MAGA Report Cards — Illinois

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

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

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

The argument they signed is the part worth reading twice.

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

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

What the brief actually argues

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

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

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

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

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

Who signed it

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

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

Some of these names carry their own history

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the argument matters beyond this case

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

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

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

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

What the filing shows

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

Nobody is doing the thing the bill bans

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

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

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

This is control, not freedom

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

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

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

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

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

Two Republicans said no

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

The bill now goes to the Senate.

The choice they made

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

Every Republican we track who voted yes

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

Iowa: Ashley Hinson, Zach Nunn

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

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

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the SAVE America Act would actually do to voters

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

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

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

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

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

The emergency the resolution describes

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

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

It cites a federal investigation that charged four people.

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

What was actually in front of them that week

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

Outside the chamber:

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

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

In their own words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 189 who voted yes

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

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho — Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas — Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi — Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey — Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

The number nine is not in the Constitution

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

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

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

What they were actually voting on

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

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

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

The timing

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

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

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

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

Who pushed it

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who voted to freeze the Court

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey: Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The man who quit over this said so at the time

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

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

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

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

The 188 who voted yes

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

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

The four who voted no

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

How they voted

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

Qatar Paid for Claudia Tenney's World Cup Trip. On the Form Where She Had to Name Who Paid, She Wrote the Name of a Law Instead.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:33:45 +0000

In November 2022, eight members of the U.S. House flew to Qatar to watch the World Cup. The government of Qatar paid for all of it.

That is legal. The Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act lets members of Congress accept foreign-government-funded travel — the idea being that lawmakers meeting foreign officials is worth something, as long as everyone can see who paid. The whole arrangement rests on that last part. You take the trip, and then you write down on a public form who bought the ticket.

Claudia Tenney took the trip. On the form, she wrote: "Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act (MECEA) Trip."

That is the name of the statute. It is not the name of anybody who paid for anything.

What the other members wrote

The delegation was bipartisan and not small: Tenney, André Carson of Indiana, Lou Correa of California, Darin LaHood of Illinois, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, Eric Swalwell of California, and David Valadao of California.

Most of them filled out the same box with the actual answer. Their disclosures name Qatar directly — "Government of Qatar," "Embassy of Qatar," "State of Qatar (MECEA)." Steil and Valadao, both Republicans on the same plane, named it.

Two members didn't. Tenney listed only the statute. So did LaHood, whose entry reads simply "MECEA."

The House Ethics Committee's instruction is not ambiguous about which answer is correct. Members are told to provide the name of the sponsor or organization that actually paid for or provided the travel — and the Committee spells out that on a MECEA trip, the sponsoring entity is the government of the host country.

Here, the host country was Qatar.

Why naming the country is the whole point of the form

Strip away the acronym and this is simple. A foreign government spent money on eight American lawmakers. The public interest in knowing which foreign government is not a technicality — it is the only reason the disclosure exists.

A member of Congress who accepts a Qatari-funded trip and files a form that never says "Qatar" has satisfied the letter of showing up and defeated the purpose. Anyone searching those filings for the word "Qatar" would find six members. They would not find Tenney or LaHood.

The Daily News reported the discrepancy on August 26, 2026, after Tenney's Democratic opponent in New York's 24th District, Alissa Ellman, raised it.

Tenney's answer

Her spokesperson, Ashlie Walker, did not answer the questions about why the filing named a statute rather than a government. What came back instead was a complaint about the coverage — that the paper was writing about this rather than about what New Yorkers need.

That response is worth reading twice. The question was: why doesn't your disclosure say who paid? The answer was: why are you asking?

Ellman's own framing was that time doesn't erase it. "Does it matter if it was four years ago?" she said. "Four years ago, I think the economic problems were still here in NY-24. There are the same issues…" She said she wouldn't accept that kind of trip if elected, and that she'd rather spend what she earns in Congress in the district — on its hotels, its restaurants, its people.

The pattern this fits

For Tenney, the through-line is who she treats as her audience. She has pushed a bill that would let the Treasury Secretary strip a nonprofit of its tax status without showing evidence, and she proposed making Donald Trump's birthday a federal holiday. Her constituents in NY-24 are not the ones being served by any of it.

For LaHood, the pattern is the same shape in a different key: on the record one way and on the roll call the other. He told Peoria radio in May that the Iran war needed an "off ramp," then voted a month later against the resolution ordering U.S. forces out.

Neither of them broke a law by going to Qatar. What they did was decline to be plainly identifiable, on a public form, as people whose trip a foreign government bought — while six colleagues on the same trip managed it without difficulty.

The bottom line

The government of Qatar paid for eight members of Congress to attend the 2022 World Cup. Six of them named Qatar on the financial disclosure where House rules require members to identify who actually paid for the travel. Claudia Tenney listed only "Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act (MECEA) Trip," and Darin LaHood listed only "MECEA" — the statute that permits foreign-funded travel, not the government that funded it. The House Ethics Committee's own guidance says the sponsor on a MECEA trip is the host country's government. Asked why, Tenney's spokesperson criticized the news outlet for asking.

Source

"Ellman criticizes Tenney for Qatar-funded World Cup trip", The Daily News (Batavia), August 26, 2026.

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

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.

Darren Bailey Says He'll "Crack Down on Repeat Offenders." He Took $3,100 From a Registered Sex Offender and Prayed at His Church.

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:16:30 +0000

Darren Bailey wants to be governor of Illinois, and his campaign website tells you exactly what he thinks the job is. He is "committed to restoring law and order and making our neighborhoods safe again." He will "hold violent criminals accountable, crack down on repeat offenders, and stop policies that put politics ahead of public safety." And the closer: "Every family in Illinois deserves to feel safe in their homes, schools, and communities—and Darren Bailey will make sure they do."

On August 17, the Chicago Sun-Times reported who has been helping pay for that message.

The Donor

Victor D. Barr is a Rockford man who was convicted of aggravated criminal sexual abuse in the early 2000s. The victim was a girl who attended the public high school where Barr taught math.

He was required to register as a sex offender — his name, photo and address posted on a publicly accessible Illinois State Police database for the rest of his life. Not for five years. Not for ten. For life. That database is free, searchable by anyone with a web browser, and it exists precisely so that people can look someone up.

Barr is now a pastor at Rockford Faith Center.

Barr and his household have given money to Bailey's campaigns three separate times:

$2,000 in 2022, about a month before that year's election
$700 in April 2026
$400 in June 2026

That is $3,100 across two campaigns and four years, all of it recorded in the Illinois State Board of Elections database that every campaign in the state is required to file with.

And Then He Showed Up in Person

This is the part that makes "we didn't know" hard to hold onto.

In June 2026 — the same month as the $400 donation — Bailey attended a service at Rockford Faith Center, the church where Barr serves as pastor. The church posted about it on Facebook afterward: "Pastor Marla had the opportunity to pray over Darren Bailey and his wife."

So the sequence is a donation in April, a visit to the church in June, and another donation in June. A candidate for governor did not merely cash a check from a stranger. He went to the man's church.

The Response Came After the Phone Call

Bailey's campaign told the Sun-Times: "We did not know his background. ... We're going to find a charity and donate it. ... We're committed to making it right."

Notice what triggered that. Not an internal review. Not a staffer running the routine check that any campaign can run for free on a state database. A reporter called.

The campaign's explanation for the church visit was that Bailey goes to a lot of churches — that "we go to African American churches, major Protestant, nondenominational churches. ... He goes everywhere."

That may well be true. It is also not an answer to the question. The question is why a campaign that promises to "crack down on repeat offenders" never once, in four years and three donations, looked up a donor whose name sits on a public sex offender registry.

This Is Not the Only Time

The week before the Sun-Times story ran, Bailey spoke at the Signs & Wonders Christian conference in Rochelle, held August 9-12. LGBTQ Nation reported that he shared the bill with Richard Jones, a registered child sex offender who was charged with two counts of sexual assault against 15-year-old male victims in 1990 and 1997, according to the Missouri State Highway Patrol. In 1997 a court sentenced Jones to six years in prison.

Jones' website now describes his walk away "from sexual addiction and homosexuality," and says he "conducts ministry and teaches principles that redeem and restore those struggling in addictive bondage."

Two different men. Two different states. Two different sets of charges involving teenagers. One candidate for governor, standing next to both of them inside the space of a few months.

At some point "we did not know his background" stops being an explanation and starts being a description of how the operation runs.

The Part That Should Sting

Here is the detail that turns this from an embarrassing story into a genuinely ugly one.

Bailey runs a Christian private school. Its curriculum, per that same LGBTQ Nation report, states that "Gay people have no more claims to special rights than child molesters and rapists."

Sit with that. The school Bailey runs teaches children that gay people are comparable to child molesters — while Bailey himself takes money from a man convicted of sexually abusing his own student, and shares a conference stage with a man convicted of sexually assaulting teenage boys.

The comparison was never a moral standard. It was a weapon, and it was only ever pointed one direction.

A Pattern of Saying It Wasn't What It Looked Like

Illinoisans have seen this move from Bailey before. It follows a shape:

He compared abortion to the Holocaust, then, when Jewish groups objected, said Jewish leaders had told him he was right — and they said that wasn't true.
He took abortion off his campaign platform, then stood at an anti-abortion rally while his running mate called it a "sin against God."
Ninety minutes after the Highland Park massacre he told Illinoisans to "move on and celebrate" — then sued six months later to undo the gun law it produced.

Every time, the pattern is the same. Do the thing. Get caught. Explain that it wasn't really the thing.

What This Actually Costs Us

Illinois families are not asking for much here. They are asking that the person who wants to run the state's police, prisons, and child protection systems be able to do the single easiest safety check there is — typing a donor's name into a public database that the state built and maintains.

Bailey's whole pitch is that he is the one who takes public safety seriously and his opponents put "politics ahead of public safety." But when checking a donor might have cost him $3,100, nobody checked. The donations stood on the public record through two election cycles. It only became a problem when it became a headline.

A candidate who promises to protect your kids should be able to notice who is writing his checks.

Source

Darren Bailey took campaign money from sex offender who's now a pastor, went to service at his church — Chicago Sun-Times, The Watchdogs, August 17, 2026. Photo: Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times; Facebook.

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.

Mike Bost Says Trump's Tariffs Put "All 3,000 of Those People" Back to Work in Granite City. His Own Press Release Said 500.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:25:01 +0000

Ask a politician about tariffs in southern Illinois and you'll get Granite City. The U.S. Steel mill there is the local proof text for whether steel tariffs work.

Here is what Mike Bost told the Effingham Daily News on March 6, 2026:

"Because of Trump wisely using the 232 Tariffs, when he came back in six months after he was elected and used the 232 the way it was supposed to be used, all 3,000 of those people went back to work. So I think that they're a very appropriate tool to be used wisely, and I think that people need to understand that."

All 3,000 of those people went back to work. It's a clean, memorable number. It is also not what happened, and the best witness against it is Mike Bost.

His own press release said 500

On March 7, 2018, Bost's office put out a statement with this headline: "Bost Statement on Bringing 500 Jobs Back to Granite City Works."

The release says U.S. Steel would restart one of the plant's two blast furnaces, and that "the company anticipates calling back approximately 500 employees beginning this month." Bost, then co-chairman of the Congressional Steel Caucus, called it "a big victory for the hardworking steel families in Granite City."

Later in 2018 U.S. Steel restarted the second furnace and brought on about 300 more workers. Five hundred plus three hundred is eight hundred. It is not three thousand.

And then the furnaces went back down — with the tariffs still in place

This is the part the tariff story always skips.

The mill's first blast furnace has been idle since 2019 — about a year after U.S. Steel finished getting both furnaces running again, with the Section 232 tariffs fully in effect. The second — the "B" furnace Bost's press release was about — was temporarily idled in the fall of 2023, and as St. Louis Public Radio reported, that "quickly became indefinite," costing hundreds more jobs. For more than two years the plant made no steel at all — it just processed slabs shipped in from other mills.

The tariffs did not prevent any of that. They were there the whole time.

What the mill actually looked like the week he said it

Bost's interview ran on March 6, 2026. At that moment neither blast furnace was producing steel, and the mill was still hiring for a restart that had not happened yet. Following a December 2025 announcement by U.S. Steel, the company said it would need roughly 400 new employees to operate the furnace, and United Steelworkers Local 1899 president Craig McKey said a fully staffed mill would employ 1,200 to 1,300 people.

The furnace relit the weekend of March 28, 2026 — three weeks after his interview. St. Louis Public Radio reported that the restart put 1,110 employees to work with the company still hiring, and that the union would bring back about 450 positions in all, leaving the total closer to 1,300.

Thirteen hundred, if everything goes right, is a good day for Granite City. It is worth celebrating. It is still less than half of "all 3,000."

The restart wasn't the tariffs — and what's holding the mill open is a deal with a two-year clock

U.S. Steel did not credit Section 232 for the restart. It said it was reigniting the furnace due to customer demand. And what keeps the mill from going cold again is not a tariff either. It's the Nippon Steel purchase of U.S. Steel, finalized June 18, 2025.

Under the national security agreement attached to that sale, Nippon cannot close, idle, or sell Granite City Works before June 18, 2027 without presidential sign-off, with exceptions for a temporary idling or a force majeure event. That is a two-year protection, and it expires next summer.

So the honest version of the Granite City story is: customers wanted the steel, and the only thing standing between the plant and another shutdown is a legally binding open-for-two-years clause that runs out in June 2027. That's a much more precarious thing to tell steelworkers than "all 3,000 went back to work."

One more thing: it isn't his district

Granite City was in Illinois's 12th District when Bost put out that 2018 press release. It isn't now. After the 2022 redistricting, Granite City and most of the Metro East moved into the 13th District, represented by Democrat Nikki Budzinski — who issued the statement as the plant's congresswoman when the furnace restarted.

Bost is entitled to talk about a plant he once represented and worked on. But he's using it in 2026 to sell tariffs to voters in a district that doesn't include it, with a jobs number that his own office never claimed and that is more than twice what the mill will employ at full staffing.

Why the exaggeration matters here

Steel tariffs are not free. They protect the mills that make steel by raising the price for everyone who buys it — the manufacturers, farmers, and builders who are also Bost's constituents. Whether that trade is worth it is a real argument. "All 3,000 of those people went back to work" is not an argument; it's a number that ends one.

We wrote about a neighboring Indiana Republican who made the same pitch in Erin Houchin Wrote an Op-Ed Called 'Trump's Tariffs Are Reviving American Manufacturing.' Indiana Then Lost 9,148 Factory Jobs. The pattern is identical: pick the one plant that reopened, round the number up, and don't mention the years it sat cold.

Granite City deserves better than being a talking point. So do the people who have to decide whether to believe one.

Source

Marie Adamick, "US Rep. Mike Bost defends ICE, supports Iran war", Effingham Daily News, March 6, 2026, and "Granite City Works plans to produce steel again this weekend", St. Louis Public Radio, March 27, 2026.

"We Know That the Protestors Are Paid. There's Not a Question." Mike Bost's Evidence: Expensive Signs.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:23:12 +0000

In March 2026, Mike Bost gave a phone interview to the Effingham Daily News. Partway through, he made a claim about the people protesting ICE:

"We know that the protestors are paid. There's not a question … We know that from our United States intelligence, who's been supporting the groups. They've been involved with them for years because they like to cause chaos."

He added:

"Most of them, when you ask the protestors: 'What are you protesting?' They can scream 'ICE,' but they don't really know what ICE does."

The reporter, Marie Adamick, wrote down what he offered as the basis for it. Per the Effingham Daily News: "Certain protestors use more-expensive signs, leading Bost to believe they have some sort of financial backing."

Nicer signs, and unnamed intelligence he didn't identify. That is the whole case.

"There's not a question" is doing a lot of work

Notice the construction. Not "I suspect," not "I've heard reports." There's not a question. A member of Congress telling his constituents that a fact is settled, when the evidence he supplies for it is the production quality of poster board.

He named Minneapolis and Chicago as where this is happening. He did not name the intelligence agency, the report, the briefing, or the groups. He did not say who is paying, how much, or how anyone knows.

There is a reason this matters beyond one loose quote. Once you decide the people objecting to something are being paid, you no longer have to answer any of them.

Which is exactly what he does with his own constituents

Bost has represented Illinois's 12th District since 2015. He does not hold in-person town halls. He holds telephone town halls.

He explained why at the top of one of them on March 11, 2025, as WPSD Local 6 reported:

"We're now in a time when live town halls are being overrun by organized protests and partisan activist groups. When they are starting to crash these across the country, it doesn't help anyone."

Same idea, a year earlier: the people who show up aren't really constituents, they're an operation.

So look at who actually showed up. That night, more than 50 people stood outside his Murphysboro office. They have names, and the paper printed them.

Judy Ashby's Carbondale Positive Action Committee organized it — the fifth protest the group had held since Presidents Day. Her stated goal was building a local network: "The more we do that, the more we'll be on a solid foundation to really make a difference."

Bonnie Cotter didn't make her own sign — she carried one about DOGE. Her question for her congressman:

"Bost is not a person who serves his constituents. What are five things you did today for your constituents? Not your donors, not your party."

Karen Frailey is a Pope County resident who lived in Jackson County for more than 30 years. She had signed up for Bost's February telephone town hall and never got a call. Her point:

"He represents everybody here and everybody in the district, not just the people that think like him. For years I wouldn't call because I thought it didn't make a difference, but even if he and his staff don't think the same way I do, they need to get calls from people so that they understand that people are unhappy."

That is a retired woman from deep southern Illinois asking to be phoned back. It is not a paid operation.

The February town hall that never called anybody

The reason Frailey was there is its own small story. Bost scheduled a telephone town hall for February 24, 2025. So many people who signed up never received the call that he had to apologize on Facebook and reschedule.

When he ran the make-up call on March 11 — with a new phone vendor — he told listeners that a big in-person town hall draws a few hundred people while his own call, he said, reached 100,000 households. That number is the pitch. It skips the part where reaching a household means a phone ringing, and being heard means being one of the few who get to ask anything.

The protests didn't stop. Constituents have circulated a petition demanding an in-person town hall. Ashby's summary to the Daily Egyptian was this: "Normally he doesn't show up in person. He just talks on the phone, and the calls are monitored," she said of Bost. "He doesn't just listen to everybody, and so he doesn't show up."

The same paper found Abby Butler at that protest. She had driven an hour and a half from Massac County to stand on a sidewalk in Murphysboro at dusk, because of a budget resolution she thought would cut Medicaid: "That's our grandmothers. That's us."

This isn't new for him either. Back on May 8, 2017, four days after he voted for the bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act, around 60 people demonstrated outside his Carbondale office over what it would do to people with pre-existing conditions. Nine years of southern Illinoisans standing on sidewalks outside his offices, and his read on the phenomenon is that somebody's paying them.

What he says he does instead

To be fair to Bost, he told the Effingham Daily News his office does engage with protesters:

"At times when it's hot outside, we bring them water and ice cream, so they don't get too hot. They brought their petitions in at one time, and they reach out, and we'll take their calls, and we'll do everything that we can legally do."

Water and ice cream is decent. It is not a town hall. Bringing a popsicle to someone standing outside your door because you won't take their question inside is not constituent service — it's hospitality offered in place of accountability.

And on the same March 2025 call where he said live town halls get overrun, he put the choice to people this way:

"Protest in the streets if you want because that's your right, and if you want to do that, that's wonderful. But do you really want to cure the problem, or do you just want to say you hate Trump and you hate Republicans?"

Judy Ashby, Bonnie Cotter and Karen Frailey would each have been happy to answer that question. In person. If he'd ever scheduled one.

Source

Marie Adamick, "US Rep. Mike Bost defends ICE, supports Iran war", Effingham Daily News, March 6, 2026, and Brandyn Wilcoxen, "Bost hosts rescheduled telephone town hall; dozens protest in Murphysboro", WPSD Local 6 / The Southern Illinoisan, March 11, 2025. Photo by Brandyn Wilcoxen / The Southern.

The VFW Put Its Protest Cartoon on a T-Shirt. Mike Bost Asked the VA to Review Whether the VFW Should Still Be Allowed to Represent Veterans.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:17:33 +0000

The Veterans of Foreign Wars has been drawing the same cartoon since the 1930s. Two men in suits, labeled "bureaucrats" and "media," pointing rifles at two veterans in fatigues. Underneath: Honor the Contract. The VFW says the modern version is based on illustrations it published in its magazines in 1933 and 1956, both times while veterans were fighting benefit cuts.

On June 30, 2026, the VFW put it on a T-shirt, sold through the Grunt Style apparel company, with proceeds going to veterans' mental health and suicide prevention.

The next day, Mike Bost wrote to the Secretary of Veterans Affairs.

What the letter asked for

Bost chairs the House Veterans' Affairs Committee and has represented Illinois's 12th District since 2015. On July 1, 2026, he and Rep. Jack Bergman of Michigan wrote to VA Secretary Doug Collins about the shirt.

They didn't just object to the image. Per CNN, which obtained the letter, they asked the VA to:

"review whether VFW's accreditation, and the good standing of its representatives, remain consistent with the responsibilities imposed upon accredited organizations and their representatives"

They also asked the VA to obtain the VFW's financial information about the merchandise.

Understand what "accreditation" means here. VA recognition is what lets the VFW — 1.3 million members, founded in 1899 — help veterans file and argue benefits claims. It is the legal basis for one of the organization's core functions. Bost asked the agency to look at whether the group should still have it, one day after the shirt went on sale. The VFW had come out against his bill — but a VFW spokesman told CNN this version of the cartoon "was not issued specifically to protest the Take Care of America's Veterans Act."

Their stated reason was that the imagery "can reasonably be interpreted as glorifying or normalizing political violence."

What Bost said in 2021

At an October 2021 hearing on violent extremism, Bost drew the line himself. Military.com pulled the quote:

"The First Amendment gives us the freedom to hold and express beliefs and opinions regardless of how extreme others may find them. It is every veteran's right to have an opinion — even one I find radical. However, if that opinion is acted on with violence, it is another thing altogether."

He went on to say free speech is foundational to democracy and that he'd oppose efforts to restrict it.

Nearly five years later, a veterans organization expressed an opinion he found radical. It was not acted on with violence. He asked a federal agency to review its legal standing.

The VFW's answer

VFW general counsel John Muckelbauer laid out what the letter did and didn't contain:

"They never asked for our side of the story, never questioned whether we had violated any accreditation requirement, and never identified a single basis for questioning the VFW's accreditation or the standing of any of our accredited representatives."

The VFW's national commander, Carol Whitmore, was plainer:

"The VFW has never apologized for forcefully defending veterans, and we are not about to start now. Political cartoons have long been part of American public discourse because they communicate difficult truths in memorable ways."

There's a detail that undercuts the "this imagery is dangerous" framing. The VFW says this illustration has been in circulation since fall 2025 — it appeared in Senate testimony in October, on buttons worn at joint congressional testimony in March 2026, and VFW members wore an earlier version while posing for photos with Bost's own staff. Muckelbauer says that to the VFW's knowledge neither Bost nor Bergman raised any concern any of those times, though Military.com notes Bost was not in the room when the image appeared at the hearing.

The image only became dangerous, by Bost's own account, once it was on merchandise "surrounding pending veterans' legislation."

Mark Takano, the ranking Democrat on Bost's committee, put it this way to CNN: "these actions look less like oversight and more like retaliation against a veterans' organization for opposing his bill." Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, with about 450,000 members, said it was "disturbed" by the request.

What the VFW was actually protesting

This is the part that matters most to veterans in southern Illinois.

The bill is the Take Care of America's Veterans Act, introduced by Bost and Senate Veterans' Affairs Chairman Jerry Moran — a package rolling together more than 60 veterans bills. Most of it is uncontroversial.

Section 108 is not. It pays for the rest of the package by reducing future disability compensation for tinnitus and sleep apnea — two of the most common service-connected conditions there are. Ringing in the ears is what you get from a career around engines, rotors, and gunfire.

The savings would fund the Major Richard Star Act, a genuinely good bipartisan bill letting combat-injured retirees collect both their retirement pay and their disability pay instead of having to choose. The VFW's objection isn't to the Star Act. It's that Congress shouldn't pay for one group of veterans by cutting another.

The bill didn't survive contact with the House. On July 16, 2026, leaders pulled it from the floor rather than hold a final vote on it.

The pattern on Bost's committee

This is not the first time. Takano compared the VFW letter to the committee's earlier scrutiny of Disabled American Veterans after a policy disagreement, arguing Bost has used committee authority against veterans organizations that cross him.

And it fits how he has handled the department itself. In February 2025, when veterans groups came before a joint House-Senate hearing worried about VA layoffs and a hiring freeze, Bost told them the job reductions amounted to less than 1% of the workforce and added, "I take Doug Collins at his word who said there will be no impact to services." He asked the groups to bring him specific examples of harm.

That July, the VA itself announced it was on pace to shed roughly 30,000 employees by the end of the fiscal year — it had already dropped from about 484,000 staff on January 1, 2025 to about 467,000 by June 1.

Aggressive scrutiny of a veterans group that drew a cartoon. Deference to the agency shedding tens of thousands of jobs. That's a chairman pointing his power in a strange direction.

Where it stands

The VA had not responded to the letter as of mid-July, though Muckelbauer said the department had contacted the VFW and the two had a meeting scheduled that week. A committee spokesperson said Bost is not seeking to pull the VFW's charter. "This is not about silencing any organization or discouraging debate," spokesperson Kathleen McCarthy said.

Muckelbauer's response to that is the whole point:

"If veterans' service organizations begin wondering whether opposing legislation could result in official scrutiny of the authority that enables them to represent veterans, then the chilling effect has already begun."

Bost is a Marine Corps veteran. The organization he asked the VA to scrutinize is the one that helps veterans in his own district file their claims.

Source

Brian Todd, "VFW cartoon showing veterans facing a firing squad sparks calls for an investigation", CNN, July 13, 2026, and Haley Fuller, "Bost, Who Defended 'Radical' Speech, Wants VFW Scrutinized for TCAVA Stance", Military.com, July 13, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta.

$70 Billion for ICE Passed the House by Two Votes. Not One Republican Voted No.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:57:39 +0000

Most big bills pass with room to spare. This one didn't.

On June 9, 2026, the House passed S. 2 — the "Secure America Act" — by 214 votes to 212. The next day it became Public Law 119-98.

Two votes. That's the whole margin. And when a bill passes by two, there is no such thing as a symbolic yes. Every single Republican who pressed the green button that day cast a deciding vote. If any one of them had voted no instead, the bill would have tied 213 to 213 and failed on the floor.

Not one of them did. Zero Republicans voted against it. All 211 Democrats present voted no, along with the House's one independent. Three Republicans didn't vote at all.

We've already written about the Senate half of this bill, which passed 52 to 47 at 4:42 in the morning on June 5. This is the other half — the one that actually made it law, by the narrowest margin either chamber managed.

What the money is for

S. 2 puts $70 billion into the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and it keeps that money available through fiscal year 2029.

The official summary of the law spells out what ICE's share pays for: hiring, paying and training personnel; transportation; facilities and fleet; 287(g) agreements, which deputize state and local police to do federal immigration enforcement; the agency's legal office; and, in the summary's own words, "operations by ICE to arrest certain unlawful aliens."

CBP's share buys agents and hardware — surveillance towers along the southern and northern borders, air and marine platforms, biometric entry-and-exit systems, and inspection equipment the summary describes as using "artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other innovative technologies."

This is not a border-security budget in the ordinary sense. It is the interior enforcement machine: the arrests, the local police partnerships, the surveillance, all funded four years out in a single lump.

The only limits Congress wrote were about equipment

Here is the detail that tells you what this Congress cared about.

S. 2 does contain restrictions. Read the summary and you'll find them. Funds can't be used to hire or train processing coordinators after October 31, 2028. And no money may go to surveillance towers "that have not been tested and accepted by CBP to deliver autonomous capabilities."

Those two, plus a handful of clauses steering Title I money to work other than immigration enforcement, are the whole of it. The guardrails Congress bothered to write into a $70 billion law are about procurement — what gear CBP is allowed to buy, and when it may stop hiring a particular job title.

Nothing about what agents may do. No body-camera requirement. No rule against agents concealing their identities. No limit on funding family separation. No mandated reporting on who is being detained, or where, or for how long. Congress found the time to specify that a surveillance tower must pass acceptance testing, and did not find the time to specify that the people operating it must be identifiable.

That omission is a choice, and it was made by the 214 members below the line.

Why the margin matters more than the bill

We write up a lot of party-line votes. Usually the honest framing is that any one member's vote didn't change the outcome — 220 Republicans vote yes, and the bill passes whether or not your representative shows up.

This vote was not that. At 214–212, the outcome turned on every last one of them.

That means the usual answer — I was one vote out of hundreds, leadership had the votes anyway — is factually unavailable here. Any one of these members could have walked to the well and changed the result. It would have taken one person out of 214 deciding that a $70 billion enforcement fund with no conduct rules attached was worth a second look.

Two. Out of 214. And the number who did it was zero.

That's worth remembering the next time one of them tells a town hall they have concerns about how ICE is operating. They had a moment where their individual vote was the whole ballgame, and they used it to hand the agency four years of money with no strings on its conduct.

The 187 with report cards

Two hundred fourteen Republicans voted yes. These are the ones who have a report card on this site and were still in their races when this published, by state:

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

How they voted

None of this is our characterization. It's the official record, and it will be there permanently: the House Clerk's roll call for vote 214 on S. 2, June 9, 2026 — every name, every vote — and the bill itself on congress.gov, including the summary of what the $70 billion buys.

If your representative is on that list, this bill needed their vote to pass.

Darin LaHood Runs the Subcommittee Over Cash Aid to Poor Families. His Bill Adds Rules for Them and Freezes the Money Until 2030.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:27:02 +0000

Darin LaHood chairs the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Work and Welfare. That is the panel with jurisdiction over Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — the cash assistance program for the poorest families with children in America — plus child welfare and unemployment insurance.

It is a genuinely powerful job that gets almost no coverage back home, and LaHood has used it. In May 2025 he introduced H.R. 3156, the Jobs and Opportunity with Benefits and Services (JOBS) for Success Act — a full rewrite of TANF, which hasn't been reauthorized since 2005.

It's worth reading, because it is a clear statement of what he thinks the problem is.

What's in the bill

From the bill text, the operative provisions:

A signed personal responsibility agreement. Every "work-eligible individual" gets an assessment and an "individual opportunity plan" that must include "a personal responsibility agreement in which the individual acknowledges receipt of publicly funded benefits and responsibility to comply with program requirements in order to receive the benefits." Universal engagement, in the bill's own words.

An income ceiling. States "shall not use the grant to provide any assistance or services to a family whose monthly income exceeds twice the poverty line."

A tighter administrative budget. The cap on administrative spending drops from 15% to 10%, with a new penalty of up to 5% of a state's grant for missing it. The bill also widens the exception to that cap, adding "case management necessary to assist an individual in developing an individual opportunity plan" alongside the computer systems current law already exempts.

A 25% floor on "core activities" — work supports, education and training, apprenticeships, short-term benefits, work activities and case management — from both federal funds and state matching funds.

A ban on spending TANF directly on child care. Section 7(c): a state "shall not use the grant for direct spending on child care and other early childhood education programs, services, or activities." The bill raises the cap on transferring TANF money into the Child Care and Development Block Grant to 50% instead — so the money can still reach child care, but only by routing through a different program with different eligibility rules, copays and set-asides. It's a redirect, not an elimination, and honest accounting should say so.

And the funding. Section 4 is the shortest section that matters. It extends the block grant by striking "2017 and 2018" and inserting "2026 through 2030."

That's it. Same dollars.

The number that never changes

Here is what those dollars are. From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

"Under TANF, the federal government gives states a fixed block grant totaling $16.5 billion each year."

That figure was set when the program was created in 1996. It has never been adjusted for inflation. LaHood's bill would carry it, unchanged in nominal terms, through 2030 — a 34-year run at one number, through two recessions, a pandemic, and the price increases of the last five years that his own district feels every week at the grocery store.

The bill has a great deal to say about what recipients must sign, what states may spend, how administrative costs must be squeezed, and how improper payments must be measured. It has nothing to say about the size of the grant.

CBPP's accounting of where the money goes, from the 2014 spending data that report examines: states spend "only slightly more than one-quarter" of combined federal and state TANF funds on basic assistance to families, "and just another quarter on child care for low-income families and on activities to connect TANF families" to work. The basic-assistance share has not moved since. CBPP's state fact sheets, updated January 2026 say that "in 2023, states spent only about one-fourth of the funds on basic assistance." Those are the two buckets the bill touches — the second one by barring direct spending.

His stated philosophy

LaHood has been consistent about the theory, and it's fair to quote him at length rather than paraphrase.

Opening the April 2025 hearing on GAO's findings:

"My belief is that we need to reclaim TANF for work, do a better job of targeting funding towards the most vulnerable families, and restore the program to its original roots... By modernizing the program, while ensuring that it continues to serve those who rely on it, we can reduce dependency and empower Americans to uplift themselves."

And on Medicaid work requirements in the 2025 budget bill, to WGLT:

"Whether you call that a cut to Medicaid or a transition to a job, that's clearly included here, but I think that's something we ought to be doing."

"The best social service program in the country is a job."

Where the theory runs into the bill

The proposition is that work is the answer, so the program should be reorganized around work. Fine. Then the design question is what a parent needs in order to work.

The near-universal answer, from every side of this debate, is child care. It's the thing that determines whether a single mother in Peoria can take a shift at all. LaHood's bill responds to that by prohibiting states from spending TANF directly on it and telling them to transfer the money to a different block grant if they want to — a block grant that is also capped, also chronically oversubscribed, and that comes with its own waiting lists.

Meanwhile the money available to do any of this stays at 1996 levels through 2030, and states get a smaller administrative allowance to run a program the bill makes considerably more administratively demanding: assessments, individual opportunity plans, signed agreements, new outcome measures, new improper-payment reporting. Case management for those plans is carved out of the cap. The rest of it is not.

That is a lot of new obligation financed with the same, steadily shrinking, dollar.

To be fair

LaHood is not a bomb-thrower on this committee. He worked with Ranking Member Danny Davis to reauthorize the Title IV-B child welfare program, and he built his TANF case on GAO's own audit findings rather than anecdote. The underlying complaint — that states have drifted TANF money far from cash aid, and that Congress hasn't reauthorized the program in twenty years — is not a partisan invention. CBPP has been making a version of it for years.

The difference is what you conclude from it. If states spend only a quarter of TANF on basic assistance and much of the rest has drifted, one answer is to require the money to reach poor families and give them enough of it. LaHood's answer is to require more of the families, more of the states, and the same amount of money.

Eleven years

LaHood has represented central Illinois since 2015 and is on the ballot again in November. During the 2025 push for him to hold a town hall, he told WGLT "I meet with any constituent that wants to meet with me" but would not commit either way to holding one. In April 2025, constituents filled the UAW Hall in East Peoria for a town hall they held themselves. He wasn't there.

The people most affected by the bill he wrote are the least likely to get a seat at any of the rooms he does show up in.

We deserve better.

Source

H.R. 3156, the JOBS for Success Act of 2025, full text via GovInfo; "ICYMI: LaHood Chairs House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Work and Welfare to Discuss TANF Reform," lahood.house.gov, April 9, 2025; "How States Use Federal and State Funds Under the TANF Block Grant," Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Photo: official congressional portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

Darin LaHood Told Peoria Radio We Need an 'Off Ramp' From the Iran War. Four Weeks Later He Voted Against One.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:27:01 +0000

On May 4, 2026, Darin LaHood sat down with WCBU's Joe Deacon in Pekin and said the war with Iran needed to end.

Not hedged. Not on background. On the record, to a public radio station in his own district:

"We need to wind down the conflict, I've publicly said that. I think we need to have an off ramp on that, that's number one."

He explained why, in terms central Illinois understands:

"Number two, we have to open the Strait of Hormuz and get that done. I think you do that through diplomatic approach. We've got to continue to work with Iran as best we can on a solution that opens the Strait of Hormuz because we've seen way too high of energy prices, fertilizer prices, petrochemical prices."

Energy. Fertilizer. Petrochemicals. That is the input cost sheet for a corn and soybean district.

On the price tag of the war — which WCBU said analysts and government officials put at approaching $50 billion — he said: "It's a lot of taxpayer money, particularly when we're $39 trillion in debt."

Four weeks later, the House voted on the off ramp.

June 3, 2026

H. Con. Res. 86 directed the President, under section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution, to remove U.S. Armed Forces from hostilities with Iran. That is the whole substance of it: Congress has not authorized this war, so bring the troops out.

It passed, 215 to 208.

Republicans voted 4 yes, 207 no.

LaHood voted no.

Then on July 23 the House did it again — H. Con. Res. 89, passed 214 to 208 — and LaHood voted no a second time.

His explanation

Five days after the June vote, WGLT published Charlie Schlenker's interview with him. Two answers.

The first was that it would be over soon anyway:

"We will have a resolution here shortly. We'll have the [Strait] of Hormuz open and we'll have an agreement."

The second was that the war wasn't really a war:

"This is not on the same level of Iraq or Afghanistan in terms of a war with troops on the ground with missiles being fired. Essentially there's been nothing that's happened militarily within the last 30 days."

Both claims have since been tested.

The resolution did not come "shortly." Six weeks after that interview ran, the House was voting on the same question again, and by the time of that July 23 vote the Pentagon's count was 18 U.S. troops killed since fighting broke out in February — four of them after July 17 — with nearly 500 injuries, 100 of those in the two weeks before the vote.

The Strait of Hormuz did not open either. Eight weeks after LaHood's prediction, on August 2, Ohio Republican Mike Turner was on Face the Nation still naming a reopened Strait as one of the two conditions for ending the war — "so that we return back to an open Straits where commerce and the flow of oil and natural gas can resume." LaHood's Democratic opponent, Paul Nolley, had put it bluntly in the same WGLT story: "Iran is now firmly in control of the Strait of Hormuz, our arsenal has been severely depleted, international alliances further strained and confidence in our nation has been damaged, both at home and abroad."

The part that doesn't reconcile

Take LaHood's stated position at face value: the war should wind down, diplomacy should reopen the Strait, and the cost is real money the country doesn't have.

Every one of those is an argument for the resolution he voted against. The resolution was not a criticism of the troops or a surrender document. It was Congress saying it hadn't authorized this and wanted the forces out — the exact "off ramp" LaHood said we needed, formalized into the one instrument the House actually controls.

He voted no in June, and again in July. The reason he gave for the first was that nothing much was happening militarily. Eighteen Americans are dead.

Where the leverage is

LaHood sits on Ways and Means and on the Intelligence Committee, where he chairs the NSA and Cyber subcommittee and vice-chairs the CIA subcommittee. He is not a backbencher on national security. He is one of a few dozen members who see the classified picture and whose vote carries weight with the rest of the conference. When the June resolution passed with four Republican yes votes, a handful more from members with his standing would not have been a symbolic act.

He is also funded, in part, by the money that flows around this issue. TrackAIPAC's tally of FEC filings, current to July 5, 2026, puts pro-Israel PAC contributions to LaHood at $146,867.

The town hall he wouldn't commit to

LaHood has represented central Illinois since 2015. During the March 2025 push for him to hold one, he told WCBU's Joe Deacon "I meet with any constituent that wants to meet with me" and "in the past, I've had lots of town halls throughout my district" — but, the story notes, he "did not commit one way or another to holding a town hall." In April 2025 a group called Citizens for IL-16 filled the UAW Hall in East Peoria to standing room only for a town hall of their own. He wasn't there.

He is on the ballot in November. Somebody should read him back the May 4 interview and ask which sentence he'd like to keep.

We deserve better.

Source

Joe Deacon, "Rep. LaHood again calls for 'off ramp' on U.S. war in Iran to bring fuel costs down," WCBU, May 6, 2026; Charlie Schlenker, "U.S. Rep. Darin LaHood and Democratic opponent Paul Nolley differ on war powers vote," WGLT, June 8, 2026; Ryan Denham, "LaHood no, Sorensen yes as House votes to end the war with Iran," WGLT, June 3, 2026. Roll call 199 from the Office of the Clerk. Photo: WCBU.

Darin LaHood Voted to Let the FBI Read Americans' Messages Without a Warrant

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:27:00 +0000

On April 12, 2024, the House voted on a simple question: should the FBI have to get a warrant before it goes into a government database and reads an American's emails, texts and calls?

The measure was Amendment No. 1 to the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act, offered by Rep. Andy Biggs. It failed on a 212–212 tie — in the House, a tie loses. A single member switching would have changed the outcome.

Darin LaHood voted No.

He then voted Aye on final passage of that bill — RISAA — which extended the surveillance authority for two years with no warrant requirement attached.

What that database is, in one paragraph

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act lets the government collect the communications of foreign targets located overseas without a warrant. Almost nobody disputes that it's valuable. The fight has always been over the other end of those conversations: when an American emails, texts or calls a foreign target, the American's words land in the same database. And the FBI can go into that database, type in an American's name, and read what's there — no warrant, no probable cause, no judge.

That is called a U.S.-person query, or the backdoor search. The Biggs amendment would have ended it. LaHood's vote kept it.

He knew exactly what it feels like

Thirteen months before that vote, on March 9, 2023, at the House Intelligence Committee's annual worldwide threats hearing, LaHood revealed something about himself.

A declassified footnote in an intelligence oversight report had described improper FBI database queries of "a US Congressman." LaHood had read the classified version. From his own statement that day:

"I have had the opportunity to review the classified summary of this violation, and it is my opinion that the member of Congress that was wrongfully queried multiple times solely by his name was in fact me."

He called it "an egregious violation that not only degrades trust in FISA and the Intelligence Community (IC) but is a threat to the foundational values of our democracy."

And he drew a line:

"Reauthorization of Section 702 without reform is a non-starter."

Then the reform reached the floor, and it was a warrant requirement, and he voted it down on a vote decided by a tie.

Three years later, "clean"

Section 702 came up for renewal again in 2026, with a hard sunset. LaHood is now chairman of the Intelligence Committee's Subcommittee on the National Security Agency and Cyber, and vice chairman of its CIA subcommittee. He is, in other words, one of the people who decides.

He sat down with Martin Matishak of Recorded Future News in his Capitol Hill office on Thursday, March 19, 2026, immediately after that year's worldwide threats hearing; the interview ran the next day. His position: back President Trump's proposal for an 18-month "clean" reauthorization — no warrant requirement attached.

"This is the singular most important collection item we have in our intelligence portfolio."

In the same interview Matishak put to him Recorded Future News's own finding that FBI queries of the database had risen by about 35% from the previous year. LaHood said he had been briefed and was satisfied, and gave the explanations he had been given: the 2024 reforms working as intended, drug cartel investigations, and administrative errors like misspellings.

Renewal without reform, he had said, was a non-starter. In 2026 he was the one carrying it, and it would take, in his words, "a little political muscle."

To be fair to him

Two things belong in the record.

First, LaHood is not a bystander who never lifted a finger. He chaired the Intelligence Committee's FISA Working Group, raised the violation at an open Intelligence Committee hearing where FBI Director Christopher Wray was testifying, and RISAA did contain real changes — FBI personnel barred from running U.S.-person queries without supervisor or attorney approval, higher criminal and civil penalties, and a requirement that the FBI notify any member of Congress whose name is queried. LaHood's honest position is that reform already happened in 2024, and that the warrant requirement was the wrong reform.

Second, that is an argument people make in good faith. Intelligence officials say a warrant requirement would slow down urgent counterterrorism work, and that a "query" of already-lawfully-collected data isn't the same as a new search.

But the argument sits badly next to the specific facts of his own case. What happened to LaHood was not a slow-moving counterterrorism emergency. It was an FBI employee typing a congressman's name into a search box, more than once, in violation of the rules that already existed. Rules that already existed are exactly what failed. A warrant requirement is the reform designed for that failure, and it is the one he voted down.

How it ended

It ended badly for everyone. The House passed a three-year extension 235–191 on April 29, 2026, Congress bought itself six more weeks with a stopgap running to June 12, and then negotiations collapsed. Section 702 lapsed in June 2026 — the first time the authority had gone dark since Congress created it in 2008.

The people who wanted a warrant requirement did not get one. The people who wanted a clean renewal did not get that either. What the country got was the thing both sides said they were trying to prevent.

And in Illinois

LaHood has represented central Illinois since 2015 — eleven years — and he is on the ballot again in November. Through the spring 2025 push for an in-person town hall he would not commit either way; asked about it, he told WCBU's Joe Deacon "I meet with any constituent that wants to meet with me" and "in the past, I've had lots of town halls throughout my district" — but, the story notes, he "did not commit one way or another to holding a town hall." In April 2025, constituents filled the UAW Hall in East Peoria for a town hall they held without him.

If anyone gets the chance, the question is short. In 2023 he said renewal without reform was a non-starter. Which reform did he mean?

We deserve better.

Source

"LaHood Addresses Violations and Need for FISA Reform," lahood.house.gov, March 9, 2023; Martin Matishak, "Rep. LaHood on why Section 702 reauthorization will take a 'little political muscle,'" The Record from Recorded Future News, March 20, 2026. Roll call 114 of the 2nd session of the 118th Congress from the Office of the Clerk. Photo: U.S. Institute of Peace via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0), via The Record.

45 Republicans We Cover Broke the Law That's Supposed to Stop Insider Trading in Congress

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:36:26 +0000

On July 22, 2026, the U.S. House passed a bill called the Stop Insider Trading Act. It passed 232 to 198, and every single Republican who voted — all 218 of them — voted yes.

Watching that, you'd think Congress had finally decided to deal with its stock trading problem.

Congress does have a stock trading problem. But there is already a law on the books meant to handle the most basic part of it, and it has been there since 2012. It asks members of Congress to do one simple thing.

We went through the report cards on this site and counted how many of the Republicans we cover have failed to do that one simple thing.

The answer is 45.

What the STOCK Act actually asks

The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act — the STOCK Act — was signed into law on April 4, 2012 after a national scandal over lawmakers appearing to profit from what they learned on the job. The Brennan Center describes it as closing part of a loophole that had exempted Congress from rules other traders had lived under since 1934.

The core requirement is almost embarrassingly easy. If you, your spouse, or your kids buy or sell a stock, a bond, or crypto worth more than $1,000, you file a form. You have 30 days from when you find out about it, and no more than 45 days from the trade itself.

That's the whole thing. It doesn't stop anyone from trading. It doesn't limit what they can own. It just says: tell us.

And there's a good reason it says that. Members of Congress know things before we do. They know which company is about to win a federal contract, which industry is about to get a tax break, whether the tariffs are real. If we can see what they bought and when they bought it, we can hold their trades up against their votes and decide for ourselves who they're working for.

Disclosure is the only tool voters get. Miss the deadline, and by the time we find out, the vote has happened, the profit is banked, and the election is over.

The roll call

Here's what "breaking a transparency law" looks like in practice. All of these are Republicans with report cards on this site.

The biggest offenders:

Rick Allen (GA) — failed to properly report 136 transactions worth between $3.05 million and $8.56 million. The oldest was a Monsanto purchase from February 2017 that he didn't disclose until August 2023 — roughly six and a half years late.
Diana Harshbarger (TN) — late on more than 700 stock trades worth between $728,000 and $10.9 million.
Julia Letlow (LA) — late on more than 210 stock and bond trades worth $225,000 to $3.3 million, some by more than a year.
Tommy Tuberville (AL) — in his first year in the Senate, disclosed 132 trades late, worth at least $894,000.
John James (MI) — 145 stock trades not disclosed on time, worth up to $2.2 million, the oldest more than eight months late. The campaign finance group End Citizens United filed an ethics complaint over them.
Lisa McClain (MI) — the No. 4 Republican in House leadership broke the law twice in 2025: first on more than 500 transactions, then again months later on $360,000 to $900,000 of her husband's trades, including up to $450,000 of Palantir stock.
Byron Donalds (FL) — months late on up to $1.6 million in trades.
Blake Moore (UT) — broke it more than 70 times in his first six months in office, on trades worth as much as $1.1 million.

The two the ethics office formally looked at. In May 2022 the nonpartisan Office of Congressional Ethics found "substantial reason to believe" that two Republicans had violated the law. Pat Fallon (TX) had failed to timely disclose 122 transactions worth between $9 million and $21 million in 2021 alone. John Rutherford (FL) had 157 late transactions worth $652,000 to $3.5 million, stretching back to the year he was sworn in.

Caught by watchdogs and reporters. A 2021 Campaign Legal Center complaint reported by NPR named three Republicans. Roger Williams (TX) filed no transaction reports for three of his wife's 2019 stock sales — General Electric, Nvidia and Disney. Warren Davidson (OH) sold $50,000 to $100,000 in Workhorse Group stock in 2020 with no disclosure form on file at all. And Lance Gooden (TX) reported a dozen stock purchases worth between $60,019 and $376,000 on his annual disclosure — American Airlines, Delta, Royal Caribbean, Hertz, Marathon Oil and others — without ever filing the transaction reports for them. All three sat on the House Financial Services Committee. What made that complaint unusual, NPR noted, is that these members appeared never to have filed reports at all. NOTUS's August 2025 investigation into late filings named Scott Franklin (FL), Brandon Gill (TX), Tim Moore (NC), Austin Scott (GA) and Dan Meuser (PA). A 2021 Business Insider review flagged Victoria Spartz (IN) and Mike Kelly (PA), whose wife's purchase of Beauty Health Company stock went unreported for more than seven weeks past the deadline.

And the rest. Raw Story's September 2024 investigation into 62 members of Congress who broke the law included Stephanie Bice (OK), Ron Estes (KS), Russ Fulcher (ID), Glenn Grothman (WI), Bill Hagerty (TN), Bill Huizenga (MI), David Joyce (OH), Tom Kean Jr. (NJ), Darin LaHood (IL), Nicole Malliotakis (NY), Maria Elvira Salazar (FL), Adrian Smith (NE), Rob Wittman (VA) and Mike Collins (GA). Add Dan Sullivan (AK), who sold Mowi and Five Below stock in August 2022 and didn't report either sale until November 3; Mike Rounds (SD), more than five months late on a $1 million to $5 million stock sale; Kevin Hern (OK), nearly two dozen trades worth up to $2.7 million; Brian Mast (FL), a year and a half late on an Ideal Power sale; Carol Miller (WV), almost a year late on at least $217,000 of her husband's trades; August Pfluger (TX), late on family trades worth up to $150,000; Juan Ciscomani (AZ), about nine months late on a Treasury bond worth up to $50,000; plus Susan Collins (ME), Roger Marshall (KS), Chuck Fleischmann (TN) and Pete Sessions (TX), whose stories are below.

Not all of these are the same size. Bill Huizenga filed an annual report ten days late. Nicole Malliotakis was late on two transactions in the $1,001-to-$15,000 range. That is nothing like Rick Allen's six and a half years, and we're saying so.

The point isn't that all 45 are equally bad. The point is that 45 of them couldn't clear a bar this low.

"My broker did it"

Read the responses side by side and a script emerges.

Rick Allen's office said his trades are "handled by a financial adviser" and blamed a compliance firm. Harshbarger's chief of staff blamed a financial advisor's "gross oversight." Julia Letlow's spokesman said she was "two layers removed" because Merrill Lynch had discretionary trading authority and "did not consult with the congresswoman." Mike Rounds's office said the sale "happened via a third-party investment firm" and that the senator "does not have direct involvement." Susan Collins's spokesperson blamed "a delay in notification from the third-party advisor." Tom Kean Jr. blamed an attorney and a family trust. Kevin Hern's office said he and his accountant forgot to hit send. Bill Hagerty called it a "clerical error."

Chuck Fleischmann's office went one better. He first reported that "a dependent child had made these trades" — then acknowledged he has no dependent children, and filed an amended disclosure six days later saying it was his financial advisor after all.

This got common enough that NOTUS ran a whole piece on it in August 2025, headlined "Lawmakers' New Botched Stock Disclosure Scapegoat: Financial Advisers." That story quoted the House Ethics Committee's own written guidance, which settles the argument in one sentence:

"You are personally responsible for incomplete and inaccurate information contained in your [financial reports], regardless of who assisted in preparation."

If you hire someone and they don't do the job, it's still your problem. Every one of us knows that from our own lives. A late mortgage payment doesn't get forgiven because the bank's website was confusing.

The penalty is $200

Here's why none of them seem especially worried.

The fine for filing late is $200 — what the Campaign Legal Center calls "a hardly impactful deterrence from the potential millions to be made off the stock market." Blake Moore broke the law more than 70 times and, as we've written before, paid $200 total. Dan Meuser was more than a year late reporting as much as $600,000 in family trades made at the very bottom of the pandemic market crash. He paid $200.

It gets softer than that. A January 2023 House Ethics memo says a report "is late if submitted any time after the due date, but there is a 30-day grace period before late fees are imposed." Chuck Fleischmann's office used exactly that to avoid paying anything at all. And the fees that do get assessed are frequently waived by the ethics committees.

The criminal side is emptier still. No member of Congress has ever been prosecuted for insider trading under the STOCK Act. The Bangor Daily News reported the same thing this June, alongside the long-standing criticism that the law "has no teeth."

So the deal on offer to a member of Congress is this: disclose your trades and let voters judge you, or don't, and risk a $200 fee you can ask to have waived. Forty-five of the Republicans on this site took the second option.

Why the timing is the whole story

A late form sounds like a paperwork problem. It isn't. It matters because of what stays hidden and for how long.

Tim Moore failed to disclose 12 trades made around Trump's April 2025 tariff announcement — the announcement that moved every market in the country.
Ron Estes was about four months late reporting up to $45,000 in Treasury savings bonds. He sits on the Ways and Means Committee, which oversees the nation's bonded debt.
Blake Moore bought up to $60,000 of Raytheon stock while sitting on the House Armed Services Committee, and didn't report it on time.
David Joyce was nearly two years late on trades that included Boeing, Citigroup and TC Energy.
Scott Franklin's late-reported trades included General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin — federal contractors.

None of that is proof anybody traded on inside information. That's exactly the point. The disclosure rule exists so the question can be asked while it still matters. When a member reports a trade two years after making it, nobody can hold it up against the vote he cast that week. The delay isn't a side effect of breaking the rule. The delay is what the rule was written to prevent.

We know what it looks like when the timeline is visible. Mike Kelly's wife bought 5,000 shares of Cleveland-Cliffs the morning after his office learned the Butler steel plant would get the federal help he had been lobbying for, then sold at a $64,476 profit — and the House Ethics Committee voted unanimously to formally reprove him, one of the very few times any of this produced a real consequence. Rob Bresnahan sold six figures of Medicaid company stock a week before voting to cut Medicaid. We only know either of those things because the filings eventually surfaced.

The ones who campaigned on this

The hypocrisy isn't incidental. It's the pattern.

Susan Collins helped write the law. She helped write it in 2012, alongside the late Sen. Joe Lieberman. In February 2026 she disclosed her husband's purchase of a Pfizer corporate bond five days after the deadline — a violation FactCheck.org confirmed even while knocking down a separate Democratic attack ad against her as false. A review of her earlier filings found 24 transactions from 2013 to 2018 reported more than 100 days late, worth up to $395,000. Her campaign notes she has never personally bought or sold an individual stock — her husband's outside advisor makes those calls.

Byron Donalds went on television in March 2022 to demand consequences for members who violate the STOCK Act — "That's when you have to have sanctions and the House has to get real" — and then broke it himself. He is now running for governor of Florida.

Maria Elvira Salazar attacked her Democratic predecessor in April 2020 over financial disclosure problems, writing that Donna Shalala "violates and skirts federal law with her own finances." Then she filed late herself — more than two months past the deadline on a Cano Health transaction worth up to $500,000 — and asked for the $200 penalty to be waived.

Tom Kean Jr. won his seat in 2022 by hammering his opponent over late stock disclosures and promising "the highest level of ethics and transparency." He has violated the STOCK Act repeatedly since.

Roger Marshall hid a dependent child's pandemic-era trades for 17 months — then, in March 2026, put his name on a bill to ban exactly that.

Mike Collins endorsed a ban on congressional stock trading while being one of the busiest crypto traders in Congress. He was also late reporting two Ethereum purchases.

And then there's Pete Sessions, who is at least consistent. He opposes banning congressional stock trading, calling it a "populist move" and saying, "I think we have enough rules and regulations." His argument for leaving things as they are was this: "If you have nothing to hide, then transparency is your friend."

He has been late on his own disclosures twice.

Back to that July vote

Which brings us back to the bill all 218 voting Republicans supported on July 22.

The Stop Insider Trading Act bans members from making new purchases of individual stocks — but lets them keep everything they already own, reinvest the dividends, and sell later. Rep. Pramila Jayapal called it a "so-called stock trading ban that literally does nothing of the sort." Rep. Joe Morelle said it was "so filled with holes, it would make Swiss cheese blush." And the bill carried a second payload most people never heard about: a set of strict new voter ID rules that would bar student IDs and require voters to photocopy their ID to vote by mail.

So the same members who couldn't be bothered to file a form got to vote for a "ban" that grandfathers in everything they already hold — and attached new hurdles for the rest of us to vote, on the way through.

The bottom line

Nobody here is on trial. Most of these are late forms, and late forms are boring.

But a democracy runs on a handful of small, boring obligations, and this is one of them. Congress wrote itself the gentlest possible rule — trade all you want, just tell us within 45 days — attached a $200 fine, waived the fine much of the time, and has never once prosecuted anyone under it. Forty-five of the Republicans we cover still couldn't follow it.

Every time one of them misses that deadline, we lose the only thing the law was ever designed to give us: the ability to look at what they bought, look at how they voted, and draw our own conclusions while it still matters.

They know that. That's why the deadline keeps getting missed.

We deserve better.

Mary Miller Filed a Resolution Saying the House Should "No Longer Recognize" Pride Month

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:50:44 +0000

On June 3, 2026 — two days into Pride Month — Mary Miller filed a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives.

It's called "Supporting the designation of June as Family Month." It runs about a page. And the operative section has three numbered parts, of which the second is four words long.

Resolved, That the House of Representatives— (1) recognizes the benefit of marriage and family to men, women, children, and society; (2) no longer recognizes Pride Month; and (3) supports the designation of Family Month for the purpose of rededicating our Nation to the importance of this essential unit.

That's from the text of H.Res.1338 as she introduced it.

The word she chose

Plenty of members of Congress promote the family. There is nothing remarkable about a resolution saying kids do well with parents who love them.

This isn't that resolution. The "whereas" clauses that lead up to those three items include this one:

"Whereas Americans are inundated with perverse Pride Month displays and events throughout the month of June that denigrate the nuclear family"

Perverse. That's the word, in a document submitted to the House of Representatives with her name on it.

It sits alongside a clause noting that Pride Month was first declared by President Bill Clinton in 1999 and continued by Presidents Obama and Biden — an act Miller's resolution describes as "rejecting the importance of marriage and family."

So the argument being made is not that families deserve a month. It's that recognizing gay Americans is what's wrong with families.

What the resolution blames on the decline of marriage

The resolution's case builds like this: about half of marriages end in divorce, young people are delaying marriage, the birth rate has fallen below replacement, and tax and welfare policy penalizes getting married.

Then it gets to the payoff line:

"Whereas the decline of marriage and family has corresponded to a rise in crime, drug abuse, and other social ill"

And then:

"Whereas our survival as a country and civilization depends on the continuation of traditional marriage and family"

Read the chain the whole way through. Pride Month displays are "perverse." They "denigrate the nuclear family." The decline of the nuclear family causes crime and drug abuse. And our survival as a civilization is at stake.

Miller told the Daily Signal the same thing in her own voice: "Our survival as a country and civilization depends on the continuation of traditional marriage and family." She also said the traditional family "is the greatest obstacle to the Left's cultural agenda, which is why they have spent decades trying to redefine, weaken, and replace it."

Nothing in the resolution proposes to lower the cost of raising a child, expand child care, or address a single one of the economic pressures it lists as reasons people aren't getting married. It renames a month and withdraws recognition from a group of Americans.

Twenty-one cosponsors

Miller introduced the same resolution in 2025 and it went nowhere. She filed it again this June, and 21 other House Republicans put their names on it as original cosponsors.

It won't get a floor vote. That's not really the point of a resolution like this. The point is the record — a document in the congressional archive, with 22 members' names on it, asking the House of Representatives to put itself formally on record as no longer recognizing Pride Month.

This is a pattern with her, not a one-off

Miller has a documented habit of using her position to single people out.

In February 2025, while presiding over the House, she introduced Rep. Sarah McBride — the first openly transgender member of Congress — as "the gentleman from Delaware, Mr. McBride." Then she posted about it on X, bragging that she had "refused to deny biological reality" on the chamber floor.

In June 2025, after a Sikh granthi delivered the morning prayer in the House, she posted that it was "deeply troubling that a Sikh was allowed to lead prayer" there, adding that "America was founded as a Christian nation." An earlier version of her post had wrongly identified the man as Muslim. Both were deleted after bipartisan condemnation.

In January 2026, she joined the Sharia Free America Caucus, which the Council on American-Islamic Relations designated an anti-Muslim hate group — the first congressional caucus in the organization's 32-year history to get that label. We traced where that panic actually came from.

The Family Month resolution isn't a stray. It's the same move applied to a different group.

Meanwhile, in the 15th District

Miller's constituents in downstate Illinois have real problems, and she has been notably hard to find when they want to talk about them.

In March 2025, hundreds rallied outside her Mahomet office carrying signs that read "Where's Mary? 1,532 days in office, ZERO town halls." In February 2026, when constituents organized a "Takin' the Town Hall to Mary" meet-up in a Quincy park, she declined to respond to the invitation — so the roughly 40 people who showed up talked to her two primary opponents instead.

She had time to write a resolution about a month.

We deserve better.

Source

H.Res.1338 — Supporting the designation of June as Family Month, introduced June 3, 2026. Reporting: The Daily Signal, June 3, 2026. Photo: The Daily Signal.

Mary Miller's Child Care Bill Was One Sentence Long. By the Time It Passed, It Could Cut Off a Whole State.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:49:50 +0000

On February 26, 2026, Mary Miller introduced a bill about child care fraud. You can read the whole thing in about thirty seconds.

It was called the No Funds for Repeat Child Care Violations Act. Its entire operative content was one amendment to the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act: strike the words "Secretary may" and insert "Secretary shall."

That's it. It turned a discretionary power to withhold funds from a state that keeps violating program rules into a mandatory one.

On June 3, the House passed it 217 to 207. By then the bill had grown from one section to six, picked up a new short title — the Stop Child Care Scams Act of 2026 — and started carrying something the February version didn't have anywhere in it.

What got added

Compare the bill as introduced with the version the House sent to the Senate. Section 5 of the passed version is new, and it does two things:

First, it cuts the improper payment threshold in half. Under current rules, a state has to file a corrective action plan when its improper payment rate goes over 10%. The bill drops that trigger to 5 percent and writes it into permanent law.

Second — and this is the part worth reading twice — it adds this:

"If for each of 2 consecutive fiscal years the improper payment rate of a State determined under this section is more 5 percent, then such State shall be ineligible to receive funds under this subchapter" — unless the state satisfies the Secretary of Health and Human Services that it will fix things.

A state goes over 5% two years in a row, and every low-income family in that state can lose its child care assistance, unless one Cabinet secretary decides otherwise.

If that mechanism sounds familiar, it's because we've written about it before. It is, essentially, the CRACKDOWN Act that Glenn Grothman introduced the very same day — same 5% threshold, same two-consecutive-years trigger, same "shall be ineligible" language, same escape hatch through the HHS Secretary.

Grothman's standalone bill is still sitting in committee. Miller's bill is the one that carried the idea onto the House floor and over to the Senate.

"Improper payment" is not the same thing as fraud

This is the load-bearing point, and it isn't a matter of opinion. The Government Accountability Office has said it flatly, and the House Education and Workforce Committee quoted it in its own report on the companion bill: while all fraudulent payments are improper, not all improper payments are due to fraud.

An improper payment is any payment made in the wrong amount, to the wrong recipient, or for a service that didn't qualify. In practice a huge share of them are documentation problems — a missing form, a late eligibility recertification, a payment that was actually too small.

Miller's public case for the bill is about scams. Her office cited an estimated $600 million a year in improper payments across federal child care programs, and the bill's fraud sections are genuinely aimed at fraud: they require the HHS Secretary to investigate it, and to permanently bar any provider found to have committed it after all appeals are exhausted.

You can argue about whether permanent debarment with no discretion is the right call. But at least those sections punish the people who did something wrong.

Section 5 doesn't. Section 5 punishes a state's error rate — and the people it takes the money from are the families, not the bureaucrats who filed the paperwork wrong.

What that would mean in Illinois

In Miller's own state, more than 36,000 children age five and under get their child care paid for through this program, according to the First Five Years Fund. That's 16% of the kids who qualify — the other 84% are already going without.

Child care in Illinois runs about $19,807 a year. Families who get the subsidy pay an average of $335 a month instead.

Now imagine Illinois posts a 5.2% improper payment rate two years running. Under Section 5, unless one federal official is satisfied with the state's promises, the funding stops — for all 36,000 of those kids at once. Their parents' options are to quit a job or find $1,651 a month.

That's the mechanism. Not a fine on the state agency. Not a clawback of the misspent money — which, incidentally, federal law already allows, along with three-year on-site reviews of every state and mandatory independent audits.

The vote

The final tally on June 3 was 217 to 207. Republicans voted 212 to 0 in favor. Democrats voted 207 to 4 against. Miller voted yes on her own bill.

An almost perfectly party-line vote is worth noticing on a bill whose supporters describe it as common-sense anti-fraud housekeeping. When 207 members of one party vote against stopping fraud, it's usually because the bill in front of them does something else too.

It's now with the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

The pattern

Miller sits on the House Education and Workforce Committee, which moved eight of these bills at once in early March. She's a member of the House Freedom Caucus. And she has built a record of writing bills that take something away and naming them after the thing they threaten.

She demanded Congress lock in every DOGE cut permanently — "Every DOGE cut targets waste, fraud, and abuse. Congress MUST codify them quickly. What's the holdup?!" — and was one of only eight cosponsors of the bill to write DOGE into federal law.

Child care assistance for 36,000 Illinois kids is not waste, fraud, or abuse. It's the thing that lets their parents go to work.

We deserve better.

Source

House passes Mary Miller bill targeting child care fraud — WSIU, June 5, 2026. Bill text and roll call: H.R. 7726 and Roll Call 198. Photo: WSIU.

Illinois Became the First State to Screen Every Kid for Mental Health Problems. Mary Miller Wrote a Federal Bill to Stop It.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:47:14 +0000

On July 31, 2025, Illinois became the first state in the country to require that every public school offer a mental health screening to every student in grades 3 through 12, once a year, free.

The law is Senate Bill 1560. It doesn't diagnose anyone and it doesn't treat anyone. It's a check — the same idea as the vision and hearing screenings schools have done for decades — meant to catch a kid who's struggling before the struggle turns into something worse. The state pays for the screening tools. The Illinois State Board of Education has to publish model policies and guidance by September 1, 2026. It takes effect in the 2027-28 school year.

And parents can already opt their child out.

Two weeks after it was signed, Mary Miller — who represents Illinois's 15th District — reintroduced a federal bill to override it.

What her bill does

The Parents Opt-in Protection Act, H.R. 4986, would require prior written consent before a student takes part in any covered school survey, analysis or evaluation that touches sensitive personal information. And the consent has to be given for that specific survey — a general authorization at the start of the year doesn't count.

In practice that means a separate signed permission slip, returned to the school, for each screening. Not a form you can decline. A form you must affirmatively return, or your child isn't screened.

Miller's own description of the Illinois law, in her announcement:

"J.B. Pritzker's plan to impose invasive 'mental health screenings' on kids, forcing parents to jump through hoops to opt out, is ridiculous and unacceptable. My bill will put parents back in charge by requiring written consent before these screenings happen."

Note the scare quotes around mental health screenings, and the word invasive for a questionnaire a school nurse gives a fifth grader.

Note also the logic. Her objection is that opting out makes parents "jump through hoops." Her fix is to require every parent in the state to jump through a hoop for every screening — and if the form doesn't come back, the kid doesn't get checked. The hoop doesn't go away. It gets moved in front of the kids who need the screening most, whose parents are the least likely to have the time, the English, or the stable address to return a form on schedule.

The House Committee on Education and Workforce — which Miller sits on — voted in July 2026 to advance the bill to the full House. It hasn't had a floor vote.

The law she's fighting isn't what she says it is

Here's what SB1560 actually does, from the state's own announcement of it.

Governor JB Pritzker: "Annual mental health screenings will be available for all Illinois students in grades three through twelve by the 2027 school year. This is a national first worth celebrating."

State Superintendent Sanders: "With universal screening, we shift from reaction to prevention. The earlier we identify a need, the better support we can provide."

State Rep. Lindsey LaPointe, who sponsored it: "No child should have to struggle in silence, especially in our public school system."

Screenings are available to every student, not forced on any. Parents can already say no. The state supplies the tools so districts don't have to pay for them. And the law pairs the screening with the BEACON portal, so a family that gets a flag has somewhere to go next.

Opponents of Miller's bill also point out that federal law already contains protections here: the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment requires schools to notify parents and give them an opt-out before surveying students about sensitive topics. Her bill isn't filling a gap. It's converting an existing opt-out into an opt-in, which is a very different thing when you're talking about reaching every child.

Look at who's backing it

Miller's press release lists the groups supporting the bill: the American Principles Project, Parents Defending Education, the Parental Rights Foundation, the Family Research Council, Eagle Forum, Concerned Women for America, Alliance Defending Freedom, the Independent Women's Forum — and Moms for America.

Moms for America is the organization that hosted the rally outside the Capitol on January 5, 2021, where Miller stood at a podium and declared that "Hitler was right on one thing. He said, 'Whoever has the youth has the future.'" The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum condemned the remark. Republicans and Democrats in Illinois both called on her to answer for it. She apologized three days later.

Five years on, that same organization is on the endorsement list for her bill about who gets to decide what happens to Illinois children.

What's actually at stake

Nobody has to guess what a mental health screening is for. It's for the kid who has stopped eating lunch, or who has started writing things in a notebook that a parent will only find out about much later, or who is being hurt at home and has no adult to tell.

Some of those kids have parents who will read the form and sign it. Some of them have parents who are the reason the form should never have to come home at all.

Illinois built a system that reaches all of them and lets any parent pull their child out. Miller wants a federal law that reaches only the ones whose parents send back a piece of paper.

She sits on the committee that just advanced it. And her constituents have been keeping count of how often they get to ask her about things like this in person: a March 2025 protest outside her Mahomet office carried signs reading "Where's Mary? 1,532 days in office, ZERO town halls." In February 2026, when constituents organized a meet-up in a Quincy park and invited her, she didn't respond.

We deserve better.

Source

Parents' rights bill sent to House amid Illinois mental health debate — WTVO, July 2026. Photo: CBS Chicago.

Darren Bailey Said the Holocaust 'Doesn't Even Compare' to Abortion. When Jewish Groups Objected, He Said Jewish Leaders Told Him He Was Right. They Said That Wasn't True.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:58:00 +0000

In 2017, while running for the Illinois House, Darren Bailey recorded a Facebook video about abortion. In it he said:

"The attempted extermination of the Jews of World War II doesn't even compare on a shadow of the life that has been lost with abortion since its legalization."

The video resurfaced on August 1, 2022, while he was the Republican nominee for governor of Illinois.

Who objected

The condemnation was not confined to one party.

The Anti-Defamation League's Midwest chapter objected. So did the Illinois Legislative Jewish Caucus, Planned Parenthood of Illinois, and Gov. JB Pritzker's campaign.

And so did the leader of Bailey's own party in the Illinois House. Republican Leader Jim Durkin said the Holocaust "was one of the worst atrocities in the history of humankind and any comments that minimize it have no place in our political discourse."

Bailey did not apologize.

The claim that fell apart

Instead, he doubled down, saying that "the Jewish community themselves have told me that I'm right."

That is a specific factual claim, and it was checkable. Bailey pointed to Lubavitch Chabad of Illinois.

Lubavitch Chabad of Illinois disputed his account directly:

"We don't know who he met with, and his comments do not reflect our position."

This is the part that separates the episode from an ordinary gaffe. The original remark was a comparison people can argue about — offensive to many, sincerely held by him. The follow-up was different. Confronted with criticism, Bailey asserted that a Jewish organization had endorsed his view, and the organization said publicly that it had not.

Why we're writing it down now

Bailey is on the ballot again, running a campaign built on affordability that keeps its older positions in the room but off the platform.

This week his running mate, Aaron Del Mar, told a Springfield rally hosted by an anti-abortion lobbying group that Pritzker is "willing to murder millions of babies" and that people come to Illinois to "sin against God" — three weeks after telling WBEZ that claims they'd restrict abortion access were "a flat-out lie."

The Holocaust remark came from the same place: the belief that abortion is a mass atrocity on a historical scale. Bailey has never withdrawn the comparison. In May of this year he told a Christian conference in Decatur, "Anyone who knows me knows there's no one here more pro-life or more pro Second Amendment than I."

He is entitled to that conviction. Voters are entitled to know he holds it while his campaign literature doesn't mention abortion at all.

What a governor does with this

A governor speaks for the state after antisemitic incidents, sets the tone on Holocaust education in schools, and represents every Illinoisan — including the Jewish Illinoisans whose legislative caucus told him this was wrong — in moments that call for moral seriousness.

The test isn't whether a candidate has ever said something wrong. It's what he does when he's told he has. Bailey was told — by the ADL, by a Jewish legislative caucus, by his own party's House leader. His response was to claim an endorsement that the named organization denied.

Illinoisans deserve a governor who can be corrected. We deserve better.

Source

"GOP candidate for governor Darren Bailey denounced for saying Holocaust 'doesn't even compare' to abortion deaths" — CBS Chicago, August 2022. Follow-up reporting from the Chicago Sun-Times and NBC Chicago. Photo via CBS Chicago.

Ninety Minutes After the Highland Park Massacre, Darren Bailey Said 'Let's Move On and Let's Celebrate.' Six Months Later He Sued to Undo the Gun Law It Produced.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:51:00 +0000

At 10:14 a.m. on July 4, 2022, a gunman opened fire on the Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois. He fired more than 70 rounds from a rooftop. Seven people were killed and more than 40 wounded.

At 11:44 a.m. — ninety minutes later, with the shooter still at large and families still searching for each other — Darren Bailey went live on Facebook to his 111,000 followers.

Here is what he said:

"The shooter is still at large, so let's pray for justice to prevail, and then let's move on and let's celebrate — celebrate the independence of this nation."

The suspect was not arrested for roughly six more hours.

"Let's move on"

Read the sequence again, because the timing is the story.

Bailey was a state senator running for governor. He was in Skokie, about eight miles from the shooting, surrounded by around 20 supporters. The attack had happened an hour and a half earlier. Nobody knew where the shooter was. Parents in Highland Park were calling hospitals.

His instruction to Illinois was to pray briefly and then move on to the celebration.

The apology that followed was conditional. Through a spokesperson, Bailey said he was sorry "if in any way we diminished the pain being felt across our state today" — the construction people use when they'd prefer not to concede the thing happened. The same statement worked in an attempt to shift blame to Gov. JB Pritzker.

Then he went to court

Six months after Highland Park, Illinois banned assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. The law is called the Protect Illinois Communities Act. It was passed because of what happened at that parade.

Bailey led a challenge to it filed in White County, arguing the ban violates the Illinois Constitution. He is also a plaintiff in a second suit brought by the same attorney, alongside more than a thousand other plaintiffs and 70 firearm dealers.

So the record reads: a mass shooting in his own state, an instruction to move on, and then a lawsuit against the law the state passed in response.

That is a coherent position — Bailey believes the ban is unconstitutional, and plenty of Illinoisans agree with him. What it is not is the position of someone who thinks Highland Park demanded any change at all. His answer to the deadliest kind of day Illinois has is that the mistake was the gun law.

What he's running on now

Bailey's 2026 campaign is pitched on affordability. His running mate, Cook County GOP chairman Aaron Del Mar, told WBEZ in July that they're "talking about core services" and are "not talking about abortion, we're not talking about transgender issues."

Guns didn't make that list of things they're not talking about — and in May, at a Christian conference in Decatur, Bailey said: "Anyone who knows me knows there's no one here more pro-life or more pro Second Amendment than I."

That's the same two-track campaign we documented when his running mate called abortion a "sin against God" at a Springfield rally three weeks after telling public radio that claims they'd restrict abortion were "a flat-out lie." The affordability message is for the general audience. The rest is for the rooms where the base is.

Illinois voters are entitled to weigh the 2022 version of Bailey, because he has not disavowed any of it. He apologized for calling Chicago a "hellhole." He has not stepped back from Highland Park, and he is still a plaintiff against the assault weapons ban.

Why it matters

A governor of Illinois signs or vetoes gun legislation, directs the state police, and decides how vigorously the state defends its own laws in court.

Bailey is asking for that job while suing to strike down the state's assault weapons ban. If he wins, the person who chooses whether Illinois keeps defending the Protect Illinois Communities Act is one of the people currently trying to kill it.

Seven people were murdered at a parade in Highland Park. Their families are still here.

Illinoisans deserve a governor whose first instinct after a massacre isn't "move on." We deserve better.

Source

Mitchell Armentrout, "Illinois GOP gov candidate Darren Bailey tells people to 'move on' after Highland Park shooting" — Chicago Sun-Times, July 2022. Photo via Chicago Sun-Times.

Darren Bailey Took Abortion Off His Platform. This Week He Stood at an Anti-Abortion Rally While His Running Mate Called It a 'Sin Against God.'

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:53:00 +0000

Darren Bailey has dialed back his position on abortion. He took it off his policy platform entirely. His campaign says the focus this time is affordability.

This week he and his running mate spoke at a "Save America" rally in Springfield. The event was sponsored by Illinois Family Action — the political arm of the Illinois Family Institute, a group that regularly lobbies against bills expanding abortion access.

His running mate, Cook County GOP chairman Aaron Del Mar, spoke for six minutes. He said Gov. JB Pritzker is "willing to murder millions of babies." Then he said this, to applause:

"Nobody wants to make Illinois a Mecca for abortions from everyone around the country to come here and sin against God."

Three weeks earlier

In July, Del Mar sat for an interview with WBEZ as part of a media tour promoting the ticket's economic policies. He was asked about abortion. His answer:

"No matter how many times JB Pritzker and the Democrat majority try to say that Darren and Aaron are going to try to take away women's access to reproductive care, that is a flat-out lie."

He went further about what the campaign is and isn't about:

"We're talking about core services. We're not talking about abortion, we're not talking about transgender issues."

Same man. Same ticket. Roughly a month apart. To a statewide public radio audience, the charge that they'd restrict abortion access is "a flat-out lie." To a room full of anti-abortion activists, Illinois is a "Mecca for abortions" and the governor is willing to "murder millions of babies."

Both of those cannot be the campaign's actual position. One of them is what they believe and the other is what they say when the wrong people are listening.

Bailey and Del Mar's campaign did not return requests for comment.

Bailey said the quiet part himself in May

This isn't only about the running mate. In May, Bailey spoke at a Christian conference in Decatur, where he said:

"Anyone who knows me knows there's no one here more pro-life or more pro Second Amendment than I."

That is not a man who has changed his mind. It is a man who has changed his audience.

The 2022 version of Bailey didn't bother with the two-track approach. He ran openly on restricting abortion access and expanding gun rights, and he called Chicago a "hellhole." He lost handily to Pritzker, badly underperforming in Cook County and the collar counties.

Del Mar explained the new approach plainly: Bailey has changed the "public-facing campaign" after "learning from his mistakes from four years ago."

Read that carefully. The thing that was a mistake was not the position. It was letting voters see it.

It is the same maneuver he ran on Chicago itself. He spent years calling the city a "hellhole" — then, once he needed the city's votes, apologized for it earlier this year. The pattern is not a change of heart. It's a change of venue.

The group in the room

There's a detail in this story that makes the rally worth more than a passing mention.

Illinois Family Action withheld its endorsement of Bailey in the March primary, even though it had donated to his 2022 campaign. It backed conservative think tank president Ted Dabrowski instead. Dabrowski lost to Bailey by 24 points.

And yet in August, IFA is the group hosting Bailey and Del Mar on a Springfield stage, alongside Republican U.S. Senate candidate Don Tracy.

A campaign genuinely pivoting away from abortion politics does not spend a week in August at a rally thrown by an anti-abortion lobbying outfit that didn't even endorse it. That is a campaign doing outreach to a base it needs and hoping the rest of Illinois isn't paying attention.

Pritzker's campaign spokesperson said Bailey and Del Mar are focused on "spreading the extreme MAGA agenda by attacking women's right to choose, supporting Trump's failing economic agenda, and spreading far-right conspiracy theories."

Why it matters in Illinois

Illinois is one of the places people travel to when their own state has banned abortion. That is the actual meaning of the word Del Mar used on that stage — "Mecca" is a complaint about patients arriving from states where the procedure is now illegal.

A governor of Illinois has real power over that: over what the state protects, what it funds, and whether the people who come here for care are treated as patients or as a problem to be solved.

Bailey is asking for that power while declining to say what he'd do with it. His platform is silent. His running mate says one thing on public radio and the opposite at a rally. Bailey himself, in May, told a friendly crowd there's no one more pro-life than he is.

Voters are entitled to know which of these is the campaign.

Illinoisans deserve a candidate who tells every audience the same thing. We deserve better.

Source

Mawa Iqbal, "Darren Bailey's running mate maintains abortion is 'sin against God'" — Chicago Sun-Times / WBEZ, August 7, 2026. Photos by Pat Nabong and Ashlee Rezin / Sun-Times.

Five Houses in Little Rock. Two of Them Occupied by Christians. That's the Sharia Takeover.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:12:00 +0000

On July 17, 2026, the governor of Arkansas posted this to her official accounts:

"In our state, you cannot replace Arkansas law with Sharia law. We will not allow it. Period."

Her attorney general quote-tweeted her an hour later to agree that Arkansas is governed by law, "not religious legal codes."

Here is what they were protecting Arkansas from.

Five houses off John Barrow Road

New Africa is a small subdivision in Little Rock's John Barrow neighborhood, built by a local mosque, the Islamic Center for Human Excellence. The Arkansas Times went out and looked at it this month.

It's five houses. Two of them are lived in by Christians. The imam lives in another. The only sign it exists is a sign that says "New Africa Community." It has been there for nearly two decades.

Buyers sign a Bill of Assurance — the same kind of covenant a homeowners association makes you sign, with rules about upkeep and conduct. That document says the development exists "for the purpose of creating a wholly owned residential Al-Islamic community conforming to the social guidelines given in the Quran." That's the sentence that launched a thousand posts.

Tauheed Salaam, part of the development team, explained what it actually means: no stealing, no crime, take care of your family, keep the property up. Nobody is made to wear a hijab or convert. The rules cover the community's public spaces, not what you do inside your own home — you can have a drink in your own house.

And he reached for an analogy that ought to stop this whole story cold. They hope people take examples from the Quran, he said, the same way a Christian might hope people follow the Ten Commandments.

Hold onto that one.

How five houses became a statewide emergency

The Arkansas Times traced the panic back to its source, and it isn't a court case or a police report. It's a content pipeline.

On March 31, the RAIR Foundation — an outlet the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as an anti-Muslim hate group — published a piece claiming Little Rock had been "conquered" by Islam, with a section on New Africa.
On April 4, pro-Trump influencer Terrence K. Williams pushed the story to his 4.5 million Facebook followers. It drew more than 18,300 likes, 7,800 comments and 6,300 shares.
That same day, Arkansas state Rep. Alyssa Brown posted about "a story out of Little Rock about an Islamic Shariah organization" that "is going viral" and "deserves more attention."
Brown then co-sponsored House Resolution 1016, the "Arkansas Property Rights Protection From Sharia Law Act," with primary sponsor Rep. Marcus Richmond. In a later post, Brown cited "a viral post about the Islamic Center compound here in Arkansas."

A hate group's blog post became a bill in the Arkansas Legislature in four days.

It died. On April 15, the House Rules Committee rejected it — and the man who took it apart was a fellow Republican. Rep. Jeremiah Moore pointed out the bill wouldn't even reach a white supremacist compound in northeast Arkansas:

"If we're trying to worry about disclosures for Sharia Law, I would also like to cover the white supremacists up near Ravenden. I'm pretty sure they're trying to do the exact thing that you're describing here…"

That was in a session so short that lawmakers had to vote just to consider non-budget bills. On the same day, another Republican was begging the committee to let him raise the homestead property tax credit because "gasoline is high, groceries are high." The imaginary threat got a named bill with three sponsors. The compound Moore was talking about got nothing.

Then the governor picked it up anyway

Three months after her own party's committee killed the bill, Sarah Sanders posted her warning to Arkansas.

Nobody could say why. Commenters under her own Facebook post asked where it came from — "Where did this come from lmao," one wrote; another called it "a dog whistle inviting hate crimes and deportations." A spokesperson for Sanders didn't respond when the Arkansas Times asked what inspired it.

Attorney General Tim Griffin amplified her post about an hour later with his own, on X and on Facebook. His office said it had "received repeated inquiries about the status of Sharia law in Arkansas." When the Times filed a public records request to see those inquiries, the AG's office refused to release them, claiming an exemption for the attorney general's working papers.

So the official story is: we responded to concerned citizens, and no, you can't see them.

There is no takeover. There never was.

Let's be clear about the thing itself. "Sharia" is a religious framework — prayer, fasting, charity, how you treat your family, how you do business honestly. It does not override American law, any more than kosher rules or Catholic canon law do. American courts answer to the Constitution.

This panic is also not new, and it has never once found anything. A 2013 Brennan Center report counted lawmakers in 32 states introducing "foreign law" bans, and found the practical result wasn't safety — it was confusion over marriages, divorces and prenuptial agreements with religious or foreign origins, and over how international businesses do deals here.

Texas has been running the play the longest. In 2015, a mosque in Irving offered its members voluntary mediation. Then-mayor Beth Van Duyne accused the mosque's leaders of creating separate laws for Muslims and "bypassing American courts," and led Irving officials in endorsing a state bill to forbid judges from using foreign laws. Mosque leaders said she was stirring up anti-Muslim feeling. Eleven years later, nobody has produced the takeover.

Texas passed a "Sharia ban" that never mentions Sharia

Greg Abbott has told Texans he banned Sharia law. He didn't.

The law he signed is House Bill 4211, signed June 20, 2025. Its official title is "Relating to certain residential property interests controlled by certain entities." It governs how business entities own and sell homes in a development. Read the text yourself: the words "Sharia," "Islam," and "Muslim" do not appear in it a single time.

That didn't stop Abbott from posting that he had banned "Sharia law" and "Sharia compounds," and telling Texans to report anyone attempting "Sharia compliance" to law enforcement. CAIR-Texas called it "reckless, discriminatory, and divorced from reality" — and pointed out that the developers of EPIC City, the Muslim community near Dallas the law was aimed at, had said they supported the bill, because they were already following the rules.

They were telling the truth. The Justice Department closed its investigation into EPIC City without bringing any charges.

None of that slowed anything down. In the March 2026 Republican primary, the state party put "Texas should prohibit Sharia law" on the ballot as Proposition 10 — one of ten advisory questions used to set party priorities. It passed with 94.81%, and Abbott promised more:

"Even though I've signed a law that bans Sharia law in the state of Texas, this is going to be something that we take going into the next session and make more crystal clear and more expansive."

He is promising to expand a ban on something that isn't happening, under a law that doesn't say what he says it says.

Congress had already built a caucus

Washington did not need Little Rock. The organization was there first: on December 18, 2025 — three months before the RAIR post — Keith Self of Texas and Chip Roy launched the "Sharia Free America Caucus." Within a month it had 26 members from 17 states. By March it had 50.

The roster reads like a directory of this site: Majority Whip Tom Emmer, plus Reps. Brandon Gill, Michael Cloud, Mary Miller, Andy Biggs, Eli Crane, Byron Donalds, Scott Perry, Randy Fine, Andy Ogles, Eric Burlison, Josh Brecheen, Sheri Biggs, Ralph Norman, Barry Moore, Tracey Mann, Russ Fulcher, Mike Kelly, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Clyde, Mark Harris, Nick Begich, Cory Mills and Mike Haridopolos.

Read their own words in Self's press release and watch how fast "we're protecting the Constitution" turns into something else. Cloud called it "an assault on our Constitution, our freedoms, and the Christian foundations of our nation." Gill complained about "the rise of mass Islamic immigration in north Texas." Ogles skipped the legal argument entirely:

"Islam is a religion of violence, abuse of women, and ruthless political conquest."

That is not a statement about a legal code. It's a statement about a faith and the people who practice it. Ogles kept going: in March 2026 he posted that "Muslims don't belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie." The same week, Randy Fine wrote that "we need more Islamophobia, not less," and Tommy Tuberville posted a photo of the September 11 attacks beside a photo of New York's Muslim mayor, captioned "The enemy is inside the gates."

In February 2026, CAIR designated the caucus an anti-Muslim hate group — the first time in the group's 32-year history it has designated a congressional caucus. The reason was the legislation. One bill members back, the Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act, would let the government revoke visas and deport any foreign national judged to be "an adherent of Sharia law." There is no test for "adherent." It's an official deciding whether your prayers count against you.

This isn't only an objection from the left. At the House Judiciary subcommittee hearing Republicans themselves called in February, George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin testified against the bill, arguing it violates the First Amendment's protections for free speech and free exercise of religion, sweeps in enormous numbers of people who pose no threat, and would actually harm national security by handing extremists a recruiting pitch.

The Senate has a bill by the same name, and it belongs to Alabama's Tommy Tuberville, who introduced S. 3009, the "Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act," on October 15, 2025 — along with S. 3008, the "No Shari'a Act," the same day.

A different Senate bill goes after Sharia in American businesses. On February 12, 2026, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas introduced S. 3887, the "Defeat Sharia Law in America Act," with Tuberville as his only co-sponsor. It would amend the Civil Rights Act so that a business covered by its public-accommodations section that provides goods or services "by implementing Sharia law" counts as discriminating on the ground of religion. Cornyn described a religion practiced by nearly two billion people as "an existential threat to our way of life." CAIR's Alabama chapter called the bill an "unconstitutional attack on religious freedom," pointing out that Sharia guides daily religious practice much the way Jewish Halacha does.

Follow the money, and the calendar

If this were a legal emergency, you'd see it in the courts. Instead you see it in ad buys.

Republicans spent more than $10 million on TV ads mentioning "Sharia" or "Islam" negatively, according to figures the ad-tracking firm AdImpact gave NPR — most of it in Texas, right before its primaries. That's roughly ten times what was spent in each of the last four election cycles.

Sabina Mohyuddin, who runs the American Muslim Advisory Council in Tennessee, put it plainly: "It is an election year and these politicians believe if they spew this hateful rhetoric, they are going to get more votes."

House Speaker Mike Johnson defended the rhetoric, saying "there's a lot of energy in the country and a lot of popular sentiment that the demand to impose Sharia law in America is a serious problem." NPR added the part he left out: Sharia is a religious framework, and it does not have standing over the U.S. Constitution.

A few Republicans wouldn't play along. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis said "freedom of religion is a pillar of our nation and broad brush statements like this are offensive and completely inappropriate." Most of the conference said nothing — a long way from 2019, when Republican leaders condemned Rep. Steve King over his comments on white nationalism and stripped him of his committee assignments.

The freedom argument falls apart on contact

Now go back to Salaam's line: they hope people learn from the Quran the way a Christian might hope people follow the Ten Commandments.

Because three days before Sanders warned Arkansas about religious law, she stood with the First Liberty Institute to announce that Arkansas ranks #1 in the nation for religious liberty. "Every American should be free to live according to their faith and conscience," she said. And one of the laws she credited for the ranking was Act 573 — the law putting the Ten Commandments in every Arkansas classroom.

So: a religious code in every public school is religious liberty. A religious code in a five-house subdivision is an invasion.

That's not the only place the principle collapses.

Texas requires the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom. Abbott signed that bill, and in April 2026 the Fifth Circuit upheld the law. A religious text, in every room, by order of the state.
A federal judge threw Arkansas's version out. In March 2026, Judge Timothy Brooks wrote that "nothing could possibly justify hanging the Ten Commandments — with or without historical context — in a calculus, chemistry, French, or woodworking class." Sanders called the Ten Commandments "the basis of all Western law and morality" and vowed to appeal. The lawyer running that appeal is Tim Griffin — the same attorney general who told Arkansas that the state is governed by law, "not religious legal codes."
Arkansas librarians can now face jail. On July 30, 2026, a federal appeals court let Act 372 take effect. Handing a minor an item deemed "harmful" is a Class A misdemeanor carrying up to a year in prison; a separate provision makes some cases a felony carrying up to six. Griffin praised the ruling.
Texas is near the top of the country in pulling books from schools. PEN America counted 1,781 book bans in Texas in the 2024–25 school year alone.
Texas bans abortion at about six weeks, with no exception for rape or incest. Abbott signed it, then told Texans not to worry because the state would "eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas."

The government tells you what religious text hangs in your kid's classroom, what books the librarian can hand your teenager, and what you can do about your own pregnancy — and that's liberty. But a Muslim family following religious guidance in their private life is a threat to the Republic.

That's not a principle. That's a target.

Who actually pays

The imam at the Islamic Center for Human Excellence said they haven't had any incidents from all this. They increased their security anyway. That's what it costs to be five houses on the wrong end of a viral post.

It costs more elsewhere. "We know this kind of rhetoric leads to more bullying in school, discrimination in the workplace, hate crimes and vandalism against mosques," Mohyuddin said. By her estimate, Ogles alone has tens of thousands of Muslim constituents in his own district.

And it isn't over. The Arkansas Legislature convenes a regular session in January 2027, and the Arkansas Times notes the Sharia bill could come back. Abbott has promised a "more expansive" version in Texas. The caucus keeps growing.

Every hour spent on an invented takeover is an hour not spent on what was actually squeezing families in that Arkansas hearing room — the price of gas, the price of groceries, the cost of seeing a doctor. Ask your representative what they did about your health insurance premium this year. Then count how many times they said the word "Sharia."

One of those numbers is going to be much bigger than the other.

Sources

Despite debunkings, misinformation about Little Rock's 'New Africa' persists — Arkansas Times, August 4, 2026
Arkansas homestead tax credit proposal advances, Sharia Law resolution fails in committee — Arkansas Advocate, April 15, 2026
House GOP leadership silent as more members post anti-Muslim statements — NPR, March 14, 2026
CAIR Designates House's 'Sharia-Free Caucus' an Anti-Muslim Hate Group — CAIR, February 18, 2026
CAIR-Texas Calls Gov. Abbott's Claim to Sign a 'Sharia Law' Ban 'Divorced from Reality' — CAIR-Texas, September 12, 2025
Sanders' July 17 post and Griffin's reply on X

Photo: Rep. Andy Ogles addresses the New York Young Republican Club, Dec. 13, 2025. Adam Gray/Getty Images.

ICE Is Reading Your Posts. Congress Paid for It.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:30:00 +0000

Somebody on Reddit used the handle Tired_Thumb. Over two months, they left three comments that mentioned ICE. Two of them included the letters "ACAB" — an old protest slogan that stands for "all cops are bastards." One of them shared a phone number for an agent, pulled off a public records website, with the link to that website pasted right underneath.

For that, the federal government has spent six months trying to learn their name.

First the Department of Homeland Security sent Reddit an administrative subpoena asking for the poster's name, address and billing records. It didn't say what law had been broken. When a legal nonprofit fought back, the government dropped that subpoena — and came back with a grand jury subpoena, which carries more weight, asking for another month of the person's activity.

Nobody has been charged with anything. The government just wants to know who they are.

That story comes from a Wall Street Journal investigation published August 3, 2026, by Hannah Critchfield and Shane Shifflett. And Tired_Thumb, as the Journal put it, is far from alone.

A round-the-clock dragnet

Here is what the Journal found.

ICE now runs a nonstop digital operation that scans the public internet — Facebook, Instagram, X, and close to 20 platforms in all, including Reddit, Discord, Snapchat and LinkedIn — looking for speech the agency decides is dangerous to its mission. Not just threats to agents. Also, in the government's own contracting language, "activities that could disrupt ICE's operations."

Private contractors do the work. They write daily reports and build files on people. Those files can include a person's name, location, date of birth, workplace, Social Security number, vehicle registration and criminal history.

The money grew fast. ICE spending on surveillance technology and consultants hit $258 million during President Trump's first full year back in office — a 57% jump from the year before, according to the Journal's analysis of federal budget data. The agency has signed at least six contracts to scan public records for "threats," paying out nearly $50 million since 2020, with more than half of that money committed since last January.

One of those contracts went to a small Virginia software firm called Amivero — more than $8 million to monitor social media. Amivero handed the actual work to Guidehouse, a big consulting company that also works on defense and intelligence. Neither company would talk to the Journal.

The government's shopping list for this program asks contractors to pull DMV records and police reports, map out who a flagged user knows, and use machine learning for something called "anticipatory threat intelligence" — software that guesses at threats before anything happens.

To find out who anonymous critics are, DHS has sent hundreds of subpoenas to social media companies.

Reddit said no. The government kept going.

Between July and December of last year, DHS sent Reddit administrative subpoenas for the information behind 11 accounts that had posted "content critical of federal actions."

Reddit looked at them and concluded these users were doing something the First Amendment protects. The company objected to every single one. DHS eventually withdrew all of them.

"Privacy is central to how Reddit operates," said Ben Lee, the company's chief legal officer, adding that Reddit routinely objects to government requests that are "overbroad or threaten users' privacy or civil rights, including their First Amendment rights."

So the government switched tools. It started using grand jury subpoenas instead, which are harder to fight.

The Journal identified 10 people — nine Americans and one Canadian — who tried to stop the government from unmasking them. Judges upheld four of the grand jury subpoenas. The government gave up on three cases. Three are still going.

No charges have been filed in any of them.

That pattern is the whole story. As civil-rights attorney Lauren Regan told the Journal:

"They're not actually filing any criminal charges where we can challenge the vagueness, the overreach and the abuse of that statute. If they just want to use this as an intimidation tactic, it's not even a fair fight."

What actually counts as "doxxing"

The administration has been rewriting a word.

In September 2025, President Trump signed a national security memo called NSPM-7. It lists "organized doxing campaigns" alongside swatting, rioting, looting, trespass and assault as the kinds of acts that can get a group labeled a domestic terrorist organization. It specifically names ICE agents in Los Angeles as an example.

Congress never voted on any of that. It's a presidential memo. As Government Executive reported, the structure "allows the president to direct law enforcement and national security agencies, with little opportunity for congressional oversight." Thirty-one members of Congress wrote to Trump in October 2025 warning of "serious constitutional, statutory and civil liberties risks." Nothing changed.

The ACLU called the memo "a fever dream of conspiracies, outright falsehoods," and warned that it "stitches together a few disparate, serious acts of actual or attempted criminal conduct with First Amendment-protected beliefs and protests against the president and his policies."

From there, the definition kept stretching. DHS has argued that filming law enforcement doing their job in public and posting the video counts as doxxing.

It even applied that logic to a newspaper. When the Minnesota Star Tribune named Jonathan Ross as the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good — a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother of three — in Minneapolis on January 7, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin responded with this:

"The Star Tribune should be absolutely ashamed of themselves for their reckless behavior, and they should delete their story immediately."

Ross has not been charged. The Star Tribune did not delete the story.

Here's the thing about all of this: the Supreme Court drew this line back in 1969. In Watts v. United States, the Court threw out a conviction and wrote that "the language of the political arena, like the language used in labor disputes, is often vituperative, abusive, and inexact." Real threats aren't protected. Angry political talk is. That's not a new or controversial idea. It's 57 years old.

Two agents, a printed screenshot, and a form to sign

On Election Day in New York — June 23, 2026 — a poll worker named Paigelynne Gonyea was working at the Central Library in Syracuse when she got a voicemail from a man who said he was a Homeland Security special agent.

He said agents had just been by her apartment. He said they were calling about a post "where you doxxed an ICE agent back in January."

Then two agents with ICE badges walked into the polling place. They carried a file on her with her name, address, date of birth, height, weight and eye color, plus printed screenshots of her posts. They asked her to sign a notice from ICE's Office of Professional Responsibility. It said, in capital letters at the top, "YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW," and directed her to "promptly remove and/or discontinue the aforementioned behavior."

What had she posted? On January 8, the day after Renee Good was killed, she wrote this:

"The ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good in broad daylight has been identified as Jonathan Ross by the Minnesota Star Tribune. I think today is a great day for Jonathan to be indicted!"

That's it. A newspaper's reporting, repeated, plus an opinion that a man should face a grand jury.

Gonyea refused to sign. She refused to delete the post. DHS later told NPR she had published an ICE officer's address online — but has not produced any evidence of that, and Gonyea says she has looked through her own accounts and can't find any address.

A local Republican election commissioner confirmed to NPR that the badges were real. He called the whole thing "a comedy of errors" and said it was "a mistake" for agents to enter a polling site at all. Federal law bars armed federal officers from polling places — NPR notes it's unclear whether these two were armed — and New York has a state law barring immigration agents from voting sites, period.

Perry Grossman of the New York Civil Liberties Union put it plainly:

"If this is the kind of speech that the administration, that DHS wants to go after, then they are trying to fundamentally redefine the First Amendment and the scope of permissible public debate. And that is wrong. That is ridiculous."

According to the Journal, the agents who visited Gonyea delivered that same letter to several other people that day. One recipient sued. A special agent tracked down David Streever while he was on vacation — five months after Streever emailed then-acting ICE director Todd Lyons following the killing of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse shot by federal agents in Minneapolis on January 24, and called Lyons "a monstrous human being." Streever says DHS is retaliating against protected speech and that it will chill the public.

The number they won't show you

DHS's whole defense rests on a statistic: an 8,000% increase in death threats against ICE officers since Trump took office.

Go read the press release it comes from. It's dated January 26, 2026. It contains one voicemail transcript and the number. No counts. No baseline. No time period. No methodology. Nothing you could check.

We've been here before with this agency. A September 2025 executive order claimed assaults on ICE agents were up "more than 1,000 percent." NPR and Colorado Public Radio went and pulled five years of federal court records to check. Comparing charges for assaulting a federal officer through mid-September 2025 against the same stretch a year earlier, they found about a 25% rise — not 1,000%.

When reporters asked DHS to show its work, the department "repeatedly declined to provide any justification." It sent back links to its own earlier press releases repeating the same number.

Bob Pence, a 30-year FBI veteran, told NPR why that matters:

"There are a number of ramifications, if the public can't believe what law enforcement is saying then law enforcement probably can't depend on the cooperation of citizens to report information to them accurately."

By January 2026, the same DHS press release that carried the 8,000% figure had bumped the assault claim up to "more than 1,300%."

Congress wrote the check

None of this built itself. It runs on money, and money comes from Congress.

In June, Senate Republicans passed S. 2 — the "Secure America Act" — at 4:42 in the morning by a vote of 52 to 47, handing ICE and Border Patrol nearly $70 billion. Combined with the mass-deportation money approved the year before, that's close to a quarter of a trillion dollars.

They moved it through a fast-track budget process that needed only a simple majority, which let them strip out the guardrails that normally ride along with funding bills — required oversight of detention conditions, transparency rules forcing ICE to report basic data to the public, and civil-rights protections in enforcement. Those protections aren't in the law. That was a choice, and you can read the full breakdown in our post on the senators who voted yes.

Be clear about the timeline, because it matters. This vote did not create the dragnet — the Amivero contract was signed in September 2025, and attorneys started seeing the subpoena spike that same month. The surveillance operation was already running.

What these senators did was vote, on June 5, 2026, to pour another $70 billion into the agency running it — five months after federal immigration agents killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, and Alex Pretti weeks after her — and to do it in a way that left out the transparency requirements that would make a program like this visible to the public in the first place.

The Senate: 52 to 47

Fourteen of the senators who voted yes have report cards on this site:

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

The House: 214 to 212

Four days later, on June 9, 2026, the House passed the same bill by 214 to 212 and sent it to the president, who signed it the next day as Public Law 119-98.

Look closely at that roll call, because the margin hides something. It was two votes — but not because Republicans were split. Every single Republican who cast a vote voted yes. Not one voted no. Three didn't vote at all: Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey, and Nancy Mace and Ralph Norman of South Carolina. The 212 no votes came from 211 Democrats and one independent.

It was close because it was unanimous on one side and near-unanimous on the other.

A hundred and ninety of the House members who voted yes have report cards here:

Alabama — Robert Aderholt, 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, Young Kim, Tom McClintock, Jay Obernolte, David Valadao
Colorado — Lauren Boebert, Jeff Crank, Gabe Evans, Jeff Hurd
Florida — Aaron Bean, Gus Bilirakis, Kat Cammack, Mario Diaz-Balart, Byron Donalds, Randy Fine, Scott Franklin, Carlos Gimenez, Mike Haridopolos, Laurel Lee, Anna Paulina Luna, Brian Mast, Cory Mills, Jimmy Patronis, John Rutherford, Maria Elvira Salazar, Greg Steube
Georgia — Rick Allen, Andrew Clyde, Mike Collins, Clay Fuller, Brian Jack, Rich McCormick, Austin Scott
Idaho — Russ Fulcher, Mike Simpson
Illinois — Mike Bost, Darin LaHood, Mary Miller
Indiana — Jim Baird, Erin Houchin, Mark Messmer, Jefferson Shreve, Victoria Spartz, Marlin Stutzman, Rudy Yakym
Iowa — Ashley Hinson, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Zach Nunn
Kansas — Ron Estes, Tracey Mann, Derek Schmidt
Kentucky — Andy Barr, James Comer, Brett Guthrie, Hal Rogers
Louisiana — Clay Higgins, Mike Johnson, Julia Letlow, Steve Scalise
Maryland — Andy Harris
Michigan — Tom Barrett, Jack Bergman, Bill Huizenga, John James, Lisa McClain, John Moolenaar, Tim Walberg
Minnesota — Tom Emmer, Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach, Pete Stauber
Mississippi — Mike Ezell, Michael Guest, Trent Kelly
Missouri — Mark Alford, Eric Burlison, Bob Onder, Jason Smith, Ann Wagner
Montana — Troy Downing
Nebraska — Mike Flood, Adrian Smith
New Jersey — Jeff Van Drew, Chris Smith
New York — Andrew Garbarino, Nick LaLota, Nick Langworthy, Mike Lawler, Nicole Malliotakis, 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, David Joyce, Bob Latta, Max Miller, Michael Rulli, David Taylor, Mike Turner
Oklahoma — Stephanie Bice, Josh Brecheen, Tom Cole, Kevin Hern, Frank Lucas
Oregon — Cliff Bentz
Pennsylvania — Rob Bresnahan, Brian Fitzpatrick, John Joyce, Mike Kelly, Ryan Mackenzie, Dan Meuser, Scott Perry, Guy Reschenthaler, Lloyd Smucker, Glenn Thompson
South Carolina — Sheri Biggs, Russell Fry, William Timmons, Joe Wilson
Tennessee — Tim Burchett, Scott DesJarlais, 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, Derrick Van Orden, Bryan Steil, Tom Tiffany, Tony Wied
Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

One name is missing from that list on purpose. Kevin Kiley of California, who the clerk's roll call lists as an independent rather than a Republican, voted no. He is the only member tracked on this site outside the Democratic caucus who did.

Twenty-four other House Republicans voted yes and don't have pages here yet.

Not one of the 204 members listed above made the money conditional on ICE telling the public what it collects, or on whom.

So who is watching the surveillance program? On paper, the ICE Privacy Office, in consultation with the DHS Privacy Office. The Journal reports the ICE Privacy Office is down to two full-time staffers.

Two people. Overseeing a $258-million-a-year surveillance operation with hundreds of subpoenas and files on American citizens.

And when members of Congress did go looking, it was one party doing the asking. Rep. Maxwell Frost and 11 other Democrats wrote to DHS in February asking what data the department collects on protesters. Lyons wrote back on April 21. He denied ICE keeps a database of protesters — but acknowledged that ICE collects "essential biographic and biometric information and situational details" on people it believes may be interfering with its operations, and keeps those records even when nobody is arrested.

ACLU attorney Scarlet Kim noticed what the letter left out: "He did not deny that, essentially, that information would not be placed in other existing databases."

The Republicans who control both chambers wrote the checks and stripped the guardrails. The questions about what ICE is collecting on Americans came from the minority.

Why this should bother you even if you never post about ICE

You might think none of this touches you. Look at the actual conduct that drew federal attention here.

A Reddit comment with the letters "ACAB" in it. An Instagram post saying an agent should be indicted, quoting a newspaper. An angry email to an agency head. Filming officers in public.

That is the ordinary stuff of American political argument. It is exactly what the Supreme Court described as "vituperative, abusive, and inexact" — and protected.

Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Virginia who studies privacy and cyberstalking, pointed out the part that ties it all together:

"We're seeing the weaponization of privacy in ways that privilege the powerful, and in particular, law enforcement. Law enforcement who are serving the public, they're hiding their names. They're hiding their faces. If they had their names on badges and they weren't wearing masks, you might see less of this activity."

That's the trade being made. Agents get anonymity. You get a file.

And notice how little the government has to do to win. It doesn't need convictions. It doesn't even need charges. It needs you to see two agents walk into your workplace holding a printout of your Instagram, and decide it isn't worth posting again.

Some of what the government is looking at is genuinely ugly. One woman the Journal spoke to had compared ICE officers to Nazis on X in January and written that "All ICE Agents need to be put down like the dogs they are." That's a vile thing to write, and nobody has to defend it.

But look at what happened next. Roughly four months later, plainclothes ICE agents showed up at her home, told her not to post like that again, and left. She was never charged. She has curbed what she says online.

If the government believed that post was a real threat, there is a courtroom for that. It went to her doorstep instead. And that tells you which outcome it was after.

That's not law enforcement. That's a warning system, paid for with public money, aimed at the public.

Source

Hannah Critchfield and Shane Shifflett, "How ICE Is Weaponizing Social Media Against Its Critics", The Wall Street Journal, August 3, 2026.
Photo: federal agents inside the Syracuse polling place where Paigelynne Gonyea was working, June 23, 2026. Video by Gracious Golden via Facebook; screenshot by NPR.

37 Republicans Signed a One-Sentence Bill to Abolish the Department of Education

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 16:15:26 +0000

Most bills in Congress run hundreds of pages. H.R. 899 is one sentence:

The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2026.

That's it. No plan for what happens to the money that goes to poor school districts. No plan for the student loans that millions of families depend on. No plan for the office that enforces the rights of kids with disabilities. Just a date.

Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky introduced it on January 31, 2025. Thirty-seven House Republicans have put their names on it as cosponsors.

Thirty-one of them have report cards on this site. Here they are.

The cosponsors

Twenty-seven members signed on the day the bill was introduced. These are the ones we track: Andy Biggs, Lauren Boebert, Josh Brecheen, Tim Burchett, Eric Burlison, Ben Cline, Andrew Clyde, Mike Collins, Eli Crane, Jeff Crank, Warren Davidson, Paul Gosar, Harriet Hageman, Andy Harris, Rich McCormick, Mary Miller, Andy Ogles, Scott Perry, Keith Self, Victoria Spartz, Claudia Tenney, Tom Tiffany, William Timmons, and Randy Weber.

Ten more signed on over the following months, including David Taylor, Brandon Gill, Greg Steube, Russ Fulcher, Anna Paulina Luna, Marlin Stutzman, and — as recently as April 30, 2026 — Sheri Biggs.

Every one of them represents a district full of public schools. Nine out of ten American children — 49.6 million of them — go to one.

Abolishing the department is the loud part

Here's the thing about H.R. 899: it's mostly a flag to wave. The bill has sat in committee since the day it was filed. It's a way to tell primary voters where you stand without having to explain what happens to Title I money the following January.

The real work is happening somewhere else, and it's working.

Roughly half the Education Department's workforce is already gone — 1,400 laid off, 600 pushed into early retirement, about 100 probationary employees fired. Its work is being handed off to the Labor Department, HHS, the Interior Department, and the State Department. None of those agencies run schools. Around $30 billion in education programs has been shipped out. The department spent $38 million paying Office for Civil Rights employees to sit at home on administrative leave.

Congress noticed. In the spending package, lawmakers wrote that "no authorities exist for the Department of Education to transfer its fundamental responsibilities" to other agencies, and warned the moves would "create inefficiencies, result in additional costs to the American taxpayer, and cause delays and administrative challenges."

And then Congress did nothing. Instead of stopping it, lawmakers asked to be sent briefings. The transfers went ahead anyway.

That's the whole story of this Congress in one paragraph. They write down that something is illegal, request a status update, and let it happen. Meanwhile the House Education and Workforce Committee is moving 10 bills to make the breakup permanent — because an executive order can be reversed by the next president, and a law can't.

The quiet part is the money

While everyone was arguing about whether to abolish a department, Republicans did something far more consequential: they created the first national private school voucher in American history, and they hid it in a tax bill.

Buried in the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" is a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit for donations to private school scholarship groups. Read that again — dollar-for-dollar. It's the only credit in the entire tax code that pays a donor back 100 cents on the dollar. Give $1,700, get $1,700 back. It costs the donor nothing.

It starts January 1, 2027. And there is no cap on how much money it can pull out of the Treasury.

The Joint Committee on Taxation scores it at $26 billion over ten years. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates it could run as high as $51 billion a year. For comparison, the federal government spends $18.4 billion on Title I for low-income schools and $14.6 billion on IDEA for students with disabilities. This one tax credit could cost more than both of those combined.

It's sold as help for low-income families. The law defines that as anyone under 300% of area median income — which in some parts of the country means a household making $500,000 a year.

Vouchers go to families who were never in public school

This is the part that never makes the press release. Every state that has tried universal vouchers gets the same result: the money goes to people who were already paying private tuition.

95% of Arkansas voucher users never attended a public school.
In Florida's first year of universal vouchers, 69% of new recipients were already in private school. Only 13% had ever set foot in a public one.
In Iowa, two-thirds were already in private school.

So the pitch — rescuing kids from failing schools — isn't what the program does. It cuts checks to families who had already made other arrangements, and it takes the money out of the schools where nine of ten kids actually are.

And the kids who do switch end up doing worse

Four rigorous studies found the same thing. In Washington, DC, voucher students scored 0.12 standard deviations lower in math than students who weren't offered one. In Louisiana, the average student fell from the 50th percentile to the 34th percentile in math after three years. Indiana and Ohio came out the same way. Students with disabilities lost the most.

Joshua Cowen, the Michigan State professor who spent nearly two decades evaluating these programs — including the original Milwaukee study — now opposes them outright. He called the Louisiana results "shockingly bad."

Where the money actually lands

Ohio spends nearly $1 billion a year on vouchers, with the vast majority flowing to Catholic and evangelical schools. Unlike a public school, those schools are free to turn your child away — over their religion, their disability, or who their parents are — and they face almost no accountability for the public money they take.

And the schools didn't use the windfall to enroll more kids. They raised tuition to capture the vouchers.

One religion, everybody's classroom

The voucher money is one half of it. The other half is what's being put into the public schools that survive.

In February 2026, the full 5th Circuit cleared the way for Louisiana's law requiring a specific Protestant version of the Ten Commandments in every K-12 classroom in the state — the law specifies the size and the font. Texas has passed a comparable law.

In June 2026, the Texas State Board of Education voted to put Bible passages on the required reading list for more than 5 million public school students. That's roughly 1 in 10 public school students in the country, and the first statewide mandatory reading list in America to include a religious text.

At a Religious Liberty Commission event held at the Museum of the Bible, Donald Trump announced Education Department guidance on prayer in public schools and said he was "restoring our identity as a nation under God." Rachel Laser of Americans United for Separation of Church and State called it a "Christian nationalist agenda."

Public schools belong to all of us — every faith, and none. A Jewish kid, a Muslim kid, a kid whose family doesn't go to church at all: they all pay for those schools and they all have to sit in that classroom.

College got more expensive too

The same "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" ended the Grad PLUS loan program, capped what parents can borrow, and eliminated the SAVE, PAYE, and ICR repayment plans.

Under the replacement plan, a family of four earning $81,000 sees their monthly payment jump from $36 to $440. Repayment stretches to 30 years. Even a borrower with no income at all has to pay $10 a month.

What this actually is

Put the pieces next to each other and the shape is obvious.

Drain the money out through an uncapped tax credit. Send it to private and religious schools that can reject your kid and don't have to answer for the results. Push one religion into the public classrooms that are left. Gut the federal department that's supposed to enforce civil rights and get money to poor districts. Then put your name on a one-sentence bill to finish the job, and go home and tell voters you're for local control.

Our public schools took generations to build. They are the one institution in American life that has to take every single child who walks through the door — rich or poor, disabled or not, any faith or none.

Thirty-seven members of Congress signed on to abolishing the agency that helps hold that together. Their constituents' kids will be living with the results long after the press release is forgotten. We deserve better.

Sources

The cosponsor list is from Congress.gov. Additional research on voucher outcomes from Brookings. Photo: ProPublica.

182 House Republicans Just Voted to Keep Us in Trump's Iran War — And Lost

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 08:20:15 +0000

The war with Iran started in February. Congress never voted to authorize it. Five months later, American troops are still dying in it.

On Thursday, July 23, 2026, the House of Representatives voted 214 to 208 to order the president to pull U.S. forces out of the fighting. The resolution — H. Con. Res. 89, written by Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington — passed.

It passed despite 207 Republicans voting against it. Only four Republicans in the entire House voted yes.

182 of the Republicans who voted no have a report card on this site. Their names are below.

What they were voting on

Nothing complicated. The resolution said: the president does not have authorization from Congress for this war, so bring the troops home.

That's not a partisan idea. It's the War Powers Resolution, the law Congress wrote precisely so a president couldn't keep the country in a war on his own indefinitely. Voting yes meant Congress gets a say. Voting no meant the president decides alone.

182 Republicans we track voted for the president deciding alone.

The cost while they stalled

This isn't an abstract fight over process. According to the Pentagon, 18 U.S. troops have died since the fighting broke out in February — and four of those deaths came after July 17 alone. U.S. forces have suffered nearly 500 injuries, 100 of them in the two weeks before this vote.

The fighting is getting worse, not better. And back home, the bill keeps arriving in other forms: gas prices climbed after the Iran war started, squeezing drivers, farmers, and families who never got a vote on any of it.

A majority of Americans oppose military action in Iran. A majority of the House now agrees. The war continues anyway.

Congress already said no. Twice.

Here's the part that should make you angry.

This was not the first time. On June 3, the House passed an almost identical resolution, H. Con. Res. 86. On June 23, the Senate agreed to that same resolution, 50 to 48.

Both chambers of Congress. The same resolution. Already passed.

The administration ignored it and kept fighting. That's why the House had to vote again on July 23 — and why Rep. Gregory Meeks, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, announced he would file a lawsuit to enforce the resolution Congress already adopted.

And when the second vote came, the same Republicans lined up the same way. Of the 182 Republicans on this list, 181 voted no both times — in June and again in July. They watched Congress get overruled by the White House, and their response was to vote to be overruled again.

The president, for his part, has called these votes "meaningless" and dismissed them as Democrats "fueled by Trump Derangement Syndrome." When 182 members of his own party vote to make Congress irrelevant, it's hard to argue he's wrong about the "meaningless" part.

The Senate blocked the version with teeth

There's a catch in all of this, and it's worth understanding, because it's how the whole thing gets to keep happening.

H. Con. Res. 89 is a concurrent resolution. As Roll Call explained, it "did not go to the president for his signature and therefore had little power to actually force him to withdraw troops from the war." It's a formal statement, not a binding order.

The binding version came up in the Senate the very same day. Sen. Chris Van Hollen's S.J. Res. 180 was a joint resolution — the kind with legal force. The House finished voting at 10:24 a.m. At 11:51 a.m., about ninety minutes later, the Senate rejected the binding version, 47 to 49. Susan Collins of Maine was the only Republican who voted to advance it.

So on one day in July, Congress voted for the version that can't stop the war and voted down the version that could.

Who leads this

Some of the names on this list aren't backbenchers. They're the people who decide what the House does.

Speaker Mike Johnson voted no. So did Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Majority Whip Tom Emmer. The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Brian Mast of Florida, held up photographs of U.S. service members killed in the war during floor debate and said, "To belittle this mission is to belittle and demean the very service these members gave their life for."

That's the argument: because Americans have died, Congress must not be allowed to ask whether they should have been sent. It gets the moral logic exactly backwards. The way you honor a service member's life is by voting before you spend it — not by using their death to shut down the vote.

Jayapal put the other side plainly after the resolution passed: "From the beginning, this war has had no clear mission, no strategy, no end goal. Congress has not been consulted."

Four Republicans managed it

It was possible to vote yes. Four Republicans did: Tom Barrett of Michigan, Warren Davidson of Ohio, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, and Thomas Massie of Kentucky.

Four out of 211. Nobody on the list below can claim there was no room to break ranks — four of their colleagues stood in exactly that room.

The 182 who voted to keep the war going

Every one of these Republicans has a report card on this site, and every one of them is recorded on the official House roll call voting no on ordering U.S. forces out of an unauthorized war:

Alabama — Robert Aderholt, 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, Young Kim, Tom McClintock, Jay Obernolte, David Valadao

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

Florida — Aaron Bean, Gus Bilirakis, Mario Diaz-Balart, Byron Donalds, Randy Fine, 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

Idaho — Russ Fulcher, Mike Simpson

Illinois — Mike Bost, Darin LaHood, Mary Miller

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

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

Kansas — Ron Estes, Tracey Mann, Derek Schmidt

Kentucky — James Comer, Brett Guthrie, Hal Rogers

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi — Mike Ezell, Michael Guest, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Mike Flood, Adrian Smith

New Jersey — Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

North Carolina — 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, 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, John Joyce, Mike Kelly, Ryan Mackenzie, Dan Meuser, Scott Perry, Guy Reschenthaler, Lloyd Smucker, Glenn Thompson

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

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

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

Utah — Mike Kennedy, Celeste Maloy, Blake Moore

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

The bottom line

Going to war is the most serious thing a government does. The Constitution deliberately made it hard, and gave the decision to Congress — the branch that has to go home and face the voters.

These 182 Republicans had the simplest possible chance to do that job. Not to end the war on their own, not to overrule the president — just to record that Congress, the branch that represents us, wants the fighting to stop. A majority of their colleagues managed it. Four members of their own party managed it. Both chambers of Congress had already managed it once in June.

They voted no anyway. And they'll vote no again unless something changes.

Eighteen families have buried someone in a war nobody in Congress ever authorized. Nearly 500 more troops have been wounded. When the next vote comes, remember which of your representatives thought the question wasn't worth asking.

We deserve representatives who answer to us — not to a president who calls our Constitution "meaningless."

How they voted

This post is based on the official congressional roll calls:

House Roll Call 282 — H. Con. Res. 89, July 23, 2026 (passed 214–208)
House Roll Call 199 — H. Con. Res. 86, June 3, 2026 (passed 215–208)
Senate Vote 184 — H. Con. Res. 86, June 23, 2026 (agreed to 50–48)
Senate Vote 207 — S.J. Res. 180, July 23, 2026 (rejected 47–49)

With reporting from NPR and Roll Call.

These 188 Republicans Voted to Let an Energy Board Block Clean-Air Rules

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 21:53:44 +0000

On December 17, 2025, the House passed a bill with a friendly-sounding name — the Reliable Power Act — by a vote of 225 to 203. The name is about the only friendly thing about it.

Here is what the bill actually does. It rewrites the Federal Power Act so that whenever the grid's reliability watchdog flags a risk that the country could run short on electricity, the Environmental Protection Agency — and every other federal agency — has to hand its rules over to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission before those rules can take effect. And here's the kicker: the agency cannot finalize the rule until FERC decides it won't hurt the power supply. In plain English, a panel of energy regulators gets to stand in the way of clean-air and climate rules on power plants.

Why this matters to you

Power plants that burn coal and gas are some of the biggest sources of the pollution that lands in the air your kids breathe. For decades, the EPA has been the agency that tells those plants how much soot, mercury, and carbon they're allowed to dump on the rest of us. This bill hands another agency a way to block those protections before they ever start.

The League of Conservation Voters — which tracks how members of Congress vote on the environment — urged lawmakers to reject the bill, warning that it would give FERC "the over-reaching authority to suggest changes and block any rule from any other agency if it relates to any electricity generation resource." That's not a narrow fix. That's a veto over clean-air rules, dressed up as a reliability study.

It was written by Ohio's own Troy Balderson, with Texas's Randy Weber and North Dakota's Julie Fedorchak as the lead cosponsors. When the roll was called, every Republican on the floor voted yes — not a single Republican voted against it.

Who voted to block the clean-air rules

188 Republicans on this site's report cards voted for the Reliable Power Act. Here they are, grouped by state:

Alabama: 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

California: David Valadao, Jay Obernolte, 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, Byron Donalds, Carlos Gimenez, Cory Mills, 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, Mike Collins, Rich McCormick, Rick Allen

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mary Miller, 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, 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, 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

The vote

None of this is our opinion about how they voted. It's the official record. You can read every name and every vote for yourself on the House Clerk's roll call for H.R. 3616, and the full text of the bill that spells out the new roadblock for clean-air rules. When your representative tells you they're looking out for the air you breathe, ask them why they voted to give a panel of energy regulators the power to stop the EPA from cleaning up the plants next door.