MAGA Report Cards — Iowa

Ashley Hinson Wrote a Bill to Void Other States' Farm Rules. Iowa Farmers Say It Punishes the Ones Who Already Paid to Follow Them.

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:46:52 +0000

On Wednesday, September 9, a group of Iowa hog and dairy farmers stood on a farm in Elkhart and asked a Republican congresswoman to stop protecting them.

The congresswoman is Ashley Hinson, who is running for the U.S. Senate. The bill is hers: the Save Our Bacon Act, H.R. 4673, which she introduced on July 23, 2025. It would block individual states from enforcing conditions on livestock products sold across state lines, as the Iowa Capital Dispatch reported from the farm that day.

Hinson sells the bill as a shield. Her own announcement called California's Proposition 12 and Massachusetts's Question 3 "a major threat to family farms and food security," and promised "there will be no bacon ban on my watch."

The family farmers who showed up in Elkhart do not want the shield. They say it takes away the only market where their work is worth more.

What the farmers actually said

Proposition 12 is the California law that says certain pork sold in the state has to come from hogs given at least 24 square feet of usable floor space. California voters passed it in 2018 with 62.7% of the vote, and it was not fully in force until 2024, after the Supreme Court upheld it.

Some Iowa farmers spent real money to meet that standard. Hinson's bill would make the standard unenforceable, and with it the market those farmers invested to reach.

John Gilbert, a Hardin County farmer whose operation runs on dairy and hogs, said the Save Our Bacon Act would "punish" producers who invested in upgrades to comply with the California law. Tony Thompson, a farmer and candidate for the Iowa Senate, said the bill would stop markets from rewarding farmers who "do something different":

"Small family farms aren't going to win a race against multinational, vertically integrated corporations on producing the cheapest pound of protein. Frankly, I don't want them to, because when lowest cost becomes the only goal, everything else starts to look like a cost to be eliminated."

That is the whole argument in two sentences. A small Iowa hog farmer cannot beat a corporate operation on price. Sometimes they can beat it on how the animals were raised — and only if a state is allowed to let its own shoppers ask for that.

Gilbert also raised something Hinson's press release does not mention. He is worried the bill would wipe out state laws that keep diseased animals out of the state. A legislative analysis from Harvard Law School identified 13 Iowa laws that the Save Our Bacon Act could affect.

And he named what bothered him most — not the money, the message:

"People like you and me, it's telling people you don't have a right … you're not entitled to have a say in what you eat."

Who is asking for this

Aaron Lehman, president of the Iowa Farmers Union, said the things that would actually help struggling Iowa livestock farmers are mandatory country-of-origin labeling, antitrust enforcement, support for local meat processing, and closer ties between farmers and the people who eat their food.

"We know how to make meaningful changes to help Iowa livestock farmers," Lehman said. "We just need the political will to demand that they be put in place. The Save Our Bacon Act won't get it done."

He also put a number on the squeeze: farmers receive less than 15 cents out of every food dollar spent in this country. That is why, as he put it, farmers can be struggling to make a living at the same time shoppers are paying more at the register.

The groups backing Hinson's bill are the other end of that arrangement. Her own announcement lists the National Pork Producers Council, the Iowa Pork Producers Association and the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation among its endorsers. The Iowa Farm Bureau's political action committee has also endorsed Hinson in the Senate race.

Holly Bice, of a producers' alliance opposing the bill, told Food Tank it "would primarily benefit large China-owned pork corporations, not independent family farmers." Pork farmer Anna Pesek told Food Tank that if Prop 12 is preempted, "it is just another signal from our policymakers that what they care about are the interests of a handful of multinational companies" — and that profits would flow out of rural communities, states and even the country.

This is the pattern, not the exception

Hinson's record on who gets protected in Iowa agriculture is already on the record here.

Iowa has the fastest-rising cancer rate in America, and Hinson has taken $77,000 from pesticide and meat companies. When a company sought to seize Iowa farmland for a carbon pipeline, the man who founded it co-hosted a fundraiser for her. Now the bill she calls a defense of family farms is opposed by family farmers and endorsed by the trade associations of the industry's biggest players.

Her opponent in the Senate race, Democrat Josh Turek, has said he opposes the Save Our Bacon Act.

The bill was written into the farm bill the House passed. It is not in the Senate version, which is still in committee — so it is still live, and Hinson is still running on it. At the Iowa State Fair on August 21, she called Proposition 12 "an over-regulatory policy, Californians trying to tell Iowans what they know how to do already best".

Nineteen days later, Iowans who raise the animals stood in a field and told her she had it backwards.

What the record shows

Ashley Hinson's Save Our Bacon Act would strip states of the power to set conditions on livestock products sold inside their borders, voiding a California standard 62.7% of that state's voters approved and putting 13 Iowa laws at risk. She describes it as protecting family farms. The Iowa Farmers Union, a Hardin County dairy and hog farmer, and a farmer running for the Iowa Senate all stood in a field on September 9 and said it does the opposite — while the National Pork Producers Council, the Iowa Pork Producers Association and the Iowa Farm Bureau, whose PAC has endorsed her, are the ones asking for it.

Source

Iowa Capital Dispatch, Iowa farmers argue Hinson's Save Our Bacon act would hurt small producers, by Cami Koons. Photo by Cami Koons/Iowa Capital Dispatch.

Elon Musk's Super PAC Is Spending $5.1 Million on the Midterms, Almost All of It in Races With 18 Republicans on This Site. It Spent $3.7 Million of That Attacking Democrats.

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:44:19 +0000

In early September, a super PAC funded by Elon Musk dropped more than a million dollars into Michigan's Senate race in a matter of days. The money went to digital ads and mailers boosting Republican Mike Rogers (MI), the former seven-term congressman trying to win the seat, and attacking his Democratic opponent Abdul El-Sayed. It was part of $28 million in outside spending on that one race since the August 4 primary, according to Detroit News reporting.

Michigan is not the exception. It is one stop on a national tour.

We pulled every independent expenditure that Musk's America PAC has reported to the Federal Election Commission for the 2026 cycle. The filings show $5.1 million spent so far, spread across Senate and House races in seventeen states. Eighteen of the Republicans that money is meant to elect have report cards on this site. About $4.95 million of the total is in races those eighteen are running in; the remaining $199,000 is spread across four other races.

How the spending breaks down

America PAC's reported spending divides in two. Some of it pays for ads and mail supporting a Republican. The rest pays for ads and mail attacking that Republican's Democratic opponent. Here is how the support side breaks down for the eighteen candidates we track:

Candidate	Race	Reported in support
Mike Rogers (MI)	Michigan, Senate	$520,499
Jon Husted	Ohio, Senate	$397,848
Ken Paxton	Texas, Senate	$124,595
Randy Fine	Florida, 6th District	$87,134
Susan Collins	Maine, Senate	$78,306
Dan Sullivan	Alaska, Senate	$58,004
Ashley Hinson	Iowa, Senate	$27,300
Gabe Evans	Colorado, 8th District	$12,220
David Valadao	California, 22nd District	$12,220
Juan Ciscomani	Arizona, 6th District	$12,220
Jimmy Patronis	Florida, 1st District	$10,244
Rob Bresnahan	Pennsylvania, 8th District	$6,690
Scott Perry	Pennsylvania, 10th District	$6,431
Ryan Mackenzie	Pennsylvania, 7th District	$6,388
Tom Kean Jr.	New Jersey, 7th District	$5,908
Mike Lawler	New York, 17th District	$5,563
Derrick Van Orden	Wisconsin, 3rd District	$5,225
Jen Kiggans	Virginia, 2nd District	$5,000

That adds up to about $1.38 million. The other $3.7 million went somewhere else.

Nearly three-quarters of the money is an attack

Of the $5.1 million America PAC has reported this cycle, $3.7 million — about 73 cents of every dollar — was spent opposing Democratic candidates rather than supporting Republican ones.

The biggest single target is not a Republican's ally. It is James Talarico, the Democrat running against Ken Paxton in Texas, with $1.49 million spent against him. Sherrod Brown in Ohio drew $941,000. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan drew $527,000. Josh Turek in Iowa, Troy Jackson in Maine, Chris Pappas in New Hampshire and Mary Peltola in Alaska each drew six figures of opposition spending.

Put plainly: the single largest expense in Musk's entire 2026 portfolio is attacking one man in Texas. It is bigger than everything the PAC has spent supporting all eighteen Republicans on this list combined.

That is a choice about what the money is for. Ads that make a case for a candidate have to say something about the candidate. Ads that attack an opponent do not.

Four races got most of it. Eleven candidates got a rounding error.

The support money is not spread evenly either. Rogers, Husted, Paxton and Fine account for $1.13 million — 82% of everything America PAC has reported spending in support of the eighteen.

Eleven of the eighteen got less than $13,000 apiece. Five of them — Gabe Evans, David Valadao, Juan Ciscomani and two candidates without pages here — each show exactly $12,220, all of it billed to the same mail vendor on the same day — the signature of a single bundled buy split across districts rather than a campaign built for any one of them. Jen Kiggans shows $5,000 in support and $4,500 spent against her opponent Elaine Luria, which is to say Musk's PAC spent nearly as much attacking her opponent as backing her.

For most of this list, the money is not the point. Being on the list is.

What the man writing the checks wanted

Musk is not a stranger to these candidates. He ran the Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting operation that took an axe to federal agencies, contracts and grants — and several of the Republicans his PAC is now paying to protect defended those cuts while their own constituents absorbed them.

Jen Kiggans called the DOGE cuts "so necessary" while her Hampton Roads district lost at least 70 contracts with veteran-owned businesses. In Arizona, 700 people in Casa Grande lost their jobs, and six weeks later Juan Ciscomani brought the Speaker of the House there to celebrate. Susan Collins is running for a sixth term, and Musk's money went to Maine to keep her in the seat.

Ken Paxton is the clearest case of what the money buys. Republican donors spent months keeping their distance from a nominee who dragged out three felony counts including securities fraud for nearly nine years before settling them, and whose own party's Texas House impeached him 121 to 23. Trump and Musk are trying to buy him the seat anyway.

And America PAC's spending is not only ads. On August 29, the PAC's voter registration site gave itself the right to sell the personal information people type into it — the same registration push the PAC is running alongside these ads in Michigan.

Why this matters where you live

Every one of these eighteen races is a race for a seat that votes on your health care, your grocery bill and your taxes. None of the eighteen candidates raised this money. They do not have to disclose it, coordinate it, or answer for it, because independent expenditures are legally supposed to be independent.

But the money is not neutral about outcomes. One man with one fortune has picked eighteen Republicans on this site, and one Democrat to spend seven figures against, and he is doing it in seventeen states at once. When those eighteen get to Washington, the person who spent $5.1 million to put them there will have interests before the government they run — and every one of them will know exactly who it was.

What the filings show

Elon Musk's America PAC has reported $5.1 million in independent spending for the 2026 cycle, almost all of it in races with eighteen Republicans who have report cards on this site. Only $1.38 million of it — 27% — paid for anything supporting those candidates. The other $3.7 million paid to attack Democratic candidates, with $1.49 million aimed at Ken Paxton's opponent alone. Four races collected 82% of the support money; eleven of the eighteen candidates got less than $13,000 each.

Source

Detroit News, Elon Musk group wades into Michigan Senate race, boosting Mike Rogers. Spending figures are from America PAC's independent expenditure filings with the Federal Election Commission for the 2026 cycle, committee C00879510, retrieved September 10, 2026, with duplicate 24-hour-notice filings removed.

Joe Mitchell Had Three Chances to Protect Homeless Veterans, Disabled Iowans and Foster Families From Iowa's Voucher Bill. He Voted No Every Time.

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 10:53:00 +0000

A housing voucher is a piece of paper that says the federal government will cover part of your rent. It is worthless if no landlord will take it.

On March 15, 2021, the Iowa House spent the afternoon deciding whether landlords could refuse them. Joe Mitchell, then a state representative, voted seven times on that bill. Six times he voted no. Once he voted yes.

The bill

Senate File 252 did one thing. It stripped Iowa cities and counties of the power to pass or enforce any ordinance stopping a landlord from "refusing to lease or rent out the dwelling unit to a person because of the person's use of a federal housing choice voucher issued by the United States department of housing and urban development."

Des Moines, Iowa City and Marion had already passed exactly those ordinances. The bill voided them.

Governor Kim Reynolds signed it on April 30, 2021. Cities lost the power to pass or enforce anything new that day; the enrolled Act gave the three existing ordinances until January 1, 2023, so that, as The Gazette put it at the time, "renters affected would not lose their homes right away." From that date landlords across Iowa could turn voucher holders away.

Three amendments, three no votes

Before the final vote, Democrats tried to carve out the people most likely to be hurt. The Iowa House Journal for that day records each attempt and how every member voted.

Amendment H-1183 would have exempted "a veterans affairs supportive housing voucher." That is HUD-VASH, the program that pairs a rent voucher with Veterans Affairs case management and clinical services for veterans who are homeless. It failed 36 to 57. Mitchell voted no.

Amendment H-1184 would have exempted "a mainstream voucher for a non-elderly person with disabilities." Those vouchers exist for people with disabilities who are at least 18 and not yet 62. It failed 37 to 56. Mitchell voted no.

Amendment H-1185 would have exempted "a family unification program voucher." That is the HUD program that exists for one purpose: it houses families when, in HUD's words, "the lack of adequate housing is a primary factor in the imminent placement of the family's child or children in out-of-home care, or the delay in the discharge of the child or children to the family from out-of-home care." It also covers young adults aged 18 to 24 who have just left foster care and are homeless or about to be. It failed 37 to 57. Mitchell voted no.

A fourth amendment, H-1163, would have delayed the law until July 2024 and applied it only to ordinances passed after that, so that cities which already had protections could keep them. It failed 37 to 57. Mitchell voted no.

A fifth vote, on an amendment to the Republican floor manager's own amendment, failed 37 to 57. Mitchell voted no. And before any of that, on the first amendment offered on the bill, he voted no on suspending the rules so the House could even consider it, after the Speaker ruled it not germane.

Then the bill came up for passage. It passed 56 to 38. Mitchell voted yes.

What each of those votes meant

Strip away the amendment numbers and the votes say this:

A veteran sleeping in a car, handed a voucher by the VA, can be told no by every landlord in town.
A disabled Iowan under 62, on a voucher built for exactly that situation, can be told no.
A parent whose only barrier to getting their kids back out of foster care is an apartment can be told no — and the children stay where they are.
A 19-year-old who just aged out of foster care with a voucher and no family can be told no.

Nobody has to give a reason. Making that refusal legal across Iowa, and stripping cities of the power to say otherwise, was the entire effect of the bill.

He is running on housing now

Mitchell is running for Congress in Iowa's 2nd District, and housing is one of the things he talks about most. It is worth reading that record together.

His campaign's housing plan is deregulation — we looked at how that experiment already went in Iowa, where a law capping what cities can require for stormwater runoff met a state with worsening floods.

He also calls the federal low-income housing tax credit "a disaster," while two development firms he later partnered in collected $2,559,880 from the Iowa workforce housing credit he voted in 2021 to expand.

So the pattern across his housing record is consistent. The subsidy that flowed to companies he had a stake in was worth expanding. The subsidy that goes to a homeless veteran, a disabled adult, or a parent trying to get their children back was worth making refusable.

What the record shows

On March 15, 2021, Joe Mitchell voted against three amendments that would have exempted homeless veterans' housing vouchers, disability vouchers, and foster-care family vouchers from Senate File 252 — a bill that barred Iowa cities and counties from requiring landlords to accept federal housing vouchers at all. All three failed. He also voted against delaying the law so existing local protections could stand. He then voted for the bill, which passed the Iowa House 56 to 38 and was signed into law, voiding the ordinances in Des Moines, Iowa City and Marion as of January 1, 2023.

Source

Iowa House Journal, March 15, 2021, pages 722 through 729, and the Iowa Legislature's own bill history and amendment texts for Senate File 252. The vote was flagged in a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee release on September 7, 2026; every vote above was confirmed against the Iowa Legislature's own records.

Ashley Hinson Says She Is 'Laser Focused on Lowering Taxes for Working Families.' She Signed a Letter to Save a Tax Break for Private Equity Managers.

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 06:55:15 +0000

Ashley Hinson is running for Joni Ernst's open Senate seat in Iowa, and her campaign website says she is "laser focused on lowering taxes for working families."

In April 2025, she signed a letter asking the chairman of the House's tax-writing committee to protect a tax break that goes almost entirely to private investment managers.

Mother Jones reported the letter on September 4, along with the money that has followed.

What the tax break does

Private equity managers get paid two ways. They take a fee for managing a fund, and then they take a cut of the profits when the fund's assets are sold. That cut is called "carried interest."

The management fee is taxed like a paycheck. The cut of the profits is not. It is taxed at the lower rate reserved for long-term investments, even though it is compensation for doing a job.

Oscar Valdés Viera of Americans for Financial Reform put it plainly to Mother Jones. If you get a bonus at work, he said, you pay tax on it at the rate for your income. Fund managers should be no different.

The Congressional Budget Office has projected that closing it would raise about $13 billion over ten years.

This is not a partisan question among people who study taxes. Jonathan Choi, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, surveyed American tax law professors and got 167 replies. On carried interest, 143 said it should be taxed as ordinary income. Ten said it should not. He calls it "the single policy on which tax professors are most strongly agreed."

It is not much of a partisan question among presidents, either. Obama tried to close it. Biden tried to close it. Trump tried to close it in 2017 and again in 2025 — he once said private equity executives were "getting away with murder."

What Hinson signed

In 2025, Trump signaled again that he wanted it gone. House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith said all options were "on the table."

Hinson joined a few dozen other House Republicans in a letter asking Smith to leave it alone.

"We recognize that the issue of carried interest has been heavily politicized and frequently mislabeled as a loophole."

The letter called it "a critical, longstanding investment management tool beneficial to our nation's economy," and warned that closing it would "harm millions of partnerships in real estate, private equity, and venture capital by disincentivizing entrepreneurial risk-taking and investment, potentially jeopardizing jobs in every state and district."

Choi's response to that argument is worth quoting in full, because he does not really disagree with the wording:

"The funny thing is, in some sense, I agree with the letter — it's not a loophole. It's not a loophole anymore because Congress has considered it and decided to leave this terrible policy on the books so many times. At this point, it's intentional malfeasance on the part of Congress."

The letter also argued that America would fall behind other countries if the break went away, and named the United Kingdom. This year the United Kingdom moved carried interest into its income tax system, taxing it as trading profit rather than as an investment gain.

Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee dropped the idea. The break survived.

Who is paying for her Senate campaign

Hinson's race against Democrat Josh Turek is close, and the money behind her is not coming from Iowa.

A hybrid super PAC called Fight On Iowa has raised $1.77 million to boost her. $1.5 million of that came from a single donor: Ken Griffin, the hedge fund billionaire. The second-largest contributor is a California hedge fund manager who gave $100,000. The third-largest individual donor is a banker from Connecticut.

Mother Jones found that none of that $1.77 million came from anyone living in Iowa, and none of it from named individuals outside the financial services industry.

Griffin has also given $10 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, which is running ads for Hinson. He is one of the biggest Republican donors of this cycle, with a reported $40 million spent on the midterms so far — the same donor who put $10 million into a PAC backing Byron Donalds in Florida's governor's race.

Her own donations tell the same story. Democrats have criticized her for taking $30,000 from Apollo Global Management's chief executive Marc Rowan and other Apollo employees — the private equity firm that owns a group of struggling Iowa health care facilities. She took $26,500 from Blackstone co-founder Stephen Schwarzman, who once compared Obama's attempt to close this very loophole to Hitler's invasion of Poland, and later apologized for it.

Across her three previous campaigns, Hinson raised more than $1 million from people and PACs tied to the securities and investment industry.

We have written before about the nearly $90,000 she and her PACs took from billionaires named in the Epstein files, Schwarzman among them — $30,500 of it while she was refusing to sign the petition that would force those files into the open.

The contrast she set up herself

Six months after arriving in Washington, Hinson ran an online video ad asking for grassroots donations. Democrats, she warned, "believe that with their outside money, and their deep-pocketed donors, they can spend their way to a victory."

Her own Senate super PAC has raised $1.77 million and $1.5 million of it came from one hedge fund billionaire who does not live in Iowa.

This is a pattern on her record rather than a single episode. Her first Senate ad promised she would take on big insurance — and her husband, it turned out, had arranged the insurance lobby's meeting with Iowa's House delegation, including her. Her 2025 financial disclosures show he owned between $1 million and $5 million in privately held stock in High Street Insurance Partners, a private equity-backed insurance brokerage.

She has also backed major cuts to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which polices Wall Street, and to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which handles complaints about scams and bad financial products.

What the record shows

Ashley Hinson campaigns on lowering taxes for working families. In April 2025 she signed a letter asking House Republicans to preserve a tax break that lets private investment managers pay the investment rate on money they earn for doing a job — a break the Congressional Budget Office says costs about $13 billion a decade, and that surveyed tax law professors said should be taxed as income by 143 to 10. The committee killed the repeal. A hedge fund billionaire has since put $1.5 million into the super PAC boosting her Senate campaign, which raised that $1.77 million without a dollar from anyone in Iowa.

Source

Ashley Hinson Fought to Save Private Equity's Favorite Loophole, Mother Jones, September 4, 2026. Photo: Charlie Neibergall / Getty.

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

Ashley Hinson, Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn All Voted Against the One Union Bill That Reached the House Floor This Year. Hinson Voted Against the Other Two As Well.

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 06:43:53 +0000

On September 3, 2026, Iowa Starting Line's Amie Rivers asked a simple question about the three Iowa Republicans in the U.S. House: they all say they are fighting for Iowa workers, so how do they actually vote when a bill for workers reaches the floor?

She picked three bills. Not tax bills dressed up as help for "working families," but three bills that do one narrow thing: make it easier for a worker to join with their coworkers and bargain.

The roll calls are public. We pulled all three from the House Clerk. Here is what they show.

The one that reached the floor this year: all three voted no

The Faster Labor Contracts Act deals with a problem that sounds procedural and isn't. When workers vote to form a union, the company is supposed to sit down and negotiate a first contract. Nothing forces it to hurry. Employers can stall for years, and workers who voted for a union end up with nothing to show for it.

The bill sets a clock. If there is no agreement after 90 days of bargaining and 30 days of mediation, an outside panel can set a two-year contract instead of letting the delay run forever.

House Republican leaders did not want a vote on it. Supporters went around them, using a discharge petition — a rule that lets a majority of members drag a bill onto the floor over leadership's objection. It worked. On June 9, 2026, the House passed it 230 to 193, with 20 Republicans crossing over to vote yes.

None of the 20 was from Iowa.

Ashley Hinson — Nay
Mariannette Miller-Meeks — Nay
Zach Nunn — Nay

Randy Feenstra, Iowa's fourth Republican, voted no too. Iowa's House delegation was unanimous against the only union bill that got a floor vote this year.

The federal workers' bill: Hinson voted no, Miller-Meeks and Nunn didn't

In March 2025 President Trump signed an executive order stripping collective bargaining from federal workers, using a national security exception in a 1978 law. He signed a second order in August 2025 that widened it. Together the two orders ended 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 one in every 14 workers in the country covered by a union contract.

The Protect America's Workforce Act would undo those orders and put the contracts back. It also got to the floor by discharge petition, and on December 11, 2025 it passed 231 to 195.

Here the Iowa delegation split:

Miller-Meeks — Yea
Nunn — Yea
Hinson — Nay
Feenstra — Nay

Miller-Meeks and Nunn were two of the 20 Republicans who voted to restore those workers' rights. Hinson was not. She voted with the 195 who left the executive orders standing, and she is the one now asking Iowans to promote her to the U.S. Senate.

The PRO Act: two no votes, and one member who wasn't there yet

The Protecting the Right to Organize Act is the broadest of the three. It bans the mandatory anti-union meetings companies make workers attend, stops employers from dragging out union elections on false pretenses, and adds real financial penalties for breaking labor law — which current law largely lacks.

The House passed it on March 9, 2021, by 225 to 206. Hinson and Miller-Meeks were both freshmen that year. Both voted no.

Nunn is not on the roll call at all — he did not take office until January 2023. But when the bill was reintroduced in February 2023 and gathered 219 cosponsors, no member of Iowa's delegation signed on.

What this costs Iowa

Iowa is not a heavily unionized state. In 2025, 6.8% of employed Iowans were union members, against 10.0% nationally. That is often presented as a reason these votes don't matter much in Iowa.

It is the opposite. A first-contract clock and a ban on captive-audience meetings matter most where unions are weakest and employers face the least resistance, because those are the places where stalling works. The three bills above are not about protecting unions that already exist. They are about whether workers who want one can get to a contract at all.

These are also not close calls buried in a thousand-page package. Each of the three was a standalone bill about one thing. Two of them only reached the floor because a majority of members had to force leadership's hand. There was no cover in these votes and no complexity to hide behind.

Hinson, Miller-Meeks and Nunn are not alone in this. We have written about the 195 House Republicans who voted to keep federal workers' contracts cancelled, and about the Republicans with the worst records on workers and unions generally. What is specific to Iowa is that all four of its Republicans voted the same way on the one bill that got through this year.

What the roll calls show

Ashley Hinson, Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Zach Nunn all voted against the Faster Labor Contracts Act on June 9, 2026, the only bill for union workers to get a House floor vote this year, and one that passed anyway with 20 Republican votes. Hinson also voted against restoring bargaining rights to about a million federal workers in December 2025, when Miller-Meeks and Nunn voted for it, and against the PRO Act in 2021. Iowa's union membership rate is 6.8%, well under the national 10.0%.

Source

Hinson, Miller-Meeks, Nunn's records on worker-friendly bills — Amie Rivers, Iowa Starting Line, September 3, 2026. Roll-call votes independently verified against the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives.

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

Ashley Hinson Doubled Iowa's Tax Credit for Small-Town Housing Developers. Four Years Later Her Husband Co-Founded a Development Firm, and It Was Awarded $1 Million of Them.

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:49:41 +0000

Ashley Hinson spent her time in the Iowa House making a state tax credit for rural housing developers bigger. She then ran for Congress promising to expand tax breaks for rural developers.

Four years after her first vote, her husband co-founded a rural housing development company. Less than two years after that, it was awarded $1 million in credits from the program she had enlarged.

The votes

In 2017, Hinson was a state representative. American Journal News laid out the sequence.

Iowa already offered housing projects approved by the state economic development agency a sales tax refund and an investment tax credit worth up to 10% of a project's cost. S.F. 488, which Hinson backed, did two things:

It set aside $5 million of those incentives specifically for housing projects in smaller cities.
It doubled the credit for those projects, from 10% to 20% of project cost.

In practical terms, a developer building a $2 million project in one of those smaller cities could now claim a $400,000 credit instead of $200,000. The bill defines a small city as one outside Iowa's eleven most populous counties — a category that did not include Hinson's own Linn County seat.

In 2019 she voted again, this time to raise the set-aside from $5 million to $10 million.

Then she ran for Congress in 2020 on a platform that included expanding tax incentives for rural developers.

Who ended up collecting

In 2021, Hinson's husband, Matthew Arenholz, co-founded BAM Development LLC, which builds and operates apartment complexes across the Midwest.

His co-founders were two sitting Iowa state representatives: Joe Mitchell — now the Republican nominee in Iowa's 2nd Congressional District — and Michael Bousselot. Mitchell was not in the legislature for the 2017 vote; he arrived in January 2019, served alongside Hinson, and joined her in voting for the 2019 bill that doubled the set-aside.

In 2023, BAM Development was awarded $1 million in tax credits made possible by S.F. 488, for its Emerald Place Townhomes development in Clear Lake, Iowa. The state program requires a local match, and the Clear Lake city council voted to put up $1 million — as a 100% property tax abatement for four years plus the extension of 14th Street.

Two Republican legislators voted to double a developer subsidy. Two years later, one of them and the other's husband co-founded a development company, and it was awarded that subsidy.

The letters of support came from her donors and her earmark

To win the S.F. 488 credit, BAM had to submit letters of support from local stakeholders. Two of them are worth naming.

One came from Sukup Manufacturing Co., an Iowa grain-equipment maker. Members of the Sukup family have given a combined $47,500 to Hinson's congressional campaigns and another $4,000 to her leadership PAC.

The other came from the North Iowa Corridor Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit covering Mason City, Clear Lake and greater Cerro Gordo County — all inside Hinson's congressional district. In February, Hinson used her seat on the House Appropriations Committee to secure $3 million for the North Iowa Corridor Workforce Housing Initiative — a project that carries the group's name, though the money's intended recipient is Cerro Gordo County. Her written funding request asserted she had no financial interest in the project.

So a company her husband co-founded needed backing letters, and got one from a family that has given her over $50,000 and one from the economic development group whose namesake housing project she later won $3 million for.

This is the second time her husband's business has run through her office

On August 27, NOTUS reported that Arenholz helped arrange a 2023 meeting between Hinson, other members of Congress, and an insurance industry lobbying group he was working with.

We covered that one: her first Senate ad promises she will take on big insurance, while her husband chaired the government affairs committee of the insurance lobby's Iowa branch and helped set up its meeting with all four of Iowa's U.S. House members, including his wife. The group's PAC has given her campaign $45,000.

Arenholz is also a stakeholder in a private-equity backed brokerage firm.

Her business partner is running on the opposite position

The other half of this story is on the ballot in Iowa's 2nd District.

Joe Mitchell, BAM's co-founder, now campaigns as a critic of housing subsidies, calling the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit "a disaster" that needs to be "totally reformed" and complaining it is "too much paperwork." We wrote about that this week: his companies collected $2,559,880 from the Iowa credit he voted to expand, including the Clear Lake project.

Iowa's housing subsidies are a disaster when someone else claims them and a business plan when this group does.

The money keeps arriving from people with business before her

This is a recurring shape in Hinson's finances, not a one-off. The man whose carbon pipeline company won the power to seize Iowa farmland by eminent domain has given her committees $42,000 and hosted her Senate fundraiser.

Iowans looking at the state's housing shortage are entitled to ask whose housing the subsidies were meant to build.

What the record shows

Ashley Hinson backed a 2017 bill that doubled Iowa's investment tax credit for rural housing developers and set aside $5 million for them, then voted in 2019 to double that set-aside to $10 million. In 2021 her husband co-founded a development firm with two of her legislative colleagues. In 2023 that firm was awarded $1 million in credits created by the law she backed, supported by letters from a family that has given her more than $50,000 and from the economic development group whose namesake housing project she later won $3 million of federal funding for. One of the firm's co-founders is now running for Congress against housing subsidies.

Source

Jesse Valentine, "Hinson backed tax credits that helped her husband's company", American Journal News, September 1, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall.

Joe Mitchell Calls Housing Tax Credits 'A Disaster.' His Own Companies Collected $2,559,880 From the One He Voted to Expand.

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:42:40 +0000

Joe Mitchell, the Republican nominee in Iowa's 2nd Congressional District, has a position on government housing subsidies. He does not like them.

He has called the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit — the main program that builds affordable apartments in this country — "a disaster" that needs to be "totally reformed." His complaint, in his own words on a business podcast this year: "It's too much paperwork. It's too much compliance. Too much cost."

There is a housing subsidy he leaves out of that speech. It is the one his companies took $2,559,880 from.

The vote, then the credits

Iowa Starting Line went through the record. Here is the sequence.

In May 2021, Mitchell was a state representative. He voted for Senate File 619, a bill that expanded Iowa's Workforce Housing Tax Credit. That program hands out $35 million a year through the Iowa Economic Development Authority.

Afterward, Mitchell became a developer. His House financial disclosure lists him as a partner in BAM Development, Monroe Street Landing, Emerald Cove LLC, Bousselot & Mitchell Company, and J Mitchell Real Estate LLC.

Two of those firms — BAM Development LLC and Bousselot & Mitchell Company — built housing projects that applied for and received Workforce Housing Tax Credits:

A 16-unit development in Grinnell
A 30-unit development in Clear Lake
A 20-unit development in Dyersville

The three projects took a combined $2,559,880 in credits from the program he had voted to grow.

What this is and isn't

It is worth being precise, because the facts are damning enough without stretching them.

The credits are awarded through a competitive application run by state economic development staff, not handed out by legislators. And Mitchell was not yet a partner in either company when he cast the 2021 vote. Nobody has shown that he voted knowing his own future firms would collect.

What the record does show is a lawmaker who voted to make a housing subsidy bigger, then spent the following years building a real estate portfolio that leaned on that exact subsidy — and who is now running for Congress telling Iowans that housing subsidies are the problem.

The federal program he wants "totally reformed" is the one that builds housing for people who cannot afford market rent. The state program he voted to expand is the one that paid his companies. His criticism, as Iowa Starting Line put it, is rooted in the perspective of a developer.

This is the third time the pattern has run

Mitchell's campaign sells him as an outsider taking on a system that "works for insiders and lobbyists." We have now documented that claim colliding with his own record three separate times.

He founded and presides over a real estate trade group that spent nearly $75,000 lobbying the Iowa Legislature — while running against lobbyists.

His entire published housing plan is deregulation, which Iowa already tried: a law capping what cities can require of developers for stormwater runoff, passed in a state with worsening floods.

And now the housing subsidies he attacks in public are the kind his companies banked $2.5 million from.

There is one more name on the paperwork. BAM Development was co-founded in 2021 by Mitchell, fellow Iowa Rep. Michael Bousselot, and Matthew Arenholz — the husband of Rep. Ashley Hinson, who voted in the Iowa House to double the very credit BAM went on to collect. Mitchell was not in the legislature for that 2017 vote, but he joined Hinson in voting for the 2019 bill that doubled the small-city set-aside again.

Who this is actually about

Iowans in the 2nd District are not looking for a debate about tax credit compliance costs. They are looking at rent and a mortgage rate.

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit that Mitchell wants "totally reformed" is the program that produces the units at the bottom of the market — the ones a family priced out of buying actually needs. His argument against it is that it involves too much paperwork for developers.

He is a developer. His companies have taken $2.5 million from the state credit whose paperwork he was willing to do.

What the record shows

Joe Mitchell voted in May 2021 to expand Iowa's Workforce Housing Tax Credit. Two development companies he later partnered in collected $2,559,880 from that program across three Iowa towns. He is now campaigning against the federal housing credit as "a disaster" with "too much paperwork" — the program that builds housing for Iowans who cannot afford to buy from developers like him.

Source

"Joe Mitchell cashed in on housing tax credit he voted to grow", Iowa Starting Line, August 31, 2026. Photo: Iowa Starting Line.

Ashley Hinson Missed Five Epstein Votes in One Week. On One of Those Days, a Billionaire Named in the Files Gave Her $14,000.

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 13:04:28 +0000

In the first ten days of September 2025, the House Appropriations Committee voted five separate times on forcing the Justice Department to give up what it was holding on Jeffrey Epstein.

Flight logs. Visitor records for his houses and his plane. Bank records. A full accounting of every document the department had on Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

All five failed. Ashley Hinson sits on that committee. Her name is not on any of the five roll calls.

It is on something else from those same two days, and that is the part worth sitting with.

Five votes, five absences

You don't have to take anyone's word for this. The House publishes the committee's roll calls, name by name, in the report on each bill.

On September 3, 2025, the committee marked up the Financial Services and General Government bill and took 20 recorded votes. Three were about Epstein:

Roll Call 11 — cut off money for the White House budget office until the Epstein files are released. Failed 26–33.
Roll Call 12 — bar public money from being used to keep back the visitor logs, flight manifests and guest records for Epstein's homes and private plane. Failed 26–34.
Roll Call 14 — bar the Treasury Department from withholding, blacking out or slow-walking financial records on Epstein and Maxwell, including the suspicious-activity reports banks file when money looks dirty. Failed 28–33.

Hinson is listed in neither the yes column nor the no column on any of the three. You can read the full vote tables for that markup and check for yourself.

A week later, on September 10, 2025, the committee marked up the bill that funds the Justice Department itself. Nineteen recorded votes. Two were about Epstein:

Roll Call 12 — require the attorney general to hand the committee a list of everything the Justice Department has that relates to Epstein and Maxwell. Failed 28–33.
Roll Call 17 — bar the department from withholding, redacting or delaying the release of unclassified records in the Epstein-Maxwell case. Failed 28–34.

Same result. Hinson's name is on neither one.

Five chances to be counted. Zero appearances.

One vote each day, and neither was an Epstein vote

Here is what makes this different from an ordinary absence.

At the end of each of those two markups, the committee voted on the thing leadership actually needed: the motion to send the bill to the House floor. September 3, adopted 35–28. September 10, adopted 34–28.

Hinson is recorded on both — and on nothing else. "Mrs. Hinson" appears exactly once in each day's vote tables. She is missing from all 19 other recorded votes on September 3 and all 18 on September 10, the five Epstein amendments among them.

So this is not a member sitting out the awkward votes and staying for the rest. It is a member who cast one vote at each markup: the one her party needed her for.

The amendment nobody had to put their name on

There was a sixth Epstein measure that week, and it tells you something about how this works.

On September 10, Washington Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez offered an amendment to hold back $35.5 million from the Justice Department until the attorney general turned over every document on the decision to move Ghislaine Maxwell out of a federal prison in Tallahassee and into a minimum-security camp in Bryan, Texas.

That move was real, and it was recent. Maxwell is serving 20 years for helping Epstein abuse girls. She was transferred to the Texas camp on August 1, 2025 — days after Todd Blanche, then the deputy attorney general and formerly Donald Trump's personal defense lawyer, spent two days interviewing her at a Florida courthouse.

The amendment was killed on a voice vote. No roll call. No names. Nobody on the committee had to be on the record about whether the public should learn how Maxwell got a better prison.

We're noting that because it's the one part of this story where nobody can be pinned down — including Hinson. She didn't dodge that vote. There was nothing to dodge.

Blanche is now the attorney general. The Senate confirmed him 50–49 at 4:17 in the morning on August 8, 2026. Hinson's reaction, to CBS2 in Cedar Rapids: "We need someone to have that position. I don't think leaving it unfilled was a good thing for our country. And so I'm glad the Senate was able to get him confirmed."

What came in on September 10

Federal Election Commission records are public, and they are searchable by date.

On September 10, 2025 — the day of Roll Call 12 and Roll Call 17 — Ashley for Iowa, Hinson's Senate campaign committee, recorded two contributions of $7,000 each: one from Stephen A. Schwarzman, the co-founder of Blackstone, and one from his wife, Christine Schwarzman.

Fourteen thousand dollars, from one household, on that day.

Schwarzman's name appears in the Epstein files more than 20 times. He has never been accused of wrongdoing related to Epstein, and there is no evidence he ever emailed Epstein directly. That is worth saying plainly, because the true version of this is bad enough on its own.

The true version is this: on a day when a member of the Appropriations Committee had two recorded chances to vote for opening a set of files, and took neither, her Senate campaign banked $14,000 from a billionaire household whose name is inside them.

Nobody had to arrange that. That's the point.

We've been here before with her

This is not the first time the calendar has lined up this way.

Last month we wrote about the Daily Beast's finding that Hinson and her committees took nearly $90,000 from billionaires named in the Epstein files — about $30,500 of it during the same fall stretch when she was refusing to sign the discharge petition that would have forced the files onto the House floor. Out of 219 House Republicans, exactly four signed it. She was not one of them.

Her stated objection was not that the files should stay sealed. It was that forcing the vote would hand the floor to Democrats — a procedural complaint about her own party's convenience.

And it is not the first time she has been missing from her own committee. Congressional records show she has missed 163 committee votes and 33 floor votes since taking office in 2021 — including, in that same September 2025 stretch, three votes in one day on funding to fight violence against women.

Committee votes are the ones that almost never show up in a member's published attendance rate. That is exactly why they are worth counting.

What she did when it was free

On November 18, 2025, after Arizona Rep. Adelita Grijalva's signature finally forced the discharge petition over the line, the Epstein Files Transparency Act came to the House floor and passed 427 to 1. Hinson voted yes. Of the 428 members who voted, only one voted no.

By then the outcome was decided and a no vote would have been a national headline. In her own committee, two months earlier, when five votes were live and her name would have gone on the record, she wasn't there for a single one.

What the record shows

Ashley Hinson sits on the House Appropriations Committee. On September 3 and September 10, 2025, that committee held five recorded votes to force the release of Epstein records — flight logs, visitor lists, bank records, and the Justice Department's full inventory. Hinson's name appears on none of them. On both days her name appears on the final vote to send the bill to the House floor — the only vote she is recorded on either day. On September 10, the day of two of those votes, her Senate campaign took $14,000 from Stephen and Christine Schwarzman; Schwarzman's name is in the Epstein files more than 20 times. She then refused to sign the petition that would have forced the files open, and voted for release two months later, when the count was 427 to 1 and her vote changed nothing.

Source

Jesse Valentine, "Hinson missed multiple votes on Epstein investigation", American Journal News, August 27, 2026. Photo: AP. The individual roll calls, vote totals and member lists in this post were independently verified against the House Appropriations Committee's published vote tables for the September 3, 2025 and September 10, 2025 markups, and the contributions against FEC records.

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.

Mariannette Miller-Meeks Says Nobody Has Complained to Her About Higher Health Costs. Iowa's Marketplace Premiums Went Up 15.3% This Year.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:36:13 +0000

On Friday, August 28, 2026, Mariannette Miller-Meeks stood on the floor of Cemen Tech in Indianola, accepted the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's endorsement, and told the assembled employees why she voted for Trump's 2025 budget bill.

Not for the business groups, she said. Not for the owners.

"It was for you, who make this country great, who keep this country moving forward, who allow us to keep globally economic (power)."

She said this while flanked by the Midwest regional manager of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the vice president of public policy for the Iowa Association of Business and Industry, who were there to endorse her.

The business organizations were not upset about the framing. They were the ones holding the event.

Then there were the health costs

Miller-Meeks said she had not heard from Iowa businesses or workers facing higher health care costs and premiums — from the budget bill itself or from the expiration of the Affordable Care Act tax credits.

What she said, as reported by the Iowa Capital Dispatch:

"First and foremost, I hadn't had any business coming and complaining to me. The majority of Americans, over 130 million Americans, are on employer-based health insurance. And extending the expanded COVID-era tax credits, which went directly to profitable insurance companies, did nothing to lower the premiums for the individuals here, or for these businesses who provide those benefits."

Here is the number she did not mention. After those federal subsidies expired, insurers raised premiums for Iowa's ACA-marketplace customers by an average of 15.3% for 2026.

Not a projection. The rates Iowans are paying now.

Miller-Meeks is a physician. She knows the difference between "nobody has complained to me" and "nobody is being harmed." The first is a statement about who gets access to her. The second is a claim about Iowa, and it is not true.

She also knows why nobody at a Chamber of Commerce endorsement event was complaining about the individual marketplace: the people on it are not in that room. They are self-employed, they work for small businesses that don't offer coverage, they're between jobs, they're farming. Her "over 130 million Americans are on employer-based insurance" answer is a way of saying the Iowans who lost the subsidy are a minority — which is true, and is not a defense.

This was not one state's bad luck. House Republicans voted 216–211 for a health bill whose text never mentions the expiring tax credits, and Miller-Meeks was one of the 216.

The rural hospital fund she is touting exists because of the bill she voted for

Miller-Meeks pointed to two things she is doing on health care: a bill she calls the Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act, and money she has secured for rural hospitals through the federal Rural Health Transformation Program.

That second one deserves a closer look, because the Iowa Capital Dispatch described exactly what the program is: it "was created to help offset the projected decline in rural Medicaid spending due to changes made through the OBBBA."

In other words, the fund exists because the budget bill cut rural Medicaid. Miller-Meeks voted for the cut, and is now campaigning on the patch.

We covered what the cut has already done in her district. A year after her vote, nearly 25,000 fewer Iowans were on food assistance, her district's hospital had stopped delivering babies, and she had told a booing town hall crowd that her committee voted "to strengthen and preserve Medicaid".

That was in July. The answer in August is that nobody has complained.

What the endorsement is actually for

The Chamber's Micah Olson explained why the group is backing her. She has "aligned U.S. Chamber priorities on issues like pro-growth tax policy, eliminating burdensome regulations, streamlining our federal permitting process, and investing in America's workforce and infrastructure."

That is a fair and accurate description of her record, offered by the people whose priorities she aligned with. It is also the exact opposite of what she told the workers at Cemen Tech at the same event — that the vote was "not for business organizations or owners."

Both things were said in the same room, at the same event, to the same audience.

The Chamber also endorsed Iowa's Zach Nunn earlier in August. Both districts are among the most competitive in the country this November, and Miller-Meeks faces Christina Bohannan for the third straight cycle. Bohannan's response to the event: "Rep. Miller-Meeks has been bad for business in Iowa, and it's affected everyone: small businesses, workers, and families."

What the record shows

Mariannette Miller-Meeks voted for a budget law that cut rural Medicaid and let the ACA tax credits lapse. Iowa's marketplace insurers then raised premiums an average of 15.3% for 2026. Asked about it at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce endorsement event on August 28, she said no business had come to complain to her, and told the workers in the room she had cast that vote "not for business organizations or owners" but for them — with the business organizations standing beside her, endorsing her for it.

Source

Robin Opsahl, U.S. Rep. Miller-Meeks says 2025 GOP tax cuts help Iowa manufacturing workers, Iowa Capital Dispatch, August 28, 2026. Photo: Robin Opsahl / Iowa Capital Dispatch.

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

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

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

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

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

"You have so many proteins to choose from"

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

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

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

"The Democrats invented this term 'affordability'"

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

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

"Earn more"

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

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

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

"Gasoline prices are down 40 percent"

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

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

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

"Gas prices are at five-year lows"

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

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

The rest of the list

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

What they have in common

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

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

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

The short version

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

Source

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

Ashley Hinson's First Senate Ad Says She'll Take On Big Insurance. Her Husband Arranged the Insurance Lobby's Meeting With Her.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 15:52:20 +0000

Here is the promise in the first ad of Ashley Hinson's Senate campaign:

"Health care companies are ripping you off, and members of Congress should not trade stocks."

"I'm working with President Trump to take on big insurance companies, and I'm fighting to ban stock trading in Congress."

That is the pitch. She is the one who takes on the insurance industry.

Now here is what NOTUS reported on August 27, 2026, after reviewing the insurance industry's own magazines.

Her husband ran government affairs for the insurance lobby

Hinson's husband, Matt Arenholz, is a longtime insurance executive. That much was already public. What was not public until now is that he chaired the government affairs committee for the Iowa branch of the Independent Insurance Agents & Brokers of America — a national insurance trade association and lobbying group. Archived material from the Iowa group's website shows he took the role in 2019 and still had it in 2023.

Government affairs is the industry's term for dealing with lawmakers. And according to the trade group's own magazine, Arenholz used the job to open a door.

Tom O'Meara, the Iowa group's chief executive officer, wrote this to members about a trip to Washington:

"In fact, Matt was able to arrange a meeting with all four of our congressional members in one large conference room. This not only saved us a lot of time but prevented us from having to bounce around from building to building in D.C."

Iowa has four members of the U.S. House. One of them is his wife — and NOTUS reports that officials at the group credited Arenholz with helping them gain access to Hinson and other Iowa lawmakers.

O'Meara was proud of the access. In another edition of the magazine, he described being asked at a national conference how many Iowa lawmakers his group had gotten in front of:

"I was given several strange looks when I responded that we met with all six of ours from Iowa. Several replied to me that they were not talking about congressional staff members rather the actual elected officials themselves. My answer remained the same, ALL SIX!"

In a fall 2023 edition of the magazine, O'Meara also acknowledged that Arenholz and Hinson are married.

What that access is worth, in the group's own words

The national organization does not hide what this is for. Its political action committee, InsurPac, explains on its own website exactly what the money buys:

"InsurPac allows Big 'I' federal lobbyists and agents to attend fundraising events where they develop relationships with members of Congress and their staff. Those relationships help open doors to advocate for or against legislation that directly impacts the independent agency system."

Open doors. That is the group's phrase, not ours. In the 2025 election cycle, it says, its agents used InsurPac money to attend more than 1,600 fundraising events, and it gave out more than $2.6 million to 278 federal campaigns.

Hinson has been one of the beneficiaries. NOTUS reports the PAC has, over the years, given more than $67,000 to her campaign and to PACs affiliated with her.

We checked the Federal Election Commission's own database for her principal campaign committee. It shows eleven checks from the trade group's PAC totaling $45,000, and the first one landed on September 16, 2019 — the same year her husband took the government affairs job, and more than a year before she was sworn in.

Separately, NOTUS reports the national group has spent more than $5 million lobbying the federal government since Hinson was elected.

The family's money is in insurance too

Hinson's annual financial disclosures show her household's stake in the industry is not small.

In her 2025 disclosure, she reported Arenholz held between $1 million and $5 million in High Street Insurance Partners, a large insurance brokerage.
In 2021, she reported he sold his interest in a private insurance company for more than $1 million.

High Street is owned by private equity. The Boston firm Abry Partners announced it was acquiring the brokerage from another private equity firm, Huron Capital, in April 2021.

Jeff Hauser, who runs the Revolving Door Project, a watchdog group that tracks lobbying, told NOTUS that Arenholz's position "blurs the line."

"No one's saying that if your significant other gets elected to Congress, you have got to stop being in insurance. Then you tell me he's involved in government affairs, right off the bat that's not normal. Most people don't do government affairs work."

Hauser also argued that national groups use state chapters for a reason. Instead of sending a Washington lobbyist to an Iowa lawmaker, he said, the group can hand talking points to its Iowa affiliate — "and then the lobbying occurs from a constituent."

Now check the ad against the record

Hinson's ad makes two promises. Look at what she has actually done on each.

"Take on big insurance companies." On December 17, 2025, Hinson voted for H.R. 6703, a bill House Republicans named the "Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act." It does not extend the tax credits that were about to expire and that keep marketplace insurance affordable; their expiration is what is driving the 2026 premium increases. The Congressional Budget Office found the bill would leave about 100,000 more people uninsured. We wrote up that vote and everyone who cast it. In November, the Iowa Insurance Division and the Kaiser Family Foundation put some Iowa married couples' average premium increases at more than $1,000 a month.

"Ban stock trading in Congress." Hinson did cosponsor a bill — the Stop Insider Trading Act, which she signed on to the day it was introduced in January 2026, and which passed the House in July. Read what it covers. It bars members and their spouses from purchasing "a security issued by a publicly traded company or any comparable economic interest acquired through synthetic means," and requires public notice at least seven days before selling one.

High Street Insurance Partners is not a publicly traded company. It is private, and owned by a private equity firm. The insurance-industry stake Hinson's household holds today is exactly the kind of asset a ban written around publicly traded stock is least likely to reach.

What the campaign says

A Hinson campaign spokesperson, who declined to be identified by name, said the meeting O'Meara bragged about was "arranged just like any other meeting with an advocacy group is arranged through the proper and appropriate channels."

The spokesperson said Arenholz has been part of the Iowa insurance organization since 2003, that his government affairs role was focused on state-level issues, and that the panel meets once a year to hear from state lobbyists about the Iowa legislature.

"Matt's not a lobbyist nor has he ever lobbied Ashley on anything — they maintain the highest ethical standards."

The campaign also said the PAC's support "had no relationship to her husband's membership" in the Iowa group. The Iowa organization itself did not answer NOTUS's questions.

Two things about that response. First, nobody has to be a registered lobbyist to arrange a meeting; O'Meara's own magazine says Arenholz arranged the meeting, and the meeting was with federal officials in Washington, not the Iowa statehouse. Second, "he never lobbied her" is a narrow denial of a claim nobody made. The reporting is about access — who gets a room with all four Iowa House members at once, and who does not.

This is the pattern, not the exception

Hinson's campaign is built on the idea that she is not part of the system.

Three weeks ago, Bruce Rastetter co-hosted her Senate fundraiser — the agribusiness figure whose carbon pipeline company won the power to take Iowa farmland by eminent domain, and who has given her committees $42,000.
She tells Iowans she is "a working mom" refueling the minivan, while her campaign spent nearly $40,000 at one private Republican club in Washington and $9,500 at a steakhouse chain.
The insurance trade group is not an outlier in her fundraising. Our own donor research on her report card puts it alongside the Koch network's super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, and a super PAC funded with $35 million from Oracle founder Larry Ellison.

Family conflicts like this are not unique to her, either. Earlier this month we covered Shelley Moore Capito voting to confirm her own son as a U.S. Attorney without recusing.

The Iowa Senate race is a dead heat. Hinson leads Democrat Josh Turek by less than a percentage point in the RealClearPolitics polling average, and the Cook Political Report moved the race to a toss-up last week.

What the record shows

Ashley Hinson's first Senate ad promises she will take on big insurance companies. Her husband chaired the government affairs committee of an insurance lobbying group's Iowa branch from 2019 through at least 2023, and the group's CEO credited him in print with arranging its meeting with all four Iowa House members — one of whom is his wife. That group's PAC has written her principal campaign committee $45,000 in eleven checks since September 2019, its national organization has spent more than $5 million lobbying Washington since she was elected, and her household holds between $1 million and $5 million in a private-equity-owned insurance brokerage. In December she voted for a health bill that left the premium increases in place.

Source

Stephen Neukam, "Rep. Ashley Hinson's Husband 'Arranged' a Meeting Between Lobbyists and Iowa Lawmakers — Including His Wife", NOTUS, August 27, 2026. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images.

Zach Lahn Calls His Kansas School the Best Model in the Country. It Owes Him and His Wife $4.5 Million.

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:12:45 +0000

Zach Lahn is the Republican nominee for governor of Iowa, and his central credential is a private school in Wichita, Kansas called Wonder. He helped found it. He has been its president since it opened. He talks about it constantly.

Here is how he described it to prospective parents in July, in one of 15 promotional emails he put his name to over 15 days:

"I can honestly say that I don't think a better model exists today for equipping children with real-life skills from an early age."

What he doesn't talk about is Wonder's books. Kansas Reflector's Tim Carpenter went and read them.

The numbers

Across six years of IRS filings:

Wonder's expenses exceeded its revenue in five of the six years.
Over the whole period, the school owed more than it owned.
In 2021 and 2022, Zach and Annie Lahn propped it up with $615,000 in personal loans.
By 2025, Wonder's debt to the Lahns had reached approximately $4.5 million. The most recent IRS Form 990, filed in May, shows each of them is owed $2.26 million.

The donations that once carried it dried up. Wonder took in $1.6 million in grants and contributions before it opened its doors in 2018, then $1.3 million in 2018–2019 — against $2.6 million in expenses and only $284,000 in tuition over that stretch. After that:

Year	Contributions
2019–2020	$640,000
2020–2021	$3,500
2021–2022	$186,000
2022–2023	$0
2023–2024	$11,900
2024–2025	$1,900

Taxpayers helped too. Wonder received $170,000 in Paycheck Protection Program loans in 2020 and 2021, both forgiven by the federal government, plus a separate $150,000 SBA disaster loan in 2020. The SBA took a security interest in the school's property, extended in 2025 for another five years.

That is $320,000 in federal money into a private school with $12,000-a-year tuition and no state accreditation.

The conflict of interest, filed with the IRS every year

This is the part that should give Iowans pause, because it isn't an accusation — it's a disclosure Wonder itself has made annually since 2021.

Zach and Annie Lahn are the school's officers: he served as board president and treasurer, she as board secretary and trustee. They are also the only publicly disclosed members of the board of trustees. And they are the school's largest creditor.

Officers, board, and lender — the same two people.

That combination triggered formal conflict-of-interest transaction disclosures to the IRS every year since 2021. As Carpenter notes, the structure runs contrary to IRS recommendations that nonprofit boards avoid domination by employees or by people who lack independence because of family or business ties.

The school also moved into its own off-campus building in Wichita, valued at roughly $3.8 million. Public records don't show whether Wonder has taken any steps to repay the Lahns.

What the campaign says

Lahn's campaign declined multiple requests from Kansas Reflector to schedule an interview about Wonder's academics or finances. After the story ran, spokesman Dan Capodilupo issued a statement.

He confirmed the operating loans during the pandemic. He said Zach and Annie bought the school's new building, remodeled it, and sold it to the school. And on the debt:

"Under the terms of the loan agreement, payments are deferred and no interest accrues until the school reaches agreed-upon enrollment numbers. Zach and Annie structured the agreement to ensure long-term success of the school."

Take that at face value and it still says the quiet part: the school is not at the enrollment it needs, so the payments haven't started. A school that is a working model does not need its founders to defer $4.5 million indefinitely.

What he wants to do with Iowa's schools

Iowa gives $8,200 per student in Educational Savings Account grants to families enrolling in state-accredited private schools. Kansas has no comparable program.

Wonder has never sought accreditation from the Kansas State Department of Education. Lahn has said he's dissatisfied that a school organized like Wonder wouldn't qualify for Iowa's ESA money without it.

He told the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition his commitment to funding ESAs is unshakable, and that the way to sustain private schools is to use state resources to enroll as many students as possible.

So the plan is public money for private schools, and his complaint about the current rules is the accreditation requirement his own school never met. We wrote in August about the rest of that record — a school with no accreditation, no state tests and no licensed teachers, and his stated intent to expand Iowa's $314 million voucher program.

He also says he'd be a champion of the Iowa public schools that serve 470,000 students.

And his handgun was stolen from the school

One more thing from the same reporting, because it sits strangely against his campaign platform.

Lahn supports letting permit holders carry firearms on school property in Iowa. He told the Iowa Firearms Coalition:

"When we put young, vulnerable children in these situations where they have no defense, we are setting things up for bad people to take advantage. And we need to have people there that are ready to protect our kids."

A September 2023 Wichita Police Department report shows that Lahn's $8,000 Ithaca Colt 1911 handgun, two .45-caliber magazines and a Ford Excursion were stolen from Wonder school. The firearm and ammunition were later recovered and released to the owner, a Wichita police spokesman said.

His campaign declined written and verbal requests to explain how the weapon came to be somewhere on school property where it could be taken.

Kansas Rep. Jo Ella Hoye, a gun owner who previously led the state's Moms Demand Action chapter, was blunt about it: "As far as someone getting one stolen from school, that is wild. Why wasn't it locked up? At the least, you've got to secure it."

The origin story he tells, and the one in the filings

Lahn moved to Kansas nearly a decade ago to build a vision of private education financed by Chase and Annie Koch — the son and daughter-in-law of billionaire Charles Koch. Wonder opened on September 4, 2018 with 39 students, initially on the campus of Wichita State University, where some objected to a private school being placed on public university grounds.

Wonder's finances began to wobble in 2020, the year Annie Koch's marriage to Chase Koch ended and Lahn's marriage ended. Eleven days after the paperwork finalizing both divorces went through, Lahn and Annie Koch applied for a marriage license in Montana. Both remained in positions of authority at the school.

The Koch connection isn't incidental to Lahn's career either — he built it at the Koch brothers' political operation before Wonder.

What the filings show

Zach Lahn is running for governor of Iowa on the strength of a Wichita private school he calls the best model in the country. Wonder's expenses exceeded its revenue in five of its six years, contributions fell to zero in 2022–2023, and it survived on $320,000 in federal pandemic money and $615,000 in personal loans from Lahn and his wife. Its debt to the two of them has reached about $4.5 million, and they are simultaneously its officers, its only publicly disclosed trustees, and its largest creditor — a conflict the school has reported to the IRS every year since 2021. The school has never sought state accreditation, and Lahn's complaint about Iowa's voucher program is that accreditation is required to receive it.

Source

Iowa gubernatorial candidate's personal loans sustain Kansas school he touts as better model — Tim Carpenter, Kansas Reflector, via Iowa Capital Dispatch, August 25, 2026. Photo by Robin Opsahl/Iowa Capital Dispatch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The vote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four of them voted for it four separate times

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

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

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

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

Arizona, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin: the promises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Source

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

One 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

Zach Lahn Says He Favors Term Limits and Isn't a 'Career Politician.' He Also Wants to Be Iowa's Governor 'for the Next Two Decades.'

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:46:09 +0000

Zach Lahn has a pitch, and he repeats it everywhere: he's an outsider. Not one of them. Not a career politician.

Here is what he told a podcast in May, when asked whether he had ambitions beyond the governor's office:

"No, I have no interest in running for anything else. If I could be the governor of Iowa for the next two decades to turn the ship around... And I don't want to be a career politician, but I think that's one of the things about Iowa that we can do, like, is have a long-term impact."

Two decades. Twenty years. In one office. Said in the same breath as "I don't want to be a career politician."

Heartland Signal's Richard Eberwein reported the contradiction on August 20.

He's for term limits — for other people's jobs

Days before that podcast, Lahn sat down with the Des Moines Register and was asked about term limits. His answer:

"One of the things I like about the governor not having term limits, and I am actually in favor of term limits for most things. I don't think they solve everything."

Read the order of that sentence. The first thing out of his mouth is what he likes about the office he's running for having no limit. The support for term limits "for most things" comes second, as a qualifier.

Iowa is one of the states that places no limit on how many terms a governor may serve. And that is a fact Lahn has clearly thought about, because he says he likes it.

The state he came from does have term limits

Here is the part that turns a contradiction into something sharper.

Lahn's connection to Iowa is a recent one. He voted in Kansas elections in 2018, 2020 and 2022. He and his wife own a $2 million mansion in Wichita. He holds a pilot's license, owns a plane, and has flown to Kansas frequently enough that both the Des Moines Register and The Daily Beast wrote about it. He says he moved to Iowa full-time in 2023 — which cleared Iowa's two-year residency requirement for running for governor with almost nothing to spare.

Kansas limits its governor's terms. Iowa does not.

Heartland Signal asked his campaign about that — why run in the state without limits rather than the one he'd been voting in. His spokesperson, Dan Capodilupo, didn't answer that question, or the one about the term-limits contradiction. He answered a different one:

"Zach's primary residence is in Iowa—he does NOT live in Kansas. This lie has been debunked multiple times."

The Wall Street Journal looked at the residency question too. We wrote about what it found.

The "outsider" resume

The other half of Lahn's pitch is that he's never been part of the machine. His actual work history:

2011 — deputy campaign manager for Rep. Cory Gardner of Colorado
2012 — managed Sen. Steve Daines's congressional campaign in Montana
2014 — managed Rep. David Young's campaign in Iowa
Montana state director for Americans for Prosperity, the political operation funded by Charles Koch
2018 — co-founded a private school in Wichita financed by Chase Koch, Charles Koch's son, and Chase's then-wife Annie. Lahn later married Annie.

His campaign's defense is that running campaigns isn't the same as running for office: "Zach is an outsider because he has never run for office before."

That's a narrow definition of insider — one that would have counted every campaign manager in America as a political outsider right up until the day they filed. We've traced the full Koch-network career, which is worth reading alongside his attacks on what he calls the agribusiness "cartel."

Why any of this matters

Term limits are not the biggest issue in Iowa. Nobody is voting on them in November.

What they measure is whether a candidate believes his own pitch.

Lahn's entire argument for himself is that the people currently in charge have been there too long, are too comfortable, and care more about staying than about fixing anything. That is a real critique, and plenty of Iowans agree with it.

But the man making it wants twenty years in the same chair, likes that Iowa has no rule stopping him, ran in the state that lacks the rule rather than the one he'd been voting in, and built his career inside the Koch political network.

His opponent, State Auditor Rob Sand, included term limits in his platform. Lahn's campaign declined to explain the discrepancy when asked.

Iowans are being asked to install someone for what he hopes will be two decades. They're entitled to notice that he told them he was the opposite kind of person.

Source

Iowa governor candidate Zach Lahn backs term limits — except for the office he wants — Heartland Signal, August 20, 2026, by Richard Eberwein. Photo: Charlie Neibergall/AP.

Zach Nunn Brought Gold Star Families Onstage at His Campaign Fundraiser. The Defense Secretary Headlining It Broke His Own Department's Rule Against Speaking at One.

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:52:53 +0000

On Monday, August 17, Zach Nunn held his annual campaign fundraiser at JR's Southpork Ranch at the Iowa State Fair. It's called "Operation Top Nunn: Salute to the Troops."

Onstage, Nunn brought up the families of two Iowa soldiers killed in Syria last December — Sgt. William Nathaniel Howard of Marshalltown and Sgt. Edgar Brian Torres-Tovar of Des Moines.

"That's what the days like this are about," Nunn said. "Recognizing how we can help those who survive with us and honor those who've given the ultimate sacrifice."

The headline guest was Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. And Hegseth did not stop at talking about the troops.

What the Rules Say

The Defense Department wrote guidance in February 2026 covering political activity by Senate-confirmed officials — people like the Secretary of Defense. Under the heading "Fundraising," it asks whether such an official may "help organize a political fundraiser or speak at a fundraiser." The answer is "No." They are:

"prohibited from… organizing a political fundraiser or speaking at an event on behalf of a political party or candidate for partisan political office."

Even at a partisan event where an official speech is allowed — one that isn't a fundraiser — the guidance says the speech "should be limited to DoW issues," and the official "must refrain from advocating for or against a candidate for partisan political office, or commenting on any campaign related issues."

Here is what Hegseth actually did at Nunn's fundraiser, according to the Iowa Capital Dispatch reporter who was there: he called on Iowans to reelect Nunn to the House, describing him as a needed ally for the administration.

"President Trump needs the type of leaders who understand why a $1.5 trillion dollar budget, a one-time generational investment, is what is necessary…" Hegseth told the crowd.

A political fundraiser: the event was Nunn's campaign fundraiser. Speaking at one: he spoke. Advocating for a candidate: he asked people to vote for one.

Iowa Starting Line, which first reported the conflict with the department's own rules, notes this is the second time this year Hegseth's conduct has run into guidance his own department wrote. In May he headlined a Kentucky rally for a primary challenger to Republican Rep. Thomas Massie.

The Pentagon's position is that Hegseth attended in his personal capacity.

The Part Nunn Owns

Hegseth broke the rule. But it was Nunn's event, Nunn's campaign account, and Nunn's decision about what the evening would look like.

This fundraiser was originally scheduled for March. It was called off after two Iowa soldiers — Major Jeffrey O'Brien, 45, of Waukee, and Sgt. Declan J. Coady, just 20, of West Des Moines — were killed on March 1 in an Iranian strike on a facility in Kuwait. They were among six Americans killed in that attack, all assigned to the 103rd Sustainment Command, based in Des Moines.

Nunn rescheduled it for the State Fair, kept the "Salute to the Troops" name, invited two Gold Star families to the stage, and booked the Secretary of Defense as the draw.

The money raised goes to Nunn's campaign, and the event also benefits veterans support organizations.

His opponent, Democratic state Sen. Sarah Trone Garriott, put it this way:

"It's disgraceful that Zach Nunn and Pete Hegseth are partying together at a campaign stop in Iowa while our service members are under threat and facing poor conditions overseas. Our leaders should be focused on ending this war and keeping Americans deployed overseas safe, not fundraising for Zach Nunn's campaign."

What Else Was Said From That Stage

Hegseth also used the fundraiser to talk about the Pentagon's rollback of diversity policies, and he used a slur for transgender people to do it. Describing the department, which the administration has renamed the Department of War, he said: "at the Department of War, we do training, not tr——es."

"It is a day and night difference," he continued. "Training, lethality, accountability, discipline, readiness — the bedrock of what it means to be an American warrior — is the only focus of our department."

That was the speech at an event honoring dead Iowa soldiers, whose families Nunn had brought onstage.

A Pattern of Borrowed Credibility

Nunn's campaign has leaned on this kind of staging before.

In July, he accepted a "badge of honor" for cancer research funding at an event where a stage-four cancer patient described being kicked off Iowa Medicaid. He promised to protect Medicaid and SNAP, then voted for the bill that cut both. When a Democratic campaign tracker asked him about rural hospitals, he swatted the phone away rather than answer.

And this campaign has already shown it will bend the rules to hold this seat. Nunn's campaign worked to knock a Libertarian challenger off his own ballot, and he has taken to calling his opponent, a Lutheran pastor, a Satanist.

Nunn is one of the most vulnerable House Republicans in the country this year. A "Salute to the Troops" that doubles as a fundraiser, with a Cabinet secretary breaking his own department's ethics guidance to headline it, is what that looks like.

Nunn's campaign did not respond to Iowa Starting Line's request for comment.

Source

Zachary Oren Smith, "Pete Hegseth broke his own department's rule to fundraise for Zach Nunn", Iowa Starting Line, August 18, 2026.

Robin Opsahl, "US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth joins Rep. Zach Nunn at Iowa State Fair", Iowa Capital Dispatch, August 17, 2026. Photo by Robin Opsahl / Iowa Capital Dispatch.

Zach Lahn Calls Agribusiness a 'Cartel.' He Built His Career at the Koch Brothers' Political Shop — and Still Sits on a Koch-Funded Board.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:49:33 +0000

Zach Lahn has built an unusual campaign for a Republican in Iowa. He calls agribusiness multinationals "cartels" that "have pillaged our state." He wants to break them up with antitrust lawsuits. He promises to "tax the heck" out of Wall Street hedge funds. He says the EPA has been captured by corporate interests.

He told Tucker Carlson it sometimes makes him sound like a "hippie."

A new investigation by Mother Jones and the Food & Environment Reporting Network asks the obvious question about a man who says all that: where was he before?

The answer is that he was working for the other side.

He ran the Koch brothers' Montana operation

In 2014, Lahn was hired to direct the Montana branch of Americans for Prosperity — the Koch brothers' flagship political advocacy group.

What did he do there? He urged Montana's Republican legislators to vote against the state's Medicaid expansion. When some of them supported it anyway, he tried to run them out of office.

Lahn is singled out by name in the award-winning 2018 documentary Dark Money as an example of how the Koch political operation works.

That is not ancient history that a man can simply grow out of. It is a career spent doing the specific thing Iowa's rural communities are still paying for. He's still defending privatized Medicaid today, after Iowa's own state auditor found it caused an 891% jump in illegal denials.

And he still sits on a Koch-financed board

In 2018, Lahn co-founded a private school in Kansas with Annie Koch, wife of Koch scion Chase Koch, who financed the project. Lahn and Annie later married.

Lahn still serves on that school's board of directors.

Now hold that next to his stump speech. Lahn wants the agribusiness "cartels" broken up. Koch Industries is one of them: its fertilizer arm, Koch Ag & Energy Solutions, is one of just four companies — with CF Industries, Nutrien and Yara — holding 84% of North America's nitrogen fertilizer capacity. Farmer advocacy groups have accused it of monopolistic practices in Iowa specifically.

To be fair and precise: Lahn did not work in the Koch family's agricultural business. He worked in their politics. But the distinction is thinner than it sounds — the politics existed to protect the business, and Americans for Prosperity was campaigning in Iowa too, for Republican candidates Mother Jones describes as friendly to Big Ag and corporate interests.

Austin Frerick, an expert on Iowa agricultural antitrust and author of Barons, offered the most economical summary:

Lahn, "at his core, is an all-star, major league political operative."

The crisis he's campaigning on is real

None of this means Iowa's problem is invented. It is severe, and both parties have avoided it for decades.

Iowa has the nation's second-highest cancer rate, and is one of only three states where the rate is increasing. The Iowa Environmental Council has explicitly tied that trend to agricultural pollution.
Pesticides, high-nitrogen fertilizers and hog-manure lagoons have laced the majority of Iowans' drinking water with unsafe contaminants.
The average farmer now makes less than 15 cents of every food dollar consumers spend.
Agribusiness spent about $224 million on lobbying last year — often outspending defense and oil and gas.

"When you live in these areas, you're living in a crisis," Frerick says. Aaron Lehman, a fifth-generation Iowa farmer and president of the Iowa Farmers Union, puts it this way: "We have hit a level of corporate control that we've never gone through before."

That's why Lahn's pitch works. The grievance is genuine. The question is whether the messenger will act on it.

The test he's already failing

Here's the cleanest way to judge whether Lahn will actually take on the powerful: watch what he says about the administration he's tied himself to.

Because on the specific issue at the center of his campaign — glyphosate, the weed killer in Roundup that Lahn says the EPA won't admit causes cancer — the Trump administration has gone the other way, repeatedly:

Trump signed an executive order declaring the production of glyphosate critical to U.S. national security.
The nation's top pesticide regulator and its undersecretary for food safety are both former Big Ag lobbyists.
In June, the Supreme Court ruled that states cannot sue Bayer, glyphosate's producer, over failing to warn consumers about the herbicide's alleged dangers.

Lahn accepted Trump's endorsement as a "patriot." He has not, so far as the reporting shows, challenged any of it.

The same goes for the rest of what Washington has done to Iowa farm country: tariffs crushing farmers, fertilizer costs climbing as the war in Iran drags on, DOGE's cuts to USDA services and regenerative farming programs, and the Medicaid and SNAP cuts in Trump's budget bill that agricultural communities increasingly rely on.

One Iowa soybean farmer told Mother Jones what he wants: "We need a governor who will stand up for Iowa when our Iowa interests are being ignored" — including, he added, by the president.

Who's paying for the anti-corporate campaign

Lahn deserves credit for one thing: unlike his primary opponent and his general-election rival, he didn't fund his primary campaign with big checks from Big Ag. He put in roughly $2.5 million of his own money.

But the money coming in now is not grassroots either. A PAC associated with the Republican Governors Association contributed $5 million. Steak 'n Shake CEO Sardar Biglari gave $25,000.

The party establishment does not write $5 million checks to candidates it expects to break up its donors' companies.

The rest of the platform

Lahn's anti-corporate message travels with positions that have nothing to do with fertilizer monopolies:

He's vowed to pull mRNA Covid shots off the market and end every childhood vaccine requirement in Iowa schools — during the worst measles year since 1991.
He's pushing a life-at-conception law, which would effectively end abortion access in Iowa.
He promises to drive "Marxists" out of Iowa schools, after running a school with no accreditation, no state tests and no licensed teachers.
He accepted an endorsement from former Rep. Steve King, who lost his seat in 2020 after questioning why "white nationalist" and "white supremacist" are offensive terms.

And the man presenting himself as a sixth-generation Iowa farmer didn't register to vote in Iowa until October 2024 — barely clearing the state's two-year residency requirement — as the Wall Street Journal documented. The Des Moines Register reported in May that he still flies to Kansas about once a week. The Daily Beast reported he has never claimed the Belle Plaine farm as his primary residence.

Lahn's campaign declined Mother Jones' interview request, and declined to answer questions about his role in the farm's day-to-day operations.

Lahn rails against out-of-state owners of Iowa farmland, and his critics note that he was one of them until recently. Silvia Secchi, a natural resources economist at the University of Iowa, put it this way: "It takes one to know one."

What Iowa should ask

Iowa farmers are right to be furious, and they are right that nobody has been fighting for them. If Lahn has genuinely changed his mind about the Kochs, monopolies and corporate power, that would be worth something.

But a conversion is proved by what you give up, not by what you say. Lahn is still on the board of a Koch-financed school. He has not criticized a president who declared glyphosate a national security priority. And on Medicaid he has not moved: he campaigned against expansion in Montana, and he is defending Iowa's privatized system now.

Iowa deserves a governor who fought Big Ag before it was popular, not one who joined the fight after checking the polling.

Source

Zach Lahn Is MAHA's Great Farm Country Hope. Is He the Populist Hero He Claims to Be? — Teresa Cotsirilos, Mother Jones, in partnership with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, August 18, 2026. Top image illustration by Mark Harris.

Ashley Hinson Says She's Just a Working Mom Refueling the Minivan. Her Campaign Spent $39,748 at One D.C. Club.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:33:02 +0000

Here is how Ashley Hinson describes herself to Iowa voters:

"I am at the heart of everything a working mom, and whether it is, you know, refueling the, the minivan or restocking my fridge for our teenager boys, uh, I, I know what is facing our families here in Iowa."

That's the pitch. She's one of us. Gas prices, groceries, teenage boys who eat everything.

Now here is what her campaign has actually been buying, according to her own filings with the Federal Election Commission.

$39,748 at one private club

Hinson's campaign committee, Ashley for Iowa, has paid the Capitol Hill Club — the private Republican club a block from the Capitol — 72 separate times, totaling $39,748.14, according to FEC disbursement records. The payments run from December 2020, right after she was first elected, through May 2026.

That's not the only tab.

The Capital Grille — an upscale steakhouse frequented by members of Congress — $9,516.14 across 18 payments between May 2021 and April 2026.
Bullfeathers, a Capitol Hill bar and grill — $4,305.42 across 34 separate visits between December 2020 and August 2025.

Those three line items alone come to more than $53,000 of campaign money spent on food and drink in Washington, D.C.

MeidasTouch first pulled these records, and put the full total at roughly $110,000 on fine dining and luxury travel, including more than $80,000 on meals in Washington. We checked the three largest items against the FEC's own database. Every figure matched.

And the resorts

The campaign's travel spending goes to places that are not on the way to Cedar Rapids.

On February 5, 2026, Ashley for Iowa paid $1,443.75 to The Breakers — the oceanfront resort in Palm Beach, Florida — filed under "travel." FEC records show it as a single disbursement.

The same review of her filings identified roughly $10,000 in resort lodging over the past five years, at properties including the Peninsula in Beverly Hills, the Fontainebleau and the Wynn in Las Vegas, the Lido House in Newport Beach, the Omni Homestead in Virginia, Stein Eriksen Lodge in Utah, and Nemacolin in Pennsylvania.

None of that is illegal. Campaigns are allowed to hold fundraisers at nice hotels, and members of Congress raise money in Palm Beach and Beverly Hills because that is where the money is.

That's rather the point. This is what a candidate's schedule looks like when the people funding her live in Palm Beach and Beverly Hills, not Waterloo and Dubuque.

The gap between the pitch and the paperwork

Hinson is running for the U.S. Senate on being relatable. The minivan. The fridge. Knowing what Iowa families are facing.

But Hinson is a millionaire. Her net worth has climbed by as much as $7 million during her time in office, according to her financial disclosures. Her husband holds stock in an insurance company valued at between $1 million and $5 million.

There is nothing wrong with being wealthy. There is something wrong with building a campaign around understanding a grocery bill while your campaign account covers 34 trips to a Capitol Hill bar and a stay at a Palm Beach resort.

And the gap shows up in her voting record, not just her expense reports:

She pushed Medicaid work requirements with the line that "if you're going to take a taxpayer benefit, you should be working" — when 92% of adults on Medicaid already do.
The man trying to seize Iowa farmland for a carbon pipeline co-hosted a fundraiser for her.
She refused to sign the petition to release the Epstein files while taking checks from billionaires named in them.
And she has missed 196 votes in Congress.

What Iowans should ask

The next time Hinson tells a crowd she's refueling the minivan, it's worth asking a simple question: whose gas is she actually paying for?

Because the receipts on file with the federal government describe a very different life than the one in the ad. Iowa families paying $4 for a gallon of milk are not expensing $9,500 in steakhouse dinners. They are not staying at The Breakers.

Iowa deserves a senator who lives in the same economy as the people who elect her.

Source

Ashley Hinson Spent Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars of Campaign Funds on Luxury Trips, Fine Dining — Troy Matthews, MeidasTouch, August 17, 2026. Dollar figures independently verified against FEC Schedule B filings for Ashley for Iowa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They wrote the rules: Aaron Bean and Ashley Hinson

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

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

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

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

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

He promised in writing: Jeff Hurd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That rescue bill has three cosponsors and has never moved.

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

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

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

He let the subsidies lapse: Jon Husted

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

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

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

The pattern

Read those seven together and the defense falls apart.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is actually being taken away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And TSA screeners got the same treatment

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

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

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

The House had a bill to end it permanently

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

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

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

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

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

The 20 Republicans who voted yes

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

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

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

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

The 195 who voted no

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

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

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

Colorado — Lauren Boebert, Jeff Crank, Jeff Hurd

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

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

Idaho — Russ Fulcher, Mike Simpson

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mary Miller

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

Iowa — Ashley Hinson

Kansas — Ron Estes, Tracey Mann, Derek Schmidt

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

Minnesota — Tom Emmer, Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach

Mississippi — Mike Ezell, Michael Guest, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Mike Flood, Adrian Smith

New York — Nick Langworthy, Claudia Tenney

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Mike Kennedy, Celeste Maloy, Blake Moore

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

The Senate has done nothing for eight months

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

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

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

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

This is not a fringe position they're protecting

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

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

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

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

We deserve better.

How they voted

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

Source

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

Ashley Hinson Has Missed 196 Votes in Congress. Her Attendance Record Looks Great, Because Nobody Counts the Ones She Skipped.

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 07:58:49 +0000

There is a number politicians like to quote about themselves: their voting attendance. Ashley Hinson's looks fine.

The reason it looks fine is that the number almost nobody publishes is the one where the work actually gets done.

According to congressional records, Hinson has missed 163 committee votes and 33 floor votes since she joined the House in 2021 — about 196 in all. A few line up with bouts of COVID in January 2022 and April 2026. The vast majority are unexplained.

Committee votes are usually left out of a member's public attendance record. So a representative can skip 163 of them and still show up in the data as reliably present.

What she missed

Hinson sits on the House Appropriations Committee. That is the committee that decides what the federal government funds. Here is a sample of the votes she wasn't there for.

May 2025 — funding for the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. The committee manager explained that the increase was meant to handle the surge in AI-generated child sexual abuse material and the strain it was putting on law enforcement. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children received more than 400,000 reports involving generative AI in 2025, and identified more than 275 children as direct victims of AI-generated abuse material across 2024 and 2025.

September 2025 — three votes on violence against women in one day. One to increase funding to enforce the Violence Against Women Act. One to increase funding for transitional housing grants for domestic abuse victims. One to fund a community-based violence intervention program. She missed all three. Domestic violence deaths in Iowa rose between 2021 and 2024.

Funding for the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. Skipped.

Health care. A 2023 vote on the doctor shortage in the Veterans Affairs system. A 2025 vote to increase funding for senior nutrition programs. A 2025 vote to fund a program that trains physicians to work in rural areas — in a state where rural hospitals are the whole argument.

2026 — data center transparency. An amendment that would have required data centers to publicly disclose construction plans and directed the Energy Department to analyze what they do to utility bills. Iowa now has 116 data centers, and several Iowa communities have passed moratoriums to stop more from being built. Hinson's position, as she told KGAN this month, is that data center rules "are best decided at the local level" — which is a curious thing to say about an amendment whose entire purpose was to give local communities the information to decide.

The fundraiser

The clearest one is from this summer.

On June 24, 2026, the House Appropriations Committee voted on 11 amendments to the 2027 Defense Appropriations bill — the bill that funds the Pentagon. Hinson missed seven of them.

The amendments covered how the Defense Department spends its money, the proposed drawdown of American troops stationed in Europe, and changes to which military officers are eligible for promotion.

An email from Grand Valley Consulting, a firm that advises Republican candidates, shows Hinson had a fundraising lunch scheduled that same day with West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito. Tickets ran from $1,000 to $2,500.

The progressive outlet MidasTouch posted video of Hinson walking into the event while the voting was still going on.

What she has made time for

Hinson is running for the Senate seat Joni Ernst is vacating. She has not held a single town hall with constituents this year. She has held plenty of campaign events.

She has also had time for other things. Within an hour of Josh Turek winning the Democratic Senate primary, her campaign was out with an attack ad making three claims he has never supported. At the Plymouth County Fair, she had time to defend Medicaid work requirements and suggest people here illegally were getting benefits — something federal law already bars.

The pattern isn't that Hinson is lazy. She is working extremely hard. She is working on getting a promotion.

Why committee votes are the ones that matter

If you only watch floor votes, you miss most of Congress.

By the time a spending bill reaches the House floor, the decisions have been made. The amendment that would have added money for the child exploitation task force either got adopted in committee or it didn't. The domestic violence housing grants either survived markup or they were gone. A member who shows up for the final floor vote and skips the markup has arrived after everything was settled.

That is where 163 of Hinson's absences are. It is also the part of the job voters have the least visibility into, which is exactly why an above-average attendance figure can sit on a campaign website next to a record like this one.

A recent Emerson College poll has Hinson leading Turek by three points. Iowans have until November to ask her one question, which she has so far had no forum to answer: where was she?

Source

Ashley Hinson missed almost 200 votes in Congress — Jesse Valentine, American Journal News, August 13, 2026. Photo: Nick Rohlman / The Gazette via AP.

Twelve Members of Congress Posed for Photos With a Group That Wants to Privatize Social Security. They're Calling It an Endorsement.

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 07:49:54 +0000

There is a simple test for whether a politician is on your side about Social Security. Look at who is handing them awards.

American Journal News reported on August 13, 2026 that a dozen House members — eleven Republicans and an independent who caucuses with them, nearly all in races they could lose — have been collecting an award from the 60 Plus Association and posting the photos.

The 60 Plus Association is not a seniors group in the way most people mean it. It is a group that has spent three decades trying to take Social Security apart.

What the 60 Plus Association actually wants

It was created in 1992 to be a conservative alternative to AARP, with seed money from the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.

In 1997, it boasted that it was "the first national senior citizens group to endorse privatization of the Social Security program." That is its own description of itself, not an attack from an opponent. It has pushed that position since the 1990s, and its leaders have called private retirement accounts "the only real answer" for the program.

Privatizing Social Security means taking the money you paid in over a working lifetime and putting it into the stock market. When the market goes up, you do fine. When it goes down — 2008, say — you do not. The guarantee is the whole point of the program, and privatization is the thing that removes the guarantee.

The group did not stop at Social Security. It also endorsed the 2011 Republican budget that would have turned Medicare into a voucher system, then ran radio ads telling seniors the plan "protects and preserves Medicare for years to come." As Politico noted at the time, the word "voucher" did not make the ad — and the group's own audience would be held harmless, because the change fell on everyone younger. Instead of Medicare paying your medical bills, you would get a fixed check to go buy insurance yourself. If the check doesn't cover the premium, that's your problem.

None of this is a secret, and none of it is old news the group has walked away from. Its president, Saul Anuzis, has also argued for repealing the Affordable Care Act.

The money behind it has never been public. 60 Plus is organized as a 501(c)(4), which means it never has to say who funds it. DeSmog's accounting found the group took in more than $42 million between 2010 and 2012 from organizations, many of them tied to the Koch network.

Who took the award

The award is called, in the group's own words, the "Guardian of Seniors' Rights Award," and the group says it is "now sought after by many looking for the endorsement of the 60 Plus Association." The lawmakers who received it treated it that way, posing for photographs with Anuzis.

Taking it this year:

Kevin Kiley, California — an independent who caucuses with House Republicans, and who took the award in both 2025 and 2026
Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Iowa
Zach Nunn, Iowa
Bill Huizenga, Michigan
Tom Barrett, Michigan
Mike Lawler, New York
Ryan Mackenzie, Pennsylvania
Scott Perry, Pennsylvania

Past recipients include Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, and Monica De La Cruz of Texas. Rob Wittman of Virginia got it in 2025.

Eleven of the twelve are on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's list of Republican-held seats it is targeting this November. That is not a coincidence — it is the point. These are the members who most need to look like protectors of seniors, and they went and got a certificate from the people who want the program privatized.

The vote that already happened

An award is a photo. A roll call is a record.

On July 3, 2025, the House passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act by 218 to 214. Eleven of these twelve voted yes: Kiley, Miller-Meeks, Nunn, Huizenga, Barrett, Lawler, Mackenzie, Perry, Kean, De La Cruz and Wittman. Fitzpatrick was the one who voted no.

That bill cuts roughly $1 trillion from Medicaid over ten years. And because of a budget law called Statutory PAYGO — a rule that forces automatic spending cuts when Congress passes something that adds this much to the deficit — the Congressional Budget Office found the bill will trigger $490 billion in cuts to Medicare from 2027 to 2034 unless Congress acts to stop it.

So the sequence is: vote for a bill that sets off automatic Medicare cuts, then accept an award from a group that backed replacing Medicare with vouchers anyway, then put the photo online.

The one who wouldn't answer the question

The most useful thing about this list is that we already know how some of these members behave when a real person asks them about Social Security.

In June 2026, a reporter asked Rob Wittman about Republican proposals to cut Social Security and Medicare. Wittman put a phone to his ear and pretended to be on a call for 90 seconds. The camera could see his screen. There was no call.

Bill Huizenga's approach was different but no more honest. When a poll showed him trailing, he deleted whole sections of his own campaign website — including the page about the national debt and the page about health care. He didn't change a single vote. He just stopped telling voters about them.

Monica De La Cruz has never held an in-person town hall since taking office. Tom Kean Jr. skipped more than 100 votes in nearly four months while a New York Times reporter went looking for him at his house.

These are not people eager to explain a Social Security position to their constituents. They are people who found a group willing to certify one for them.

This is a pattern, not an accident

The 60 Plus award is one piece of a larger push that has been running all year.

Ron Estes, the congressman who chairs the House subcommittee that oversees Social Security, went on Newsmax to say he was looking forward to what DOGE would find at the agency he is supposed to be protecting. The agency lost 6,645 employees between January and November 2025.

Tom Cole has pushed a bill for seven Congresses that would hand Social Security to 13 appointees and then force Congress to vote yes or no on whatever they write — no amendments allowed, four hours of House debate, no filibuster. It is a machine for passing cuts that no member would have to sponsor by name.

That is what makes the photographs matter. Nobody in Congress is going to introduce a bill titled "The Privatize Social Security Act." What happens instead is quieter: a commission with no amendments, a budget rule that fires automatically, a staff cut here, an award ceremony there.

You get 65 once. There is no second try if the money isn't there. When twelve members of Congress in tough races decide the safest thing to be seen with is a group that spent thirty years trying to privatize the program, that tells you something they would rather explain in a press release than at a town hall.

Source

House Republicans embrace group that wants to privatize Social Security — Jesse Valentine, American Journal News, August 13, 2026. Photo: American Journal News.

Max Miller's PAC Gave $70,000 to 16 Republicans in Tight Races. Exactly One Gave It Back.

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:13:33 +0000

There is a simple test in politics for whether a scandal is real to a party or just inconvenient. It's the money.

Max Miller runs a leadership PAC called Dependable Conservative Leadership. According to FEC records reviewed by POLITICO, that PAC has given more than $70,000 to 16 Republican incumbents in the toughest races on the 2026 map — mostly in chunks of $1,000, $2,500 and $5,000, with maxed-out $10,000 donations to some of them.

Miller's ex-wife, Emily Moreno, has accused him of assaulting her and their young child. She is also the daughter of Ohio Republican Senator Bernie Moreno. Miller denies the accusations. He refused to leave the race before Ohio's deadline to replace him on the ballot, which means his party is stuck with him.

This week POLITICO went to all 16 recipients and asked a single question: are you giving the money back?

One said yes.

The tally

Brad Finstad (Minnesota) — returned the $5,000. That's it. That's the entire list of Republicans who gave it back.
Mike Lawler (New York) — took $10,000 and is keeping it. His spokesman's justification was that Lawler's Democratic opponent attended a fundraiser hosted by former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who resigned in 2008 in a prostitution scandal.
Derrick Van Orden (Wisconsin) — took $2,500. Asked about it Tuesday night, he refused to discuss it, describing the accusations against Miller as "allegations" he had heard about "the day before yesterday."
The other 13 said nothing at all. Their offices and campaigns did not return POLITICO's requests for comment.

Those 13: Jon Husted of Ohio, Rob Bresnahan, Ryan Mackenzie and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, Nick Begich of Alaska, Tom Barrett of Michigan, Juan Ciscomani of Arizona, Gabe Evans of Colorado, Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey, Jen Kiggans of Virginia, and David Valadao of California.

Husted is the one to look at

Jon Husted publicly said Max Miller should not run for reelection.

Husted also took a maxed-out $10,000 from Miller's PAC and, when asked this week whether he'd return it, said nothing.

That is the whole story in one man. He'll say the words. He won't write the check.

Husted is running against former Senator Sherrod Brown in what is expected to be one of the closest Senate races in the country. Ten thousand dollars is not what decides that race. Which is exactly why keeping it is a choice about something other than money.

What Van Orden said

Van Orden's answer deserves its own look, because he gave one.

He called the accusations "allegations" he'd heard about "the day before yesterday."

The allegations against Max Miller have been public and heavily reported for months. We wrote about the domestic violence lawsuits and about the House Ethics Committee opening a probe. Ohio's two Republican senators had already called on him to quit. Republicans have been openly worried about the seat since at least early August.

"The day before yesterday" is not a timeline. It's a way of not answering.

The pattern, not the exception

None of this is new behavior around Max Miller.

Popular Information found — and we checked the FEC filings ourselves — that dozens of major corporations are funding Miller's own campaign this cycle, several of them with checks that arrived after the allegations were published. Stanley Black & Decker gave $10,000. Elevance gave $7,000. Kroger, an Ohio company, gave $3,500.

Meanwhile Trump's political team urged Ohio Republicans to hold off on publicly pressuring Miller to drop out, so the party wouldn't look divided.

So: corporations keep paying him, the White House told his own state party to keep quiet, and 15 of the 16 colleagues who took his money won't say whether they'll give it back.

The one consistent principle is that nobody wants to give up anything.

Why it matters where you live

If you vote in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Alaska, Michigan, Arizona, Colorado, New Jersey, Virginia, California, Wisconsin or New York — or in Ohio's Senate race — there is a good chance one of the people on that list is on your ballot.

They were each asked a yes-or-no question about money from a man accused of assaulting his wife and small child. Fifteen of them declined to say yes.

Brad Finstad managed it. It took a $5,000 check and about one sentence.

Source

Eli Okun and Mia McCarthy, "Republicans stay mum on whether they'll return campaign cash from embattled Max Miller", POLITICO, August 12, 2026.

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.

$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 Supreme Court Said Birthright Citizenship Is in the Constitution. Ashley Hinson Says the Court 'Got It Wrong.'

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 08:25:20 +0000

Ashley Hinson spent Thursday morning at a housing roundtable in Cedar Rapids with Linn County officials. Iowans have real problems with housing.

Afterward, she told The Gazette she's on board with President Trump's newest attempt to take away birthright citizenship — six weeks after the Supreme Court told him he can't.

"For too long, birthright citizenship has been exploited to incentivize illegal immigration. I support efforts to end birthright citizenship and birth tourism."

And on the Court that had just ruled against exactly that:

"I do think the court got it wrong."

What the Court actually decided

In June, the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration's first attempt to end birthright citizenship by executive order.

This wasn't a close procedural call. Five justices concluded that birthright citizenship is protected by the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — which means getting rid of it would require a constitutional amendment, not a signature. Justice Brett Kavanaugh also voted against Trump's order, though he rested his reasoning on federal law rather than the Constitution.

That first order never took effect. Lower courts blocked it, and the Supreme Court finished it off.

The 14th Amendment says it plainly: all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens. It has said that since 1868.

Hinson thinks the Court got that wrong.

She is a member of Congress. She took an oath to that document. Her disagreement isn't with a regulation or a spending bill — it's with the Constitution's plain text, as read by a majority of the Supreme Court.

So they're trying it again anyway

On Thursday, Trump signed two new executive actions. One narrows who automatically gets citizenship at birth. A second targets "birth tourism" by restricting visitors who come to the U.S. mainly to give birth.

The new order is narrower than the first one. It is still an executive order attempting to do something five justices just said requires amending the Constitution.

The American Civil Liberties Union predicted this attempt will be struck down too, the Associated Press reported.

Hinson's position is that the president should try it anyway:

"I do agree we need to enforce the laws on the books. But in general, I think that we should be holding these bad actors accountable, and if it takes an executive order to do that right now, I think that's appropriate."

Read that carefully. She agrees the laws on the books should be enforced. Then she says an executive order is appropriate anyway.

Here's why that matters: the laws on the books already cover this. Federal law already prohibits using a fraudulently obtained visitor visa to come to the United States primarily to give birth for citizenship. The Migration Policy Institute has noted that birth-tourism visa fraud is already grounds for denying or revoking a visa, and previous administrations have prosecuted birth tourism schemes.

Hinson knows the tools exist. She wants a new executive order regardless.

This is the same pattern we saw when Speaker Mike Johnson responded to the same ruling by saying Congress would "deal with it" — a promise to work around a constitutional holding rather than accept it.

The numbers she isn't saying out loud

Hinson describes birthright citizenship as something that has been "exploited" on a scale big enough to be "incentivizing illegal immigration."

Here is the scale, according to the Migration Policy Institute: roughly 26,000 births a year could be attributed to birth tourism, out of approximately 3.5 million births in the United States each year.

That's under 1%.

The State Department said in a June news release that U.S. embassies uncovered hundreds of suspected birth tourism cases — more than 100 visa applicants in West Africa and more than 400 suspected cases in Europe since 2024, with investigators dismantling networks that coached applicants to hide pregnancies.

Hundreds of cases is not nothing. It is also not a reason to rewrite the 14th Amendment for 3.5 million American babies a year.

Hinson also volunteered who she has in mind:

"The biggest offenders here that are really creating a tourism industry — the Chinese have been doing this for years in California."

This is not a one-off for her

Hinson isn't reacting to a news cycle. She is a co-sponsor of the Birthright Citizenship Act, legislation that would largely mirror Trump's original executive order — limiting automatic citizenship to children with at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident.

That's the same order the Supreme Court just refused to let stand.

She is far from alone in this. We've written about Andy Ogles, who wants to end birthright citizenship and called the babies "anchors", about Brandon Gill's bill to charge doctors with "criminal conspiracy", and about two Virginia Republicans racing each other to strip the right away. It's a caucus-wide project.

What Hinson could be working on instead

Hinson is running for the U.S. Senate. When she announced, she said what she wanted the job for: to be "President Trump's top ally in the United States Senate."

Not Iowa's top ally. Trump's.

You can see it in what she does with her time. She has publicly defended Trump's trade war while it hammered Iowa. On a September 2025 call with reporters, she said "I know that President Trump will not abandon our Iowa farmers." An Iowa State University economist put the tariffs more plainly: "We're all going to be poorer."

Her Democratic opponent for the Senate, state Rep. Josh Turek, took the other position on the ruling. "I believe in the Constitution, and I think birthright citizenship is very clear," he said. Turek — who voted in 2024 for a Republican-backed Iowa law creating a state crime for previously deported immigrants who illegally reenter the state — put it this way:

"We need to have safe and secure borders, but we also need to have an easier pathway to citizenship, especially in a state like Iowa, where we need a healthy, robust immigration program for industries like the ag industry, beef packing plants and also for the direct care workers."

That's Iowa's actual economy talking. Packing plants and direct care workers and farms.

Hinson had a housing roundtable that morning. What she wanted to talk about afterward was ending a constitutional right that covers roughly 3.5 million American babies a year, to stop something that accounts for fewer than 1% of them.

Source

Tom Barton, "Hinson backs renewed push to restrict birthright citizenship," The Gazette Des Moines Bureau, August 7, 2026. Photo: Savannah Blake/The Gazette.