MAGA Report Cards — Georgia

Rick Jackson Promises More Jobs Than Any Governor in Georgia's History. A Company He Owns Paid Nearly $2 Million to Workers Who Said It Shorted Them on Overtime.

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 10:47:00 +0000

Rick Jackson's entire case for being governor of Georgia is that he is good at business. He built a health care staffing empire. He is spending his own fortune to say so. He has promised to "create more jobs than have ever been created in the history of Georgia."

The Daily Beast went and looked at how his companies treated the people who worked for them. It found millions of dollars paid out to settle claims that they were not paid what they were owed.

Nearly $2 million, about 300 workers, five years in court

In 2017, workers sued Jackson Nurse Professionals, the travel-staffing arm of the company Jackson founded. Their claim was not complicated. They said the company failed to properly pay their overtime, failed to pay bonuses they had earned, and failed to pay the wages they were owed when they left the job.

The case ran for five years. In 2022, the company settled for "almost $2 million," the Daily Beast reports, covering "about 300 workers."

About 300 people said they did the work and the money did not come, and after five years the company paid instead of taking it to trial.

The Daily Beast is clear about one limit on this: none of the settlements included a finding that Jackson personally broke labor laws. Companies settle for all sorts of reasons. But he owns them, he ran them, and he is running for governor on the strength of how he ran them.

It happened again, with foreign nurses

The overtime case is not the only one.

Avant Healthcare Professionals, another company inside Jackson's business, settled in June 2026 for $3 million with more than 5,000 current and former international workers. As we reported in August, the nurses who sued said Avant paid them less than the nurses hospitals hired directly, demanded tens of thousands of dollars from anyone who tried to leave, and had staff threaten to contact Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One nurse was billed $41,832 and given 30 days to pay it.

That settlement landed days after Jackson became the Republican nominee for governor, while his television ads promised that immigrants who break the law would be "deported or departed."

Two companies. Two groups of workers. Two payouts. One pattern: the people doing the work said they were shorted, and the money came out at the end.

He is not short of money

Jackson's answer to almost every question about his campaign is that he is rich enough not to need anyone. "I have built a $3 billion business without any outside financial help, and when you know how to do stuff like that, you can do a lot of things to solve problems, and that's what I plan to do all over the state," he told a campaign audience in Augusta in April.

He is now spending close to $200 million of that fortune on the governor's race — an $87 million ad buy in late July, the largest in the race so far, on top of an estimated $100 million-plus already spent.

The company found nearly $2 million for those workers only after they sued and waited five years.

What he wants to do with the state

The gap between what Jackson says he will build and what his companies did shows up in his policy too.

He is invested in a data center in Texas, and told a room of Georgia business leaders that Georgia counties should be able to let data centers operate with no property taxes at all — "It's totally up to them," he said. His company signed a new state contract on July 22, and three weeks later he told voters that as governor he would never do business with the state of Georgia. Asked about Georgians without insurance, he said they still have healthcare, because they can go to an emergency room — a doctor serving in the legislature called that "battlefield triage."

Trump has credited Jackson's success to exactly the thing this record calls into question — his business acumen. "Congratulations to Rick Jackson, who very successfully campaigned on being 'TRUMP', and won," the president said after Jackson won the June Republican run-off.

What the record shows

Rick Jackson is running for governor of Georgia on a promise to create more jobs than any governor in the state's history. A company he owns, Jackson Nurse Professionals, was sued in 2017 by workers who said it shorted them on overtime, bonuses and final wages, and settled in 2022 for close to $2 million covering about 300 workers. A second company he owns, Avant Healthcare Professionals, paid $3 million this June to more than 5,000 current and former international workers who said they were underpaid and threatened with immigration authorities when they tried to quit. Neither settlement found that Jackson personally broke labor law. He is spending close to $200 million of his own money on this campaign.

Source

Farrah Tomazin, MAGA Billionaire Rick Jackson's Ugly Business Baggage Exposed, The Daily Beast, September 7, 2026. Photo illustration: Thomas Levinson / The Daily Beast / Getty / Reuters.

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

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

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

Not immigration money. Housing money.

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

Any grant. All of them.

What that money actually pays for

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

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

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

How wide the net is

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

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

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

The Montana communities in the crosshairs

Downing has said what he thinks:

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

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

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

Downing did not respond.

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

Nineteen Republicans on this site signed it

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

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

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

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

The part nobody is saying out loud

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

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

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

What the bill does

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

The argument they signed is the part worth reading twice.

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

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

What the brief actually argues

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

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

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

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

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

Who signed it

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

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

Some of these names carry their own history

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the argument matters beyond this case

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

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

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

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

What the filing shows

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

Nobody is doing the thing the bill bans

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

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

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

This is control, not freedom

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

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

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

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

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

Two Republicans said no

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

The bill now goes to the Senate.

The choice they made

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

Every Republican we track who voted yes

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

Iowa: Ashley Hinson, Zach Nunn

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

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

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

Rick Jackson Told a Supporter That Brian Kemp Will 'Get the National Guard' for Georgia's Election. The Governor's Office Indicated There Are No Plans For It.

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:41:22 +0000

On August 13, 2026, at a campaign rally in Columbus, a man in the crowd told Georgia's Republican nominee for governor that he was worried Democrats would cheat in November. Then he asked for soldiers.

"Trump's got federal troops," the supporter said. "Can you call up and get some federal troops from Trump?"

Rick Jackson did not tell him that no one is cheating. He did not tell him that troops do not belong at a polling place. He gave him a better offer.

"We'll get National Guard — Governor Kemp is going to watch it for us," Jackson said.

"Is that right?" the man asked.

"Yes," Jackson said. "He's going to get the National Guard."

The exchange was captured on audio obtained by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and it put the sitting governor's office in the position of being asked whether any of it was true.

Kemp's office indicated there is no such plan

Governor Brian Kemp's spokesman was asked about the possibility of the state deploying the National Guard in the 2026 election. He did not confirm any such plan. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that he indicated there are no plans for a deployment.

"We've proven for multiple cycles now that it's easy to vote and hard to cheat in Georgia elections," the spokesman said in a statement. "The same will be true this cycle. We are approaching this upcoming election the exact same way we have in the past."

That is a sitting Republican governor's office declining, in public, to back up what the Republican nominee to replace him told his supporters.

Jackson's campaign now says he "never suggested deploying troops at polling places," and points to Georgia's record of making it "easier to vote and harder to cheat." Read the transcript again. The question he was answering was a request for federal troops to stop cheating at the election. His answer was that the National Guard was coming. If that is not suggesting troops at the election, it is hard to say what he thought the man was asking for.

The Center Square says it was unsuccessful in getting comment from Jackson before publishing.

The thing the man actually asked for is a federal crime

The supporter's specific request — call Trump and get federal troops — runs into a statute that has been on the books since the 1800s. 18 U.S.C. § 592 makes it a crime for anyone in the civil or military service of the United States to order, bring, or keep "any troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held." The only carve-out is if armed force is genuinely needed to fight off an armed attack on the country.

The penalty is a fine, up to five years in prison, or both — plus being disqualified from holding any office of honor, profit, or trust under the United States.

Georgia has its own rule for the ground itself. Under O.C.G.A. § 21-2-413, nobody may carry a firearm within 150 feet of a polling place except peace officers regularly employed by a government and certified security guards. Guardsmen are neither.

So the version the supporter wanted is illegal, and the version Jackson offered him would run into a state law written specifically to keep armed men away from voters.

This is not the first time this year a Republican running for governor has promised armed federal personnel at the polls. Eleven days ago in Maine, Bobby Charles told a room of young Republicans he would call Trump's border czar and ask for ICE agents and marshals at Maine's voting booths — the same statute, the same problem.

The premise nobody in the room questioned

Georgia has been the country's stress test for this argument since 2020, when Trump lost the state and then called Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to say, on a recording, "I just want to find 11,780 votes."

That fight is not over. The FBI raided the Fulton County Elections Office in January. The Justice Department has since subpoenaed the county for the personal information of the people who worked the 2020 election. Those are the same poll workers — ordinary Georgians who counted ballots — that Trump's allies spent years accusing of fraud.

None of it has produced a case that Georgia's elections are being stolen. Raffensperger, a Republican, has now stood up a bipartisan election integrity task force whose stated job is to "push back" on election misinformation. Its members include two former Republican officeholders, two former Democratic ones, the head of the Georgia Sheriffs' Association, and county election directors.

Rick Jackson is running to be governor of that state. When a supporter handed him the fraud premise and asked for troops, he could have done what Kemp's office did and say Georgia's elections are secure. Instead he confirmed the man's fear and told him help was coming.

His Democratic opponent, Keisha Lance Bottoms, put it this way: "Rick Jackson is once again telling Georgians how he will be Trump's favorite governor — this time by spreading election lies and threatening our elections."

The "favorite governor" line is not Bottoms's. It is Jackson's. Standing on a stage beside Trump after the endorsement, pointing at him, Jackson said he was "going to be this man's favorite governor" — an endorsement Trump publicly said came after Jackson gave him "a couple of" million dollars.

What soldiers at the polls actually do

There is no version of this where armed troops at a polling place make an election more accurate. Ballots are counted by machines and by people, and a soldier standing in the parking lot does not check anyone's math.

What soldiers do is change who decides to walk in. That is the entire reason the 1800s statute exists, and it is why Georgia drew a 150-foot line around the door.

It is also part of a broader push. Trump's Homeland Security Secretary has threatened election officials with prison and fines if their states won't hand over voter data for federal "scrubbing" — over a fraud problem the government has never been able to document at any meaningful scale.

The bottom line

Asked at an August 13 rally in Columbus to get federal troops from Trump to stop Democrats from cheating, Rick Jackson told his supporter that Governor Brian Kemp would "get the National Guard" for Georgia's election. Kemp's office indicated there are no such plans and said the state is running this election exactly as it has run the last several. Federal law makes bringing troops to a polling place a crime punishable by up to five years in prison, and Georgia law bars anyone but police and certified guards from carrying a gun within 150 feet of one. Jackson's campaign now says he never suggested troops at polling places — an answer that does not survive listening to the question he was asked.

Sources

Jackson suggests Kemp will use National Guard to monitor election — Greg Bluestein, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, updated August 25, 2026. The AJC obtained the rally audio.

Rick Jackson wants the National Guard to monitor Georgia's election. Will Brian Kemp do it? — Kim Jarrett, The Center Square / The Georgia Sun, August 30, 2026. Photo: Rick Jackson at a Georgia Association of Manufacturers candidate forum in Atlanta, April 21, 2026 (Matthew Pearson/WABE via AP).

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The man who quit over this said so at the time

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

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

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

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

The 188 who voted yes

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

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

The four who voted no

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You have so many proteins to choose from"

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

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

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

"The Democrats invented this term 'affordability'"

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

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

"Earn more"

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

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

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

"Gasoline prices are down 40 percent"

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

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

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

"Gas prices are at five-year lows"

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

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

The rest of the list

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

What they have in common

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

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

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

The short version

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

Source

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

Mike Collins Says He Has 'Always Condemned' Racism and Antisemitism. His PAC Paid $7,700 to a Man Who Posted a Swastika and an Image of Himself in Klan Robes.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:42:12 +0000

Mike Collins is the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Georgia. On Thursday, August 27, 2026, The Washington Post published what it found on the X account of a man who used to work for him.

A swastika. An image of himself in what look like Ku Klux Klan robes. A racial slur for Black people, posted several times. The words "White Power." All of it in June and July of this year.

The man is Preston Parra, 24. Until August 24, when he changed his biography and made his posts private, his own X account described him as a "twink fascist."

What Collins actually paid him

Collins' campaign has a habit of describing the people around him as strangers. So it is worth being exact about this one, because the paperwork is public.

Parra interned in Collins' congressional office for two months in 2024, according to LegiStorm, the tracker of federal staff employment.

Then he got paid. Overhaul PAC — Collins' own leadership PAC — sent Parra two checks in May 2025: $2,700 on May 7 and $5,000 on May 23, both filed with the Federal Election Commission as "fundraising consulting." That is $7,700, in the FEC's own records. It was about two months before Collins launched his Senate campaign in July 2025.

Parra's consulting website goes further. It quotes Collins praising the quality of his "product": "You can grade it by the amount of people that are watching it and pushing it back out." The site does not say when Collins said it or what he was talking about, and Parra told the Post it was about the video clipping and digital work he did, not the personal account. Collins' campaign was asked whether he stands by that endorsement. It did not answer.

"Satire," he says

Parra told the Post the Klan image was made with Grok's AI tool and that the account is "satirical." He said he is a provocateur. He said Collins didn't know about the personal account because it was private at the time. "What, is there supposed to be some kind of CIA background check?" he said.

He also told the Post he is not a white supremacist — because it goes against his religion, and because his father is Colombian.

And then, in the same interview, he said this:

"I do think that the white race contributes more to the world."

That is not a joke that landed badly. That is a man explaining his actual position to a national newspaper, on the record, while defending himself.

Parra also said he liked working for Collins because of the tone. "I like the edginess," he told the Post. "I didn't think it was edgy enough."

The fourth one

If Parra were the only one, Collins could plausibly say he got unlucky in a hire. He is not the only one. He is the fourth person connected to Collins caught with this material, and each one was documented by a different newsroom.

His son-in-law. In July, CNN reported that David Alan Scheer II — married to Collins' daughter — is a "pro-White nationalist" influencer with more than 1.5 million followers who shares antisemitic conspiracy theories and Nazi imagery. We wrote that story up here. Scheer asked his followers to vote on whether he should make a video titled "why Gen-Z doesn't hate Hitler." He is registered to vote at a house Collins owns.

His chief of staff. In May, Slate reported that Kip Talley — Collins' chief of staff — was in a roughly 30-person group chat that included Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer, two of the best-known white nationalists in the country. In the chat, Talley described working to help Charles Johnson, who has promoted Holocaust denial, while Johnson was locked up. "I'm going to try and use the levers of the legislative branch to check into his detention," Talley wrote in December 2025. Collins replaced him in July. Talley said he acted "solely in my personal capacity."

His digital director. In May, William Paul — who worked as Collins' digital director in 2025 — walked up to Rep. Mike Lawler in a Washington bar and started in on him. A NOTUS reporter was standing right there and heard the whole thing — including Paul telling Lawler that Jews were anti-American, and that Lawler's Jewish supporters served Israel more than America. Paul later apologized on X and said he was getting help for a drinking problem.

And now Parra. Four people. Four different outlets. One congressman in the middle of all of it.

His answer was to change the subject

Here is what Collins said about his son-in-law earlier this month:

"He has had no role in my campaign whatsoever, and I don't believe or support those views and I have always condemned racism and antisemitism regardless of the source."

Here is what his campaign said about Parra this week: it did not answer the Post's detailed list of questions. A spokesperson put out a statement saying Collins condemns antisemitism and finds it "abhorrent" — and then accused Jon Ossoff, who is Jewish, of not condemning antisemitism on the left hard enough.

That is the pattern, and it is the whole pattern. A general condemnation of a category. No mention of the specific person. And a pivot to his opponent.

He did the same thing when more than 50 Black Georgia lawmakers signed a statement demanding he explain his ties. "No one speaks for me, and I don't speak for anyone else," he said. Nobody had said anyone spoke for him. They asked him to account for the people he hires, pays and marries into. He has still never done it.

Georgia Republicans stopped waiting

The people saying this out loud are not Democrats.

Debbie Dooley, an original tea party organizer in Georgia who backed Collins' rival in the primary, put it to the Post this way: "In the South, we have a saying: You lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas. Well, Mike Collins has got a lot of fleas on him." She added: "We do not need a senator that thinks he's a media influencer on X and has no integrity. Ethics matter. I cannot support him."

Shelley Wynter, a conservative radio host in Georgia, endorsed Ossoff. So did former Republican Sen. Jeff Flake and the Republican mayors of Valdosta and Tifton — three crossovers in three days.

And a former Collins staffer told the Post what the office's social media strategy actually was, under longtime chief of staff Brandon Phillips: "casual trolling" and a "comms philosophy of shock factor." Another Georgia Republican operative summed up the confusion inside the party: "There was always a question of where does Mike end and Brandon begin."

Phillips is the same aide at the center of the open House Ethics investigation into Collins' office, where a nonpartisan watchdog found "substantial reason to believe" that Collins himself "retained an employee who did not perform duties commensurate with the compensation the employee received" and "discriminated unfairly by dispensing special favors or privileges by retaining an employee with whom his Chief of Staff had a personal relationship." The complaints that started it said she was paid $5,000 as a district intern for no work. Investigators recommended subpoenas. Collins called it a "nothingburger."

Collins' own feed

None of this is happening to a man with a spotless account of his own.

In March 2024, Collins replied "Never was a second thought" to a post attacking a Washington Post reporter that flagged her Jewish identity, and refused to apologize when people objected: "Y'all just see stuff that ain't there."

In May 2025, he said replacing a Steak 'n Shake in the congressional food court with a halal restaurant was "equivalent to the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in the 7th century."

In 2024, he reposted a video of mostly white college students confronting a Black pro-Palestinian protester, with one of them making apelike sounds at her. He said afterward that he disavows racism and that the sounds were not the video's "focal point."

Parra said he took the job because he liked the edginess of that feed, and wished it were edgier.

What the record shows

Four people connected to Mike Collins — his son-in-law, his chief of staff, his digital director, and a paid contractor for his leadership PAC — have been caught posting or defending Nazi imagery, white nationalist company, or antisemitic abuse, in reporting by four separate news organizations. Collins' PAC paid the contractor $7,700. Collins has never explained a single one of them by name. His answer, every time, has been a general condemnation of racism and a complaint about Jon Ossoff.

Source

Liz Goodwin and Olivia George, "Mike Collins's former staffer posted KKK, Nazi imagery," The Washington Post, August 27, 2026. Photo of Mike Collins via The Advocate.

Ethics Investigators Say Mike Collins Refused to Cooperate. They Recommended a Subpoena. His Campaign Says He 'Fully Cooperated.'

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:07:29 +0000

Mike Collins is running for the U.S. Senate in Georgia. There is an open House Ethics Committee investigation into whether his congressional office spent taxpayer money on things it wasn't allowed to.

On Tuesday, August 25, 2026, Sen. Jon Ossoff held a press conference about it. Politico's Erin Doherty reported his remarks:

"Congressman Collins must cooperate with this investigation, he must commit to testifying and he must explain to the public and the press why he has refused to cooperate, why he has obstructed, and why he has stonewalled this investigation to date."

An opponent saying that in an election year is politics. What makes it worth your attention is that a nonpartisan ethics office said the same thing first, in writing, back in January.

What the ethics office found

The Office of Congressional Conduct is the nonpartisan, quasi-independent body that reviews ethics complaints before passing them to the House Ethics Committee. In January 2026, its report on Collins became public.

Its finding: there was "substantial reason to believe" that Rep. Collins "used congressional resources for unofficial or otherwise unauthorized purposes."

Two more findings sat beside it, in the same formula. Substantial reason to believe Collins "retained an employee who did not perform duties commensurate with the compensation the employee received." And substantial reason to believe he "discriminated unfairly by dispensing special favors or privileges by retaining an employee with whom his Chief of Staff had a personal relationship."

The employee was a paid district intern in his Georgia office.

Strip the formal language out. A member of Congress's office is alleged to have put a person on the taxpayer's payroll because she was involved with the chief of staff, and to have paid her more than the work was worth.

The chief of staff at the center of it, Brandon Phillips, is no longer on payroll.

And then the part that isn't about the intern

The report contained one more finding, and it's the one that should bother people regardless of what the underlying allegations turn out to be.

The Office of Congressional Conduct said Collins "refused to cooperate" with its review — and recommended that the House Ethics Committee issue him a subpoena.

The report files that recommendation under a heading that says plainly what it is for: "Information the OCC Was Unable to Obtain and Recommendation for the Issuance of Subpoenas." It is what the office asks for when the people it needs to hear from won't answer.

Two accounts that cannot both be true

Here is Collins' campaign, in a statement from spokesperson Meyer Siegfried on Tuesday afternoon:

"Rep. Collins has fully cooperated with the House Ethics Committee on this bogus, politically motivated complaint and looks forward to the committee fully clearing him in short order."

And here is the nonpartisan office that reviewed the complaint: he refused to cooperate, and should be subpoenaed.

The campaign statement is technically about the Ethics Committee, while the refusal finding was about the Office of Congressional Conduct — two different bodies, and a careful reader will notice the seam. But the campaign's framing is that Collins has been cooperative throughout, and the written record of the office that actually reviewed the complaint says otherwise.

The Ethics Committee is now running its own inquiry. It does not comment on pending cases.

The rest of the campaign's statement was that Ossoff "would know if [he] weren't too busy abandoning Georgia to suck up to liberal activist donors in the Hamptons." That's an answer about the Hamptons. It is not an answer about the intern.

This is the second taxpayer-money question about his office

In July we wrote about a separate one: Collins spent more than $400,000 of official taxpayer office money on television ads that look nearly identical to his campaign ads, right down to the same clip of Trump praising him — something House rules do not allow official funds to be used for.

Different allegation, same account. Both are about the difference between the money Georgians give a congressman to serve them and the money a candidate raises to get himself promoted.

Why this matters in a Senate race

Georgia's Senate race is one of the most closely watched in the country, and whoever wins it will help decide control of the chamber. Voters get to weigh a candidate's record on the things that reach them — healthcare, grocery prices, the beef and farm economy.

They also get to weigh whether the candidate answers questions when a nonpartisan office asks them.

Collins can end this argument any time. He can testify. Ossoff's demand — cooperate, commit to testifying, explain the refusal — is a demand any constituent could make, and it costs a person with nothing to hide nothing at all.

What the record shows

In January 2026 the nonpartisan Office of Congressional Conduct found substantial reason to believe Mike Collins used congressional resources for unauthorized purposes, and that he kept on the payroll a district intern who was in a romantic relationship with his chief of staff and whose work didn't match her pay. The same report said Collins refused to cooperate with the review and recommended that the House Ethics Committee subpoena him. His campaign says he "fully cooperated." The chief of staff is off the payroll, the Ethics Committee inquiry is still open, and Collins is asking Georgia to send him to the Senate in November.

Sources

Ossoff presses GOP opponent Mike Collins on House Ethics probe — Erin Doherty, Politico, August 25, 2026.

OCC Report and Findings, Rep. Mike Collins, Review No. 25-7636 — Office of Congressional Conduct, adopted September 24, 2025, released January 5, 2026.

Rick Jackson Says Uninsured Georgians Still Have Healthcare. A Doctor in the Legislature Called That 'Battlefield Triage.'

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 10:07:01 +0000

Rick Jackson is the Republican nominee for governor of Georgia. He made his fortune in healthcare staffing.

At an event in Buckhead on August 20, he explained his approach to Georgians who have no health insurance.

"You need to understand: Not having insurance in Georgia does not mean you don't have healthcare. There's a huge difference. Some people equate it. That is not true."

And on Medicaid:

"What I'm going to be doing is helping each of these people get off of Medicaid."

What he's actually describing

There is one thing that makes Jackson's first claim technically true. A federal law requires hospital emergency rooms to treat and stabilize anyone who comes in, regardless of whether they can pay.

That's it. That's the entire healthcare system he is describing.

State Rep. Michelle Au — a Democrat from Johns Creek who is also a practicing anesthesiologist — responded on X:

"That is not 'healthcare' in the sense that most people think of it. That is battlefield triage."

Au pointed out what an emergency room is not required to do: cancer screenings, annual physicals, ongoing maintenance, or preventive care.

An ER will stop you from dying today. It will not catch your tumor at stage one. It will not adjust your blood pressure medication. It will not keep your diabetes from taking your foot.

Leah Chan of the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute put the cost in plain terms: "When you're unable to take care of manageable health conditions, and to prevent sickness or injury, you are paying more down the line for more costly acute care, both as an individual and then we as a society."

That's the part that should matter to every Georgia taxpayer, insured or not. Treating a condition after it has turned acute costs more than managing it early — that is Chan's point — and the bill doesn't disappear. It lands on hospitals, as uncompensated care.

"Get off of Medicaid"

Jackson says he supports what he calls "intelligent Medicaid expansion." Asked what that means, he described it this way:

"That's what I'm going to be doing is helping each one of these people to get off of Medicaid. If they get onto commercial insurance that's a first stop of success for them so they can grow their career."

Georgia is one of a small number of states that has never expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. That decision is why the state has a "coverage gap" — people who earn too much to qualify for Georgia's very limited Medicaid, and too little to get much help buying a plan on their own.

Jackson's answer to that gap is that people in it should move onto commercial insurance so they can "grow their career." He did not say how someone whose job does not offer coverage is supposed to buy it.

And it's about to get worse

Georgia isn't holding steady on coverage. It's losing ground.

An estimated 150,000 Georgians will lose health coverage under Trump's budget bill, 32,000 of them losing Medicaid specifically. If the enhanced ACA premium tax credits are also allowed to expire, a Georgia-specific analysis projects that 492,000 Georgians will lose coverage and become uninsured by 2034.

Those are the people Jackson is telling to use the emergency room.

His website says two words about healthcare

Jackson's campaign site promises to "transform healthcare."

That is the whole healthcare policy. There is nothing else on it.

For a candidate whose entire public identity is that he is a healthcare businessman, that is a remarkable amount of nothing — and it isn't the first time. At the Georgia Chamber's annual luncheon in August, he pitched property-tax-free data centers while personally invested in one, and rejected Medicaid expansion in the same speech.

The staffing business that made him a billionaire has its own record with the people who actually deliver care. A company he owns paid $3 million to settle claims it trapped more than 5,000 immigrant workers in contracts they couldn't leave, with allegations it threatened to report nurses to immigration authorities if they tried to quit — while his campaign ran ads promising immigrants who break the law would be "deported or departed."

What we know

Rick Jackson, a healthcare billionaire running to govern Georgia, told an audience that not having insurance "does not mean you don't have healthcare," and that his plan is to help people get off Medicaid. The only thing backing that claim is a federal law requiring emergency rooms to stabilize patients — no screenings, no checkups, no chronic care. A physician in the state legislature called it battlefield triage. Georgia has never expanded Medicaid, 492,000 Georgians are projected to lose coverage and become uninsured by 2034, and Jackson's campaign website's entire healthcare policy is the phrase "transform healthcare."

Source

Jackson campaign website promises to "transform healthcare," but nominee shuns Medicaid expansion — Doug Richards, 11Alive, August 24, 2026.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brad Finstad chairs the subcommittee that writes SNAP policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't believe in welfare."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eight weeks. That is the gap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Cole called it "an extraordinary piece of legislation"

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

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

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

Extraordinary is one word for it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

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

Joe Wilson wrote it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ohio said no in 2011. Jim Jordan signed anyway.

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

Jim Jordan is Ohio's signature on this bill.

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

Pennsylvania sent five signatures on a law it never wanted

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

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

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

What it costs a paycheck

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

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

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

This is not a one-off

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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.

Rick Jackson Ran Ads Promising Immigrants Who Break the Law Would Be 'Deported or Departed.' His Own Company Was Accused of Threatening to Call ICE on Nurses Who Tried to Quit.

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:29:47 +0000

This spring, Georgians could not turn on a television without seeing the same commercial. Rick Jackson, the billionaire running for governor, looks straight into the camera and promises that immigrants who break the law on his watch will be "deported or departed." The ad ran nearly 9,000 times on Georgia stations.

At the exact same time, a company Jackson owns was fighting a lawsuit from immigrant nurses who said it had trapped them in contracts they could not get out of — and threatened to call immigration authorities on them when they tried.

On June 22, 2026 — days after Jackson became the Republican nominee for governor — that company agreed to pay $3 million to settle. CNN reported the story on August 20. Until now it had gotten almost no attention in the governor's race.

What the nurses said happened

The company is Avant Healthcare Professionals. Its business is recruiting nurses from other countries and placing them in American hospitals. Jackson Healthcare — the conglomerate Jackson founded in 2000 — bought Avant in 2018. Business records filed in Florida list Rick Jackson as Avant's manager.

Two nurses sued in 2023. Latoya Lewis came from Jamaica in 2021. Lucinda Byron came from St. Vincent and the Grenadines and started at a South Dakota hospital in 2022. Both signed multi-year contracts with Avant.

According to their complaint, what they found was this:

They were paid less than nurses the hospitals hired directly.
They could take almost no time off, and had little chance to move up.
They struggled to pay their bills on what Avant paid them.
When they tried to leave, Avant told them they owed money to cover the cost of bringing them here. Avant wanted $41,832 from Byron, due in 30 days.
Staff allegedly threatened to contact Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and led them to believe that quitting could put their immigration status at risk.

That last part is the one to sit with. These nurses came in on EB-3 visas, which come with a green card. A green card does not generally require you to stay with the company that brought you here. The threat, their lawyers argued, was leverage — not law.

Here is how the nurses themselves put it in their complaint:

"Avant's 'employment' is essentially indentured servitude."

Their lawyers argued the contracts violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and federal wage law. Avant asked a federal judge to throw the trafficking claims out. The judge refused. The case moved to state court in Florida and grew into a class action.

The settlement: 5,219 workers, about $500 each

By November, both sides had identified 5,219 current and former Avant workers who qualified. A judge approved the deal in July 2026.

The payout is $3 million spread across all of them. A spokeswoman for Jackson Healthcare noted that of the workers getting money, "most will receive approximately $500 or less." Others get fees waived and nothing more.

Avant denied doing anything wrong, and the court never ruled that its practices were illegal. The company says it settled "to avoid the cost and distraction of continued litigation."

That is a normal thing for a company to say. It is a stranger thing for a company owned by a man running for governor on the promise that he will be the toughest person in Georgia on immigration.

This is not the first time

Avant's hiring practices drew federal scrutiny five years before Jackson bought it.

In February 2013, the U.S. Justice Department settled with Avant over hundreds of internet job postings that federal investigators said showed an illegal preference for foreign-trained workers over American ones. Avant paid a $27,750 penalty and agreed to change its policies.

So the record on this company reads: penalized by the federal government for favoring foreign workers over Americans, then sued by those same foreign workers for how it treated them once they got here.

Avant is not alone in the second part. Bloomberg Law counted at least 10 class actions by nurses over these contracts in 2024. And in 2025, New York Attorney General Letitia James recovered more than $660,000 for 71 foreign-recruited nurses from a different staffing agency that charged them up to $20,000 to quit. Her office called it labor trafficking. Some labor attorneys call these deals "stay-or-pay" contracts. California and New York have banned them.

Georgia has not.

Two Rick Jacksons

The gap between the campaign and the company is not subtle.

In a campaign ad that CNN says helped fuel his political rise this spring, Jackson says: "I don't care if you're a Muslim or a Mongolian. You don't have the right to force your culture on our country."

In Avant's own guide for the foreign workers it recruits, the company tells them: "You don't have to choose between the culture you came from and the one you're adapting to. Finding harmony between the two creates a well-rounded, multicultural identity."

It goes further than tone. Jackson is campaigning to help President Trump tighten the immigration system. Avant has been fighting that same administration over it. In 2020 the company sued the Trump administration over visa delays for nurses it was trying to bring in from the Philippines; the case was withdrawn after the visas came through. Earlier this year, Avant's senior vice president of global operations, Lesley Hamilton, said in a March video that a new $100,000 fee on H-1B visas would cost the company more than she could calculate on the spot:

"That is a lot of money if we were to bring in the volume of nurses this year under the H1B that we brought in last year."

CNN asked Jackson's campaign how he plans to partner with Trump on immigration when his own company is in a fight with the administration over visa policy. The campaign did not respond.

CNN also asked whether Jackson supports more visas for foreign workers. No answer there either.

His spokesman, Garrison Douglas, said Jackson's focus is on "criminal illegal immigration and following the law," and that Avant's nurses "come to America legally, waiting several years, learn English, pay taxes and save lives."

Both things can be true. That is exactly the point: Jackson wants credit for a company that depends on legal immigration while running ads that treat immigration itself as the threat.

Who actually gets hurt

There are two sets of losers here, and they are not who the ads say they are.

The first is the nurses. People who sold everything to come here, took a job that paid less than the person working beside them, and were told leaving would cost them $41,832 and maybe their status.

The second is American nurses. Rachel Dempsey, a lawyer for the plaintiffs and associate director of the worker-rights firm Towards Justice, told CNN that hospitals like recruiting through staffing companies because those workers are typically paid less — which means American-trained nurses are competing against cheaper labor.

"It brings down wages for everybody," Dempsey said.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates there will be about 190,000 openings for registered nurses every year over the next decade. Somebody is going to fill them. The question is whether they get paid fairly — and Jackson's company has spent years on the wrong side of that question while he ran ads about the border.

The pattern

This is the third time in a month Rick Jackson has said one thing on the campaign trail while his businesses did another.

He said he would never do business with the state of Georgia — 21 days after one of his companies renewed a state contract.

He says being a billionaire makes him incorruptible — while spending close to $200 million of his own money to win the office. Through April, every other donor in Georgia combined had given his campaign about $280,000.

And now: he promises immigrants who break the law will be "deported or departed," while a company he owns was accused of using the threat of ICE to keep immigrant nurses from quitting.

Jackson is not the only Republican running on a hard line while depending on the workers he campaigns against. Texas Governor Greg Abbott wants "exactly zero" foreign-visa teachers in a state that employs more of them than any other. The rhetoric is for us. The workforce is for them.

Georgians vote on this in November. It is worth knowing which Rick Jackson would be governor.

Source

Georgia GOP candidate Rick Jackson faces an immigration scandal at his company — CNN, August 20, 2026. Photo: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images.

Rick Jackson Signed a New State Contract on July 22. Three Weeks Later He Said He'd Never Do Business With Georgia.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:35:56 +0000

Rick Jackson, the billionaire Republican running for governor of Georgia, has a line he uses when reporters ask about the roughly $1 billion his companies have collected from Georgia state agencies.

He says he'll unwind it.

On Wednesday, August 12, he said it again:

"I don't want even the appearance that there's ethics impropriety and all that. … I never will do business with the state of Georgia."

11Alive reports the second sentence was about what he would do as governor.

Twenty-one days earlier, his company had signed a new one.

The contract

On July 22, 2026, a subsidiary of Jackson Healthcare called Locum Tenens renewed its contract with the Georgia Department of Behavioral Health, 11Alive's Doug Richards reported. Locum Tenens supplies temporary healthcare workers to the agency.

State records show the agency has paid the company $17,903,044 since 2022.

One of the renewal documents carries Rick Jackson's own signature.

And here is the detail that turns an awkward coincidence into something worth paying attention to: the renewed contract runs to June 30, 2027. Georgia's next governor is sworn in that January. The contract was written to last a full six months into the term of the person Jackson is running to become.

If he wins, he takes office as the head of the executive branch — and his own company holds a live contract with an agency he now oversees.

"A continuation," says the campaign

Jackson's campaign didn't dispute any of it. A spokesman told 11Alive:

"This is a continuation of a service provided to the state since 2021. As Rick has said before: after he is elected he will unwind any business with the state and not seek any new contracts."

Read that carefully, because it's doing a lot of work.

"A continuation" — a renewal signed three weeks ago is a new signature on a new agreement with a new end date. It is not the same thing as an old contract running out on its own.
"After he is elected" — the unwinding happens later. Between now and then, the money keeps coming.
"Not seek any new contracts" — a renewal, apparently, is not a new contract.

Asked directly whether Jackson would keep providing the service under the new agreement, the spokesman would only repeat that he'd "unwind any contracts he has with the state as governor."

That's a promise about the future being used to answer a question about what he did last month.

To be clear: this is legal

There is no law stopping a candidate for governor from doing business with the state. Jackson hasn't broken a rule.

That's exactly why it matters. He isn't being accused of doing something illegal. He's being measured against his own standard — the one he set himself, on a stage, in front of Georgia voters, three weeks after the signature.

His Democratic opponent, former Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, put it plainly at an event in Cobb County:

"He says he's going to dial back his business with the state, but my understanding is that just last week, he got another contract from the state. So don't just say it. Do it."

The pattern

This isn't the first time Jackson's public position and his private ledger have pointed in opposite directions.

His companies have been paid nearly $1 billion by Georgia state agencies since fiscal 2020, including about $709 million in federal pandemic money under a contract Georgia Health News described as sole-source, and whose bidding opportunity does not appear in the state's public database of contracting opportunities.
He owns part of a data center — and then told Georgia's business leaders that data centers should pay no property taxes.
He says he can't be bought, while spending $187 million of his own money to buy the governor's office.
He lent a bankrupt hospital $35 million at 14% interest and called it "venture philanthropy".

The through-line is not that Jackson is dishonest about money. It's that he keeps describing arrangements that benefit him as something other than what they are — a no-bid contract as normal business, a high-interest loan as charity, a renewal signed in July as a continuation of something from 2021.

What Georgians should ask

Georgia's Department of Behavioral Health serves people in mental health crisis and people fighting addiction. It is chronically stretched. The temporary staffing it buys is not a luxury — it's how understaffed facilities keep the lights on.

The question isn't whether Locum Tenens should provide those workers. It's whether the man who owns Locum Tenens should also be the man who appoints the commissioner of the agency buying them, sets that agency's budget, and signs off on the next contract.

Jackson says he'll fix that after the election. He had a chance to fix it on July 22, and instead he signed.

Georgia deserves a governor whose promises are kept before the votes are counted, not after.

Source

Despite pledge to 'unwind' his business, Rick Jackson extends a state contract — Doug Richards, 11Alive, August 18, 2026.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bill Is Three Phrases Long

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

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

", and individuals applying for or receiving,"

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

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

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

That limit is exactly what the bill removes.

These Teams Are Already Very Good at the Job They Have

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who's Behind It

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

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

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

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

Their Argument, and the Numbers Under It

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

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

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

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

Now Put That Next to What They Did to Medicaid

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

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

So hold the two numbers side by side:


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

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

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

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

What It Would Feel Like to You

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is actually being taken away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And TSA screeners got the same treatment

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

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

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

The House had a bill to end it permanently

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

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

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

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

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

The 20 Republicans who voted yes

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

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

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

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

The 195 who voted no

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

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

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

Colorado — Lauren Boebert, Jeff Crank, Jeff Hurd

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

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

Idaho — Russ Fulcher, Mike Simpson

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mary Miller

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

Iowa — Ashley Hinson

Kansas — Ron Estes, Tracey Mann, Derek Schmidt

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

Minnesota — Tom Emmer, Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach

Mississippi — Mike Ezell, Michael Guest, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Mike Flood, Adrian Smith

New York — Nick Langworthy, Claudia Tenney

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Mike Kennedy, Celeste Maloy, Blake Moore

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

The Senate has done nothing for eight months

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

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

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

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

This is not a fringe position they're protecting

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

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

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

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

We deserve better.

How they voted

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two of them were sworn in before Reagan was inaugurated

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

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

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

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

Here is the part that should end the argument.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why they don't leave: eleven of thirteen gavels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ones who won't even stand in a room

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

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

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

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

And then there's Grassley

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

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

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

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

This was supposed to be a job you leave

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the state parties wrote down

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

Another section goes after surrogacy directly:

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

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

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

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

The SAFE KIDS Act

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who signed it

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

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

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

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

The part they don't put in the press release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why surrogacy, and why now

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

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

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

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

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

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

What this costs real people

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

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

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

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

Source

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

Six Georgia Republicans Voted for the Budget Bill. Now the State Says It Can't Afford Kemp's Medicaid Program Because of It.

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 10:42:46 +0000

Georgia's Board of Community Health met on Thursday and said, in effect: the federal government broke our Medicaid program, and we need the federal government to pay for it.

The federal government, in this case, is a law that six of Georgia's own Republicans in Congress voted for.

What Georgia is asking for

Georgia is one of ten states that never fully expanded Medicaid. Instead, Gov. Brian Kemp built Pathways to Coverage — a partial expansion that covers adults earning up to 100% of the federal poverty level (about $15,960 for a single adult) only if they complete 80 hours a month of work, school or community service. When it launched in 2023, it made Georgia the only state in the country with a work requirement for its newly covered enrollees.

Pathways covers about 20,000 people.

Now the state wants Washington to raise its federal match from roughly 67% to 90% — the rate reserved for states that fully expand Medicaid. Stuart Portman, who runs the Department of Community Health's division of medical assistance plans, explained why:

"The federal government fundamentally reshaped the operational and financial realities of Georgia's waiver. Therefore, we ask that the federal government also provide the enhanced match necessary to make that expansion viable."

What reshaped it? The new federal Medicaid eligibility rules in Trump's tax break and spending cuts package — the budget bill passed last year. Those rules take effect next year, and they require Georgia to widen its exemptions well past the single one it has now. Today the only way out of the work requirement is being the parent of a child under 6. The federal rules add parents of children under 13, people formerly in foster care, and people who are medically frail.

Georgia's own projections say those exemptions will add about 100,000 people to the rolls. And in its public notice, the state wrote that "Georgia does not have the financial capacity to fund this expanded scope without additional federal dollars."

Read that sentence again. It's the state of Georgia saying it cannot afford the law its congressional delegation voted for.

Who voted for it

On July 3, 2025, the House passed H.R. 1 by 218 to 214. Every Georgia Republican in the chamber voted yes. Six of them are people we track:

Rick Allen (GA-12)
Andrew Clyde (GA-9)
Mike Collins (GA-10, now running for U.S. Senate)
Brian Jack (GA-3)
Rich McCormick (GA-7)
Austin Scott (GA-8)

Two votes the other way and it is a 216-216 tie, which fails. Any two.

None of them have to answer for the state budget hole now, because the request for money is coming from Atlanta, not Washington. That's the trick of a bill like this — Congress writes the rule, and the state gets handed the bill and the blame.

Allen said this wouldn't happen

Rick Allen, who chairs the House Education and Workforce Committee's Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions, told a reporter last year that the health cuts wouldn't touch Georgia at all — because Georgia never expanded Medicaid in the first place. When a hospital CEO in his own district said the bill would cost him his ICU, Allen said the CEO was "dead wrong."

KFF's allocation of the law's Medicaid cuts puts Georgia's share at $7.32 billion in lost federal Medicaid funding over ten years, about 6% of what Washington would otherwise have spent on Georgia's program.

Georgia's Department of Community Health has now filed a public notice saying the federal changes make the state's program financially unsustainable. That is the state's own health agency, under a Republican governor, contradicting the claim.

The cheaper option nobody wants to say out loud

There is a way for Georgia to get the 90% match. It's the way every other state got it.

Leah Chan, director of health justice at the left-leaning Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, laid it out:

"Georgia already tried this tactic in 2019 under the Trump administration, and it failed. But I think what we do know is that the temporary federal approval for Pathways expires in December. So rather than wasting our time pursuing dead ends, we could simply just raise the Pathways income eligibility limit from 100% to 138% of the federal poverty level and pull down the enhanced 90% match authorized under the Affordable Care Act."

She's right about 2019, too. Georgia asked the first Trump administration for the enhanced match without full expansion, and HHS said no — the 90% rate goes to states covering people up to 138% of the poverty line, about $22,025 for a single adult. Georgia is asking the same administration the same question again.

Kemp's office is careful about the framing. Spokesperson Annalise Morning said "the waiver modification is NOT a Medicaid expansion for Georgia," but rather something to "preserve the long-term sustainability of Georgia Pathways."

So the state wants expansion money at expansion rates without calling it expansion, from an administration that already refused once.

What's actually at stake

Pathways' temporary federal approval expires in December. A request to run it through 2030 is still pending.

Under Trump's budget bill, KFF projects 150,000 more Georgians without health insurance by 2034 — and 500,000 more if the enhanced ACA premium tax credits are also allowed to expire. A separate Georgia-specific analysis by Manatt Health lands in the same place: 492,000 Georgians "projected to lose health coverage and become uninsured by 2034". Both figures count people added to the uninsured, on top of the Georgians who are already without coverage — they are not the size of the uninsured population.

Whitney Griggs, director of health policy at Georgians for a Healthy Future — a patient advocacy group that supports full Medicaid expansion — summed up the state's posture in one line: "What I'm getting from this is: 'We'd like to continue Pathways as is.'"

Meanwhile, Natalie Crawford of the bipartisan group Georgia First questioned whether doubling down is even fiscally responsible compared to full expansion, which "maximizes available federal dollars, further reduces the number of uninsured Georgians and better strengthens our healthcare system."

You can say something about it

Georgians can comment on the proposed waiver changes in writing through Sept. 14. There's a virtual public hearing on Aug. 19 at 11 a.m. and an in-person hearing at the Department of Community Health's board room at 12:30 p.m. on Aug. 24.

The six members of Congress who voted for the law creating this problem are not on the agenda at either one. They should be.

Source

Alander Rocha, "Georgia officials say new federal Medicaid rules threaten state's partial expansion program," Georgia Recorder, Aug. 14, 2026. Photo: the_burtons/Getty Images, via Georgia Recorder.

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

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

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

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

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

What the judge did

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

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

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

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

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

What the letter asks for

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

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

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

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

The man who led it sells the products

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

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

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

Who signed

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

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

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

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

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

What registration was actually doing

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

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

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the gloves are

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

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

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

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

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

The warnings come from the company that sells them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congress wrote guardrails. They were about equipment.

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

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

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

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

Two votes made this possible

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

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

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

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

The 201 with report cards on this site

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

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

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

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

Source

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

More Than 50 Black Georgia Lawmakers Asked Mike Collins to Explain Himself. All He Has Said Is 'No One Speaks for Me.'

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:27:38 +0000

For weeks, the question about Mike Collins was whether he would say anything at all.

Now he has. And what he said is worth reading closely, because it is a careful non-answer to a question nobody actually asked him.

On August 11, 2026, the Georgia Recorder reported that more than 50 Black Georgia state lawmakers had signed a statement condemning Collins — the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate — over what the statement calls his "extensive ties to white nationalists." The signers are not activists or opposing campaign staff. They are sitting members of the Georgia General Assembly.

Their central complaint was not the ties themselves. It was that Collins had never explained them.

"We condemn the Georgia congressman and urge our Republican state legislators to join us in demanding answers for his extensive ties to white nationalists."

State Sen. Nikki Merritt, a Grayson Democrat who leads the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus, put it plainly: "I signed this letter because these are some really concerning allegations. We're talking about ties to people who promote white nationalism, just hate and racist propaganda, and these are targeted specifically at Black people and minorities."

Collins' campaign did not respond to the Recorder's requests for comment.

What he actually said

Collins was asked about his son-in-law at an event in Athens the week before. Here is his answer:

"No one speaks for me, and I don't speak for anyone else. I condemn all forms of antisemitism. I don't care what the source is. Any type of hate, I condemn, period. That's not who I am."

He then pointed to his voting record supporting Israel's military, and said his son-in-law has never been part of his campaign.

Count what is missing. He does not name David Alan Scheer II. He does not say whether he has spoken to him. He does not address the chief of staff he replaced. He does not address the video he himself reposted. He condemns "all forms of antisemitism" in the abstract — a statement no one would dispute — and moves on.

"No one speaks for me" answers a charge nobody made. Nobody claimed Scheer speaks for Collins. The charge is that Collins has spent years surrounded by this and has never once drawn a line.

The three things he did not address

His son-in-law. In July, CNN's KFile documented that Scheer, married to Collins' daughter, promotes white nationalist ideology to an audience of more than 1.5 million followers across TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Telegram. We went through that reporting in detail — the Patriot Front posts, the Nazi propaganda imagery, the "Jewish Bolsheviks" video. The Recorder reviewed his accounts too, and found posts claiming Jews control the media and are responsible for the death of Jesus. In one video posted in November 2025, Scheer said: "All we're told is Germany bad, Hitler evil. Don't ask questions. Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust."

His chief of staff. A May 28 Slate report found that Kip Talley, then Collins' chief of staff, took part in a group chat with white supremacists, where he documented efforts to help an associate who had been jailed for contempt. The man Talley was trying to help had minimized the Holocaust and argued that non-white people were genetically predisposed to violence. Talley said he acted on his own: "I was simply trying to help a suffering inmate connect with counsel. I did not act at the direction of Rep. Collins, use official resources, or coordinate with anyone else in the group chat."

Collins replaced Talley last month. That was the second chief of staff he lost — the previous one was under congressional investigation over campaign funds and had used a Collins campaign account to mock a woman who said she was raped.

The video he posted himself. This is the one that cannot be blamed on anybody else. In 2024, Collins reposted footage of a pro-Palestinian demonstration at Ole Miss in which white counterprotesters mocked a Black demonstrator — one of them imitating a monkey. Collins captioned it: "Ole Miss taking care of business."

After the blowback, he wrote that he had meant to elevate the reaction to the protests, not the behavior in the video, and that he now recognized "there certainly seems to be some potentially inappropriate behavior that none of us should seek to glorify."

That is not a staffer's post. That is not an in-law's post. That is Mike Collins' own account, his own caption, and a walk-back that still would not use the word racist.

Why Georgia Republicans are being asked to sign too

The most pointed line in the legislators' statement is the one aimed at their own colleagues: they urged "our Republican state legislators to join us."

That is a test, and so far it is going unanswered. Collins is not a fringe candidate — he is the Republican nominee for a U.S. Senate seat, with Donald Trump's endorsement, running against Sen. Jon Ossoff in November.

It is also not only Democrats who have noticed. Former Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona and the Republican mayors of Valdosta and Tifton have all crossed party lines to endorse Ossoff. Gov. Brian Kemp backed Collins' primary opponent, arguing that Collins' record and history of controversial statements on social media could harm him in a general election.

The Center for Politics' Sabato's Crystal Ball recently moved Georgia's Senate rating from "leans Democratic" to "likely Democratic."

The pattern is the point

Any one of these could be a coincidence. A relative with ugly views. A staffer in a bad group chat. A repost that landed wrong.

The reason 50 lawmakers signed a statement is that it keeps happening, and the response is always the same shape: a general condemnation of hate, a pivot to his record on Israel, and no engagement with the specific thing he is being asked about.

Georgians asking Mike Collins what he believes have gotten one sentence: "That's not who I am." They are still waiting to hear who he is.

Source

Four dozen Black Georgia lawmakers press Collins on alleged 'white nationalist' ties by Ross Williams, Georgia Recorder, August 11, 2026. Photo: Ross Williams/Georgia Recorder.

Clay Fuller Wrote a Bill to Execute People for Crimes the Supreme Court Already Said You Can't Execute People For

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:33:59 +0000

On June 4, 2026 — seven weeks after being sworn into Congress — Clay Fuller introduced a bill called the Millstone Act.

It is short, and it does one thing, over and over: it takes federal criminal statutes and inserts the words "punished by death."

Nobody wants to defend people who hurt children. That is exactly why a bill like this is worth reading closely instead of nodding at the title. So let's read it.

What the bill actually does

The text of H.R. 9146 is a list of amendments to title 18 of the U.S. Code. Each one adds the death penalty to an existing offense. Here is the list, in the bill's own order:

Female genital mutilation — currently up to 10 years. Fuller's bill: "punished by death or imprisonment for any term of years or for life."
Civil rights offenses involving sexual misconduct — death added to four of the penalty provisions in 18 U.S.C. § 250(b), none of which requires that the victim died.
Sex trafficking of children — death inserted.
Sexual abuse of a minor — currently "imprisoned not more than 15 years." Fuller's bill strikes that and inserts "punished by death or imprisonment for any term of years or for life."
Abusive sexual contact — a touching offense. Death.
Sexual exploitation of children — the entire penalty subsection is rewritten so that anyone who "violates, or attempts or conspires to violate" it "shall be fined under this title and punished by death or imprisonment for any term of years or for life."
Selling or buying of children — death.
Material involving the sexual exploitation of minors — the whole penalty rewritten to death for anyone who violates, attempts, or conspires.
Material constituting or containing child pornography — same rewrite, same sentence.
Coercion and enticement — death.
Transportation of minors — death.

Read that list again. Not one of those crimes requires that anyone died.

And two of them are possession offenses. 18 U.S.C. § 2252A covers, among other things, knowingly possessing or accessing illegal images — an offense that today carries a maximum of 10 years, or 20 in aggravated cases. Fuller's bill deletes that entire penalty scheme and replaces it with a single sentence ending in "death or imprisonment for any term of years or for life."

A crime that is a ten-year sentence today would become a capital crime. The bill also extends the death penalty to attempts and conspiracies.

The Supreme Court settled this in 2008

This is not a close constitutional question, and it is not new.

In Kennedy v. Louisiana, decided in 2008, the Supreme Court held — in the words of the syllabus — that "The Eighth Amendment bars Louisiana from imposing the death penalty for the rape of a child where the crime did not result, and was not intended to result, in the victim's death."

The Court drew the line at death. Capital punishment is reserved for crimes where the victim was killed or the defendant intended to kill. The Death Penalty Information Center's summary of the case puts the vote at 5–4.

Fuller's bill runs headlong into that holding on every single line. Not one of the eleven offenses it makes capital requires a death.

He is not the first to try. Since Kennedy, Florida, Tennessee, Idaho, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama and Mississippi have all passed state laws doing something similar, on the open theory that a differently constituted Supreme Court might overrule the precedent. The Florida bill says so on its face: it declares that Kennedy was "wrongly decided and that such cases are an egregious infringement of the states' power to punish the most heinous crimes." Ron DeSantis put it in his own words at a news conference — "I believe that that precedent was wrong. We do not believe the Supreme Court in its current iteration would uphold it."

That is the strategy: pass a law you know is unconstitutional today and hope the Court changes its mind.

The part that makes this his

Plenty of members of Congress introduce bills they haven't read. Clay Fuller read this one. He wrote it.

Fuller's own House biography says he "served as the District Attorney for the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit," that he was "the top prosecutor for the region," and that he "secured convictions in numerous jury trials, including murder, rape, and armed robbery, resulting in life sentences for the perpetrators." It adds that he "has argued criminal cases before the Supreme Court of Georgia and the Court of Appeals of Georgia," and that he is a lieutenant colonel and Deputy Staff Judge Advocate in the Air National Guard.

So he is a career prosecutor who has stood in front of a state supreme court and argued about what the law permits. He knows what binding precedent is. He knows what the Eighth Amendment says. He knows that a sentence a court will strike down is not a sentence anyone will ever serve.

He wrote the bill anyway.

This is the same instinct we documented when he demanded at least five separate times that Anthony Fauci be jailed, and called a private citizen's use of the Fifth Amendment proof of guilt — and when he proposed amending the Constitution to bar naturalized Americans from serving as federal judges. The pattern is a lawyer who knows the rules using his office to perform contempt for them.

Then he wrote a second one

Twenty-six days later, on June 30, Fuller introduced the HONEST Act of 2026 — H.R. 9545, with no cosponsors.

It reaches the same statutes — female genital mutilation, the civil rights sexual misconduct penalties, sex trafficking — with one change. This version applies the death penalty specifically when the offender is "an officer of the United States or a Member of Congress."

Same non-fatal crimes. Same constitutional problem. He just added a category of defendant.

What this doesn't do

A sentence a court will strike down is not a sentence anyone serves. And the Millstone Act does not add a single investigator, a single prosecutor, or a single dollar to the agencies that actually find and charge people who abuse children. Every section of it changes the number at the end of a statute. That is the whole bill.

Fuller was the top prosecutor in a four-county circuit until January 12, 2026, when he resigned to run. He knows the difference between a charge that sticks and a headline.

Where it stands

Both bills were referred to the House Judiciary Committee and have gone no further. The Millstone Act picked up six cosponsors — Brian Babin, Rich McCormick, Randy Weber, Mike Collins, Keith Self and Tim Burchett. The HONEST Act got none.

Fuller has been in Congress since April 2026. In that time he has introduced a constitutional amendment to strip automatic citizenship from children born here to parents who are neither citizens nor permanent residents, a bill to bar non-citizens from federal benefits, a Congressional Gold Medal for Donald Trump, and two bills to expand the federal death penalty past the line the Supreme Court drew eighteen years ago.

Northwest Georgia's grocery prices, insurance premiums and hospital access are what they are. We deserve better.

Sources

The bill texts are the primary record: H.R. 9146, the Millstone Act, introduced June 4, 2026, and H.R. 9545, the HONEST Act of 2026, introduced June 30, 2026 — both on Congress.gov. The controlling precedent is Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008), syllabus via Cornell Legal Information Institute. Biography and legislative list from Fuller's own House website. Photo: Clay Fuller sworn in, 2026, via Wikimedia Commons.

Georgia Counted Its Ballots Three Times. Days Later, Austin Scott Signed a Brief Calling Them Unconstitutional.

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

There is a document with Austin Scott's name on it, filed at the Supreme Court of the United States, and you can read it yourself. It has a table of contents. Section III is titled, in full:

"THE USURPATION OF LEGISLATIVE POWER IN GEORGIA PRODUCED UNCONSTITUTIONAL BALLOTS."

Georgia. Not Pennsylvania, not Michigan, not Wisconsin — those got their own sections. Section III is about the state Austin Scott was elected to represent, and about the ballots his own constituents in Georgia's 8th District had filled out five weeks earlier.

Scott has been in Congress since 2011 and is the most senior Republican in Georgia's entire congressional delegation. The brief lists him individually, by name and district: "Amicus U.S. Representative Austin Scott represents the Eighth Congressional District of Georgia in the United States House of Representatives."

What Georgia had already done by the time he signed

This is the part that matters most, because it establishes what Scott knew when he signed.

November 19–20, 2020. Georgia completed a full hand tally of roughly five million ballots — an audit required under a new state law, not a response to any suspected problem. It affirmed Biden's lead, and the state certified the result.

December 2–3, 2020. A second recount — a full statewide machine recount, this one requested by the Trump campaign — ran to its midnight deadline.

December 6, 2020. Georgia's Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, went on ABC's This Week and told George Stephanopoulos: "We've never found systemic fraud — not enough to overturn the election."

The same day, Georgia's Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and Republican lieutenant governor, Geoff Duncan, refused Trump's demand that they call a special legislative session to appoint a different slate of electors. Their joint statement: "The judicial system remains the only viable — and quickest — option in disputing the results of the November 3rd election in Georgia."

December 7, 2020. Raffensperger recertified. Biden won Georgia by 11,779 votes. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that day, Raffensperger said: "We have now counted legally cast ballots three times, and the results remain unchanged."

December 10–11, 2020. Austin Scott signed the brief.

Three days after his own state's Republican election chief announced the third count had changed nothing, Scott put his name on a filing asking the Supreme Court to treat Georgia's ballots as unconstitutional.

The brief names Georgia's Republican secretary of state as the violator

This wasn't vague hand-waving about "irregularities." The document Scott signed makes a specific accusation against a specific Georgia Republican:

"Georgia's Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, violated Article II of the U.S. Constitution when he usurped legislative power by purporting to issue procedures that were in direct conflict with Georgia's Legislative Acts governing the choosing of electors."

That is the sitting secretary of state of Scott's own state, elected as a Republican, accused in a Supreme Court filing of violating the Constitution — by a Georgia congressman of the same party, four days after that same official said under questioning on national television that there was no systemic fraud.

The lawsuit Scott was supporting was brought by the state of Texas against Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Read that again: a Georgia member of Congress signed a brief supporting another state's lawsuit against Georgia.

The Supreme Court threw it out on December 11, 2020, the day after it landed, holding that Texas lacked standing — it had no legally recognizable interest in how other states run their elections.

The letter he signed a month later says the quiet part

Scott's usual defense is that he didn't join the January 6 objections to the electoral count, and that's true. On January 5, 2021, he signed a letter to House leadership — hosted on his own congressional website — laying out why Congress had no role:

"Congress has only a narrow role in the presidential election process. Its job is to count the electors submitted by the states, not to determine which electors the states should have sent."

Credit where it's due: that is the correct constitutional reading, and it took some nerve to write it down on January 5, 2021.

But read the rest of the letter, because it does not say the election was fine. It opens by declaring the signers "outraged at the significant abuses in our election system resulting from the reckless adoption of mail-in ballots," says the elections in six battleground states "raise profound questions," and complains that Congress had held only one hearing on election integrity.

And then it points at a different door:

"Of the six states as to which questions have been raised, five have legislatures that are controlled by Republicans, and they all have the power to send a new slate of electoral votes to Congress if they deem such action appropriate under state law."

Georgia is one of those states, and Georgia's legislature is Republican-controlled. So the letter isn't a defense of Georgia's result. It's an argument that Congress shouldn't overturn it — combined with a note that Republican state legislatures still could.

Scott signed that on January 5. Georgia's Republican governor and lieutenant governor had publicly said one month earlier that a legislature retroactively naming its own electors would be unconstitutional and immediately blocked by the courts. Scott's letter treats it as an open option anyway.

He isn't the only one, but those were Georgia's ballots

126 House Republicans signed that brief, and this site has written about several of them. Mississippi's Michael Guest signed it, voted to reject two states' electors, and then told a Jackson TV station in February 2021 that "we were never presented evidence to show that the voter irregularity, the voter fraud was substantial enough that the elections should be overturned" — after he'd already voted to throw those states' ballots out.

What separates Scott from most of the 126 is whose votes he was asking the Court to void. A congressman from Alabama or Tennessee signing that brief was asking the Court to throw out someone else's ballots. Austin Scott was asking it to throw out Georgia's — the same ballots his own constituents had cast in the same election that returned him to Congress. He asked a court to declare his own voters' ballots unconstitutional, and he did it after his own party's state officials had counted them three times and told him they were fine.

There is nowhere to ask him about it

If a voter in Warner Robins wanted to ask Austin Scott why he signed a brief attacking Georgia's ballots, there is no room to do it in.

Scott hasn't held a public town hall in his district since 2015 — and that one was only for veterans. In March 2025, close to 200 constituents came to his district office anyway, put a blue blazer on an empty folding chair, and asked their questions to it. Nobody from his office came outside.

He is now running for a ninth term.

Every piece of this is on the public record, in his own filings, on his own website. The brief is on the Supreme Court's docket. The letter is on austinscott.house.gov. The counts are certified by a Republican secretary of state who said out loud, three days before Scott signed, that nothing had changed.

Georgia voters counted their ballots three times. Their most senior Republican congressman signed a document calling them unconstitutional anyway. He has never had to answer a single question about it from the people who cast them.

Source

The primary documents: Texas v. Pennsylvania — amicus brief of 126 House Republicans, including Austin Scott (U.S. Supreme Court, December 2020), and the January 5, 2021 letter to House leadership posted on Scott's own House website. Photo: official House portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

Andrew Clyde Begged FEMA for Disaster Money in March. He Wrote the Bill That Would Let the President Keep It.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:39:00 +0000

On March 19, 2026, Andrew Clyde sent a letter to the acting head of FEMA about Winter Storm Fern, which had hammered Northeast Georgia in late January. It's a good letter. He'd walked the damage himself in White, Habersham and Rabun counties, and he laid out the numbers in detail.

"The damage caused by Winter Storm Fern is simply beyond the capacity of these counties' budgets to address alone. This burden is compounded by the economic vulnerability of these communities, as the majority of the affected counties are rural and have poverty rates above the national average… They have made clear to me that without additional federal assistance, a full and timely recovery will not be possible."

Habersham County came in at $7,223,461 in eligible damage — nearly 32 times the level FEMA treats as the outer limit of what a county can absorb on its own. White County was 35 times over. Rabun County, more than 20 times.

He closed by promising: "I will use every tool available to me as a Member of Congress to advocate in a fiscally responsible way for the resources Northeast Georgians need and deserve."

Here is one of the tools he's already used.

H.R. 1180

On February 11, 2025, Clyde introduced H.R. 1180. The whole bill is contained in its title: "To repeal the Impoundment Control Act of 1974."

The Impoundment Control Act is the law that says when Congress appropriates money, the president has to spend it. If he wants to cancel some, he has to send Congress a formal request, and Congress has to agree. It's a 1974 Nixon-era law — the response to a president who decided on his own that money Congress had approved wasn't going out the door.

Clyde wants it gone. When he and Sen. Mike Lee first introduced the repeal in December 2024, Clyde called the 1974 law "unconstitutional" and said rolling it back is "one of the most effective ways Congress can help President Trump in the fight to deliver the spending cuts and government efficiency that the American people overwhelmingly voted for."

He was blunter to Fox News Digital when he reintroduced it: "I think it goes hand in hand with what DOGE is doing right now and with what the president has in mind to do, and that is to make our government more effective and more efficient."

That's not a technical claim about budget procedure. It says out loud what the bill is for: making it easier for one man to decide that money Congress appropriated doesn't get spent.

Which includes FEMA money

This isn't a hypothetical. The Government Accountability Office — Congress's own nonpartisan watchdog, not a partisan outfit — has been investigating whether the administration is withholding money it was ordered to spend. It has found violations of the Impoundment Control Act again and again: at Head Start, at NIH, at the Institute of Museum and Library Services, at the Department of Energy. GAO publishes every one of those decisions.

And twice at FEMA. In a decision issued September 29, 2025, GAO found that FEMA had illegally withheld money from three programs, including $117 million from the Emergency Food and Shelter Program and nearly the entire 2022–2024 appropriation for FEMA's Next Generation Warning System.

GAO's finding:

"Currently available evidence indicates that FEMA has violated the ICA by improperly withholding, delaying, or effectively precluding the obligation or expenditure of budget authority."

That's the law Clyde wants repealed. It is the only law that made those findings possible. Take it off the books and FEMA withholding disaster money isn't a violation anymore — it's just a decision, and nobody in Habersham County gets a vote in it.

He is on both committees this runs through

Clyde is not a bystander to appropriations. By his own biography, he "currently serves on the House Appropriations and Budget Committees." H.R. 1180 was referred to the Budget Committee — the one he sits on.

So the job description is: decide how federal money gets spent. And the bill he wrote would make that decision advisory.

If Congress can't compel the money to move, then an appropriations bill is a suggestion. Clyde's own FEMA letter is an argument for why federal dollars have to reach four rural Georgia counties that can't cover the cost themselves. His bill is an argument for why the president shouldn't have to send them.

Both of those are his.

The pattern

This isn't the first time Clyde has treated the machinery that protects his own constituents as the enemy.

When Sen. Raphael Warnock warned Georgia seniors that DOGE had flagged Social Security offices in the state for lease termination, Clyde took DOGE's own denial as the answer and went after Warnock — "Senator Warnock has peddled lies and fearmongered Georgia seniors long enough" — calling the criticism part of a campaign to "distort the Administration's work."

Meanwhile, in March 2025, more than 100 Northeast Georgia residents turned out on the Gainesville square outside his district office asking him to hold a town hall. Ten days later, about 50 came back, chanting "why do you hide Andrew Clyde" — and asking, specifically, what DOGE was doing to the Social Security office in Gainesville.

He is not alone in the trade-off he's making. Ohio's Troy Balderson told a room of business leaders in February 2025 that "Not the president, not Elon Musk. Congress decides." — and his office walked it back within a day. The difference is that Balderson at least said the right thing once. Clyde wrote the bill.

We deserve better

Everything in Clyde's FEMA letter is true. Rural counties really can't absorb a $7 million hit. Federal disaster money really is the difference between a full recovery and a partial one. He was right to write it, and Northeast Georgia should get the declaration.

But you can't spend a year arguing that the president should be free to ignore what Congress appropriates, and then send a letter asking that same president's agency, please, to spend what Congress appropriated.

Congress holds the purse. That's Article I, and it's the only real leverage a member from a rural district has when his counties need help. Andrew Clyde put his name on a bill to give it away.

Sources

Rep. Clyde Urges FEMA to Recommend Major Disaster Declaration for Northeast Georgia After Winter Storm Fern — Office of Rep. Andrew Clyde, March 19, 2026.
Rep. Andrew Clyde seeks disaster declaration in wake of Winter Storm Fern — The Gainesville Times, March 19, 2026. Photo: Scott Rogers / The Gainesville Times.

A Convicted January 6 Rioter Asked Mike Collins if Taxpayers Should Pay Him. Collins Said "That's Easy. Yes."

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:24:55 +0000

At a breakfast event in Savannah on August 11, a man convicted of two felonies for his part in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol stood up, introduced himself as a "non-violent Jan. 6-er from here in Savannah" and asked Georgia's Republican Senate nominee whether he would back the compensation fund, or some other form of relief, for himself and for anyone else harmed by a "weaponized political system."

Mike Collins answered without hesitation.

"When the federal government harms you, then yes, they have a liability too. That's easy. Yes."

The exchange was recorded and posted by the man who asked it, Dominic Box, on the morning of August 11. It spread from there. The Lincoln Project put the video in front of a national audience within hours.

Let it be known, Georgia GOP Senate candidate @MikeCollinsGA proudly supports Trump's $1.8 billion "weaponization" slush fund for January 6th insurrectionists. When asked if he supports it Mike says "that's easy, yes".

Share this with a Georgia voter you know today. pic.twitter.com/ZtVrasvfKA
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) August 11, 2026

The next day his campaign attempted to clarify it. Spokesperson Meyer Siegfried said Collins "fully supports holding the government accountable when federal agencies abuse their power and believes Americans who've been wronged by their government ought to have a path to seek justice," and added: "He does not support a blank-check fund or automatic taxpayer-funded payouts to anyone simply because they were prosecuted for January 6."

Read that carefully, because of what it doesn't do. It doesn't dispute a word of what Collins said. It denies support for a fund — and the fund had been formally killed eight days before he spoke. The payouts that are actually moving don't come from a fund. They come from the Judgment Fund and from claims filed one at a time, which is the machinery laid out below, and which a "blank-check fund" denial leaves entirely intact.

Jon Ossoff, the senator whose seat Collins is running for, wanted more than a clarification. "Yesterday, we heard Congressman Mike Collins unacceptably and disgustingly call for taxpayer-funded payouts to the violent thugs who ransacked the United States Capitol to try to overturn the 2020 election," he said. "Congressman Collins needs to immediately come out and publicly retract his support for these taxpayer-funded payouts to violent insurrectionists." What he got instead was a campaign that rejected Ossoff's framing — not the words Collins said.

Two things about that answer are worth slowing down for. The first is who was asking. The second is that Collins called "easy" a question that has torn his own party apart for three months.

The man asking the question stands to get paid

Dominic Box is not a curious voter who wandered into a town hall. He is a Savannah man who was convicted in October 2024 on two felony counts of civil disorder and four misdemeanors for what he did at the Capitol. He waived his right to a jury trial, turned down a plea deal, and was found guilty by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly. Federal surveillance images placed him on the Capitol's east stairs; he entered through the Senate wing door.

"Civil disorder" — the felony he was convicted of twice — is the federal crime of acting "to obstruct, impede, or interfere with any fireman or law enforcement officer lawfully engaged in the lawful performance of his official duties incident to and during the commission of a civil disorder." It carries up to five years in prison.

He remains proud of it. In an August 2024 update, he wrote: "To this day, I remain fully confident and proud of my decision to attend the events of that day…" His X biography today reads "Guerrilla Journalist" and "J6 Survivor." In his own post about the Savannah exchange, he described himself in the third person as the "Savannah Insurrectionist."

So when Collins said the government "has a liability," he was saying it to a man who would personally collect. Box understood exactly what he had gotten. He called the moment "HISTORIC" and claimed Collins had become the first U.S. Senate candidate to go on the record backing payouts — his characterization, not a verified fact, but he was clear about what he thought he'd won: "Now the pressure is on every other candidate."

What Collins actually said yes to

The "liability" Collins was talking about is real money, and it comes with a story most Georgians haven't heard.

Trump sued the IRS for $10 billion over a 2019 leak of his tax information. He then settled that lawsuit — a lawsuit against the federal government — with officials he had appointed himself. In exchange for dropping the claim, the government created a $1.776 billion "anti-weaponization" fund, a number chosen to echo 1776. The settlement also handed Trump, his sons Don Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization immunity from tax audits and enforcement tied to that leaked information. A federal judge in Florida said in a July 13 order that the arrangement amounted to using the presidency to "manipulate" the courts. We laid the whole thing out when it blew up in Washington a week before Collins spoke.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress in June that the Justice Department was "not moving forward" with the fund, after Republicans balked and refused to vote on an unrelated ICE and Border Patrol funding bill until it was dealt with. Trump said that same week that he didn't know whether the fund was dead or just on hold, but called it "a beautiful thing" that he loved.

And killing the fund doesn't kill the payouts. The Justice Department still has the Judgment Fund — a bottomless pot of Treasury money for settling claims against the government, with no appropriation from Congress required. Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, the department's number three official, said publicly that he already had the authority "to settle any claim that is brought against the United States of America."

The line is forming. Roughly 400 pardoned January 6 participants are already seeking compensation from the federal government, most asking for $1 million to $10 million each. One Florida attorney told ABC News he has already filed claims for about 200 clients and expects to file for 200 more. The government has already paid just under $5 million to the family of Ashli Babbitt.

That's the bill Collins says Georgians have a "liability" for.

"That's easy" — except it wasn't easy for anyone else in his party

Here is the part that should stick with Georgia voters. Mike Collins is describing as obvious a question that Republicans in Washington have been fighting over since May.

Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina called it "stupid on stilts," and Rep. Mike Flood of Nebraska said in the same reporting: "I do not think one penny of any fund should ever go to any January 6 insurrectionist that was in the Capitol on January 6, 2021."
Sen. John Cornyn of Texas joined Tillis in refusing to advance Blanche's nomination for attorney general until the fund was formally ended in writing — stalling Trump's pick to run the Justice Department over exactly this question. The two of them got that order on August 3, 2026, eight days before Collins spoke in Savannah.
Sen. Susan Collins of Maine spent a May 19 Justice Department budget hearing pressing Blanche on whether any of it was even legal, asking what "the legal basis for those decisions" would be and whether the claims would ever be publicly reported.
On the Senate floor, Democrats tried to pass the No Rewards for January 6 Rioters Act by unanimous consent on May 21. Sen. Tommy Tuberville objected, and it went nowhere.

Senators in both parties spent three months treating this as one of the hardest questions in front of them — hard enough to stall an attorney general and jam up an immigration bill. A Republican Senate nominee looked at the same question and said it took no thought at all.

The people who don't get a check

More than 140 police officers were injured defending the Capitol on January 6. Former Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell was dragged into the crowd by his shoulder straps and nearly suffocated, and still has shoulder and foot injuries. Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges was crushed between heavy doors and beaten in the head while calling for help.

Hodges is one of the officers suing the Trump administration to stop the fund, alongside former Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn.

Former Capitol Police Officer Winston Pingeon, who was attacked and knocked to the ground that day, put it simply: "The pardons erased what little justice there was."

Nobody has proposed a fund for them.

Collins has been rewriting January 6 for years

None of this came out of nowhere. On the fourth anniversary of the attack, Collins posted that "thousands of peaceful grandmothers gathered in Washington, D.C., to take a self-guided, albeit unauthorized, tour of the U.S. Capitol building." He called the rioters "peaceful protestors" who had been "hunted down, arrested, held in solitary confinement, and treated unjustly."

His 2022 campaign ad had him running through debunked Georgia voter-fraud claims with an AR-15 before shooting a ballot drop box to pieces.

Saying the rioters deserve money is not a departure for him. It is the logical last step of a story he has been telling for four years: that nothing bad happened, and the only real victims were the people who did it.

He is not alone in the whitewashing. Rep. Pat Harrigan of North Carolina, a former Green Beret, called Trump's pardon of 1,500 January 6 defendants "leadership rooted in honesty and accountability". What Collins added in Savannah was the invoice.

Georgia has 42 people in this line

Federal prosecutors charged 42 Georgians in connection with the Capitol attack. Trump's clemency covered all of them.

If the payouts go forward at the numbers lawyers are asking for, a share of that money goes to Georgians — paid for by every other Georgian. Collins wants to represent all of them in the U.S. Senate. In Savannah, he told one of them, on camera, that the money should flow.

He didn't ask a follow-up question. He didn't distinguish between people who wandered in and people who beat police officers. He didn't mention the officers at all.

He said it was easy.

It isn't. And a senator who thinks it is has told us exactly who he plans to work for. We deserve better.

Source

Dominic Box, posted video and account of the exchange, X, August 11, 2026; video also circulated by The Lincoln Project. Reporting from the event and the reaction to it by Ross Williams, "'That's easy': Collins tells pardoned Jan. 6 defendant that government should pay wronged Americans," Georgia Recorder (August 12, 2026). Photo: official congressional portrait, 118th Congress, via Wikimedia Commons.