MAGA Report Cards — Indiana

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

Marlin Stutzman Told CNN That Mail Ballots Are 'Where Most of the Fraud Takes Place.' There Is No Evidence of Widespread Fraud in Recent Elections.

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 06:43:57 +0000

On September 1, a federal official inside the U.S. Postal Service told Congress that the system the agency was rushing to switch on that very day — the one that has to clear your mail ballot before it gets delivered — was built so badly it could "derail the midterm elections."

That evening, Marlin Stutzman went on CNN and said he agrees with the plan.

What the whistleblower said

The disclosure, released by Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, describes an agency that "discarded all best practices" racing to meet a September 1 deadline. Postal Service IT teams would get less than a week to test the finished system. "For a system that manages something as important as handling voting and ballots, four days of user testing is entirely unreasonable," the whistleblower wrote. Some officials inside the agency reportedly called the process a "shit show."

The mechanics are the part that should worry anyone who votes by mail. Under the rule, when election officials bring a batch of ballots to the post office, the envelopes get scanned against a federal portal. If a single envelope in the batch doesn't match, the Postal Service refuses to deliver the whole batch while the discrepancy gets sorted out.

North Carolina begins mailing ballots on Friday, September 4. Other states follow this month. Courts are still fighting over whether the rule is even legal.

What Stutzman said about it

CNN's Phil Mattingly asked Stutzman for his reaction. Stutzman's answer never engaged with the whistleblower's warning:

"We want to make sure that the voter rolls match up with those ballots that are coming in through the U.S. Postal Service. And there has to be accountability there."

He then reached for a number: that in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, California, and Nevada, "250,000 names were on the voter rolls that should not have been."

Mattingly pushed back. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security, he said, had privately told state officials that the Nevada figure was off dramatically — they had confirmed only about 600 of the names on Nevada's list. Why, he asked, should anyone believe a number published with no methodology behind it?

Stutzman did not withdraw it. "Well, there should be follow up," he said. "Let's be sure that we know for sure that the voter rolls are as clean as possible."

The claim at the center of it

Mattingly pressed him on the practical risk to his own constituents: a voter does everything right, one barcode in the batch doesn't match, the clerk has to haul the ballots back and resubmit them, and Indiana gives no grace period for late-arriving ballots.

Stutzman said he wanted those ballots counted. Then he said this:

"I understand and I agree with the decision that the President made regarding the matching of the names on voter rolls and the USPS, because that's where most of the fraud takes place."

That last clause is the whole argument, and it is not true. CNN's own framing of the segment stated the plain finding: experts say there is no evidence that widespread voter fraud has occurred in recent elections.

Stutzman offered no source for "most of the fraud." He offered a memory instead: his son, voting for the first time in 2024, had to cast a provisional ballot because the address on his driver's license didn't match his registration. That is a story about a young man being made to jump an extra hurdle. Stutzman told it in defense of adding more hurdles.

Indiana is not the problem he says it is

Mattingly made a point worth repeating, because it undercuts the whole appearance. Indiana already does everything the administration says it wants: you need an excuse to vote by mail, you need to apply, and you need to supply an ID number. Indiana is not the target of the new rule. Its voters get nothing out of it.

What they can get is the failure mode — a clerk's batch bounced back over one mismatch, close to a deadline with no grace period, in a state that counts nothing that arrives late.

Stutzman's answer to that was to pitch legislation. He named the SAVE America Act, which would require people to show documentary proof of citizenship — a passport, a birth certificate — to register to vote in federal elections. He allowed that it might not be in place for this election.

He is already on that bill. Chip Roy introduced it on January 30, 2026, Stutzman cosponsored it ten days later, and it has sat in the House Administration committee ever since. He had already voted for its predecessor, the SAVE Act, on April 10, 2025, when the House passed it 220-208. Voting-rights groups have warned for two years that the documents it requires are exactly the ones millions of married women, older Americans, and rural voters do not have on hand — a problem we have written about again and again.

What was actually asked, and what he actually answered

Strip the interview down and the shape is clear. He was asked about a whistleblower's specific, mechanical warning that whole batches of ballots could be refused. He answered with voter rolls. He was told his headline number had been walked back by the administration's own officials. He said there should be follow-up. He was asked whether his own constituents might lose their votes. He said mail ballots are where most of the fraud takes place.

What the record shows

Hours after a federal whistleblower told Congress the new Postal Service ballot system could derail the midterms and reject entire batches of ballots over one mismatched scan, Marlin Stutzman went on national television and endorsed it, telling viewers mail ballots are "where most of the fraud takes place" — a claim experts and CNN's own reporting say the evidence does not support. Told on air that the government had confirmed only about 600 of the names behind his 250,000 figure, he did not withdraw it.

Source

"Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-IN), Is Interviewed About USPS Whistleblower: New Ballot System Could Fail, Hamper Midterms", The Lead, CNN, September 1, 2026. Photo: official congressional portrait, 119th Congress.

Indiana Has Dropped More of Its Children From Medicaid Than Any Other State. All Seven of Its Republicans in Congress Voted for the Law That Cuts Another $900 Billion.

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:55:29 +0000

Nearly 2.5 million children in the United States have lost Medicaid or Children's Health Insurance Program coverage since January 2025, according to data published on September 1, 2026 by the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families.

No state has shed a larger share of its kids than Indiana.

And the part that should worry everyone: none of this is the 2025 budget bill's Medicaid cuts. Those have not started yet.

What has already happened

Georgetown's researchers have been tracking child enrollment state by state since the start of Trump's second term. Their June 2026 report found Indiana at the top of the list — an enrollment decline of 19.8%, or over 174,000 children, comparing April 2026 to January 2025. By the data released this week, Indiana's drop had passed 23%.

Five states have now seen declines of 10% or more. Ten states — California, Texas, Indiana, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Ohio, Arizona, Virginia and Kentucky — account for two thirds of the losses. In the June report, only two states in the country were holding steady or rising.

Georgetown's own words on the timing:

"these enrollment losses are occurring BEFORE Medicaid cuts associated with H.R. 1 are coming into play, which is alarming as more declines will be on the way."

The causes Georgetown lists are paperwork and fear: more red tape and less help getting through it, anti-immigrant policies producing a chilling effect on families whose children are citizens, federal coverage protections that are not being enforced, state eligibility systems making mistakes, and families who assume the cuts are already in force and do not renew.

Joan Alker, who directs the Georgetown center, put the consequence simply: "when Medicaid child enrollment declines, the number of uninsured kids typically goes up."

Paperwork is the mechanism, and it is not an accident

This is the part that gets lost when people argue about eligibility rules. Nowhere in its list of likely causes does Georgetown say these children were found ineligible. Every item on that list is about the process, not about whether a child qualifies.

Eileen Appelbaum of the Center for Economic and Policy Research says the same thing will happen when the new federal rules start next year: "The best guesses from the experts are that two-thirds of the people that will be disqualified will actually be eligible, but they just couldn't handle the paperwork."

Brown University epidemiologists Abdullah Shihipar and Brandon DL Marshall put it in the terms that matter to a family: "Paperwork here is not merely an annoyance, it is a matter of life or death for millions with Medicaid coverage."

A child who loses coverage does not stop getting sick. The asthma inhaler, the ear infection, the well-child visit that catches something early — those either get paid for out of pocket, or they do not happen.

What Indiana's members of Congress voted for

Indiana is already the worst in the country at this, and every Republican it sends to the U.S. House voted to make the national version harder.

On July 3, 2025, the House voted on final passage of H.R. 1, Trump's budget bill. The clerk's roll call records all seven Indiana Republicans voting aye:

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

That law cuts an estimated $900 billion from Medicaid over ten years. It also does nationally, starting next year, the same kind of thing Georgetown says is already pulling Indiana's rolls down — a 2025 state law that "added additional red tape and reporting requirements." H.R. 1 doubles how often people have to re-prove eligibility, from once a year to twice, and adds an 80-hour-a-month work or volunteer reporting requirement for certain adults.

Indiana has spent the last year and a half running a live demonstration of what happens when you add paperwork to children's health coverage. Its answer was 174,000 kids. Its congressional delegation voted to add more of it, nationwide.

They were told

This is not hindsight. The scale of the Medicaid cuts in H.R. 1 was public before the vote, and it has been the single most-covered consequence of that bill since.

Missouri's Mark Alford voted for the bill in July 2025, then introduced legislation eight months later to keep rural hospitals open — a bill with three cosponsors that has never moved. Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall, an OB/GYN, told a reporter "there are no Medicaid cuts" and called the opposite claim a lie, with his state projected to lose $3.9 billion.

The Indiana seven are on the same roll call. What is different in Indiana is that the state has already produced the number, before the law they passed has done anything at all.

What the record shows

Nearly 2.5 million American children have lost Medicaid or CHIP coverage since January 2025, and Indiana has lost a larger share of its children than any other state — more than 174,000 of them as of April 2026, driven by red tape, fear and confusion rather than by anyone being found ineligible. All of that happened before the Medicaid cuts in the 2025 budget bill took effect. All seven Indiana Republicans in the U.S. House voted for that bill, which cuts $900 billion from Medicaid and doubles how often families must re-prove they qualify.

Source

"Nearly 2.5 Million Children Have Lost Medicaid and CHIP—So Far—During Trump's Second Term", Common Dreams, September 1, 2026. State data: Georgetown University Center for Children and Families, "Which States Are Seeing the Largest Declines in Child Medicaid/CHIP Enrollment?", June 10, 2026. Vote record: U.S. House Clerk, Roll Call 190, July 3, 2025.

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.

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

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

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

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

We now know exactly what that cost.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Jordan — Ohio, −32%

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

Jim Jordan voted yes on the House bill.

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

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

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

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

Stephanie Bice — Oklahoma, −32%

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

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

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

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

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

Juan Ciscomani — Arizona, −30%

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

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

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

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

Sheri Biggs — South Carolina, −29%

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

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

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

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

Victoria Spartz — Indiana, −28%

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lisa McClain — Michigan, −27%

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

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

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

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

Michael Guest — Mississippi, −26%

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

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

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

Jason Smith — Missouri, −25%

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia Foxx — North Carolina, −21%

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roger Marshall — Kansas, −20%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ashley Moody

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

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

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

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

Gus Bilirakis

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

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

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

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

Texas — the thinnest safety net in America, cut anyway

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

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

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

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

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

Monica De La Cruz

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

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

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

Ronny Jackson

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

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

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

He voted yes.

The through-line

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Thirteen Groups Spent Weeks Planning a Candidate Forum. Jefferson Shreve Never Wrote Back.

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:39:19 +0000

Thirteen organizations across Indiana's 6th Congressional District spent the summer trying to put on one event: a forum where voters could hear from the two people running to represent them.

They booked nothing fancy. They asked both campaigns for two available dates by July 31, so volunteers could find a venue, set up a livestream, organize watch parties in outlying counties, and give the public enough notice to show up.

Cinde Wirth's campaign sent the dates.

Jefferson Shreve's campaign never replied — "despite receiving the invitation by certified mail and hand delivery to both his Greenfield and Richmond offices," the coalition wrote in a joint letter this week.

Under the nonpartisan bylaws of both the League of Women Voters and the NAACP, a forum needs at least two candidates. So the forum was cancelled.

Who was asking

This is worth spelling out, because of what Shreve's campaign said next.

The coalition was: League of Women Voters chapters in Brown/Bartholomew, Wayne, Henry, Hancock, Johnson and Marion counties; NAACP units in Richmond, Bartholomew-Columbus and Greater Indianapolis; Indivisible Wayne County and Central Indiana; South INDY-visible; and the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Columbus.

The League of Women Voters has been running candidate forums since the 1920s. It has bylaws requiring nonpartisanship — that is the whole reason the event had to be cancelled rather than held with one chair empty.

Their stated goal:

"Our goal was simple: make the forum accessible to as many voters as possible through a central location, live-streaming and county watch parties for those who could not attend in person."

What his campaign called them

When The Republic asked Shreve's campaign why it never responded to an invitation delivered by certified mail, campaign spokesman Kory Wood didn't say the schedule didn't work. He didn't say they'd offer another date. He said this:

"The event was nothing more than a far-left rally masquerading as a 'non-partisan' forum, all evidenced by a cursory review of the participating organizations' websites and affiliations."

That is a sitting congressman's campaign describing the League of Women Voters and the NAACP as a far-left rally.

It is also an answer to a question nobody asked. The coalition's complaint wasn't that Shreve declined. It's that he never responded at all — not to say yes, not to say no, not to propose different terms. If the objection was that the sponsors were biased, that objection could have been raised in July, in writing, and the groups could have adjusted or the public could have judged the exchange for itself.

Instead, the invitation went unanswered — certified mail, hand delivery, two district offices — until a reporter called.

This is not the first time

Shreve has a record here.

In May 2025, Democrats in the 6th District held what they called a "People's Town Hall" after Shreve declined to attend. It was part of a broader run of "empty chair" town halls that drew crowds across Indiana — events where constituents showed up, the congressman didn't, and organizers left a seat out for him.

Since then, constituents have gone to him instead. They've gathered outside his Greenwood office to protest the use of Camp Atterbury for ICE detention and the state's redistricting push. They've demonstrated against immigration policy in the same city.

When you won't hold the meeting, people hold it on the sidewalk.

Why it matters right now

The 6th District covers Johnson County plus all or parts of Bartholomew, Fayette, Hancock, Henry, Randolph, Rush, Shelby, Union and Wayne counties, and southern Marion County. That's a lot of ground, and the one event that would have put both candidates side by side before the November 3 election is off.

They have plenty to ask about. Shreve is one of the cosponsors of a bill that would void surrogacy contracts outright based on the nationality of the intended parents. He reversed himself on guns after once being rated F by the NRA. He has been trading stocks after tariff announcements. And ICE detention at Camp Atterbury is happening inside his district.

Every one of those is a fair question. A forum is where a voter gets to ask it and hear the answer in the candidate's own voice, next to the other candidate's answer.

Shreve won 64% of the district in 2024. But he took just 53% in his May 2026 primary against challenger Sarah Janisse Brown — and only 51% in Bartholomew County.

Incumbents who feel safe show up. Incumbents who don't, don't.

The simple version

Thirteen nonpartisan groups, six League of Women Voters chapters, three NAACP units. Certified mail. Hand delivery to two district offices. A July 31 deadline that came and went.

No reply. Forum cancelled. And then, only when a reporter asked, an insult.

The coalition's closing line to voters was to go look the candidates up themselves at VOTE411.org, since they couldn't get one of them into a room.

Source

Andy East, The Republic: "Coalition cancels 6th District candidate forum after Shreve doesn't respond." Photo: The Republic.

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

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

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

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

What the state parties wrote down

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

Another section goes after surrogacy directly:

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

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

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

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

The SAFE KIDS Act

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who signed it

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

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

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

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

The part they don't put in the press release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why surrogacy, and why now

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

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

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

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

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

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

What this costs real people

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

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

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

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

Source

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

Mark Messmer Raised $1.4 Million in Political Money. He Paid for His Trumpet Ad With Yours.

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:19:42 +0000

There is a television commercial running in Terre Haute right now in which Mark Messmer marches around his hometown of Jasper playing a trumpet.

"Some say Mark Messmer is tooting his own horn," the voiceover says, "but all he's doing is spreading the news of conservative results for Southern Indiana."

The ad goes on to tout his votes to "secure" the southern border, to keep "Hoosiers safe from illegal fentanyl and dangerous cartels," and his support for Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill." A sheriff walks out of a police station and waves at him.

You paid for it.

The Evansville Courier & Press pulled the records. The disclaimer at the end of the spot reads "Paid for by official funds authorized by the House of Representatives." The WTWO purchase order in the FCC's public inspection file lists the product description in plain language: "IN-08 Franking."

What franking money is supposed to be

Franking is the taxpayer-funded allowance members of Congress use to communicate with constituents — traditionally mailers explaining a new law, a change to Medicare, where the mobile office hours will be.

The House Communications Standards Manual is not vague about the limits. Official communications "should not be used for political or personal business," and it specifically warns against "campaign content or electioneering." A violation, the manual says, results in "disciplinary action."

Messmer's ad threads a needle. It never asks anyone to vote for him. It never mentions his opponent, Evansville city councilor Mary Allen.

Nick LaRowe, an associate professor of political science at the University of Southern Indiana, explained why that technicality doesn't mean much:

"Distinguishing between taxpayer-funded communications with your constituents (permitted) and persuading them to vote for you (not permitted) can be hard to distinguish in practice and thus enforce. If you are telling constituents how hard you work and all the good things you have supported, the obvious implication is they should vote for you, even if you don't say that."

The calendar tells on him

Here is the detail that makes the "it's just constituent outreach" defense collapse.

Federal law bars members of Congress from sending franked communications within 60 days of a general election. The rule exists precisely because everyone understands what these ads turn into as an election approaches.

Messmer's ad is scheduled to run 84 times between August and early September — during local newscasts, The Today Show, Saturday Today, The Kelly Clarkson Show, and Wheel of Fortune.

Its last scheduled day on air is September 2. That is 62 days before Election Day.

He isn't stopping because the message is finished. He's stopping two days before the law would make him stop.

He is not short of money

Allen called it a "clear misuse of taxpayer dollars," and made the obvious point:

"Public funds designed for constituent outreach should be used to communicate important information or official government business, not campaigning. What makes it even more egregious is that he has hundreds of thousands of dollars in his campaign account. If he wants to run ads boasting about his record 80-something days out from the election, he should use his campaign funds, not hard-earned tax dollars."

The FEC filings back that up. Messmer's latest report showed $681,902 in total contributions as of June 30. The Messmer Victory Fund, a PAC tied to him, has raised another $763,580.

That's roughly $1.4 million raised into his political operation — and he reached for the public's wallet instead.

LaRowe's read on why is the least flattering explanation available, and the most likely:

"I don't claim to have any insight into the decision making of the Messmer campaign. But if you could run a digital communication that is legal and functions like a campaign ad while saving money … well, why not do it?"

The parts that don't add up

Four details in this story are worth sitting with.

His own constituents can't see it. The ad only airs on WTWO, the Terre Haute NBC affiliate. Evansville-area residents — the population center of the 8th District — never see it. The Courier & Press had to get a copy from Allen's spokeswoman, and the Allen campaign only got one because someone recorded it off their television. A "constituent communication" that most constituents can't watch and that his own office didn't circulate is a strange kind of public service.

The sheriff didn't know. Gibson County Sheriff Bruce Vanoven appears in the ad walking out of the Jasper police station and waving as Messmer passes. Asked about it, he told the Courier & Press: "Mark contacted me and asked me if I was available. I have not seen the video and I have no knowledge how it was funded."

Nobody will answer. The Courier & Press contacted a Messmer staffer and emailed the congressman's personal address on Monday, asking why the office paid for the spot with public funds. Both went unanswered.

How much did it cost? Unknown. The price was redacted in the FCC records.

This is the pattern, not a slip

Messmer's problem isn't that he communicates with the 8th District too aggressively. It's that this is the only way he communicates with it at all.

He has never held an in-person town hall anywhere in the 21 counties he represents. In June 2026, about 70 people gathered at the Central Library in Evansville for a town hall he never answered an invitation to and never showed up for. In 2025, protesters at a "People's Town Hall" put his face on a fake milk carton. In March of that year, his office asked Boonville library workers to call the police on a crowd of mostly older constituents who had come to a mobile office hours event. The library staff refused.

So: he won't take unscripted questions in a room. He won't answer a reporter's email. But he will spend public money on 84 airings of a spot in which he plays the trumpet and lists his accomplishments, timed to end 62 days out.

He is not alone in this. Georgia's Mike Collins spent more than $400,000 in taxpayer office money on TV ads nearly identical to his own campaign spots — one of them built around Trump praising him by name. Minnesota's Michelle Fischbach sent more taxpayer-funded mass communications than anyone else in her state's delegation — 55 in one year, 50 more in a single quarter — while never holding an in-person town hall in her district.

The pattern is always the same. The mailers and the ads go out. The town halls don't happen. And the bill goes to you.

Source

Jon Webb, "Records: Rep. Mark Messmer used taxpayer funds for commercial", Evansville Courier & Press, August 12, 2026.

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

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

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

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

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

What the judge did

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

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

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

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

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

What the letter asks for

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

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

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

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

The man who led it sells the products

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

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

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

Who signed

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

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

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

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

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

What registration was actually doing

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

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

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

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

Source

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

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.

The Only Ukrainian-Born Member of Congress Voted Against Aid to Ukraine. A Year Later She Called Zelensky a "Moron."

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:57:47 +0000

Victoria Spartz was born in Nosivka, in Ukraine's Chernihiv region, in 1978. She came to the United States in 2000 and became a citizen in 2006. She is the first and only Ukrainian-born member of Congress.

On March 1, 2022 — five days after Russia invaded — she stood at a House Republican news conference and called it a genocide. She described the bombings her grandmother and her friends back home had lived through.

On April 20, 2024, the House voted on $61 billion in aid for Ukraine. It passed 311 to 112.

Spartz voted no.

What changed

The Associated Press went to Sheridan, Indiana, a few days later and asked her about it.

She said she was "kind of appalled" at the idea that her heritage should determine her vote, and that she opposed giving "blank checks" without better oversight of how the money was spent.

"My responsibility is the protection of American people," she said.

That is a defensible position. Plenty of members hold it.

Here is the part the AP put right next to it. Spartz was two weeks from a primary against eight challengers in one of the most conservative districts in Indiana — a race made harder because she had announced in early 2023 that she wouldn't run again, then reversed herself, leaving a full year of open runway for opponents.

Her best-funded challenger, state Rep. Chuck Goodrich, had been attacking her over Ukraine, saying she put "Ukraine first." He had loaned his campaign $4.6 million. She went into the final weeks with $134,000 in the bank against his $1.3 million.

And a former Indiana state representative interviewed by the AP described what actually moves Republican primary voters in that district: not Ukraine, but the southern border. Of the field, he said, "They're all gunning to be as Trump-like as possible."

Then there's what the AP watched her do on stage at that event. She gave a speech to the voters in that hall about socialism and about Republicans she says act like socialists.

She did not mention the war in Ukraine at all.

"Morons and crooks"

A year later, the criticism stopped being about oversight.

In April 2025, The Telegraph published an interview with Spartz under a headline saying Zelensky must cede land to Russia. She objected that the paper had misrepresented her — she says it amended the headline after her team complained, but kept a colon that left the false impression standing — and she put out her own statement to set the record straight.

This is what she wrote in that statement:

"I spent an enormous amount of energy trying to help the Ukrainian military to win their brutal fight against Russia. Unfortunately, if you have morons and crooks like Zelensky and his puppet parliament running your country, it's a lost cause."

Her own clarification called the elected government of the country she was born in morons and crooks, and said that with them running it, the fight she claims to have spent enormous energy on is a lost cause.

On the substance she landed here:

"The current reality on the ground is that Ukraine is not in the position to retake its territories, nor could they agree to give them up permanently."

Her position, in her own words, is a temporary freeze that gives "each side some time to regroup." As the Kyiv Post noted in that same piece, both Kyiv and Moscow have made the same argument about a ceasefire — that it lets the other side regroup for more war later.

The oversight argument didn't survive contact with her own record

The Kyiv Post pointed out one more thing in that piece. Before the $61 billion bill gained traction, Spartz had said that "only weapons can bring peace," while calling for more oversight. Then she voted against the bill that would send the weapons.

You do not have to take a side on Ukraine policy to see the shape of this. She was for it when being for it cost her nothing. She was against it seventeen days before a primary she was losing on money. Then, once she'd won, the objection escalated from "we need receipts" to "morons and crooks."

That is the same pattern Hoosiers have watched from her on other things. She said she was retiring, then filed for reelection days before the deadline, after at least nine other Republicans had entered the race. She told The Hill on the morning of February 10, 2026 that it was Congress's job "to decide which tariffs are good, which tariffs are bad" — and that night, after leadership held the vote open for more than 45 minutes, she switched her vote. She has also signed on to repeal the 17th Amendment and take away Indiana's direct vote for U.S. senators.

Indiana Capital Chronicle columnist Michael Leppert's verdict on her holds up: "unquestionably unreliable."

Why Hoosiers should care about any of this

Because Ukraine was the one issue where Victoria Spartz had something nobody else in Congress had — she grew up there, her family is there, she saw the war through her own relatives.

If that is the subject on which she moved with the political wind, the honest question for Indiana's 5th District is which of her positions wouldn't move.

Her constituents are not asking her to vote a particular way on a foreign war. They are asking to know, before an election, what she is actually going to do after one.

We deserve better.

Sources

This congresswoman was born and raised in Ukraine. She just voted against aid for her homeland — The Associated Press, April 29, 2024. Photo: Darron Cummings/AP
Spartz Calls Zelensky 'Moron,' Rebuffs Telegraph Report — Kyiv Post, April 2025
House Roll Call 151 — Ukraine Security Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2024 — Office of the Clerk, April 20, 2024

A Former Staffer Turned Down $60,000 From Victoria Spartz's Office Because It Came With a Gag Order

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:55:36 +0000

In March 2026, a woman named Cynthia West was offered $60,000 to make a complaint about Victoria Spartz's congressional office go away.

There was a condition. She would have to sign a nondisclosure agreement — a legal promise never to talk about it.

She said no.

Two months later she went public, and Axios obtained the proposed agreement and confirmed the terms. Here is how West explained turning down the money:

"What kind of person would I be if I did this [by taking a settlement with an NDA] when I have the ability to teach the culture."

What she says happened

West worked in Spartz's office from early January to late March 2025. She had gotten the job through Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, whom she was dating at the time.

After her employment ended, she filed a complaint with the Office of Congressional Workplace Rights — the independent office Congress set up to handle its own workplace disputes.

West told Axios she believes she was let go after she complained about three things: the toxic work environment in the office, Spartz's decision to hire a noncitizen for a district director job, and Spartz's insistence on getting involved in Ukraine's elections.

Those are her allegations, and the complaint has not been adjudicated. Spartz denies them. What is not in dispute is the settlement offer, the dollar figure, and the nondisclosure clause.

Spartz's office has given two different answers

Watch how the explanation changed over about 48 hours.

First, a spokesperson told Axios that the office "cannot comment on the details of Ms. West's pending allegations, but we can confirm that Ms. West held a temporary 90-day probationary position with our office, and her employment was not extended beyond that period due to unsatisfactory job performance."

Then, in a statement Spartz posted on social media, the reason changed. Her temporary employment, Spartz said, "was not extended beyond 90 days due to concerning conduct."

Unsatisfactory job performance is a normal thing to say about a probationary hire. "Concerning conduct" is an accusation about a person's character, made publicly, by a member of Congress, about a former employee with a live complaint pending against her — and no specifics were offered for what the conduct was.

Spartz says she denied West's allegations during a pre-filing process, and that she later reconsidered settlement discussions "to save taxpayer money and mitigate disruptions to the operation of the office." She denies trying to force West into a nondisclosure agreement.

Both things can be in the record at once: Spartz says she didn't try to force an NDA, and the proposed agreement Axios reviewed contained one, which is why West walked away from $60,000.

This is not the first complaint about working for her

If the phrase "toxic work environment" sounds familiar in connection with this office, that's because it has come up before, from people who have nothing to do with Cynthia West.

In June 2024, Politico reported that the House Ethics Committee was investigating Spartz over her treatment of staff. Aides who were given anonymity for fear of retaliation described an atmosphere of "abuse," "rage" and "general toxicity". One current staffer described it this way:

"The common thing is for her to call someone up or to their face, cuss them up, say the F-word about a million times... That's a weekly thing. It's not rare. All my interactions with her have been filled with complete and total rage."

Spartz has defended herself by saying, "I work extremely hard at a pace that is not for everyone."

Separately, two former aides told the Daily Mail — in reporting picked up by Raw Story — that Spartz was known to "throw furniture" at her staff, and that she would blow up at them at public and private events alike. One described her conduct as "verbally abrasive, if not borderline abusive."

And there is a number attached to it. LegiStorm, which tracks congressional staffing, found Spartz's 2024 staff turnover was nearly 3.5 times the House average — tied for the second-highest of any member of Congress that year.

People do not leave a good job at three and a half times the normal rate.

Why the gag order is the part that matters

Set aside every contested allegation. The undisputed shape of this is simple.

A former employee raised a workplace complaint against a member of Congress. The response was an offer of $60,000 conditioned on her silence. When she wouldn't take it, the member's office went out in public and said she had engaged in "concerning conduct" — while also saying it "cannot comment on the details."

This is a congresswoman who talks constantly about accountability. She was one of six original cosponsors of the DOGE Act, the bill to write Elon Musk's cost-cutting operation into federal law, and she told a jeering town hall crowd in Muncie that DOGE was "doing a good job for you, and someday you will appreciate." She has signed on to repeal the 17th Amendment and take away Hoosiers' direct vote for their U.S. senators — a change its sponsor sells as making senators answer to their states.

Accountability for federal agencies. Accountability for the Senate. A nondisclosure agreement for the woman who filed a complaint about her office.

Indiana Capital Chronicle columnist Michael Leppert concluded in 2024 that Spartz is "unquestionably unreliable." Two years later, her office cannot keep one story straight about why a 90-day employee was let go.

Cynthia West gave up $60,000 rather than agree not to talk about it. That decision is the only reason any of us know about it at all.

We deserve better.

Sources

Marc Caputo and Kate Santaliz, Thomas Massie's ex accuses him of hush money offer — Axios, May 12, 2026
Thomas Massie, Victoria Spartz deny 'hush money' allegations days before Kentucky primary — WDRB, May 14, 2026

Threats and Assaults on Park Rangers More Than Doubled in the Year Before the Pandemic. Rudy Yakym Wrote a Bill to Put Guns Inside Their Buildings.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:14:38 +0000

On July 16, 2026, Rudy Yakym introduced H.R. 9719, the Federal Lands Lawful Carry Act, with Texas Rep. Pat Fallon. It went to the Judiciary Committee. Three cosponsors had signed on by the time this was published.

The bill would let people carry firearms inside buildings on federal lands — visitor centers, ranger stations, and the other public facilities run by the National Park Service and other federal land agencies, plus U.S. Army Corps of Engineers facilities.

Yakym's case for it:

"Hoosiers who can lawfully carry shouldn't lose that right when they step into a federal park building."

Fallon's was broader: "Americans' Second Amendment rights are under assault, and we in Congress must do all we can to ensure that they retain their God given right to bear arms."

The bill is endorsed by the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, and the Second Amendment Foundation.

What the law actually is right now

It's worth being precise, because the framing of this bill depends on you not knowing the current rule.

You can already carry a gun in a national park. That changed in 2010. As the Park Service explains it, people who can lawfully possess firearms under federal and state law may possess them in the park. Trails, campgrounds, overlooks, roads — all of it.

The single remaining restriction is buildings. Under 18 U.S.C. § 930, a firearm can't be carried into a federal facility, and every one of those buildings is posted with the same sign:

"Federal law prohibits the possession of a firearm or other dangerous weapon in this Federal facility unless specifically authorized."

Within the park system, "federal facility" means the staffed buildings: government offices, visitor centers, ranger stations, fee collection buildings, maintenance facilities. Rooms with employees in them.

So the "right" Yakym describes as being lost isn't the right to carry in a national park. It's already there. What his bill changes is the last few hundred square feet — the room with the ranger behind the desk.

Who is in that room

This is where the bill stops being abstract.

A 2022 report by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, covered by E&E News, documented what has been happening to that workforce:

228 threats and assaults on NPS law enforcement personnel in 2019 — more than double the 94 recorded the year before
Violent crimes in the parks up from 60 in 2014 to 293 in 2019
Permanent law enforcement rangers down 15% between 2005 and 2021; seasonal rangers down 30%
U.S. Park Police at a nearly 50-year staffing low

PEER's director summed it up: "The thin green line of park law enforcement rangers is being stretched to the breaking point."

Those are the people Yakym's bill affects. Not hikers on a trail — hikers on a trail can already carry. The staff standing at a counter, in a building with no metal detector and no armed security, telling visitors that the campsite is full, that the permit is denied, that the fee is due, that they have to leave.

Fewer of them than there were. More assaults on the ones who remain. And a bill to remove the one place their building is legally off-limits to a firearm.

The bill's real audience

The tell is who wrote the argument.

In March 2026, months before Yakym filed his bill, the Second Amendment Foundation — one of the three groups endorsing it — sued to strike down the very same statute, 18 U.S.C. § 930(a), as applied to Park Service facilities. Their complaint, filed with the Firearms Policy Coalition, argues it is unconstitutional to make someone disarm to walk into a visitor center and pick up a camping permit.

SAF's founder Alan Gottlieb was explicit about the broader target:

"These so-called 'sensitive places' restrictions across the country are nothing more than an attempt by idealogues to circumvent the Supreme Court's ruling in Bruen."

Yakym's bill is the legislative version of that lawsuit. If the court won't do it, Congress does it instead — and the sponsor gets endorsements from all three of the groups pushing both tracks.

His record on this isn't new

This fits a pattern that predates the parks bill.

In September 2023, Yakym was an original cosponsor of H.R. 5561, a bill "to prohibit the President and the Secretary of Health and Human Services from declaring certain emergencies or disasters for the purpose of imposing gun control" — barring the President and the Health Secretary from declaring an emergency, a pandemic among them, for the purpose of imposing gun control, and barring any federally declared disaster from being used to prohibit guns, ammunition or magazines.

Meanwhile, in the state he represents: Indiana has about 17.2 gun deaths per 100,000 people — 34% above the national average, roughly 1,200 Hoosiers a year.

Yakym has not introduced a bill about that number. He has introduced one about visitor center doors.

He's not alone in this session

The 119th Congress has produced a run of bills that take the last remaining restricted spaces and open them.

In Colorado, Jeff Crank wrote a bill to make it easier to bring personal guns onto military bases — the opposite of what the Pentagon's own suicide-prevention committee recommended, in a service where two-thirds of active-duty suicides involve a firearm. In North Carolina, Richard Hudson's national concealed carry bill drew a plea from the Fraternal Order of Police to kill it, because it strips officers of the power to check a permit. In Texas, Ken Paxton spent two years suing to put guns back into the State Fair after a shooting there injured three people, and lost to an all-Republican court.

Every one of these takes the same shape: find a place where guns are still restricted, and argue that the restriction is the anomaly.

The question nobody gets to ask him

If a constituent thought the ranger at the front desk of a visitor center should not have to wonder who's armed, there isn't much they can do about it.

Yakym has not held a public town hall. When hundreds of people rallied outside his Mishawaka office in March 2025 asking for one, he put out a statement about the protest saying his office would "not allow our efforts to be derailed by individuals whose sole intention is to disrupt and create chaos." What he offers instead is staff-run "mobile office hours," and his own office says those "are not town halls."

The NRA got a say in this bill. Gun Owners of America got a say. The Second Amendment Foundation got a say.

The rangers didn't. Neither did we.

We deserve better.

Source

GOP lawmakers want to allow guns in federal park buildings — E&E News by POLITICO, July 2026, and Congressmen Yakym, Fallon introduce bill to end Federal Ban on Firearms in Federal Park Buildings — GIANT fm. Bill status from congress.gov. Ranger staffing and assault figures from Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, as reported by E&E News. Photo: official congressional portrait.

Rudy Yakym Voted to Cut Food Stamps by Nearly $200 Billion. Now He's Written a Bill Letting Food Pantries Ask for Your ID.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:11:22 +0000

On May 21, 2026, Rudy Yakym introduced H.R. 8953, the Preserving Community Food Assistance Act of 2026. It was referred to the House Agriculture Committee. It has no cosponsors. He is the only member of Congress on it.

Here's what it does.

It amends the Emergency Food Assistance Act of 1983 — the law behind TEFAP, the federal program that sends USDA food to food banks and pantries. The whole bill is one sentence. Into the residency test at 7 U.S.C. 7503(b)(4) it inserts the words "(at the option of the State agency based on documented proof of residency such as a photo identification card, a piece of mail, residency documentation, or other similar document)." A state could then write a document check into the eligibility rules its pantries apply. Yakym's own title for it is "to restore choice to community food assistance providers to request identification"; WRTV's headline was that it "could lead to ID requirements for food aid."

It is aimed at one specific rule. On December 30, 2024, a USDA regulation took effect providing that "Length of residency, address, or identification documents shall not be used as an eligibility criterion" for TEFAP food. Yakym's bill turns that prohibition into a permission, and names the documents.

His stated reason:

"Hoosiers are generous by nature, but that charity should not be abused."

What "abuse" turns out to mean

Read the complaint the bill is built on, because it isn't fraud.

The Mishawaka Alliance for Care Food Pantry, which supports the bill, said the 2024 change has led to an increase in people from outside its service area and repeat visits from members of the same household. The result, its director Kristi York said in a statement, is that "our resources have been depleted at a much faster rate, placing additional pressure on our volunteers, donors, and operational funding." Hearts United for Bristol Food Pantry said it withdrew from USDA grocery support because of the change.

Those are real operational problems, and the people running those pantries aren't villains. Small pantries running on donations and volunteers do get overwhelmed.

But look at what the described behavior actually is. Someone came from outside the service area. Someone came back a second time. Someone in the same household came separately.

That is what hungry people do when there isn't enough food. It is the signature of scarcity, not of cheating. And Yakym's fix isn't more food. It's a document check at the door.

Who a document check keeps out

TEFAP is emergency food. The people at the far end of it are, by definition, at the end of something.

A photo ID, a piece of mail in your name, residency documentation — those are the exact things you don't have when you've just been evicted, when you're couch-surfing, when you left a violent house in a hurry, when your ID was in the car that got repossessed, when you're a kid sent to pick up a box for the family, when you're elderly and your mail goes to a relative's address.

Nobody in that list is defrauding a food pantry. They're the reason the federal rule was written the way it was.

And the fix Yakym is reversing was not a Washington whim about paperwork — it was a decision about whether a free box of food should require you to prove where you sleep.

The part he leaves out

Here is the sequence, in order.

On July 3, 2025, Yakym voted Aye on final passage of Trump's budget bill, H.R. 1 — it cleared the House 218 to 214. According to Feeding America Action, that law cuts nearly $200 billion from SNAP — through state cost-shifting, tighter eligibility, expanded work requirements, and new limits on USDA's ability to adjust benefits. Feeding America estimates it could take nearly 6 billion meals off the table for SNAP participants every year.

Six billion meals is roughly what the entire Feeding America network distributes in a year: 5.9 billion at the last count.

Then, nearly eleven months later, he introduced a bill making it easier for food pantries to turn people away.

You cannot separate these two things. Cutting SNAP does not make people stop being hungry; it moves them from the grocery store checkout to the pantry line. The increase in visits that Yakym's supporting pantries describe is the predictable downstream effect of the vote he cast. Since the law took effect, SNAP enrollment has fallen by more than 4.5 million people — about 11 percent, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, while unemployment stayed flat. Nobody stopped being hungry.

He voted to push people off food stamps. Then he wrote the bill to let the backstop check their papers.

In his own district

Indiana's 2nd District is not a place with a surplus.

25,416 households in IN-02 — about 9% of every household in the district — rely on SNAP to put food on the table, according to USDA data. That includes 13,986 households with children and 7,736 with someone 60 or older.

Those are the households the cuts hit. They are also, when the benefit shrinks, the households that show up at MAC in Mishawaka and Hearts United in Bristol.

Nationally, Feeding America counts 48 million people a year facing food insecurity, including 14 million children.

The pattern

This is the shape the food fight keeps taking: vote for the cut, then perform concern about the consequences.

In Arkansas, Rick Crawford voted to cut food assistance by $187 billion and then threw a celebration over an amendment letting SNAP recipients buy a hot rotisserie chicken — a change that adds no money and helps nobody already cut off. In California, David Valadao cast a deciding vote for the same bill in a district where 27% of households are on SNAP, and said the enrollment drop doesn't worry him. And a 1,000-mile reporting trip through four states found what the cuts look like on the ground: people selling blood twice a week, people who can't afford toilet paper.

Yakym's contribution to that record is a bill that would let the last place those people can go ask them for a piece of mail first.

The bill nobody else would sign

The tell is the cosponsor count.

Members of Congress cosponsor thousands of bills a year. They are cheap to sign and cost nothing if they never move. H.R. 8953 has been sitting in the Agriculture Committee since May with exactly one name on it — Yakym's.

If the case were as simple as he makes it sound — pantries overwhelmed, a bureaucratic rule to fix, Hoosier generosity being abused — this would be an easy signature for a hundred colleagues.

Nobody else signed.

We deserve better.

Source

US Rep. Yakym's bill could lead to ID requirements for food aid — WRTV Indianapolis, May 24, 2026, and the same report via WISH-TV. Bill status from congress.gov. Photo: WRTV / Scripps.

The Crypto Industry Spent $504,020 in the Last Week of Mark Messmer's Primary. He Got the Seat on the Crypto Subcommittee.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:05:54 +0000

A week before the 2024 Republican primary in Indiana's 8th District, a super PAC called Defend American Jobs bought $493,420 worth of ads. The next day it spent another $10,600 producing more of them. All of it was to elect one candidate: Mark Messmer.

You can look the spending up yourself in the FEC's independent-expenditure records — $504,020, spent April 30 and May 1, 2024, and described on the filings as nothing more than "IE-MESSMER-MEDIA BUY" and "IE-MESSMER-MEDIA PRODUCTION."

Nothing about the name "Defend American Jobs" tells you what it is. That's the point of the name.

What Defend American Jobs actually is

It is the cryptocurrency industry's Republican-facing super PAC — an arm of Fairshake, the crypto network that has become one of the biggest spenders in American politics.

FEC filings show where its money comes from. In the current election cycle alone, Defend American Jobs has taken $28 million in transfers from Fairshake, plus $250,000 directly from Ripple Labs and $100,000 from the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz's AH Capital Management — a check the filing itself breaks out as $50,000 each from Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz personally.

That is not a coalition of Indiana job creators. That is a handful of crypto companies and their investors, pooling money to pick who writes their rules.

Then he got the seat

When Messmer arrived in Congress in January 2025, he was assigned to the House Agriculture Committee. Within it, he sits on the Subcommittee on Commodity Markets, Digital Assets, and Rural Development.

"Digital Assets" means crypto. That subcommittee is where the House writes the rules governing the exact industry that had just spent half a million dollars getting him elected — because crypto tokens traded as commodities fall under the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which the Agriculture Committee oversees.

Messmer's official biography describes him and his wife as "small business owners", and he spent sixteen years in the Indiana legislature before this — six in the state House, ten in the state Senate. Nothing in that record is about digital assets.

In July 2025, when the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act came to the House floor — the bill setting the ground rules for how crypto is regulated, and the industry's central ask in this Congress — Messmer voted yes. It passed 294–134 and is now pending in the Senate.

We've written about this playbook before. Defend American Jobs spent $12 million to make Barry Moore Alabama's Senate nominee, and put another $615,885 into a first-time candidate in San Antonio — part of $2.1 million there from AI and crypto money, all of it through PACs whose names mention neither industry. Messmer's race was an early, cheaper version of the same bet.

The bigger picture: he was the sixth most expensive House race in America

The crypto money was one piece of something larger.

By May 1, 2024 — six days before the primary — outside groups had spent $5,069,670 in Indiana's 8th District. That made it the sixth most expensive congressional race in the entire country that spring, ahead of every Senate race except four, according to an OpenSecrets tally reported by the Indiana Capital Chronicle.

All of that $5 million was aimed at just two of the nine Republicans running: Messmer and former congressman John Hostettler.

The money on Messmer's side of the ledger, per that reporting:

$955,000 from the Republican Jewish Coalition, spent for Messmer
$1.2 million from the United Democracy Project, the super PAC tied to AIPAC, spent against Hostettler
$1.5 million from America Leads Action against Hostettler, plus $106,000 for Messmer
$420,000 from America's First Freedoms for Messmer
$504,020 from the crypto industry's Defend American Jobs for Messmer
$49,000 from Building a Strong America for Messmer

Hostettler had two groups behind him: Protect Freedom PAC at $482,000 and the American Leadership PAC at $233,000.

Messmer's own campaign raised $1,545,284 across the entire 2024 cycle, according to FEC totals — less than a third of what outside groups spent in his race. Of that, only $17,595 came in small unitemized donations. That's roughly one percent.

He won the primary with 38.5% of the vote to Hostettler's 19.7%. In a safe Republican district, that primary was the election.

Where he sits today

Two years later, the pattern hasn't changed. Who Bought My Rep, which builds its rankings from FEC filings, ranks Messmer 409th out of 440 House members in the share of his money that comes from grassroots donors — and 256th out of 275 Republicans. His single largest career backer is the Republican Jewish Coalition's victory fund at $954,925; Defend American Jobs is third at $504,020.

None of this is illegal. Super PACs can raise and spend unlimited money as long as they don't coordinate with the campaign, and the crypto industry is entitled to spend it. The question isn't legality. The question is who a congressman is accountable to when the people who put him in the seat were a handful of national industry funds — and the people back home can't get him to show up for a town hall.

Indiana's 8th District has 750,000 people in 21 counties. In 2024, the loudest voice in their primary belonged to none of them.

Source

Whitney Downard, "Outside spending in three of Indiana's congressional races ranks in the nation's top ten", Indiana Capital Chronicle, May 3, 2024. Photo by WNIN News.

Rudy Yakym Called Trump's Tariffs Smart Leverage. Eighteen Months Later, on Live TV, He Said the Prices Are Still Biden's Mess.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:29:10 +0000

On Monday, August 10, 2026, Rudy Yakym went on NewsNation's Morning in America and got asked the question his party has been dodging for a year.

The setup: the day before, RNC chairman Joe Gruters had told NewsNation, "This is Biden's prices that we're still dealing with, and we're still getting under control."

Host Markie Martin put it to Yakym directly:

"Congressman, do you think that's a winning message to just say it's not our fault? And 18 months in, is it not Trump's economy yet?"

Yakym's answer:

"You know, President Trump was certainly left with a mess to clean up. But when you're left with a mess, what you do is you roll up your sleeves and you go to work. That's what President Trump has been doing since day one."

He came back to it a moment later: "We just do what we do in the Hoosier State. We roll up our sleeves, we go to work, and you'll find me and the Hoosiers that I serve to be happy warriors in that endeavor."

Eighteen months into the term. Still the last guy's fault.

What Yakym said when the tariffs started

The thing that makes this one worth writing down isn't the dodge itself. It's that Yakym has a record on exactly the policy driving the prices — and he was proud of it.

On February 18, 2025, he toured a manufacturing plant south of Nappanee and defended the administration's tariff threats to The Elkhart Truth. His argument was that tariffs are leverage and Trump is good at using them:

"Look at the way he leveraged tariffs back in his first administration, look at how he's leveraging tariffs today."

A co-owner of the plant, Darren Miller, told him what business people actually needed to know: "If it's Trump just using it as a leverage tool, a temporary leverage tool, it's whatever. If it's a two-year thing, it's a big deal."

His brother Ryan asked Yakym straight out whether companies should start moving their supply chains — "do you feel like our eggs should be moved to a different basket, long-term?" Yakym told the Millers that was a business decision they would have to make. On the tariffs themselves, he said he was hearing plenty: "We're getting a lot of incoming feedback on that right now."

A month later, on March 20, 2025, he told ABC57 that the RV industry was raising "tariff issues, which we are certainly being their voice inside the administration on," and that he'd gotten "loud and clear feedback" about the Canada and Mexico tariffs.

Being their voice inside the administration. That was the promise. Eighteen months on, it is still going.

What it did to Indiana

On July 22, 2026, the Midwest Economic Policy Institute and the Project for Middle Class Renewal at the University of Illinois published the arithmetic. As Indiana Legislative Insight summarized the findings:

The average Hoosier household paid $2,600 more because of the 2025 tariffs alone — $3,600 counting the earlier rounds
Indiana's economy shrank by $2.65 billion
9,148 Indiana manufacturing jobs were eliminated
Hoosier small-business importers paid an average of $586,000 more

Indiana came out second-worst of the six Midwest states studied, behind only Michigan. Low-income households took it hardest.

That is not a mess anyone inherited. That is the bill for a policy Yakym publicly defended while it was being written.

And it landed on his district hardest of all

Yakym represents Elkhart County. More than 80% of all RVs in the United States are built there and in the surrounding area, and those companies and their suppliers support 126,000 jobs across Indiana. It is a bedrock industry for the state, and it sits in his district.

From April 2025, RV manufacturers paid a 19% import tax on Luan — the lightweight plywood used to build motorhomes, which comes almost entirely from Indonesia.

Then the layoffs came. In May 2025, Thor Industries — the world's largest RV maker, headquartered in Elkhart — filed WARN notices for layoffs across its brands effective June 20: five Cruiser RV plants in Howe, six Heartland Recreational Vehicles plants in Elkhart and one in Middlebury, and a DRV plant in Howe. A Heartland facility across the state line in Sturgis, Michigan closed the same day, taking 121 more jobs.

Then, in February 2026, it got worse in a new way. On Thursday the 19th, the United States and Indonesia struck a trade deal that removed the Luan tariff. The next day the Supreme Court struck down the emergency-powers tariffs as improperly imposed — including that same Indonesia tariff, throwing the new deal into doubt. On Saturday, Trump announced plans for a 15% across-the-board tariff on every country in the world under a different law.

Elkhart calls that whiplash. Manufacturers who spent ten months rebuilding supply chains around one set of rules were left not knowing which set applied.

Yakym's public position on all of it, this Monday, was that the president is rolling up his sleeves.

He is not the only Hoosier running this play

Yakym's fellow Indiana Republican Erin Houchin published an op-ed titled "Trump's Tariffs Are Reviving American Manufacturing" — the same study that priced the damage at $2,600 a household counted the 9,148 factory jobs Indiana lost after she wrote it. In Minnesota, Brad Finstad spent ten months telling farmers the tariff pain was "short term" and then voted twice to protect the tariffs causing it. In Kentucky, Andy Barr co-chairs the Bourbon Caucus while the tariffs hit the distillers he represents.

The script is always the same. Defend the policy on the way in. When the prices arrive, change the subject to the last administration.

There's nowhere to ask him about it

Here's the part that closes the loop.

In that same March 2025 interview, Yakym said he was "very accessible around Indiana's second district" — that he travels "to all 11 counties, every single month, hear from Hoosiers, hear what their concerns are."

What he does not do is hold a town hall. In March 2025, hundreds of people rallied outside his Mishawaka office asking for one on tariffs, Social Security and high prices. He described them as "individuals whose sole intention is to disrupt and create chaos." In April 2025, hundreds more filled a community town hall in South Bend that he was invited to and, organizers say, never responded about.

What he offers instead is "mobile office hours" run by his staff. His own office says those sessions are not town halls.

So a Hoosier who paid $2,600 more last year, or who got a WARN notice from an RV plant, can watch their congressman tell a national TV audience that this is still Biden's mess — and has no room to walk into and say otherwise.

We deserve better.

Source

GOP Rep Pressed on Blaming Biden for Economy 18 Months Into Trump Term — The Daily Beast, August 10, 2026. Tariff impact figures from the Midwest Economic Policy Institute and the University of Illinois' Project for Middle Class Renewal, summarized by Indiana Legislative Insight, August 5, 2026. Photo: NewsNation broadcast still, via The Daily Beast.

Mark Messmer Has Never Held an In-Person Town Hall. A Library Director Says His Chief of Staff Asked Her Staff to Call the Police on 12 Constituents.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:28:06 +0000

On June 20, 2026, about 70 people gathered in the Browning Rooms at the Central Library in Evansville for a town hall with their congressman.

Their congressman did not come. He also never told them he wasn't coming.

Mark Messmer has represented Indiana's 8th District since January 2025. In that time, according to WNIN, he has not held a single in-person town hall anywhere in the 21 counties he represents. The closest thing was a telephone call-in event in May 2025, where a staffer decided which questions reached him.

The invitation

Wendy Bredhold, president of Indivisible Evansville, did it by the book. She called Messmer's office first, and they gave her an email address to send the request to.

Her letter, dated May 15, 2026, is published in full on WNIN's site. It is about as non-confrontational as an invitation to a politician gets. It offers him opening remarks about "your experience in Congress thus far and the issues you are currently focused on." It spells out the ground rules: attendees must "remain civil, limit themselves to one question at a time, and ask questions rather than make statements." It offers to change the format entirely if he'd prefer: "We are also happy to discuss any format preferences or accommodations that would help make the event constructive and comfortable for your office."

The reply, in Bredhold's account:

"I did call Representative Messmer's office and I said I wanted to extend this invitation and they said okay, here's the email address. Send the request to this address, I did, I was very polite, I offered him all kinds of accommodations. They didn't reply at all."

It later turned out the Indiana Republican convention was in Fort Wayne that same Saturday. Nobody from his office mentioned that either. As Bredhold put it:

"That would have been an easy thing for them to tell me: 'It's the Republican State Convention so he has to politely decline.' But instead I got no answer and didn't know until after we had scheduled the event."

So the group held the meeting anyway. Bredhold ran a slideshow on Messmer's record in the Indiana Statehouse and in Congress, and on where his campaign money comes from. People wrote their questions for the absent congressman on poster board and held them up. One member held a sign with his face on it.

March 2025: the library called on to call the police

This didn't start in 2026.

Messmer's office runs "mobile office hours" — staffers at a table in a public building, taking questions one at a time. On March 11, 2025, about a dozen constituents showed up at the Warrick County Public Library. Most were seniors. They wanted to ask their questions as a group rather than one-by-one, and the library offered a bigger conference room so they could.

What happened next is the account of the library's own director, Brooke Bolton, in WNIN's reporting: a Washington, D.C.-based staffer — Bolton identified him as Messmer's chief of staff, Michael Curcio — phoned the library and asked staff to call the police on the attendees.

The library refused.

"My staff told (Curcio) that no one was breaking any rules of this library," Bolton said. "They were not being hostile, they were not being disruptive."

The topics those seniors had come to raise were Medicaid, Social Security, and care for a special-needs child. One of them, Kristina Bickle, described what they were after:

"So really, all we were wanting to do was have a public discourse in which we could ask questions in a respectful way of the people who are supposed to represent the people who represent us. That's all we wanted."

Bolton said the library had never had anything like it happen at a congressional office-hours event before. She added that they'd host Messmer's staff again — in a bigger room next time.

March 2025: 300 people outside his office

Eleven days later, on Saturday, March 22, 2025, people rallied outside Messmer's Evansville office asking for a town hall. "We held an event here on Saturday and over 300 people at least were here to express their concerns," Bredhold told WFIE. On the Monday, dozens of letters were delivered to his office — on health care, on economic policy, on environmental rules.

Messmer's statement to WFIE was gracious and beside the point:

"The Evansville weekend protest reflects how blessed we are to live in the United States of America. And while I disagree with many of their positions, I fully respect and embrace their right to freely protest. I am in Washington, D.C. today so I was not in the Evansville office to receive the letters the protesters dropped off, but my staff was happy to collect them."

He respects their right to protest. He has never given them the meeting they were protesting to get.

May 2025: the telephone town hall

Under that pressure, Messmer did agree to something — a virtual town hall on May 6, 2025, held by phone with a moderator and screened questions.

About 30 people gathered at the McCullough Library in Evansville to listen together at an event they called "Unmuting the 8th District." Roughly nine of them submitted questions to his staff. None were chosen.

Bredhold described the format:

"Once he answered a question or read his answer, whatever the case may be, he was done. There was no opportunity for follow up, like people were silenced after."

WNIN's account of the call is worth reading in full. In the first half hour, a few harder questions got through — one caller pushed back on Trump's tariffs. After that, the questions turned friendly. One asked about the effort to rename the Gulf of Mexico, which prompted this from Messmer:

"'The Gulf of America' just makes more sense."

Another asked how DOGE's cuts could be made permanent. Another simply thanked him for supporting a county music festival.

Laura Brown had wanted to ask him to publicly commit that he wouldn't support sending any 8th District resident to a foreign prison — a petition with more than 600 signatures behind it. She didn't get on. Tom Zeta wanted to ask who exactly was defining "waste, fraud and abuse" in the DOGE cuts. He didn't get on either.

Messmer's office didn't answer WNIN's questions about how many people registered, how questions were picked, or whether rejected questions would ever be answered.

Mitzi Mathieu, listening at the library, summed up the evening in three words: "It's just unbelievable."

The pattern

Line it up:

A dozen seniors ask to be heard as a group — the library director says his chief of staff tried to get the police called.
Three hundred people rally for a town hall — he issues a statement about how blessed we are to live in America.
He holds one call-in event where a staffer screens every question, and not one of the nine questions submitted by the group that organized around it makes the broadcast.
Twelve months later, a polite written invitation offering him any format he likes gets no reply at all.

He is not unavailable, exactly. He turns up at events around the district. What he does not do is stand in a room in his own district and take an unscreened question from someone who might disagree with him.

That's not unique to him — we've documented Republicans who were told to stop holding in-person town halls as a matter of party strategy. But Messmer is running for re-election in November 2026, and he has now gone his entire first term without doing it once.

Bredhold's read on why it might finally matter:

"I think that he's, he's quite vulnerable right now, given that he's gotten, he's been under a lot of criticism for how he's not available to constituents, he's not available to the media, he refuses to answer any questions, like that's not going to make him a very popular guy."

Source

John Gibson, "Town Hall Carries On Without Messmer", WNIN, June 24, 2026. Photo by Brody Atchley / WNIN News.

Mark Messmer Is Vice Chair of the Workforce Protections Subcommittee. He Wrote the Bill to Ban Workplace Heat Protections Forever.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:25:00 +0000

On July 21, 2026 — in the middle of a summer of dangerous heat across the country — a House committee voted 18 to 15, straight down party lines, to make sure the federal government can never again try to keep workers from dying of heat on the job.

The bill they voted on was written by Mark Messmer.

Messmer has been Indiana's 8th District congressman since 2025. He sits on the House Education and Workforce Committee, and on that committee he serves as vice chair of the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections — the panel whose entire job, by name, is protecting workers.

The bill he wrote is called the Heat Workforce Standards Act. Apart from a line giving it that name, here is the whole of it:

"The Secretary of Labor may not finalize, implement, or enforce the proposed standard titled Heat Injury and Illness Prevention in Outdoor and Indoor Work Settings published by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in the Federal Register on August 30, 2024 (89 Fed. Reg. 70698), or any substantially similar standard."

That's the whole bill. Fifty words. There's no replacement standard in it. There's no expiration date. There's no process for a future administration to try again. It just says: never.

What the rule would have required

The rule Messmer wants to kill forever is not exotic. OSHA published it in August 2024. It sets two trigger points:

At a heat index of 80°F — drinking water (a quart per worker per hour, kept "suitably cool"), a break area to cool off in, and a gradual ramp-up period for new workers.
At a heat index of 90°F — a paid rest break of at least 15 minutes every two hours.

Water. Shade. A break. OSHA picked 80 degrees because, by its own analysis, that threshold catches 96 to 100% of heat-related worker deaths. The rule would cover roughly 36 million workers — about a third of the country's full-time workforce.

The people it covers are the ones who don't get to sit in air conditioning: farmhands, roofers, road crews, warehouse workers, delivery drivers, line cooks, foundry workers.

The body count

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has documented 1,042 American workers killed by heat on the job between 1992 and 2022 — an average of 34 a year. Over the decade from 2011 to 2020, BLS estimated 33,890 heat injuries and illnesses serious enough that the worker missed days of work.

Safety researchers say both numbers are undercounts, because heat deaths get written down as heart attacks.

Sixty-four organizations and elected officials — occupational-health physicians, nurses' unions, farmworker groups and a dozen state legislators — wrote to Congress the day of the vote, pointing out what makes this bill different from an ordinary "we don't like this regulation" fight:

"H.R. 6213 would permanently prohibit the Department of Labor from finalizing, implementing, or enforcing a federal heat standard ... no sunset provision, no mechanism for future reconsideration."

Their other line was blunter: "Workers have no control over extreme heat, and many are unable to refuse hazardous assignments without jeopardizing their livelihoods."

"The Biden Heat Rule was never about safety"

That's Messmer's own description of a rule about drinking water and rest breaks. He said it in his own press release announcing the bill in November 2025:

"The Biden Heat Rule was never about safety, but was rather, unsurprisingly, focused upon expanding federal bureaucratic control over hard working Americans."

He framed it as a small-business owner's complaint about red tape: "As a small business owner myself, I've seen how unwarranted, heavy-handed regulations can crush innovation, increase costs, and undermine the productivity of American institutions."

Notice what's missing. Not one word in that release about the workers who die. The release lists what the rule would do to businesses — paperwork, fines, "regulation requirements" — and never once mentions a worker who has died, or a single person who has been hurt.

The line in his own press release that doesn't survive contact with Indiana law

Buried in the background section of that release is the argument Messmer uses to say nobody gets hurt by his bill:

"State governments already have the authority to establish their own occupational safety and health standards and are required to have their plans be 'at least as effective' as Federal OSHA standards."

Fine. So what does Indiana do?

Indiana has a state workplace-safety agency, IOSHA. And Indiana has a state law, Indiana Code 22-8-1.1-17.5, that says this:

"The commissioner may not adopt or enforce any provision used to carry out the enforcement of this chapter that is more stringent than the corresponding federal provision enforced by the United States Department of Labor under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970."

Read those two passages together. Messmer's defense is that states can write their own heat rules. Indiana law says its labor commissioner is forbidden from going beyond the federal standard. Indiana can only ever copy Washington.

So if Messmer's bill becomes law and the federal heat standard is dead forever, the state ceiling drops to zero — and by Indiana statute, Indiana cannot raise it. Hoosiers working in the heat would have no federal protection and no legal path to a state one.

Messmer spent sixteen years in the Indiana legislature before he came to Congress — six in the state House and ten in the state Senate. This is not a corner of state law he can plausibly claim to be unfamiliar with.

Who asked for this

Messmer's press release names them. The Heat Workforce Standards Act is endorsed by the National Federation of Independent Business, the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association, the Mason Contractors Association, Independent Electrical Contractors, the National Restaurant Association, the American Building Materials Alliance, and about twenty more trade groups — an almost perfect list of the industries whose workers the rule would have covered.

That's the same pattern a report published in May 2026 by the Groundwork Collaborative, Workshop, and Harvard Law School's Center for Labor and a Just Economy laid out: the US Chamber of Commerce and major employers publicly praising worker safety while lobbying to block heat rules. That report estimated a real federal heat standard could save up to 1,500 lives a year.

Messmer's own campaign money comes from the same neighborhood. His donors include the home builders' BUILDPAC and the Indiana Farm Bureau's political action committee, according to FEC filings compiled by Who Bought My Rep — construction and agriculture, two of the four sectors OSHA's rule names by name.

He is not the only one. Florida's Byron Donalds signed on as a co-sponsor, which we wrote about in Byron Donalds Co-Sponsored a Bill to Strip Heat Protections From Florida's Outdoor Workers. But Donalds was one of 62 co-sponsors as of August 2026. Messmer is the author.

The part that should bother his own district

Messmer also sits on the House Agriculture Committee. Agriculture is one of the four sectors OSHA's rule explicitly covers, and southwest Indiana is farm country — the same constituents he tells farm audiences he's fighting for.

Indiana is not Arizona. Nobody has to pretend it is. But a grain bin, a warehouse dock, or a roof in Evansville in July is hotter than the air outside it, and the rule Messmer wants permanently banned would have meant that on those days, the worker gets fifteen minutes and cold water.

His committee sent the bill forward in the middle of a stretch of dangerous heat across the country. It now waits for a floor vote.

Source

Jake Johnson, "Amid deadly temperatures, GOP advances bill to ban federal heat protections for workers", The Real News Network / Common Dreams, July 24, 2026. Photo of Rep. Mark Messmer by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images.

$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.

The Same Day the UN Voted, Jim Baird Filed a Bill to Defund It. A Committee Advanced It 28-18.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:08:02 +0000

On May 10, 2024, the UN General Assembly voted 143 to 9 to upgrade the Palestinians' standing at the United Nations. It did not make Palestine a member state. It did not give Palestine a vote. It moved the Palestinian delegation out of the observer seats at the back of the chamber and let it sit among member states in alphabetical order, submit amendments, and speak on behalf of a group.

The same day, Jim Baird introduced a bill to punish the United Nations for it.

He called it the No Official Palestine Entry Act. He introduced it again in the next Congress, on May 6, 2025, with eight cosponsors — among them two fellow Indiana Republicans, Rudy Yakym and Marlin Stutzman.

Most House bills are a few pages of nothing. This one is two pages that would blow a hole in America's relationship with the entire United Nations system. It's worth reading, because it's short.

What the bill actually does

Two laws already on the books tell the U.S. government to stop paying the UN under certain conditions.

The first is from 1990. Public Law 101-246 says no federal funds may go to "the United Nations or any specialized agency thereof which accords the Palestine Liberation Organization the same standing as member states." The second, from 1994, cuts off money to any UN-affiliated organization that grants "full membership" as a state to a group without the recognized attributes of statehood.

That's the standard the U.S. has used for decades. It's the law that forced the United States to stop funding UNESCO in 2011 after that agency admitted Palestine as a full member — a shutoff that eventually cost the U.S. its vote there and led to withdrawal.

Baird's bill takes both of those triggers and replaces them with the same eight words. From the text of H.R. 3208:

…is amended by striking "the same standing as member states" and inserting "any status, rights, or privileges beyond observer status".

…is amended by striking "full membership" each place it appears and inserting "any status, rights, or privileges beyond observer status".

Now read those changes next to what the General Assembly actually did in May 2024: it gave Palestine a seat among member states, the ability to submit amendments, and the right to speak for a group — status, rights and privileges beyond observer status.

That is the trigger Baird's bill writes into law. And it wouldn't cut off one agency. It would cut off the United Nations — the General Assembly itself, plus any specialized agency that does the same thing.

What that means in practice

The specialized agencies of the UN are not an abstraction. They include the World Health Organization, which tracks disease outbreaks. They include the Food and Agriculture Organization — which a Purdue-trained agricultural scientist might be expected to have some feeling for. They include the International Civil Aviation Organization, which keeps international airspace coordinated.

Baird's bill doesn't weigh any of that. It carves out nothing — not disease surveillance, not agricultural research, not air safety. It sets one condition — how a chamber in New York seats one delegation — and hangs American participation on it.

It does contain one carve-out. Section 4 reads, in full: "Nothing is this Act shall be construed to apply to Taiwan." The typo is in the bill. So the principle is not that observer-status delegations must never be upgraded. The principle is that this delegation must never be upgraded.

Who's paying for this

Baird is not a Middle East specialist. His Foreign Affairs subcommittees are Africa, and Oversight and Intelligence. His other two committees are Agriculture and Science. Nothing about his portfolio explains why the UN's seating chart for the Palestinian delegation is the bill he filed, and filed again.

Something else might. TrackAIPAC, using FEC filings, puts the total from pro-Israel PACs to Baird at $25,856 as of July 2026.

That's not a headline number by congressional standards. It doesn't have to be. We've written before about how a handful of donors bought the Republican Party's foreign policy — AIPAC and allied groups spent $8 million to take out a single sitting Republican who wouldn't fall in line. The lesson most members took from that wasn't "I should hold out for more money." It was "I should not be the one they come for."

Filing the No Official Palestine Entry Act, twice now, for free, is how a back-bench member from Indiana makes sure he never is.

This is not a throwaway bill

It would be easy to file this under harmless messaging. It isn't, quite.

The 2024 version didn't just get introduced and forgotten. On July 11, 2024, the House Foreign Affairs Committee ordered it reported out, 28 to 18 — a real committee vote, moving it one step from the House floor. The tally sheet shows every Republican who was in the room voting yes, and four Democrats — Kathy Manning, Greg Stanton, Jim Costa and Brad Schneider — crossing over to join them. It ran out of Congress before it got there. The 2025 version is sitting in the same committee now, waiting for the same treatment.

Meanwhile, in the district Baird actually represents, the Joint Economic Committee projects 21,540 people will lose health coverage — 11,000 losing Affordable Care Act coverage and 10,540 losing Medicaid — and 21,647 households rely on SNAP to buy food. Constituents held a town hall without him in March 2025 to ask about exactly this, and his office would not say whether he had any of his own planned. He has found the time, twice, to draft legislation about where the Palestinian delegation sits in a room in New York.

Source

H.R. 3208, the No Official Palestine Entry Act of 2025 — introduced by Rep. Jim Baird, May 6, 2025 — and UN General Assembly presses Security Council to give 'favourable consideration' to full Palestinian membership, UN News, May 10, 2024. Photo: UN Photo.

250 People Chanted 'Where Is Jim?' at a Town Hall Jim Baird Skipped. The Year Before, He Flew to Cape Town, Sydney and Dublin.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:04:37 +0000

On Sunday, March 30, 2025, more than 250 people filled two rooms of the West Lafayette Public Library. They brought signs. They brought questions. They had a congressman in mind.

Jim Baird was not there. He had been invited, several times.

"Kinda doing his job for him," is how Matt Gyure of Greater Lafayette Indivisible described the evening to WTHR. His group had reached out to Baird's office repeatedly — to ask why he wasn't holding town halls, and to invite him to the one they were organizing anyway.

The room did what rooms do when the chair is empty. Attendees stood up and talked about Medicaid, about the federal budget, about Elon Musk. One woman said: "What representative Baird and his colleagues are doing is taking the lives of America's most vulnerable and sacrificing them on the altar of conservative billionaires."

At some point the room broke into a chant: "Where is Jim?"

13News reached out to Baird's office and his press secretary that day — for comment, and to ask whether he had any town halls planned. They did not get a response.

This was not the first time somebody asked

Go back a year, to April 2024. There was a 4th District candidates forum at that same West Lafayette Public Library. Baird did not attend that one either. His campaign said he was in Washington because Congress was in session.

His Republican primary challenger that year, Charles Bookwalter, said this to the room:

"Where's Jim Baird? He's the incumbent and he's not here. Where's he been? He only comes back when he needs your vote."

Same question, same library, two different years, two different sets of people. A congressman who wanted to be found would have noticed by the second time.

Even his 2026 primary challenger ran on it. Craig Haggard, a state representative who took Baird on in the May primary, told Based in Lafayette he was running "because I believe we need someone who will show up, be accountable and work for the people of Indiana." Baird won the nomination anyway, and is on the ballot in November for a fifth term.

What he did find time for

Baird files a financial disclosure every year with the Clerk of the House, and Section H of it lists travel somebody else paid for. For most of his time in Congress that section says "None disclosed."

Then comes his annual report covering 2024, filed August 12, 2025. Three trips, all paid for by the Aspen Institute Congressional Program:

Dates	Itinerary
Feb. 18–24, 2024	Washington, D.C. → Cape Town, South Africa → Washington
May 25 – June 1, 2024	Washington, D.C. → Sydney → Washington
Aug. 11–20, 2024	Washington, D.C. → Dublin → Washington

That's roughly three weeks on three continents in a single calendar year, on someone else's dime.

Nobody is saying a member of Congress shouldn't travel and learn about the world. That's rather the point: the calendar was never the problem. He found a week for Cape Town in February, a week for Sydney in May, and ten days for Dublin in August. He could not find one evening for the West Lafayette Public Library, in the district that elects him.

The office nobody wants to work in

There's one more measure of how this office runs, and it comes from the trade publication that tracks congressional staffing.

In October 2023, LegiStorm published its analysis of House staff turnover. Reporter Keturah Hetrick wrote:

"Reps. Brandon Williams (R-N.Y.), Jim Baird (R-Ind.) and Mary Peltola (D-Alaska) each have turnover roughly three times the average and round out the House's five worst staff-retention rates."

Five worst in a 435-member House. Three times the average rate of losing people.

Staff are the constituent-service operation. They are who answers when you call about a Social Security check that stopped, a VA claim that stalled, a passport that won't come. When an office churns through them at triple the normal rate, the institutional memory of your case walks out the door with them.

So the picture from the outside is consistent: constituents can't get a town hall, reporters can't get a call back, and the people hired to help you don't stay long.

What he doesn't want to be asked about

It's worth being specific about what those 250 people came to the library worried about, because it wasn't abstract. The room that Sunday was charged about Medicaid, Social Security and school lunches — cuts that were still being drafted.

Three months later, Baird voted Aye on final passage of Trump's budget bill, on July 3, 2025. In IN-04, the Joint Economic Committee projects 21,540 people will lose health coverage — 11,000 losing Affordable Care Act coverage and 10,540 losing Medicaid. Another 21,647 households in his district rely on SNAP to buy groceries, including 12,569 households with children and 7,735 with someone 60 or older.

And on the cuts coming out of Washington that February, he told Fox59:

"I am concerned about our indebtedness. We've been concerned about that for quite some time, and apparently, this is a means for accomplishing that."

That's the whole answer. It is a lot easier to say that to a TV camera in Washington than to a librarian in West Lafayette who wants to know what happens to her mother's coverage.

He is not the only one who figured this out. Jeff Hurd skipped a town hall 400 people showed up to and called it "political theater". The playbook is the same everywhere: telephone town halls you control, mobile office hours staffed by aides, and no room where a constituent gets to follow up.

Baird represents 16 counties. He can find Cape Town. He can find West Lafayette.

Source

'Doing his job for him' | Indiana District 4 residents hold town hall without congressman accepting the invite — Ashton Hackman, WTHR 13News, March 30, 2025, and Hundreds ask 'Where's Baird?', vent during West Lafayette town hall, Based in Lafayette via The Indiana Citizen. Photo: Dave Bangert / Based in Lafayette.

Erin Houchin Went on National TV to Say DOGE Was a Threat to Bureaucracy, Not Democracy. DOGE Expired With No Report, No Proven Savings, and 18 People Laid Off in Bloomington.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:58:29 +0000

In February 2025, when DOGE was firing federal workers faster than courts could rule on it, Indiana's television stations went looking for reaction from the state's members of Congress.

Erin Houchin gave them a clean quote.

"Bureaucrats in Washington are now making decisions that they've never been elected to make; DOGE is uncovering some of this."

That's what she told Fox59, which noted that several members of Indiana's delegation "said they stand behind DOGE's mission full stop."

Not all of them did. In the same story, fellow Indiana Republican Jefferson Shreve said he had questions about DOGE's approach and its pace: "People that give their service to our government at any level need to be communicated with fairly, timely, in a reasonable fashion."

Houchin went the other way. On February 13, 2025, she appeared on NewsNation's Morning in America. The network headlined the segment "DOGE is a threat to bureaucracy: Rep. Erin Houchin," and summed her up this way: "Houchin also says the Department of Government Efficiency is a threat to bureaucracy, not democracy."

Her vote is the reason the cuts happened

On June 12, 2025, the House took up H.R. 4, the Rescissions Act of 2025 — the bill cancelling $9.4 billion Congress had already approved for foreign aid and public broadcasting.

It passed 214 to 212.

Houchin voted yes. In a two-vote margin, every yes is the deciding one.

Two days later she posted about it, celebrating that the House had "passed the first round of DOGE rescissions—cutting $9.4 billion in reckless, unnecessary spending", and singling out the cuts to USAID for praise.

When the Senate sent it back — $400 million lighter, after senators voted to spare the global AIDS program PEPFAR — the House needed one more vote to finish the job. On July 18, 2025, H.Res. 590 passed 216–213 — a rule written so that agreeing to it also sent the cuts to the president's desk. Houchin voted aye on that too.

What "reckless, unnecessary spending" meant in Bloomington

Bloomington is the largest city in Houchin's district. It is home to Indiana University, and to Indiana Public Media — WFIU radio and WTIU television.

Those stations lost about $1.33 million a year in federal funding, roughly 11% of their budget, when the money Houchin voted to cancel disappeared and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting began winding down. That came on top of about $450,000 a year in state funding that had already been eliminated.

On May 16, 2026, Indiana Public Media announced it was laying off 18 people — 4 full-time and 14 part-time — effective July 15. It also outsourced its master control operations. "Like many public media organizations across the country, we are facing a significant financial challenge that requires us to adjust how we operate for long-term sustainability," executive director Mike Arnold wrote to staff.

Across Indiana, the same reporting put the federal cut to the state's 17 public stations at up to $13 million.

This is the recurring shape of the rescissions vote: the member votes for a number in Washington, and a station in their own district finds out what the number meant. In Michigan, John Moolenaar called defunding public radio "a win for the American people" — and WCMU, licensed to a university in his district and serving 42 Michigan counties, lost 19% of its budget.

Then DOGE just ended

DOGE's charter expired on July 4, 2026.

There was no final report. No accounting. The budget director told a hearing, "We have no plans to do kind of a closing DOGE report," and the White House would not say whether DOGE had officially folded or already had. Elon Musk, who promised at a 2024 rally that DOGE would cut at least $2 trillion, was long gone. The final claim was $215 billion — about 3% of the roughly $7 trillion the government spends each year. Against that, the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service estimated that in fiscal 2025 alone — back when DOGE was still claiming $160 billion in savings — the paid leave, the rehiring of mistakenly fired workers, and the lost productivity DOGE caused would cost taxpayers $135 billion. Federal spending went up. We wrote the obituary here.

So the ledger on Houchin's position reads like this. The thing she defended on national television as a threat to bureaucracy rather than democracy produced no report, no verified savings, and a $9 billion cut that took $1.33 million a year and 18 jobs out of the public media operation in her own largest city.

The rest of the bill she voted for

Houchin has been in Congress since 2023 and sits on the Rules, Budget, and Energy and Commerce committees — three of the places where a member has real leverage over what the House does.

She used that position to vote for the 2025 budget bill as well. In her district, an estimated 22,748 people are projected to lose health coverage as a result — 11,748 from Medicaid and 11,000 from the Affordable Care Act — according to the Joint Economic Committee.

When Hoosiers wanted to ask her about any of it, they had to improvise. In April 2025, after she paused some of her regular office hours in Bedford, the Indiana Democratic Party held a town hall for her in Bloomington with an empty chair and a sign bearing her name. About 80 people came. The state party said her office never answered its emailed invitation.

DOGE is gone. The people it cost their jobs are still here.

Sources

Houchin's DOGE comments come from Fox59 (February 2025) and NewsNation's Morning in America (February 13, 2025), both linked above. The votes are public record on the House Clerk's site — Roll Call 168 and Roll Call 203, also linked above. The Indiana Public Media layoffs were reported by the Indiana Daily Student on May 16, 2026. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The Only Ph.D. Scientist Representing Purdue Called the Federal Audit Long Overdue. Then NSF Cancelled $5.9 Million in Purdue Grants.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:58:24 +0000

There are not many scientists in Congress. Jim Baird is one of them.

He earned a bachelor's and a master's in animal science at Purdue, and after Vietnam he went on to a doctorate in monogastric nutrition from the University of Kentucky. He served on the advisory council for Purdue's Dean of Agriculture. All three of his children are Purdue graduates. He sits on the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, and he co-chairs the Congressional R&D Caucus.

And Indiana's 4th Congressional District contains Lafayette and West Lafayette — which means Purdue University is his constituent.

If any Republican in the House was positioned to defend federal research money, it was this one.

Here is what happened instead.

What happened at Purdue

In April 2025, the Purdue Exponent went out and talked to the graduate students and faculty living through the first months of the administration's research cuts. The paper reported that "almost $170 million worth of Purdue's NIH and NSF funding may be on the chopping block" — two agencies that are, as the story put it, "responsible for doling out almost two thirds of the federal money appropriated to research."

The students were not subtle about what it felt like. One Ph.D. student, Izaak Gilchrist, told the paper:

"No one knows whether a future in science is even feasible in this country anymore."

"We are in graduate school to prepare for a career in science, and then (the cuts and layoffs are) opening up this whole question of, will there be careers in science in the United States?"

Another student, Montse Robles, said she had come from Mexico because "it was always a huge deal for me to do a Ph.D. here," and was now thinking about leaving for Europe. Nationally, nearly 2,000 scientists had signed an open letter on March 31 describing "a climate of fear" in the research community.

This is a newspaper published on the campus in Jim Baird's district, describing his district's largest research institution, in the field he holds a doctorate in.

The receipts: 13 grants, $5,917,472

You don't have to take the students' word for it. The National Science Foundation published its own list of terminated awards — a spreadsheet of every grant the agency killed, with the recipient and the obligated dollar amount.

Purdue University appears on it 13 times, for a combined $5,917,472 in cancelled research money, as of the list's June 5, 2025 export. Among the projects terminated:

$1,500,000 — a knowledge-graph warehouse for neighborhood information
$721,716 — a career-award study on the mechanisms of dehumanization
$644,957 — engineering education for sustainability
$555,089 — a long-term study of identity development in Black science students
$513,506 — a career award on reducing bias in engineering assessments
$349,516 — engineering research on diversity, equity and inclusion
$336,877 — research on reducing racially biased beliefs through genetics education

Eight of the 13 came out of NSF's engineering and STEM education directorates. These are not line items in a budget document. They are people — graduate students on assistantships, postdocs, lab technicians — whose salaries stopped.

What Baird said while it was happening

In March 2025, as the cuts were landing, WISH-TV asked Baird about the Department of Government Efficiency. He told them that an audit of the entire federal government for waste, fraud and abuse was long overdue, and treated DOGE's recommendations as proof the cuts were needed.

Separately, when Fox59 canvassed Indiana's delegation and found several members standing "behind DOGE's mission full stop," what Baird offered was the national debt and not much else:

"I am concerned about our indebtedness. We've been concerned about that for quite some time, and apparently, this is a means for accomplishing that."

That's what he told Fox59. Apparently, this is a means for accomplishing that. A scientist watching the machinery of American science get taken apart, describing it as a bookkeeping method.

DOGE itself is gone now — its charter expired on July 4, 2026 without a final report. The grants it helped cancel did not come back.

He knows exactly what the numbers are

This is the part that's hard to explain away.

In June 2025, Baird appeared at a Capitol Hill briefing — in his capacity as R&D Caucus co-chair, alongside Democrat Bill Foster — on what proposed NSF cuts would do to community colleges and STEM training. As Forbes reported it, NSF was facing cuts of up to 56 percent, with a 75 percent cut to the agency's STEM education directorate, if Congress followed the administration's proposed budget.

He introduced the NSF and USDA Interagency Research Act that same month. He shows up to the briefings. He knows the numbers.

And the President's budget request keeps coming back for more. In April 2026, the administration asked Congress for $4 billion for NSF — a 54% cut from the enacted level, and proposed funding STEM education at $428 million, another 54% cut.

Baird has not stopped any of it.

The part where he takes the credit

On April 28, 2026, Baird's office put out a press release with this headline: "Congressman Baird Announces Purdue University to Gain Over $2.7 Million in Research Under USDA Reorganization."

Read what he's actually celebrating. Purdue picked up a research project worth $2.701 million and seven Agricultural Research Service employees — because the USDA was decommissioning the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, the department's flagship research campus in Maryland. Baird's statement:

"Purdue University and the State of Indiana continue to solidify their standing as the premier location for agricultural research and opportunity. As a farmer and lifelong Hoosier, I am pleased to see the USDA expanding opportunities in Indiana as the agency refocuses on its core mission…"

Expanding opportunities. A federal research center was being shut down and its pieces scattered, and the co-chair of the R&D Caucus described the scattering as an expansion because seven jobs landed in his district.

Do the arithmetic on his own district. NSF cancelled $5.9 million of Purdue research. Baird's press release claims $2.7 million of salvage from a shuttered federal lab. He put out a statement about the $2.7 million. Search his press page for the $5.9 million and there is nothing there.

This is a familiar pattern on this site. Robert Aderholt chairs the subcommittee whose bill eliminates the adult job training program, the youth job training program and the jobs program for low-income seniors — and announced $22 million for rural hospitals back home out of that same bill. Cut it in Washington, cut the ribbon at home, and hope nobody puts the two next to each other.

Why this one stings more

Most members of Congress have never run a lab, never written a grant proposal, never sat on a university advisory council.

Baird has done all three. He knows what a terminated award does to a graduate student in year four. He knows that the research pipeline he came up through — a land-grant university, a doctorate in animal science, a career in agricultural extension — was built with exactly the kind of money now being cancelled.

He also isn't hearing about it, because he doesn't put himself in rooms where people can tell him. His constituents say he refuses to hold public town halls, and when 13News asked his office about holding any, it got no answer. In late March 2025 — the same weeks the Exponent was interviewing frightened graduate students a few blocks away — more than 250 of his constituents packed the West Lafayette Public Library and held a town hall without him, chanting "Where is Jim?"

He wasn't there. He was in Washington, calling the audit long overdue.

Source

Trump cuts leave Ph.D. researchers, professors questioning future — Ronak Mohanty, The Purdue Exponent, April 22, 2025. Photo: The Purdue Exponent.

Erin Houchin Wrote an Op-Ed Called 'Trump's Tariffs Are Reviving American Manufacturing.' Indiana Then Lost 9,148 Factory Jobs.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:55:45 +0000

On April 29, 2025 — four weeks after Trump's April 2 "Liberation Day" tariffs — Erin Houchin published an op-ed with a headline that left no wiggle room:

"President Trump's Tariffs Are Reviving American Manufacturing."

In it, she wrote that the tariffs were doing exactly what they were designed to do, that "now we're seeing the results, not just in statistics or economic reports, but in real communities," and that "this is just the beginning."

She closed: "President Trump's America First agenda is not a slogan—it's a governing philosophy. ... And it's working."

Fifteen months later, the statistics and economic reports she waved off have arrived.

What actually happened to Indiana

On July 22, 2026, the nonpartisan Midwest Economic Policy Institute and the Project for Middle Class Renewal at the University of Illinois published Tariffs and the Midwest: Impacts on Households, Manufacturing, and Economies in Six States.

For Indiana, as Indiana Legislative Insight summarized the findings:

	Indiana, 2025 tariffs
Added cost to the average household	$2,600 ($3,600 counting all tariffs in force)
Lost state GDP	$2.65 billion (−0.51%)
Manufacturing jobs lost	9,148
Added cost to the average small-business importer	$586,000

Across the six Midwest states studied, tariffs cost almost 42,000 manufacturing jobs and more than $18 billion in GDP. Only Michigan lost more factory jobs than Indiana, and only Michigan's households paid more; on GDP, Illinois lost the most of any state in the study.

There's a reason for that, and Houchin knows it better than most members of Congress: Indiana is the most manufacturing-dependent state in the country. Manufacturing is 24.2% of its GDP — the next closest Midwest state is Iowa at 16.7% — and 16% of its workforce, double the national share. When you tax the imported steel, aluminum and components that factories buy, Indiana is the state that pays first.

The report's own framing is that Midwest states are "manufacturing-intensive and have large agricultural sectors, making them vulnerable to tariffs and retaliatory actions by other countries."

The researchers also worked out the marginal cost, which is the number to remember every time the rate goes up: each additional one-percentage-point increase in tariffs costs the average Hoosier family $364, kills 1,288 Indiana factory jobs, and knocks 0.07% off state GDP.

At the end of July 2026, the administration announced a new round of tariffs of 10% to 12.5% on goods from more than 80 countries, replacing temporary global duties that were about to expire.

Her evidence was one bicycle company

Houchin's op-ed made its case with a single example: Guardian Bikes, which was putting $19 million into a factory in Seymour, Indiana, to build bicycles domestically. She toured the plant, wrote that CEO Brian Riley "made it clear that President Trump's trade policies were a driving force behind this decision," and called it proof.

Guardian is a real company doing real work — it expects to sell about half a million bikes a year and pays starting wages around $22 an hour. Nobody should want that factory to fail.

But one plant is not a state economy. Guardian's expansion and Indiana's 9,148 lost manufacturing jobs happened in the same year, in the same state. Houchin's column was about the first number.

There's a further wrinkle. Guardian went on to ask the federal government to add a 50% tariff on the aluminum, steel, frames and parts in imported bicycles — a push the Indianapolis Business Journal reported puts the company at odds with much of the bicycle industry. The rest of the industry filed more than 1,300 comments against it, and in April 2026 the White House published a revised Section 232 list with bicycles left off it and shut the request process down altogether. Guardian did not get its tariff. That is what tariff policy usually looks like up close: a concentrated winner who wants more, and a diffuse set of losers who each pay a little.

Houchin's op-ed only described the winner.

The honest caveats, and why they don't rescue the column

Two things cut in her favor and are worth saying plainly.

Indiana's economy did not collapse. The state's forecasting consultant, S&P Global Market Intelligence, warned in April 2025 that tariff uncertainty would drag growth down to 1.3%, and by December was telling lawmakers that tariff impacts had been "generally less than feared in spring 2025." Real gross state product grew about four percent last year.

But "less bad than the worst case" is not "reviving American manufacturing." The study measures what the tariffs themselves did — $2.65 billion in output that didn't happen, 9,148 factory jobs that don't exist, $2,600 out of the average Hoosier household's pocket. A growing economy that would have grown more is still a household paying more at the register.

And the household number is the one voters feel. $2,600 a year is a car payment. It is the deductible. It is a big share of the grocery budget for the 21,534 households in her district that use SNAP to buy food.

She's not the only Hoosier who wrote this check

Indiana's other Republicans have been running the same play. Fellow Indiana congressman Marlin Stutzman kept defending the tariffs while Indiana farmers ate a $607 million hit — the agricultural half of the same story the University of Illinois team documented.

Houchin has been in Congress since 2023. She sits on Energy and Commerce, Rules, and Budget. She wrote that "if we stay the course on tariffs ... we can see a manufacturing resurgence like this across every state in the country."

Indiana stayed the course. It lost 9,148 manufacturing jobs, and every household in the state paid for the privilege.

Source

Tallying tariffs' Indiana impact — Indiana Legislative Insight, August 5, 2026, reporting on the MEPI/PMCR study. Houchin's op-ed was published by WBIW on April 29, 2025, and is linked above.

Erin Houchin Represents the County Where More Than 230 People Got HIV From Shared Needles. Her Bill Would Make Opioid Treatment Harder to Get.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:50:15 +0000

On September 30, 2025, Erin Houchin introduced a bill with no title.

Not a catchy one, anyway. H.R. 5629 is named, in full, "To provide that the final rule of the Department of Health and Human Services titled 'Medications for the Treatment of Opioid Use Disorder', except for the portion of the final rule relating to accreditation of opioid treatment programs, shall have no force or effect."

Translated: erase the rule that made it easier for people addicted to opioids to get the medication that keeps them alive.

Ten months later, it still has zero cosponsors. Not one other member of Congress, in either party, has put their name on it.

What the rule she wants gone actually did

During COVID, the federal government loosened the rules on methadone clinics because forcing thousands of patients to stand in line every single morning during a pandemic was dangerous. In 2024, after watching the results, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration made those changes permanent.

The 2024 rule did three things:

Let patients take home up to seven days of doses in their first two weeks of treatment, and up to 28 doses in a month, instead of showing up at a clinic daily.
Dropped the requirement that you must prove at least a year of opioid addiction before a clinic will admit you.
Allowed treatment with methadone or buprenorphine to be started by telehealth.

Houchin's bill nullifies all of it.

Houchin sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which handles the bill. At a hearing of its Health Subcommittee in March 2026, she explained her thinking: "Medications like methadone are effective for some, but are also associated with serious risks, including respiratory depression, cardiac complications, potential for misuse and diversion and dangerous interactions with other substances, particularly in today's environment where illicit drugs are increasingly potent and unpredictable."

Filter, which covered the hearing, reported that she also claimed methadone-related overdose deaths rose during the pandemic because of the expanded take-home doses — a claim the magazine reported has been debunked by studies conducted during and after the pandemic. Methadone treatment, Filter noted, cuts overdose deaths by more than half. Her office did not respond to the magazine's requests for comment.

Nearly everyone who treats addiction told her no

The opposition to this bill is not partisan. It's clinical.

The Drug Policy Alliance's federal policy manager, Daniel Fishbein, laid out the mechanics: "Currently, 80 percent of US counties do not have an OTP, meaning many people who are prescribed methadone must travel hours and wait in line just to get one daily dose. Eliminating take-home doses could make it impossible for someone who relies on this lifesaving medication to continue care — putting people's recovery at risk, throwing them into painful withdrawal, and potentially driving them back into the illicit market."

The American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Use Disorder — the clinics' own trade group — filed a statement of "serious concerns," joined by more than 25 organizations. Its president, Mark Parrino, put it bluntly: "The Congresswoman does not seem to like methadone treatment."

A coalition including the American Society of Addiction Medicine and the American Academy of Family Physicians warned in a March 2026 letter that if the bill became law, "it would result in more opioid overdoses, because fewer people would get methadone treatment."

Recovery groups in the region weighed in too. People Advocating Recovery and allied organizations sent lawmakers a statement for the record, reported by Spectrum News, saying they were "deeply concerned that repealing the OTP Final Rules would set our nation backwards just as we are starting to make progress in our fight against opioid misuse and overdoses." Dr. James Murphy, a pain and addiction specialist practicing in Kentucky and Indiana, described what it means in rural country: "If you don't get this medication from somebody who was willing to prescribe it, you're not going to have it."

Scott County

Here is why this bill, from this member, is worth stopping on.

All five townships of Scott County, Indiana sit inside the district Houchin represents. So does Salem, the Washington County town her official biography lists as her hometown.

In 2015, the town of Austin, in Scott County, population 4,132, became the site of one of the worst rural HIV outbreaks in American history. More than 230 people were infected. Of the almost 200 who tested positive in 2015, about 80 percent lived in Austin. Governor Mike Pence declared a public health emergency.

The cause was injection drug use. People were crushing and liquifying a painkiller called Opana and injecting it, sharing and reusing the same syringes, because Indiana had banned handing out clean ones. Of the 181 people diagnosed in the first year of the outbreak, 92.3 percent were also infected with hepatitis C.

The county's syringe exchange — the first in Indiana — ran for six years and was shut down in 2021 when county commissioners declined to renew it. Testing dropped off after that.

So this is a district that has already run the experiment on what happens when you make it hard for people who use drugs to reach a clinic. The answer arrived in 2015, and it made international news.

Indiana already has some of the tightest rules in the country

Houchin's bill wouldn't be operating on a permissive system. Filter's reporting notes that Indiana caps take-home methadone at 14 doses, caps the total number of clinics allowed in the entire state at 27, and requires a "certificate of need" to open a new one — a process that lets neighborhood opposition groups block clinics before they exist.

There's one more thing about the rule she wants to repeal: it's a permission, not a mandate. The 2024 changes are recommendations. Each clinic decides whether to adopt them, and many don't. Houchin is spending her legislative capital repealing regulations that clinics are already free to ignore.

And she voted to cut the program that pays for the treatment

Medicaid is the single largest payer for substance use disorder treatment in the United States. Roughly 40 percent of people with opioid use disorder rely on it for coverage.

Houchin voted for the 2025 budget bill that cuts it. In her own district, an estimated 22,748 people are projected to lose health coverage — 11,748 losing Medicaid and 11,000 losing Affordable Care Act coverage by 2034, according to the Joint Economic Committee's House minority.

So the plan, taken together: cut the insurance that pays for addiction treatment, then pass a law making the treatment itself harder to reach.

When the Indiana Democratic Party wanted to ask her about her record in April 2025, they had to hold a town hall with an empty chair and a sign with her name on it. About 80 people showed up in Bloomington. The state party said her office never answered the emailed invitation.

Houchin has represented Indiana's 9th District since 2023. Her bill has been sitting in committee since September, with no cosponsors and no path — which is its own kind of statement about what she thinks her constituents need.

Source

Federal Bill Would Roll Back Modest Progress on Methadone Access — Helen Redmond, Filter, April 13, 2026. Photo: Helen Redmond / Filter.