Donalds is not making this argument in a vacuum.

In September 2025, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced he wanted to eliminate every vaccine mandate in the state — a move that would have made Florida the first in the country to do it.

It didn't happen, and not because anyone changed their mind. Some of the required shots are written into Florida law and would need the legislature to act. Others are set by the Department of Health, which Ladapo runs — and his own department has yet to file the paperwork to complete the rule change. The mandates survived on a technicality.

So this is the backdrop for Donalds's answer: a state where the top health official tried to scrap vaccine requirements, where kindergarten vaccination rates have been sliding, where exemptions are at a ten-year high, and where measles is now spreading in the district he represents.

Asked what he'd tell parents, the man who wants to run all of it said "No."

He has made a habit of this

This is not the first time Donalds has answered a question with something other than the facts.

Days before the primary he told a rally that "even the American Medical Association has finally realized that this is insanity," claiming the country's largest doctors' group had turned against gender-affirming care for minors. The AMA told The Advocate it still believes parents, families and medical professionals should decide together.

A PAC supporting him ran an ad that deceptively edited a David Jolly clip on gender-affirming care to make Jolly appear to endorse surgery for children — PolitiFact found he was quoting someone else and never mentioned surgery, and rated the ad False.

And he told Floridians that the state's new data center law "ensures that utility rates will not go up due to data centers" — PolitiFact rated that Half True, because the law outlines ways to protect consumers but doesn't guarantee it, and doesn't cover rural cooperatives or municipal utilities at all.

In summary

Asked on national television whether Florida parents should vaccinate their children against measles — in a state with 141 cases by late July, a kindergarten vaccination rate of 88.9%, and an active outbreak in his own congressional district — Byron Donalds said "No," and blamed the outbreaks on "rampant illegal immigration." When Margaret Brennan asked what evidence he had, he named two places where measles is spreading. He offered nothing else.

Source

Transcript: Rep. Byron Donalds on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan," Aug. 23, 2026 — CBS News. Reported by Yahoo News.

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

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

Joe Wilson wrote it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ohio said no in 2011. Jim Jordan signed anyway.

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

Jim Jordan is Ohio's signature on this bill.

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

Pennsylvania sent five signatures on a law it never wanted

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

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

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

What it costs a paycheck

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

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

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

This is not a one-off

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

Byron Donalds Says Trump 'Did Not Break That Promise' to Lower Prices. In the Same Interview He Defended $4 Gas as the Cost of the Iran War.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:05:33 +0000

Donald Trump ran for president promising to bring prices down on day one. That promise is the reason a lot of people voted for him.

On Friday, August 21, NBC's Kristen Welker asked Byron Donalds — freshly nominated as the Republican candidate for governor of Florida — whether Trump had broken it.

Donalds said he had not. Trump, he said, has done "incredibly well" on the economy, pointing to wages and GDP growth. NBC titled the clip after his answer: Trump "did not break that promise" to keep prices down.

Then, in the same conversation, he said this about the price of gasoline:

"Do I want to see $4 gas? No, I do not. I don't want anybody to have to pay that."

And then he explained why Floridians should pay it anyway: the higher fuel prices, he said, are what it costs to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.

Read those two answers together

The promise was that prices would go down. The defense is that prices are up for a good reason.

Those are not the same argument, and Donalds made both in one interview. A promise you have to justify breaking is a promise that got broken. If the case for $4 gas is that it's the price of stopping Iran's nuclear program, then say that — but you cannot say it and also say the day-one pledge is intact.

There's a second problem with the reasoning. Donalds also argued the administration is being careful — that Trump has not committed troops on the ground in Iran and won't get stuck in another Afghanistan or Iraq. Fine. But that's an argument about American casualties. It says nothing about whether a Floridian filling up a truck in Immokalee should be paying $4 a gallon for it, or how long they should expect to.

Nobody voted for that trade. It wasn't on the ballot, and it wasn't in the promise.

He is running for governor on affordability

This matters more than a normal cable-news answer, because affordability is the entire platform Donalds is running on in Florida. In the same interview he laid out his plans: tort reform and home hardening to bring down property insurance, a permitting overhaul he says would cut 20–30% off the cost of building a house, and property tax cuts.

That last one is where his own numbers have already run into trouble. Donalds is the loudest voice in Florida for Amendment 3, a property tax cut even Ron DeSantis won't campaign for. When Florida's own state economists priced it at $11.86 billion a year, Donalds' response was that revenue estimators are "often wrong".

So the pattern is consistent. When a number helps him, it's proof. When it doesn't, the people who produced it are unreliable — or the price is justified by something else entirely.

The rest of the affordability record

Donalds has been in Congress since 2021, and his votes there are a better guide to what he'd do about Floridians' bills than a Sunday show appearance.

He cosponsored a bill to block heat protections for Florida's outdoor workers — the people who build the houses he wants permitted faster, working in the state where that protection matters most.

He promised Floridians that data centers won't raise their electric bills. The law doesn't say that, and the developers have given him $894,000.

And one billionaire, Ken Griffin, gave $10 million to a PAC backing him — the single biggest contribution of the race.

What he's actually asking Floridians to accept

Strip away the framing and the ask is simple: keep believing prices are being handled, while paying more, because there's a reason.

Every politician who presides over rising costs eventually reaches for that argument. What's unusual here is watching a candidate make it and insist the original promise is untouched in the same breath — and then run for governor promising to make things affordable.

Florida votes November 3.

Sources

Byron Donalds promotes his economic plans for Florida, defends Trump's record — WLRN, August 21, 2026
Byron Donalds says Trump 'did not break that promise' to keep prices down amid Iran war — Meet the Press NOW, NBC News

Ashley Moody Told Florida Her Opponent Wants to Defund the Police and Let Noncitizens Vote. PolitiFact Checked All Four Claims. None of Them Hold Up.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:00:02 +0000

On August 18, Ashley Moody won her primary and walked onstage to tell Floridians who she'd be running against in November.

Here is what she said:

"My opponent will be a self-proclaimed socialist that proudly signed up and joined the Democratic Socialists of America. That will be my opponent. … You're going to have one side that I'm going to be up against that wants to, and the platform says, 'Defund the police, don't fund our military, open up the border, noncitizen voting.'"

Four charges, in one breath, in the first sentence most Floridians will ever hear about her opponent.

PolitiFact went and checked all four. Reporters Maria Briceño and Samantha Putterman published their findings three days later, and the short version is that Moody read positions off an organization's platform and attributed them to a person who has publicly rejected two of them and never said a word for the other two.

What Nixon actually says

"Defund the police." Angie Nixon has said publicly that she does not support defunding the police. Her words: "I don't support defunding the police. I do support comprehensive criminal justice reform to make sure we are addressing some of the root causes of people leading into a life of crime." PolitiFact found no evidence she has ever supported it.

"Don't fund our military." PolitiFact found no evidence Nixon has advocated for defunding the military. What she has criticized is the Pentagon failing its audits while veterans go homeless, and the billions spent on the Iran war — arguments about priorities. The closest PolitiFact found to a funding cut was foreign: Nixon said she would have voted for a resolution ending $3.3 billion in military aid to Israel.

"Open up the border." Nixon's campaign told PolitiFact she supports secure borders "with clear and compassionate pathways for citizenship." In her own words: "border patrol should make sure they are securing the border while there are clear pathways to citizenship."

"Noncitizen voting." Nixon's campaign said she "supports the right of every eligible American citizen to vote." PolitiFact found she has never said she supports it, and it isn't on her website.

Nixon is a member of the DSA. That part is true, and Moody is entitled to say it. What she isn't entitled to do is read that group's platform aloud and present it as her opponent's positions when the opponent has rejected them on the record or never held them at all.

Moody knows exactly how this works

This is the part worth sitting with. Moody is not a first-time candidate winging it at a podium. She was Florida's attorney general — a job whose entire purpose is weighing evidence before making an accusation.

She has spent her political career on precisely the issue she just got caught mischaracterizing. We've written before about how Moody asked the FBI to investigate people who helped Floridians pay off their fines so they could vote, and how she has been attaching voter ID to one bill after another. "Noncitizen voting" is not a phrase she reached for by accident. It's her signature issue, and she used it on a claim that has nothing behind it.

There's a reason attacks like that work. Noncitizen voting is already a deportable felony, and where states have actually gone looking for it, they've found almost nothing — a University of St. Thomas professor's 10-year study of Minnesota turned up three cases out of 13.3 million votes. But an accusation doesn't have to be true to do its job. It just has to be the first thing voters hear.

The pattern of what she won't answer

Moody's campaign is happy to make claims about her opponent. It has been considerably less forthcoming about claims involving her own record.

She has still not explained her role in the Hope Florida affair, in which $10 million meant for poor kids' Medicaid ended up funding a political campaign — money her own chief deputy attorney general says she approved, and that she won't discuss. And Hope Florida's books have since moved into the same Alabama building as the super PAC backing her.

That's the trade Florida is being offered: four unsupported accusations about someone else, and silence about her own.

Florida votes November 3.

Source

How aligned is Angie Nixon with democratic socialists? Moody's Florida Senate race attack misleads — Maria Briceño and Samantha Putterman, PolitiFact, August 21, 2026.

Tampa Electric's Rates Are Up 86%. Ohio's Bills Are Up 53%. These Five Republicans Took the Utilities' Money and Handed Data Centers the Grid.

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:58:01 +0000

An AI data center is, from the power grid's point of view, a small city that never sleeps and never leaves.

A typical new one runs 100 to 1,000 megawatts — a load equal to a new neighborhood of 80,000 to 800,000 average homes, around the clock. Hundreds of them are being built. And the grid they're plugging into is the same one your house is on.

That leaves exactly one question, and it is not a technical one: who pays to build the extra power?

There are only two possible answers. Either the companies that want the electricity pay the full cost of the poles, wires, plants and substations needed to serve them — or the cost gets spread across everybody's bill, and your neighbor with a fixed income helps finance a server farm.

We've already written about the Republicans who accused their own constituents of working for China for objecting to a data center, and the eight who took the industry's money and then discovered concerns.

This one is about the money coming out of your account every month.

Greg Abbott gave away $3.2 billion and put the bill on the grid

Texas already knows what a fragile grid costs. In 2021 it collapsed and hundreds of people died.

Since then, Greg Abbott has branded Texas "the epicenter of AI development," personally announcing deals like a $40 billion Google build-out.

What he gave them:

A sales-tax exemption the comptroller's office says will cost $3.2 billion in forgone sales-tax revenue over two years — already one of the state's costliest incentive programs, and soon to be the most expensive of its kind in the nation.
A regulatory door held open. ERCOT expects Texas power demand to nearly double by 2030, with large-load projects wanting up to 56,458 more megawatts queued for its approval. Texas now has more data centers under construction than any other state — 142, against Virginia's 141.

What Texans got:

The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that data-center demand could push wholesale electricity prices at ERCOT's North hub roughly 79% higher than otherwise expected by 2027.
A $33 billion transmission build-out — ERCOT's own estimate for its 765-kV expansion plan — that shifts long-term costs onto ratepayers.

And now, in an election year, with voters in both parties turning on Big Tech, Abbott has suddenly proposed new restrictions and started saying data centers "must operate in ways that reduce costs for residential electricity customers."

He invited the build-out. He's campaigning against the consequences.

Ashley Moody spent six years as Florida's top lawyer and never once fought a rate hike

Between December 2020 and January 2026, Florida households watched this happen:

Tampa Electric: up 86%
Duke Energy: up 49%
Florida Power & Light: up 45%

Ashley Moody was Florida's Attorney General for six years, until January 2025 — an office with standing to walk into a utility rate case and fight on behalf of customers.

She never did it. Not once.

That is not how the job used to work. As the Florida Phoenix documented, previous Florida attorneys general — Republicans Bill McCollum and Charlie Crist among them — intervened against rate increases and won multi-year rate freezes for customers.

A possible explanation sits in her own filings. Moody has taken $431,000 in career campaign money from Florida's investor-owned utilities. This cycle she has raised more from electric utilities than any other Senate candidate in the country.

Florida just passed a data-center law, SB 484, that is supposed to make big customers pay their own way. Her party's front-runner for governor promised it means rates "will not go up." PolitiFact checked that promise and found the law directs a process, not a result.

Vivek Ramaswamy is running for the office that picks who pays

Ohio electricity bills have climbed 53% since 2021. In the year ending May 31, AEP's Ohio Power disconnected 15% of its customers — the worst rate of any utility in the state.

Here is what Ohio's governor actually does: appoints all five members of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and designates its chair. That's the body that sets electricity rates and decides who pays for data centers.

Vivek Ramaswamy is running for that job, and the industry has noticed. Utility, gas, oil and solar PACs gave his campaign $97,468.91 during 2026. AEP's own political committee gave $17,000 of it.

His opponent, Amy Acton, received nothing from those PACs.

And when a watchdog exposed the utility money in May, it didn't stop — it doubled. Another $65,603 arrived over the following ten weeks, from a wider set of companies. The largest checks landed on July 31, the final day of the reporting period: $16,615.67 from the Utility Scale Solar Energy Coalition of Ohio — matching Ohio's per-election ceiling to the penny — plus $16,615 from Vistra's employee PAC and $10,000 from Diversified Gas & Oil.

The man who would appoint every rate regulator in Ohio is being funded by the companies those regulators oversee.

Rick Jackson owns a piece of one and wants them to pay no property tax

Rick Jackson, the billionaire running for governor of Georgia, has an unusually direct stake in this fight.

At the Georgia Chamber of Commerce's luncheon in August, he told more than a thousand business leaders that counties should be able to host data centers with no property tax bill at all.

He is personally invested in a data center in Texas.

Property tax is the money that pays for the county's schools, roads, fire department and water system — the local services a data center's construction and power demand put pressure on. Jackson's proposal is that the facility contributes nothing to any of it, and everyone else in the county covers the difference.

At the same luncheon, he ruled out expanding Medicaid in a state where 624,000 Georgians are projected to lose health coverage by 2034.

Gregg Hull's answer for a state running out of water is to cool them with fracking waste

New Mexico is drying up. At an Albuquerque Journal town hall on May 11, Gregg Hull, the Republican running for governor, faced a flurry of questions about whether he supports a moratorium on data centers. He said he is not opposed to them. What the state should explore instead, he said, is requiring developers to cool their servers with alternative water — brackish water, or produced water from oil and gas operations.

"I think there's some very creative ways we can work with these industries. Every time we tell an industry that we don't want them here or we push them out of the state without coming up with a way that we can actually work with those industries, we're sending a message out to the rest of the United States that we don't want those opportunities here."

Produced water is the wastewater that comes back up out of an oil and gas well. New Mexico's Water Quality Control Commission spent 18 months studying it and concluded it "contains hundreds of known and unknown chemicals, many of which are toxic to human health and the environment" — that no technology can treat it safely at scale, and that the state has no surface water quality standards for at least 180 of the potentially toxic chemicals in it. In May 2025 the commission banned discharging it into New Mexico's ground and surface water.

That ban is now under attack. In May 2026 — the same month Hull was answering the Journal's questions — the commission voted 7–4 to open a rulemaking on an industry petition that would let the wastewater back into surface and ground water and into agriculture.

Hull's own platform is on the industry's side of that fight: rules on produced water handling, he writes, are "overly complex and drive up costs without clear safety benefits. I support streamlining these rules so water can be safely treated and reused only within the industry while protecting our freshwater resources." And the next governor appoints the Environment Department that petitioned for the ban in the first place.

So: a state running out of water, a candidate for governor who won't back a pause on data centers, and an answer that points them at the fracking industry's leftovers — from a man who wants the rules on that waste streamlined.

The pattern

Five states, five Republicans, and the same arrangement underneath all of it.

The tech companies get the tax exemptions, the interconnection, the water and the political cover. The politicians get the ribbon-cuttings and the checks — $431,000 to Moody, $97,468 to Ramaswamy, a data center stake in Jackson's own portfolio, $3.2 billion in Abbott's giveaways.

And the cost of the extra generation, the extra transmission, the extra everything lands in the one place nobody negotiated on behalf of: the line at the bottom of your bill.

None of this is an argument against data centers. They will get built. Somebody will build them.

The argument is about who pays — and every one of these five had a chance to say "the companies that want the power," and said something else instead.

You will find out what they chose the same way most people do. When the bill comes.

Sources

The build-out. The scale of a single facility is EPRI's, from Powering Intelligence 2026, executive summary, updated Feb. 25, 2026: "A typical new data center of 100 to 1000 megawatts represents a load equal to that of a new neighborhood of 80,000 to 800,000 average homes."

Texas. The 2021 blackout death toll is from Andrew Weber and Mose Buchele, "Texas has an official death count from the 2021 blackout. The true toll may never be known," KUT via Texas Standard, Aug. 5, 2022 — the state's official count is 246, which researchers call a severe undercount. Paul Cobler and Apurva Mahajan, "Texas losing a billion dollars a year on data center tax break," Texas Tribune, April 8, 2026 — the comptroller's $3.2 billion two-year estimate, the tax break as "soon to be the most expensive of its kind in the nation," and the 142-to-141 count of data centers under construction against Virginia's. The interconnection queue and ERCOT's demand forecast are from Kayla Guo, "Data centers are booming in Texas. What does that mean for the grid?" Texas Tribune, Jan. 24, 2025. The price forecast is Robert Walton, "Data center demand spike could drive 79% ERCOT price hike in 2027: EIA," Utility Dive, March 16, 2026 — EIA's 78.9% is for the ERCOT North hub under a high-demand scenario. ERCOT's $32.99 billion estimate for its 765-kV Strategic Transmission Expansion Plan is reported in Paige Feild, "Permian Basin Power Fix Becomes $33 Billion Statewide Project," Texas Scorecard, Oct. 28, 2025. Abbott's directive to the PUC and ERCOT: Sarah Davis, "Abbott seeks new limits on Texas data centers," The Hill, June 11, 2026. The "epicenter of AI development" quote and the $40 billion Google announcement are from the governor's own press release.

Florida. Mitch Perry, "Florida's GOP AGs used to intervene in utility rate cases, but no longer," Florida Phoenix, June 17, 2026 — the Tampa Electric, Duke and FPL increases from December 2020 to January 2026 (Food & Water Watch), Moody's $431,000 in career money from the investor-owned utilities (CLEO Institute), her lead among Senate candidates in electric-utility fundraising (OpenSecrets), and the McCollum and Crist rate-case interventions. On SB 484: Samantha Putterman, "Donalds says FL law will prevent electric bill hikes from data centers. That's not guaranteed," PolitiFact, Aug. 7, 2026.

Ohio. Bonnie Lucas, "Ramaswamy takes nearly $100K from energy PACs as bills soar," TiffinOhio.net, Aug. 6, 2026 — the $97,468.91 total, the $65,603.24 that arrived after the Energy and Policy Institute flagged the giving, the July 31 checks, the governor's five PUCO appointments, Ohio's 53% rise in electricity bills since 2021, and AEP Ohio Power's 15% disconnection rate, first reported by Canary Media.

Georgia. Ross Williams, "Bottoms, Jackson offer competing visions on data centers, Medicaid expansion at business luncheon," Georgia Recorder, Aug. 5, 2026 — the luncheon, the property-tax proposal, the Medicaid answer and Jackson's stake in a Texas data center. His net worth is from Forbes. The 566,000 projection is the Joint Economic Committee's fact sheet on district-level impacts of health care cuts.

New Mexico. Joshua Bowling, "NM GOP governor candidate Gregg Hull touts experience leading, growing Rio Rancho," Source New Mexico, May 12, 2026, reporting the Albuquerque Journal town hall of May 11. On produced water, the Western Environmental Law Center's releases of May 14, 2025 and May 12, 2026. Hull's regulatory position is from his own campaign site.

Greg Steube's Birthright Bill Would Deny an American Newborn a Social Security Number Until the Parents Pay for a DNA Test

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:42:55 +0000

On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court settled the question. In Trump v. Barbara, the Court struck down the executive order ending birthright citizenship by a vote of 6–3. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, and stated the holding about children born in this country to parents here unlawfully or temporarily plainly:

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

Fourteen days later, Greg Steube filed a bill to get around it.

What H.R. 9662 actually does

Steube's bill is called the Birthright Citizenship Limits for Aliens and Illegal Migrants Act — the Birthright CLAIM Act. It was introduced on July 14, 2026 and referred to the House Judiciary Committee, where it has sat ever since.

Three colleagues signed on as cosponsors: Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, and Tim Burchett of Tennessee.

The text of the bill does three separate things, and only the first has gotten any attention.

1. It strips citizenship from babies born to legal visa holders

Everyone expects a birthright bill to target the children of people here illegally. This one goes further than that.

Under Steube's language, a baby born on American soil is denied citizenship if both parents are non-citizens and at least one of them is either here unlawfully or here legally in any status short of a green card.

Read that second half again. "Present in a lawful status other than lawful permanent residency" covers:

A student on an F-1 visa
An engineer on an H-1B
A doctor on a J-1
A refugee or someone with temporary protected status
A tourist

These are people who followed the rules, got the paperwork, and are here legally. Their American-born children would not be Americans.

2. It makes it harder for U.S. citizens living abroad to pass on citizenship

This part has gotten almost no coverage, and it hits American families directly.

Right now, if you're a U.S. citizen married to a non-citizen and you have a child overseas, you can pass your citizenship to that child if you were physically present in the United States for a total of five years, two of them after you turned 14.

Steube's bill doubles it: ten years total, four of them after age 14, and three of them in the five years right before the child is born.

That last clause is the one that bites. A missionary. An engineer on a three-year posting. A teacher. If they've been out of the country for the five years before their baby arrives, their child is not automatically an American — no matter how long they lived here before that. (Service in the U.S. armed forces or work for the U.S. government abroad still counts as time at home; the bill leaves that carve-out alone.)

3. It requires a DNA test before a newborn gets anything

This is the part worth sitting with.

If a baby is born in the United States to a mother who is not lawfully present, and the claim to citizenship runs through the father — a U.S. national or green-card holder — then under Section 3 of Steube's bill that baby is not a citizen until DNA testing proves the father is the father.

Who pays? The bill answers plainly: the cost "shall be born by the parents or legal guardians."

And until that test comes back, no federal agency may issue that child a passport, certificate of citizenship, Social Security number, or any other document based on their citizenship.

So: an American father. A baby born in an American hospital. And no Social Security number for that child until the family finds an approved laboratory and pays the bill.

A Social Security number is not a nicety. It's how you get a child covered by health insurance. It's how you claim them on your taxes. It's how a hospital bills. Steube's bill turns it into something a family has to buy.

Why now: they think Kavanaugh left a door open

Steube's own framing is that he's answering a call from President Trump and Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Here's what that refers to. In Trump v. Barbara, Kavanaugh agreed the executive order was invalid — but he got there on statutory grounds rather than constitutional ones. Roberts's majority said the Constitution decides it. Kavanaugh said the current immigration statute decides it.

If Kavanaugh is right and Roberts is wrong, then Congress could change the statute and get the result the executive order couldn't. That is exactly what H.R. 9662 tries to do — it amends the Immigration and Nationality Act, not the Constitution.

But a majority of the Supreme Court did not agree with Kavanaugh. The five justices who joined Roberts's opinion — Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett and Jackson signed on — said the Constitution answers this, and pointed to United States v. Wong Kim Ark, decided in 1898, which held that "the Citizenship Clause incorporated the common law and granted citizenship to nearly all children born in the United States." We wrote about that ruling when it came down.

Steube is legislating on the concurrence and ignoring the majority.

Where it stands, and what it says about the four of them

H.R. 9662 was referred to the Judiciary Committee on July 14 and has not moved since. It has three cosponsors out of the other 434 seats in the House.

That's a familiar picture. Morgan Griffith's bill to end citizenship for babies born in Guam has zero cosponsors. Brian Babin wrote the original House bill to end birthright citizenship. Marsha Blackburn kept looking for a workaround after the Court ruled.

These bills mostly don't pass. That is not the point of them. The point is the press release, the cable hit, the fundraising email.

But four members of Congress did put their names on this specific text. Not a resolution. Not a message bill about the border. A bill that says an American baby doesn't get a Social Security number until the parents pay a lab.

Greg Steube wrote it. Stephanie Bice, Ralph Norman and Tim Burchett signed it.

Their constituents should ask them about section 3.

Sources

H.R. 9662, Birthright CLAIM Act of 2026 — Congress.gov
Full text of H.R. 9662 as introduced — Government Publishing Office
Rep. Steube Introduces Birthright CLAIM Act — Steube's office
Trump v. Barbara, 609 U.S. ___ (2026), slip opinion — Supreme Court of the United States

A Byron Donalds Ad Cut a Sentence in Half to Claim His Opponent Backs 'Gender Changing Surgeries on Kids.' Jolly Was Quoting Someone Else's Grandfather.

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:54:05 +0000

On August 8, a PAC supporting Byron Donalds put out an attack ad about David Jolly, the Democrat running against him for governor of Florida.

The text on screen said Jolly supports "gender changing surgeries on kids." Then it played a clip of Jolly saying:

"We embraced it, the medical pathways, the gender-affirming care."

PolitiFact rated it False, and the reason is worth reading slowly.

The Sentence the Ad Cut in Half

The clip comes from a September 2025 podcast interview. Jolly was telling a story about a phone call he got a few years earlier from a grandfather in Florida.

The man's grandchild was in high school, was transgender, was having suicidal thoughts, and was wondering whether to leave home.

Here is the full sentence Jolly said, quoting that grandfather:

"As a family we embraced it, we sought the right pathways, the medical pathways, the gender-affirming care, for this grandchild."

Those are the grandfather's words about his own family. Jolly was repeating them.

The ad cut out the beginning, cut out the end, and ran the middle as if it were Jolly announcing his own policy.

The man wasn't calling to talk about surgery, either. He was calling because Florida lawmakers were considering SB 254 — the bill that made it a felony for a doctor to provide gender-affirming care to a minor. He told Jolly his family's doctor could be arrested, and that the parents could lose custody. That bill became law in May 2023.

A grandfather afraid of losing his grandchild became, in the ad, proof that a candidate wants to operate on children.

What Jolly Actually Says

PolitiFact looked for any instance of Jolly talking about gender-affirming surgeries for kids. It found none in the public record. It asked the Donalds campaign for one. The campaign didn't provide any.

PolitiFact also asked Jolly's campaign directly about the ad and about his position on gender-affirming surgeries for minors, and got no response — so on that narrow question his campaign has not said either way. What he has said, when Politico asked him in July about medical care for minors:

"I simply subscribe to the old-school Republican position that government should stay out of your life, out of your doctor's office, and out of your bedroom. The last person you need sitting on the foot of your bed during hard family conversations is Byron Donalds."

What "Gender-Affirming Care" Actually Means

The ad depends on people hearing that phrase and picturing an operating room.

Gender-affirming care covers a wide range of things, starting with using a person's chosen name or pronouns. For adolescents, medical treatment can include puberty blockers and hormone therapy. Surgery is rare, limited to older teens, and requires a parent's consent.

Surgeries are not performed on young children. That is the thing the ad's on-screen text says Jolly wants.

Donalds Said It Himself, Too

This wasn't only the PAC. In July, at a restaurant in Doral, Donalds told patrons that Jolly believes "it's okay to change the gender of young kids."

And when PolitiFact asked his campaign to back the ad up, spokesperson Skylar Swanson didn't walk anything back:

"I do not know what further statement you need when he says it pretty plainly himself."

He doesn't say it plainly. He doesn't say it at all. He was quoting a grandfather.

The Second One This Month

This is the second time in a week that a claim Donalds made about Jolly and transgender kids has fallen apart when someone checked it.

Days earlier, at a rally before the primary, Donalds said the American Medical Association had "finally realized that this is insanity" and come around to his position. The AMA told a reporter that is not what it said, and that it still believes families and doctors should decide together.

It is also not the first ad of this cycle to pin "surgeries on kids" on an opponent who never said it. In Iowa's Senate race, PolitiFact rated False an Ashley Hinson attack ad claiming Josh Turek supports "sex changes for kids" — an ad her campaign put out within an hour of Turek winning his primary. That one was built differently: it ran video of surgeons operating while citing Turek's vote against a school law about names and pronouns, which PolitiFact found "did not authorize or regulate medical gender-affirming care."

The move underneath is the same: put an operating room in front of the voter, and attach it to something that was never about surgery.

Why This Matters to Floridians

Donalds is asking to run a state of 23 million people. His campaign's response to being shown, in detail, that its ad reversed the meaning of a sentence was to say the sentence speaks for itself.

Meanwhile, the actual policy question in Florida is not hypothetical. SB 254 is law. Doctors face felony charges. Families like the one that grandfather described have to decide whether to leave the state.

Donalds' contribution to that conversation was an ad built out of half a sentence.

Source

Samantha Putterman, "Byron Donalds' ad deceptively edited David Jolly clip on gender-affirming care", PolitiFact, August 19, 2026.

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

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

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

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

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

He said he would pay it off

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the second term has actually done

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

The yearly numbers are worse than the totals suggest:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have seen this exact movie twice before

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

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

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

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

"The party of fiscal responsibility"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DOGE was supposed to fix this

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

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

The debt went up $3.8 trillion anyway.

What this costs you, personally

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

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

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

The debt hawks who voted for the debt

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

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

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

Sources

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

2.6 Million Americans Have Already Lost Their Health Insurance. These Republicans Voted to Let It Happen.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 12:09:54 +0000

For four years, people who buy their own health insurance got enhanced tax credits that held their premiums down. Those credits expired at the end of 2025. Congress could have extended them. It didn't.

We now know exactly what that cost.

Nationally, the number of people actually enrolled and paying for ACA coverage fell from 21,776,626 to 19,169,147 — a loss of 2,607,479 people, or 12%, in a single year. That's the first drop in seven years, and it's KFF's own July 28 analysis of federal data, not a projection.

What enrollees actually paid — premiums net of tax credits — rose an average of 58%. Enrollment fell in 49 of 50 states. The only exception was New Mexico, which spent state money to fill the gap.

Here is what it cost the twelve states represented by the Republicans below:

State	Lost coverage	Drop
Ohio	161,385	−32%
Oklahoma	85,557	−32%
Arizona	107,183	−30%
South Carolina	159,190	−29%
Indiana	78,096	−28%
Michigan	130,789	−27%
Mississippi	68,658	−26%
Missouri	86,425	−25%
North Carolina	164,682	−21%
Kansas	36,040	−20%
Florida	442,785	−10%
Texas	146,345	−4%

Two votes decided this. On December 11, 2025, Senate Republicans blocked S. 3385, which would have extended the credits — the motion to even begin debate got 51 of the 60 votes it needed. Six days later, on December 17, the House passed H.R. 6703, 216–211, a bill titled the "Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act" that contains no extension of the credits at all.

Ten of those twelve states lost a bigger share of their coverage than the country did, and Ohio and Oklahoma lost the biggest shares in America. These are the members who represent them — and who voted for it anyway.

Jim Jordan — Ohio, −32%

No state lost a larger share of its coverage than Ohio — 32.4%, just ahead of Oklahoma's 32.3%. That is 161,385 Ohioans, nearly a third of the state's marketplace, gone in a single year. Only Florida and North Carolina lost more people outright, and both are far bigger states.

Jim Jordan voted yes on the House bill.

Ohio's own numbers were not a surprise to anyone in its delegation. An estimated 356,000 Ohio residents are projected to lose health coverage under the Trump spending law — a projection that comes on top of the 161,385 Ohioans above, who had already lost marketplace coverage when the tax credits were allowed to expire. The state also stands to lose an estimated $33 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade.

Jordan is not a backbencher who got rolled by leadership. He is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, a founder of the Freedom Caucus, and one of the handful of members who can genuinely move House Republicans when he wants to. When Jordan decides something matters, the conference hears about it.

He has been in Congress since 2007 — nineteen years — and in that time has never sponsored a single bill that became law. Not one.

That is the record he brings to the worst-hit state in the country: maximum leverage, and nothing built with it.

Stephanie Bice — Oklahoma, −32%

Stephanie Bice voted yes on the House bill. Oklahoma lost 85,557 people, tied for the steepest percentage drop in the country.

Bice went to Congress saying she would fight for affordable health care. She then voted against capping insulin at $35 a month and against letting Medicare negotiate lower drug prices — in a state where 13.2% of adults have been told they have diabetes.

But the case that captures this best is a household the Oklahoma Policy Institute modeled. A 60-year-old Oklahoma couple earning $85,000 would pay $30,784 a year without the enhanced credits, against $7,225 with them.

That is not a rate increase. That is a family being priced out of the insurance market. And $85,000 for a couple is precisely the income the enhanced credits were designed to reach — people who earn too much for the old subsidy cliff and nowhere near enough to absorb a $30,000 premium.

Oklahoma hospital leaders also warn that the budget bill Bice voted for will cut reimbursements to Oklahoma hospitals by $8.7 billion over the next decade and eliminate nearly 15,000 jobs. Ten Oklahoma hospitals have closed since 2005, one of those hospital leaders noted, and he expects the cuts to bring more.

Juan Ciscomani — Arizona, −30%

Juan Ciscomani voted yes. Arizona lost 107,183 people, a 30% collapse.

Ciscomani represents a swing district and has spent two years insisting he's a moderate on health care. The arithmetic doesn't care about positioning. Arizona's marketplace shed nearly a third of its enrollment in twelve months — 107,183 people who were paying for coverage in 2025 and are not in 2026.

That is the part that gets missed about the subsidy expiration. When 107,000 people lose insurance, they don't stop getting sick. They show up at an emergency room uninsured, and the hospital absorbs the bill. In rural Arizona there isn't much hospital left to absorb it.

It also fits his pattern. Six weeks after 700 people in Casa Grande lost their jobs, Ciscomani brought the Speaker of the House there to celebrate. The announcement and the aftermath keep pointing in opposite directions.

Sheri Biggs — South Carolina, −29%

Sheri Biggs voted yes. South Carolina lost 159,190 people — the fourth-largest raw loss in the country, from a state of five million.

Biggs is a nurse practitioner. She has spent a career in exam rooms with patients who couldn't afford care.

In her own district, an estimated 27,623 people in SC-03 are projected to lose health coverage — 24,900 of them losing ACA marketplace coverage, 2,723 losing Medicaid, according to the Joint Economic Committee's House Minority staff.

She, more than almost anyone who cast this vote, knows exactly what happens to a person who stops being able to afford their medication. She voted for it anyway.

Victoria Spartz — Indiana, −28%

Indiana lost 78,096 people, more than a quarter of its marketplace. Victoria Spartz voted yes.

On top of that, an estimated 650,000 Hoosiers on Medicaid expansion are at risk of losing coverage under the budget bill — a number that would devastate hospitals and rural communities across the state.

What separates Spartz from most of this list is that she actually showed up to hear about it.

In late March 2025, after Republican leaders advised members against holding town halls at all, Spartz held two anyway on back-to-back days, in Westfield and Muncie. Credit where it's due; most of her colleagues hid.

Then she stood there while her constituents chanted "Do your job!" and protested outside.

Showing up is the first step. It isn't the whole job. Spartz heard directly from Hoosiers about what these cuts would do, in a room, to her face — and nearly nine months later voted for the bill that let their premiums jump anyway.

Lisa McClain — Michigan, −27%

Michigan lost 130,789 people. Lisa McClain voted yes.

McClain is not a rank-and-file member. She serves as House Republican Conference Chair — the fourth-highest position in House Republican leadership. She is in the room where the conference decides what it will and won't bring to the floor.

Michigan was already exposed. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer estimated 200,000 Michiganders could lose Medicaid coverage under the budget bill, and a report from the state Senate warned it could blow a $2 billion hole in the state budget — because 70% of Michigan's Medicaid spending comes from federal dollars.

Stack that on 130,789 people already out of the marketplace, and Michigan is absorbing losses from two directions at once. The member of its delegation with the most influence over what House Republicans do next is the one who helped set the agenda that produced it.

Michael Guest — Mississippi, −26%

Michael Guest voted yes. Mississippi lost 68,658 people — in the state that can least afford it.

Mississippi already runs on Medicaid: 714,600 people, or 24.2% of the entire state population, were covered by it in FY 2024. It is also one of the ten states that never expanded Medicaid, so working-age adults who lose marketplace coverage there usually have nowhere else to go.

Guest has form on this. He spent his August recess promoting $206 million for Mississippi's rural hospitals — after voting for the law projected to take billions out of the state's Medicaid funding. The pattern repeats: vote for the cut, announce the crumb.

Jason Smith — Missouri, −25%

Missouri lost 86,425 people. Jason Smith voted yes — and he is the single member on this list with the clearest jurisdiction over the thing that expired.

Smith chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, the most powerful tax committee in Congress. He writes the nation's tax laws.

The enhanced ACA premium tax credits are, literally, a tax credit. They live in the tax code. Extending them is a Ways and Means matter. When people ask which committee could have moved an extension through the House, the answer is his — and he has held the gavel since 2023.

Missouri's own reporting matches the federal numbers almost exactly: more than 86,000 Missourians dropped ACA marketplace coverage between February 2025 and February 2026 — a nearly 25% decline, among the steepest in the country — explicitly attributed to the expiration of the enhanced credits. That reporting draws on the same CMS release, so it is the federal number seen up close rather than a second one.

And the forecast was published before the vote. An estimated 160,000 more Missourians are projected to be uninsured by 2034 under the budget bill — rising to 230,000 if the enhanced ACA premium tax credits were also allowed to expire.

They were allowed to expire. The chairman of the committee that writes tax law voted for the bill that didn't extend them.

Virginia Foxx — North Carolina, −21%

North Carolina lost 164,682 people — the largest raw loss of any state in this group, and second nationally only to Florida.

Virginia Foxx voted yes. And of everyone on this list, she is the one who most directly controlled whether the House got to vote on anything else.

Foxx chairs the House Rules Committee. That is the panel that decides what reaches the floor and which amendments may even be offered — Speaker Johnson appointed her to it. Nothing gets a vote in the House of Representatives without going through her committee first.

So consider what the House actually voted on in December. Not an extension of the expiring credits. A substitute bill that doesn't extend them, brought to the floor under a rule.

Foxx has been in Congress since 2005 — twenty-one years — and is the former chair of the Education and the Workforce Committee, which writes the rules for employer health plans. She is not a member who lacks the standing or the procedural knowledge to force a health care vote. She is the member who decides which ones happen.

Meanwhile North Carolina stands to lose an estimated $49.9 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade, with up to another 195,000 residents at risk of losing coverage on top of the 164,682 already gone.

Roger Marshall — Kansas, −20%

Roger Marshall is the one who said the quiet part out loud, and he's a doctor.

Marshall is an OB-GYN who sits on the Senate's health committee. He voted to block the extension. Kansas lost 36,040 people, a 20% drop.

Asked about the expiring subsidies in December 2025, he shrugged: some people's premiums, he said, "are going to go up some."

What people pay went up 58% on average. For the Oklahoma couple in OK Policy's model, it is 326%.

This is the same senator who once explained the uninsured this way: "There is a group of people that just don't want health care and aren't going to take care of themselves."

A physician is allowed to hold conservative views about how health care should be financed. What's harder to defend is a physician who describes a 58% premium spike as going up "some," and who ascribes the resulting uninsurance to people not wanting coverage.

Florida — 442,785 people, the biggest loss in America

Florida's −10% looks mild next to Ohio's −32%. Don't be fooled by the percentage. Florida's marketplace is enormous — 4.3 million people were enrolled and paying in February 2025, more than in any other state — so a 10% drop means 442,785 Floridians lost coverage, nearly three times as many as any other state on this list.

No state has more people on this coverage than Florida. That is why the two Florida members below matter more than their percentage suggests.

Ashley Moody

Ashley Moody was one of the senators who blocked the extension. On December 11, 2025, she voted against even taking up a three-year extension of the ACA premium tax credits. The motion drew 51 votes — nine short of the 60 needed to advance.

She cast that vote knowing more of her own constituents rely on this coverage than in any other state.

It isn't a new position for her. As Florida's Attorney General, Moody kept the state in the lawsuit seeking to strike down the entire Affordable Care Act — a position she maintained in May 2020, in the middle of the COVID pandemic, with more than a million Floridians having filed unemployment claims since mid-March.

First she tried to have the law struck down in court. Then, in the Senate, she voted to let the part holding premiums down expire. The method changed; the outcome she was working toward did not.

Gus Bilirakis

Gus Bilirakis voted yes on the House bill. He has been in Congress 19 years, chairs the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade, and sits on that committee's Health Subcommittee — the panel with jurisdiction over much of federal health policy.

His donor list is where this gets uncomfortable. GuideWell, the parent company of Florida Blue, has given his campaign $22,500 — and Florida Blue is the dominant insurer on the very ACA marketplace that just shed 442,785 customers. BioMarin Pharmaceutical has given $47,500, from a drugmaker whose approvals and pricing run through his Health Subcommittee.

The Florida Policy Institute, working from KFF's projections, puts the combined effect of the budget bill and the ACA marketplace changes at 1.5 million Floridians losing their health insurance — an estimated range of 1.1 million to 1.9 million — of which 1.4 million, 93%, is down to the marketplace changes rather than the Medicaid cuts. Florida's uninsured rate is projected to go from a historic low of 10.7% in 2023 to 16.7% starting in 2026.

A member on the Health Subcommittee, funded by the health industry, representing the state with the most to lose, voted for it.

Texas — the thinnest safety net in America, cut anyway

Texas lost 146,345 people — a 4% drop that sounds small and isn't, because of where it landed.

Texas already had the highest uninsured rate in the United States: 19.2% among people under 65, nearly double the national rate of 9.8%, according to KFF's read of 2024 Census data. The Texas Tribune counts nearly 5 million children and adults under 65 there without coverage. Texas is also one of the ten states that never expanded Medicaid.

That combination is what makes a "mild" percentage brutal. In a state with expanded Medicaid, some people who lose marketplace coverage land somewhere. In Texas, most of them land nowhere.

And the forecast was ugly before this vote: KFF projects 480,000 more uninsured Texans by 2034 because of the budget bill, with Texas set to lose $27.9 billion in federal Medicaid funding over ten years.

Every Texas Republican in the House voted for H.R. 6703. Two of them stand out.

Monica De La Cruz

Monica De La Cruz represents TX-15 in South Texas, and she sits on the Ways and Means Committee — the same committee Jason Smith chairs, the one with jurisdiction over the tax credits that expired.

Her own district is among the hardest hit in the country. An estimated 65,193 people in TX-15 are projected to lose health coverage, per the same Joint Economic Committee minority analysis — and note the split: 61,700 of them losing ACA marketplace coverage, against 3,493 losing Medicaid.

This is not a Medicaid story in her district. It is almost entirely a marketplace story — which is to say, it is almost entirely about the credits her own committee could have extended.

Ronny Jackson

Ronny Jackson is a doctor. He served as White House physician to three presidents before taking TX-13 in 2021.

He is the third clinician on this list, after a nurse practitioner in South Carolina and an OB-GYN in Kansas. All three voted the same way.

There is no version of a medical career that leaves you unaware of what happens when a patient's coverage lapses. You see it directly: the delayed scan, the rationed insulin, the condition that was manageable in March and is not in September. Jackson spent decades close enough to that to know.

He voted yes.

The through-line

Look at the vote counts again. The Senate blocked the extension by nine votes short of cloture. The House passed its substitute 216–211. Neither outcome was inevitable; a handful of members in either chamber could have changed it.

Then look at who these fourteen people are. This is not a list of backbenchers who got steamrolled:

Jason Smith chairs Ways and Means, the committee that writes tax law — and these were tax credits. Monica De La Cruz sits on it too.
Virginia Foxx chairs Rules, the committee that decides what reaches the floor at all.
Lisa McClain is Conference Chair, fourth in House Republican leadership.
Jim Jordan chairs Judiciary and founded the Freedom Caucus.
Gus Bilirakis sits on the Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee.
Roger Marshall is a physician on the Senate health committee, and Ronny Jackson was White House physician to three presidents.
Sheri Biggs is a nurse practitioner.

Four of them held the gavels or the leadership posts that control what the House votes on. Two sit on the committee that writes tax law, and two more on the health panels themselves. Three of them treat patients for a living. If any group in Congress had both the power and the knowledge to force a different result, it was these fourteen — and their own states include the two that lost the biggest share of their coverage in America, and the one that lost the most people outright.

And notice what the House actually passed. Not a repeal. A bill named "Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act," which loosens rules on association health plans and does nothing about the credits whose expiration was about to raise what enrollees pay by 58%. It exists so that members can say they voted to lower premiums.

Every member above can now go home and say exactly that. The 2.6 million people who lost coverage this year are the reason it isn't true.

We've documented what this looks like on the ground in Alabama, Wisconsin, Arkansas and Ohio, and the full national tally of both votes is here.

The credits are gone. The people are uninsured. The votes are on the record with names attached — and in 2026, so are the members who cast them.

The Republicans Who Voted Against the CHIPS Act — Then Took Credit for the Jobs

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 12:06:19 +0000

On July 28, 2022, the House passed the CHIPS and Science Act 243 to 187. Every single one of those 187 no votes was a Republican. Only 24 Republicans voted yes.

The law has since sent billions of dollars into semiconductor plants, research corridors and tech hubs — a lot of it into districts and states represented by people who voted against it.

That created a problem for those members. Not a policy problem. A photography problem.

Because the ribbon-cuttings happen at home, in front of local news, with hundreds or thousands of new jobs standing behind you. And E&E News found that of the 31 tech hubs designated under the law, 15 would directly assist the administration's climate goals. Ten of those 15 sat in states or districts represented by Republicans who did not vote for the law — and ten of those Republicans were claiming credit or touting the benefits.

Here is what that looks like, member by member. Every vote below is from the official House roll call or the Senate's, where the bill passed 64–33.

Frank Lucas — he wrote it, then voted against it

Start with the most extraordinary one.

Frank Lucas of Oklahoma was the top Republican on the House Science Committee. The science half of the CHIPS and Science Act was, substantially, his.

He said so himself on the House floor, in a statement his own office published under the headline "Regrettably, I Will Not Be Casting My Vote for the CHIPS and Science Act Today":

"I have worked on this bill for more than three years. When I first took leadership of the House Science Committee as Ranking Member in 2019, developing legislation to strengthen American science and technology was my highest priority."

He introduced the comprehensive version in January 2020. He then worked two years with Democratic Chairwoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, gathering stakeholder feedback and holding hearings. His own words:

"This has been an exemplary bipartisan process."

Then Senate Democrats announced a separate budget deal, and Lucas voted no. He opened his floor statement with: "Just 24 hours ago, I expected my remarks on the CHIPS and Science Act to be very different."

Three years of his own work, killed in his own vote, over a deal on a different bill.

And then the sequel: once Republicans took the House and Lucas became Chairman of the Science Committee, he convened a hearing titled "CHIPS on the Table: A One-Year Review of the CHIPS and Science Act."

He gaveled in a review of the law he'd voted to stop.

Claudia Tenney — "inextricably linked," then "honored to lead this effort"

In July 2022, Claudia Tenney of New York explained her no vote by tying the bill to Democrats' budget deal. Senate Democrats had announced their reconciliation agreement, she said, "only hours after" the CHIPS and Science Act passed the Senate — and of that budget bill, which became the Inflation Reduction Act:

"The bill is poised to send our country into a crushing recession even faster, and it is inextricably linked to passage of the CHIPS and Science Act."

Fifteen months later, she thanked colleagues for their "bipartisan support" in helping her secure a tech hub designation for the New York Semiconductor Manufacturing and Research Technology Innovation Corridor — created by the law she had voted against.

Then in January 2026 she stood at the groundbreaking of Micron's plant in Clay, New York — a project worth $100 billion over at least 20 years and up to 50,000 jobs — and posted that she "was honored to lead this effort in the House."

PolitiFact rated that Half True, noting the obvious: "In 2022, Tenney voted against the CHIPS and Science Act, which eventually provided billions of dollars in federal support for the Micron plant."

Tenney did not respond to E&E News' requests for comment. We wrote about this one in full here.

Maria Elvira Salazar — Miami is "ground zero," and she voted no

Maria Elvira Salazar voted against the bill. When the South Florida Climate Resilience Tech Hub was designated, her enthusiasm was, in E&E's word, effusive:

"Miami is ground zero for sea-level rise, and we continue to lead the charge in developing resilient infrastructure."

"The establishment of a Tech Hub in Miami ensures we continue leading in innovation and technological advancement, while creating new jobs, growing our economy, and promoting national security."

Her spokesperson's explanation is worth reading closely, because it's the most honest version of the defense anyone offered:

"Regardless, it still became law, and therefore Rep. Salazar will continue to fight for any wins possible for Miami."

Translated: she opposed the thing, lost, and will now accept the winnings. That is at least coherent. It is not "we continue to lead the charge."

Jim Risch — the press release that credits his own legislation

Jim Risch of Idaho voted no in the Senate. A press release on his own website then credited him with laying the groundwork for the Inland Northwest's American Aerospace Materials Manufacturing Tech Hub — which, it said, was selected

"as a result of Risch's legislation, the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act."

That's an earlier version of the bill, which was expanded and then signed into law — the law Risch voted against. His spokesperson said he's been "a leader and chief supporter of American-led semiconductor technology his entire career," but voted no "due to last-minute changes."

So the CHIPS is his. The Act is not.

Andy Biggs — $8.5 billion, and an empty chair

Andy Biggs took a different approach: silence.

Intel received an $8.5 billion federal grant under the law to expand semiconductor manufacturing in Chandler, Arizona, with up to $11 billion in loans available on top. The administration projected 10,000 manufacturing and construction jobs in the state, plus thousands more indirect.

When President Biden announced it at Intel's Ocotillo Campus on March 20, 2024, Biggs — who voted no — did not attend. The Arizona Republic reported that he "has kept a low profile on the topic," that "his public statements on the 2022 semiconductor law are scarce," and that he did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Biggs is now running for governor of Arizona on an economic platform. The single largest federal manufacturing investment in his state's recent history is one he voted against and has said almost nothing about.

Mike Johnson — "probably will" repeal it, then "apologized profusely"

Mike Johnson voted against the bill as a member. Then he became Speaker of the House.

On November 1, 2024 — campaigning in Syracuse, near the site of the Micron plant — Johnson told reporters Republicans "probably will" try to repeal the semiconductor law if they won Congress and the White House.

The backlash was immediate, and the retreat was faster. Johnson clarified within hours:

"I fully support Micron coming to Central NY, and the CHIPS Act is not on the agenda for repeal."

The local Republican he was campaigning for said Johnson "apologized profusely, saying he misheard the question."

That is the whole dynamic in one afternoon. The Speaker's honest instinct was repeal. The politics of standing near the site of a chip factory made it unsayable. So it became a misheard question.

What the pattern actually is

None of these six is being accused of a crime. Voting against a bill is legitimate. Members are allowed to think a law is bad and still serve the constituents it helps.

But look at what they actually said. Not "I opposed this, I lost, and I'll make sure my district gets its share" — which is Salazar's spokesperson's line, and which is defensible. What they said was that they led the effort. That the hub came as a result of their legislation. That they continue to lead the charge.

That's not constituent service. It's collecting the credit for a result you tried to prevent, and it only works if voters don't check the roll call.

The roll call is right here, and it has 187 names on it.

There is a version of this that would be honest, and Frank Lucas came closest to it — he told the House exactly what he was giving up and why, on the record, before he did it. Then he chaired the victory lap anyway.

When a factory opens near you in 2026 and your member of Congress is at the podium, the question worth asking is simple: how did you vote?

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.

The Republicans With the Worst Records on Workers and Unions

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

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

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

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

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

Scott Fitzgerald wrote the playbook

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

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

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

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

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

Glenn Grothman called the overnight protesters "slobs"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He voted no. Twice. On his own bill.

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

Byron Donalds: no water, no shade, no break

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

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

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

Rich McCormick wants you fired for using the Fifth Amendment

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

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

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

Robert Aderholt deleted the job training

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

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

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

Tom Tiffany takes the anti-union lobby's money

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

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

This isn't seven bad apples

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

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

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

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

They're on the ballot in November.