MAGA Report Cards — Kansas

Roger Marshall's Medical Practice Sued More Than 700 of His Own Patients Over Their Bills. 81 of Them Were Arrested.

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:50:15 +0000

Before he was a United States Senator, Roger Marshall delivered babies in Great Bend, Kansas. He still runs on it. It is the first thing his campaign tells you about him.

On September 8, 2026, The New York Times reported what else he did in those years. Marshall and his medical practice sued more than 700 of their own patients over unpaid bills. At least 81 of those patients were arrested after missing a court date. The practice garnished paychecks and bank accounts, charged 18 percent interest a year on what people owed, and went to court over bills as small as $101.

These were not wealthy people. They were his patients in Barton County, a rural part of Kansas the Times describes as having above-average poverty and uninsured rates. Some were new mothers with unpaid bills from their own deliveries.

What it looked like for the people he sued

The cases are not abstract. Reporters found the patients and asked them.

Kellie Clutts was taken to court over a $129 bill from a postpartum checkup — the visit a woman has after giving birth. Her baby was nine months old. Marshall's side eventually garnished her bank account. She told the Times: "I told them I could make partial payments, but it seemed like no matter what I said, they wanted the full amount at once."

Joe Vasquez and his wife were arrested over Easter weekend in 2007. The bill was $4,561, for an emergency hysterectomy she had needed three years earlier. They missed a court appearance. Marshall's lawyers asked a judge for a warrant. The couple spent two days in jail while their son borrowed the money to bail them out. The police took them, Vasquez told the Times, as their grandchildren were getting ready for an egg hunt.

Another woman, sued in 2004 over $1,200, wrote to the court asking not to be held liable for care she had received "for me and my twins (who I lost)."

That is the record. A doctor's office, in a small Kansas town, asking the county to arrest the women he had treated.

"Judges issue warrants, not doctors"

Marshall did not deny any of it. His spokeswoman, Payton Fuller, said that he had spent decades caring for patients regardless of their ability to pay, and that "judges issue warrants when people repeatedly miss court dates, not doctors."

That is true, and it is beside the point. A judge cannot issue a warrant nobody asked for. Marshall's lawyers were the ones who filed the cases, and they were the ones who asked for the warrants — dozens of times.

Nothing here required him to do any of it. Plenty of doctors write off small unpaid bills. Plenty of practices never sue a patient at all. Marshall's did it more than 700 times, and kept doing it for years.

He did well out of it

While this was happening, Marshall and eight other doctors opened a four-bed surgical center in Great Bend that grew into a full-service hospital generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue. He chaired its board. His most recent financial disclosure puts his worth between $3 million and $9.8 million.

He stopped practicing medicine in 2016, when he was elected to Congress.

What he has done with the seat

Marshall sits in the Senate as a physician on both committees that write health care law — Finance, including its Health Care subcommittee, and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Here is what he has done with that.

In March 2017, he explained to the health care news site STAT why some people go without medical care. "There is a group of people that just don't want health care and aren't going to take care of themselves," he said, in remarks TIME picked up. He had spent the previous two decades suing people who could not pay him.

In December 2025, he said he expects the health insurance subsidies to expire, shrugging on Newsmax that "some people's premiums are going to go up some."

And when Kansas doctors warned him that his vote on Trump's budget bill would cost their patients care, he said there were no Medicaid cuts at all and called the claim a lie — while Kansas is projected to lose $3.9 billion, $2.7 billion of it out of hospitals.

Kansans who want to ask him about any of this have had a hard time finding him. He has not held an open town hall in more than 500 days, despite once bragging about holding 105 of them.

What a medical bill does to a family

Medical debt is not like other debt. Nobody chooses an emergency hysterectomy. Nobody shops around during labor. You get the care, and the bill comes later, and it is a number you had no way to plan for.

What Marshall's practice added to that was 18 percent interest, a court summons, money taken out of a paycheck, and — for 81 people — a jail cell. A $129 bill for a postpartum visit became a garnished bank account. A $4,561 bill became an arrest on Easter weekend.

Marshall is now asking Kansas to send him back to Washington for another six years to make health care policy for the country.

What the record shows

Roger Marshall's medical practice took more than 700 of its own patients to court over unpaid bills, charged them 18 percent annual interest, garnished their wages and bank accounts, and asked judges for arrest warrants when they missed a hearing. At least 81 patients were arrested. The bills ran as low as $101, and some belonged to new mothers in one of the poorer parts of Kansas. The doctor who did that now sits on both Senate committees that write health care law, has said poor people "just don't want health care," and voted for a bill projected to cost his state $3.9 billion in Medicaid.

Source

Reporting by Sarah Kliff, "Roger Marshall Sued 700 Patients for Debts; 81 Were Arrested. Now He's a Senator.", The New York Times, September 8, 2026. Photo: official U.S. Senate portrait, via Wikimedia Commons.

Roger Marshall Said the Epstein Files Should Be Public. Then He Cast One of the 51 Votes That Killed the Amendment to Release Them, and Called It a 'Political Stunt.'

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 07:03:33 +0000

Roger Marshall is one of the Republicans who said publicly that the Justice Department's Jeffrey Epstein files should be released.

On September 10, 2025, he got a chance to force it, and voted the other way.

The Senate voted on a motion to kill an amendment to the defense bill that would have required the attorney general to release all unclassified records related to Epstein: the flight logs, the vehicle manifests, the names connected to his crimes, the entities tied to him, and the material about his death.

The motion to kill it passed 51-49. Marshall voted with the 51. Only two Republicans, Rand Paul and Josh Hawley, voted to let the amendment live.

Marshall called the amendment a "political stunt" that held servicemembers "hostage."

The objection, and what it was worth

Marshall's stated reason was procedural. The amendment was attached to the annual defense policy bill — the one that authorizes the yearly troop pay raise — and that, both Kansas senators said, was why they voted to kill it.

That is a real bill and a real pay raise. It is also the standard objection to any amendment anyone does not want to vote for, and it disappears the moment you notice what he did next.

Two months later, in November 2025, the House passed a standalone bill compelling the release. No defense bill, no troops, no hostages. The Senate passed the same bill by unanimous consent, and Marshall did not object.

So the version he could kill quietly, he killed. The version that was going to pass anyway, he let through without a word. Three weeks after the September vote, a PBS News/NPR/Marist poll found about three-quarters of Americans wanted all the Epstein files released.

The money

Two Blackstone executives whose names appear in the Epstein files gave money to Marshall's campaign committee, Kansans for Marshall, in the spring of 2025 — months before that September vote. Federal Election Commission records show:

Stephen Schwarzman, Blackstone's chief executive: $7,000 on March 27, 2025.
Joseph Baratta, a Blackstone executive: $6,000 on April 4, 2025.

That is $13,000 in eight days of filings, five months before Marshall voted to bury the files.

Schwarzman is not new to Marshall's donor list. FEC records show he also gave $2,800 in 2020 and $2,700 in 2016.

Our earlier reporting on the Epstein-file billionaires funding Ashley Hinson established the detail on Schwarzman himself: his name appears in the files 23 times, including an email in which Epstein called him "terrific." He never emailed Epstein directly and faces no accusations of wrongdoing. A name in the files is not an accusation.

Marshall also took $500 in September 2020 from lawyer Greg Ezring, whose name appears in the files 35 times, and $11,400 in October 2019 from Bryant Park Capital chief executive Joel Magerman, whose name appears three times — though FEC records show $5,600 of the Magerman money was reattributed to his wife and $200 refunded, leaving $5,800 credited to him.

Schwarzman's money has followed this pattern elsewhere. A super PAC backing Susan Collins took his money too.

The rest of the record

Marshall's handling of the Epstein files is not an isolated data point. It sits on top of a voting record on sexual violence that runs the same direction.

In April 2019, as a House member, Marshall voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act. It passed anyway, 263-158.

He voted to confirm Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., both of whom faced sexual assault allegations. He voted to confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general after Epstein survivors asked senators to vote no.

We have written about other parts of his record: 500 days without a town hall, a Stock Act violation, and telling Kansas doctors there are no Medicaid cuts in the bill he voted for.

Why it matters now

Marshall is running for a second term, and it is closer than anyone expected. A poll taken days after the August primary put him a single point ahead of Democratic pastor Adam Hamilton, 46 to 45.

He does not have to explain the September vote to anyone but Kansas voters, and there is no roll call left to change it.

What the record shows

Roger Marshall was among the Republicans who said the Epstein files should be public. On September 10, 2025, he cast one of the 51 votes that killed the amendment forcing their release, calling it a political stunt that held servicemembers hostage — then raised no objection two months later when a standalone bill with no troops attached passed the Senate. Five months before that vote, two Blackstone executives named in the files gave his campaign $13,000. In 2019 he voted against reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act.

Source

Roger Marshall has an Epstein files problem, by Jesse Valentine, American Journal News, September 4, 2026. The roll call, the Kansas quotes and the donation figures above were verified independently against the Senate's own vote records, KSNT's reporting and the Federal Election Commission's contribution database. Photo: Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call via AP Images.

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

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

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

The argument they signed is the part worth reading twice.

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

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

What the brief actually argues

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

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

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

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

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

Who signed it

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

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

Some of these names carry their own history

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the argument matters beyond this case

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

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

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

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

What the filing shows

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

Nobody is doing the thing the bill bans

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

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

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

This is control, not freedom

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

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

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

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

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

Two Republicans said no

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

The bill now goes to the Senate.

The choice they made

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

Every Republican we track who voted yes

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

Iowa: Ashley Hinson, Zach Nunn

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

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

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the SAVE America Act would actually do to voters

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

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

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

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

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

The emergency the resolution describes

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

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

It cites a federal investigation that charged four people.

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

What was actually in front of them that week

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

Outside the chamber:

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

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

In their own words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 189 who voted yes

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

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho — Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas — Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi — Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey — Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

The number nine is not in the Constitution

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

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

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

What they were actually voting on

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

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

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

The timing

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

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

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

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

Who pushed it

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who voted to freeze the Court

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey: Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

Then a second missile killed them.

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

Congress never voted to authorize any of it.

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

We do not know who most of these people were

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

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

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

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

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

What the Senate actually voted on

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

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

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

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

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

It failed, 48 to 51.

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

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

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

Two of them switching sides would have carried it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The legal case for all this is classified

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The House looked into it for ten days

The Senate is not the only chamber that folded.

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Source

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

Kansas Doctors Told Roger Marshall His Vote Would Cost Their Patients Care. The OB/GYN Kansas Sent to the Senate Said 'There Are No Medicaid Cuts' and Called It a Lie.

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 07:08:47 +0000

Roger Marshall is a doctor. He practiced medicine in Great Bend, Kansas, for more than 25 years as an OB/GYN and delivered more than 5,000 babies, and it is the first thing his own Senate biography tells you about him.

On Thursday, Kansas doctors held a press conference to say that a law he voted for is going to take care away from their patients. His answer the next day, on camera, was that they are lying.

"There are no Medicaid cuts"

At a virtual press conference, Dr. Christa Balanoff, a Kansas surgeon, laid the coming Medicaid losses directly at Marshall's feet.

"When the Medicaid cuts that Senator Marshall supported take full effect next year, more Kansans will go without care. Senator Marshall should be working to fix the problem. A physician in the United States Senate should be leading the effort to expand access to care, not taking a victory lap on policies that make coverage harder to afford, and harder to keep."

The next day, KSNT's Capitol Bureau asked Marshall to respond. He did not soften it, qualify it, or point to a program he was trying to protect.

"There are no Medicaid cuts," Marshall said. "We spent more money on Medicaid this year than last year, we're going to spend more money next year than we are this year as well. There are not any Medicaid cuts. I think that's a lie and you can look at the numbers to see that we're increasing spending every year on Medicaid."

The numbers he says to look at

So look at them.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates the 2025 budget law will reduce federal Medicaid spending by more than $1 trillion over ten years. KFF, allocating those CBO estimates state by state, puts Kansas's share at about $2.85 billion in lost federal Medicaid money over the decade — 8% of what Kansas would otherwise have received.

Independent modeling done for Kansas specifically lands in the same place. Manatt Health, commissioned by the United Methodist Health Ministry Fund and the REACH Healthcare Foundation, ran the final version of the law through Kansas's KanCare program and projected the state would lose $3.9 billion in Medicaid funding over ten years, with $2.7 billion of that coming out of Kansas hospitals. The analysts noted their own estimates are understated, because the model doesn't capture everything the law changes.

Marshall's defense is that total Medicaid spending goes up each year. That is true and beside the point. Spending was already scheduled to rise as costs and enrollment rose; the law cuts roughly a trillion dollars off that path. Saying there is no cut because the line still slopes upward is the same argument as saying a pay cut isn't a pay cut as long as you got a smaller raise than you were promised.

Sheena Schmidt, a senior analyst at the non-partisan Kansas Health Institute, described where the money actually comes from:

"The Medicaid cuts in H.R 1 are going to be primarily related to what providers or hospitals receive to increase access to care across the state of Kansas."

And she said when Kansans will feel it: some changes start around the beginning of 2027, but "the bulk of the changes that I think will result in the most funding loss will start to happen beginning in 2028."

That timing matters. Marshall voted for the law in 2025. The hospitals lose the money starting after the 2026 election.

He has said the quiet part before

This is not the first time Marshall has told Kansans that the people worried about losing coverage have it wrong.

Back in 2017, as a freshman congressman helping lead the Republican effort to replace the Affordable Care Act, he told the health care news site STAT that he did not believe Medicaid had helped people: "There is a group of people that just don't want health care and aren't going to take care of themselves."

In December 2025 he told Newsmax he expects the enhanced ACA subsidies to expire, shrugging that "some people's premiums are going to go up some."

The pattern is consistent: when Kansans stand to lose coverage, Marshall's position is that the loss is either imaginary, or their own fault, or not that big.

Other Republicans are running the same play

Marshall isn't alone in this. When a hospital CEO in his district warned that the budget bill would cost him his intensive care unit, Rick Allen said he was "dead wrong". Jeff Hurd signed a written promise not to cut Medicaid and then voted for the cuts twice. Michael Guest spent his August recess promoting $206 million for Mississippi's rural hospitals after voting for the law projected to take billions out of the state's Medicaid funding.

The difference in Marshall's case is the credential. When a surgeon tells a senator the cuts will hurt patients, most senators have to argue policy. Marshall is a physician, and he used that standing to tell Kansas health care workers that what they are describing is a lie.

What the record shows

Roger Marshall voted for a law that the Congressional Budget Office scores as cutting more than $1 trillion from Medicaid over ten years — about $2.85 billion of it in Kansas, 8% of the federal money the state would otherwise get. Independent modeling for Kansas puts the total loss at $3.9 billion, with $2.7 billion coming out of the state's hospitals, and the non-partisan Kansas Health Institute says the biggest losses hit starting in 2028. When Kansas doctors said so publicly, Marshall — a physician himself — told a reporter there are no Medicaid cuts and that saying there are is a lie.

Source

"There are no Medicaid cuts": Sen. Marshall responds to criticism about Medicaid changes passed in H.R 1 — KSNT 27 News Capitol Bureau, August 28, 2026, by Brayden Day. Photo: KSNT.

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.

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

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

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

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

He told them it had nothing to do with vaccines.

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

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

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

What Kennedy did not tell the senators

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

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

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

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

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

The fourteen votes

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

Fourteen of those yes votes came from Republicans we track:

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

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

What Susan Collins was promised

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

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

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

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

What happened to the promises

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

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

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

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

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

The MMR vaccine is now the target

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who would have to investigate

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Source

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

Roger Marshall Charged Kansas Taxpayers $18,886 for 14 Official Trips Through the Part of Florida Where He Owns a Beach House

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 10:01:21 +0000

Roger Marshall is the junior senator from Kansas. He sold the house in Great Bend where he and his wife raised their children 10 days after being sworn into the Senate in January 2021. Two years before that, he bought a beachfront house near Sarasota, Florida.

For the next three years, his Senate office billed taxpayers for trip after trip that ran through that part of Florida.

The Kansas City Star's Reality Check series just put a number on it. Between July 2021 and July 2024, Marshall took at least 14 official trips through the Sarasota area, and his office charged taxpayers $18,886 for them.

That breaks down as:

Nearly $12,000 for his airfare and other transportation
More than $6,000 in per diem — the daily allowance a senator collects for meals and lodging while traveling
$689 in incidental expenses

It is illegal to use taxpayer money to pay for personal travel.

This is four times bigger than what we knew before

Politico first reported on these flights on September 20, 2024. At the time, the public records showed eight trips and nearly $4,500.

That was the version Marshall's office defended. The flights, they said in 2024, were all approved by the Senate Rules Committee and were "admissible official travel that included visits to military bases, agriculture interests, and meetings regarding healthcare policy."

The Star went back and pulled the later filings with the Secretary of the Senate. The real figure was more than four times higher, across nearly twice as many trips.

Marshall's office confirmed to the Star that roughly $19,000 in travel expenses were reimbursed. It then argued that most of those charges were racked up outside Florida, and produced itemized expense reports — never made public — showing $5,296 in reimbursements for purchases made inside Florida.

When the Star asked what specific government business the Gulf Coast flights were for, his office did not respond.

The boat lift

One trip stands out.

On December 13, 2021, Marshall signed off on a boat lift installation at the Florida property. The document was notarized in Washington, D.C.

Five days later, on December 18, his office spent $318 on airfare from Washington to Sarasota.

Then the trips stopped

Marshall's last taxpayer-funded trip to the Sarasota area was in the summer of 2024. The Star found no record of any Gulf Coast travel charges between July 9, 2024 and March 31, 2026, the end of the most recent reporting period.

Look at what happened in between:

July 9, 2024 — the last billed trip
September 20, 2024 — Politico publishes the story
September 26, 2024 — Hurricane Helene brings strong winds and historic flooding to parts of Sarasota County
October 9, 2024 — Hurricane Milton becomes the first hurricane to directly strike Sarasota since 1944, with gusts up to 115 mph

The trips stopped two months before the storms — and two months before the story broke.

"I only wish I had a home in Florida"

At a campaign stop earlier this month, Marshall told the Topeka Capital-Journal on August 10: "I only wish I had a home in Florida. Our home in Florida was destroyed by a hurricane almost two years ago."

He still owns it. He put it on the market on March 30, according to the listing agent's website, at an asking price of $1.45 million. The listing calls it "an exceptional opportunity" to "create your dream waterfront retreat in one of Sarasota's most desirable locations," and the photos show rooms that remain unfinished.

Sarasota County property records list the combined home and land value at $921,100, down from just under $1.3 million before the hurricane damage.

Back in 2024, the Star reported that the Florida property — then appraised at $1.2 million — was worth more than eight times the cabin and surrounding land in Stafford County, Kansas, that Marshall identifies as his primary residence.

Records show two of Marshall's four adult children also have homes in Sarasota. "We do have grandchildren there," he told reporters in Topeka. "My wife wanted a second place to go visit. I didn't ever get there very often."

The trips stopped. The fundraisers didn't.

Taxpayer-funded travel to the Sarasota area ended in July 2024. Marshall's political operation kept going back.

In late February 2025, he hosted a three-day fundraising retreat at Sarasota's St. Regis Longboat Key Resort. A document published by Politico advertised it as the "second annual Sarasota Retreat With Senator Roger Marshall, M.D."

Federal election filings show two political action committees controlled by Marshall paid the St. Regis a combined $1,804 for travel-related expenses in the two days after that retreat — and a combined $5,180 almost exactly a year later, on consecutive days in early March 2026.

A pattern of paperwork problems

This is not the first time Marshall's own filings have been the story.

He broke the STOCK Act by filing a dependent child's pandemic-era stock trades more than 17 months late — trades in Microsoft, Disney, Chevron, Gilead and Roku — and then cosponsored a bill in 2026 to ban exactly that kind of trading.

He was also convicted of reckless driving after a neighbor called 911 saying Marshall nearly ran him over with a pickup, only for a prosecutor whose father was Marshall's business partner and across-the-street neighbor to get the conviction swapped for a traffic ticket on Christmas Eve.

And while he was flying through Florida, he was not holding open meetings back home. Marshall once bragged about holding 105 town halls and then went more than 500 days without holding a single open one — long enough that nearly 3,850 Kansans from 100 of the state's 105 counties signed a petition asking for one.

What his office says

Marshall's chief of staff, Brent Robertson, went after his Democratic opponent instead, calling the Rev. Adam Hamilton's focus on Marshall's residency hypocritical: "Hamilton should know that people in glass houses shouldn't throw a stone — he owns four homes, two of which are in Missouri."

Hamilton is registered to vote in Stilwell, Kansas, where he and his wife have owned a home since 2001. His lakefront house is in Climax Springs, Missouri. The other two are in Lawrence and Kansas City, and his campaign says his two daughters live in them.

Marshall himself posted his own accounting on Monday: over six years, he says, he has averaged 185 days a year in Washington, 130 days a year in Kansas with over 300 stops annually, about 35 days of official travel, and 20 holiday or personal days.

What the filings show

Roger Marshall's Senate office billed Kansas taxpayers $18,886 for at least 14 official trips through the part of Florida where he owns a beachfront house — more than four times what was publicly known before, with nearly $12,000 of it his airfare and transportation. One of those flights was booked five days after he signed a boat lift order for that house. When the Kansas City Star asked what government business the trips were for, his office would not say. The house is now listed at $1.45 million, and Marshall says he only wishes he had a home in Florida.

Source

Marshall spent more time, taxpayer money near Florida property. It's up for sale — Matthew Kelly, The Kansas City Star, August 24, 2026. Photo: Facebook/Senator Roger Marshall, M.D.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brad Finstad chairs the subcommittee that writes SNAP policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't believe in welfare."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eight weeks. That is the gap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Cole called it "an extraordinary piece of legislation"

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

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

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

Extraordinary is one word for it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

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

Joe Wilson wrote it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ohio said no in 2011. Jim Jordan signed anyway.

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

Jim Jordan is Ohio's signature on this bill.

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

Pennsylvania sent five signatures on a law it never wanted

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

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

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

What it costs a paycheck

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

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

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

This is not a one-off

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

We now know exactly what that cost.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Jordan — Ohio, −32%

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

Jim Jordan voted yes on the House bill.

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

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

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

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

Stephanie Bice — Oklahoma, −32%

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

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

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

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

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

Juan Ciscomani — Arizona, −30%

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

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

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

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

Sheri Biggs — South Carolina, −29%

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

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

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

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

Victoria Spartz — Indiana, −28%

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lisa McClain — Michigan, −27%

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

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

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

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

Michael Guest — Mississippi, −26%

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

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

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

Jason Smith — Missouri, −25%

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia Foxx — North Carolina, −21%

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roger Marshall — Kansas, −20%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ashley Moody

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

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

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

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

Gus Bilirakis

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

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

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

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

Texas — the thinnest safety net in America, cut anyway

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

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

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

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

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

Monica De La Cruz

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

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

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

Ronny Jackson

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

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

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

He voted yes.

The through-line

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bill Is Three Phrases Long

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

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

", and individuals applying for or receiving,"

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

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

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

That limit is exactly what the bill removes.

These Teams Are Already Very Good at the Job They Have

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who's Behind It

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

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

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

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

Their Argument, and the Numbers Under It

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

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

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

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

Now Put That Next to What They Did to Medicaid

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

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

So hold the two numbers side by side:


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

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

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

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

What It Would Feel Like to You

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is actually being taken away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And TSA screeners got the same treatment

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

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

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

The House had a bill to end it permanently

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

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

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

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

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

The 20 Republicans who voted yes

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

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

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

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

The 195 who voted no

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

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

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

Colorado — Lauren Boebert, Jeff Crank, Jeff Hurd

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

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

Idaho — Russ Fulcher, Mike Simpson

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mary Miller

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

Iowa — Ashley Hinson

Kansas — Ron Estes, Tracey Mann, Derek Schmidt

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

Minnesota — Tom Emmer, Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach

Mississippi — Mike Ezell, Michael Guest, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Mike Flood, Adrian Smith

New York — Nick Langworthy, Claudia Tenney

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Mike Kennedy, Celeste Maloy, Blake Moore

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

The Senate has done nothing for eight months

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

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

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

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

This is not a fringe position they're protecting

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

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

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

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

We deserve better.

How they voted

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the judge did

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

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

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

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

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

What the letter asks for

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

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

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

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

The man who led it sells the products

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

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

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

Who signed

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

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

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

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

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

What registration was actually doing

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

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

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the gloves are

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

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

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

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

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

The warnings come from the company that sells them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congress wrote guardrails. They were about equipment.

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

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

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

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

Two votes made this possible

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

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

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

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

The 201 with report cards on this site

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

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

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

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

Source

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

Derek Schmidt Says Washington Made Decisions That 'Don't Make a Lot of Sense Out in the Countryside.' He Was One of the People in Washington.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:36:15 +0000

On June 18, 2026, Derek Schmidt put his name on a bill to keep USDA offices from closing.

It's called the USDA Field Office Stability Act. Democrat Sharice Davids of Kansas wrote it, and Schmidt signed on as an original cosponsor the day she filed it, which is genuinely unusual and genuinely useful. It would bar the Agriculture Department from shutting or moving the county offices that farmers actually walk into — the Farm Service Agency, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, Rural Development — unless another office sits within 20 miles. It would force USDA to keep enough people on staff to keep the doors open during business hours.

Here is Schmidt explaining why it's needed:

"Many small offices are staffed by only one or two people, which means a reduction in staffing can leave the office unable to function."

He's right. That is exactly what happened. The question worth asking is who did it.

Kansas lost about a third of its USDA workforce

The numbers in Schmidt's own bill announcement are brutal. Kansas has lost more than 500 USDA employees — roughly 32 percent of its USDA workforce, the largest percentage drop in the region. Nationally, more than 24,000 USDA employees left the department after January 2025, a nearly 27 percent reduction between September 2024 and December 2025.

That did not happen by accident, and it did not happen because of some vague thing called "Washington."

The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition tracked the departures using federal personnel data. It found about 20,000 USDA employees gone between January 2025 and January 2026, and attributed the majority of them — around 15,000 — to the Deferred Resignation Program, the buyout push run by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. Kansas shows up in that data at 559 employees lost. The number of USDA staff with more than ten years of service fell by nearly 7,000 over that year, from 45,247 to 38,291. Investigate Midwest, reporting on a separate NSAC analysis built from a Freedom of Information Act request, found the same cause: the losses came primarily after DOGE's early-retirement and deferred-resignation offers.

So: DOGE emptied the offices. Now let's look at what Derek Schmidt was saying while it was happening.

"Maturing"

In April 2025 — the month USDA gave employees one week to decide on a second round of buyouts — Schmidt went on KVOE radio in Emporia and was asked about DOGE. He said the approach was "maturing" and would become more "predictable" over time.

Not "this is going too fast." Not "somebody should check what this does to farm country." Maturing.

Seven weeks later, on June 12, 2025, Schmidt voted to make a big chunk of DOGE's work permanent. He put out a press release taking credit for it, naming "the Department of Government Efficiency," and saying he hoped the $9.4 billion clawback of money Congress had already approved would prove "a watershed."

DOGE itself shut down on July 4, 2026, with no final report and nobody willing to own the wreckage. The wreckage stayed.

Ten months later, the countryside called

By April 2026, the empty offices were a problem Schmidt could not talk around.

On April 23 he signed onto a letter with 14 other members of Congress asking USDA to fix the staffing shortages. His own press release describing that letter lays out the damage in plain language: constituents were reporting "delays in application processing, payments, and contract certifications," with conservation programs and the FSA farm loan program hit hardest. If it kept up, the letter warned, the disruption could spread across every USDA program in that division.

Talking to KWCH that evening, Schmidt put it this way:

"Sometimes decisions get made in Washington that look good on paper, but don't make a lot of sense out in the countryside in Kansas."

Read that again. Schmidt is Washington. He has been since January 2025. He was in the room, he had a vote, and when the decision was in front of him he hoped out loud it was a watershed.

The Kansas Farmers Union's executive director, Nick Levendofsky, told the same station that some parts of the state now have no USDA staff at all, so producers either drive further or give up on benefits they've already earned. On KZRG in May, Schmidt described the mechanics himself: "In a lot of these small counties, there are literally one or two people. That's the entire staff of the USDA local office. Well, if you cut one person out of it or two, you're literally left with an office that can't function." And: "In some cases, there's nobody there to do the work."

He is describing, accurately and with real feeling, the wreckage of a project he cheered.

The same offices Kansas farmers need because of his other votes

The timing is its own indictment. Kansas farmers need those FSA counters more than usual right now, and the reason is the trade war.

Schmidt voted twice in March 2025, and again that September, to keep the House from even considering a repeal of Trump's tariffs — one sentence tucked into a procedural motion, three times over. As of that October, U.S. soybean sales to China for the year stood at zero. Moody's put the Kansas economy in recession, driven largely by collapsing farm exports.

The federal answer to that has been bailout money. Bailout money is applied for, processed, and certified at exactly the county offices that no longer have anybody sitting in them.

We've seen this movie

This is now a recognizable genre. A Republican cheers the cuts, the cuts land on people back home, and the Republican writes letters.

New York's Andrew Garbarino did it with the 9/11 responders' health program — four rounds of DOGE cuts, four rounds of letters to undo them, and then a vote to make the rest of DOGE's cuts permanent. Kentucky's Andy Barr told a Lexington business crowd "don't worry about DOGE", passing along promises from Elon Musk that turned out to be wrong one after another.

The bipartisan USDA bill is a good bill. Kansas Farmers Union president Donn Teske thanked Schmidt and Davids for it, and he was right to. But it is a patch on a hole Schmidt helped cut, and it does not bring back 559 people or their combined decades of knowing which form a Kansas rancher needs.

If your congressman wanted to tell you about that, there'd be a room and a microphone somewhere. Schmidt's version of a town hall is a phone call, on a topic he picks, where the announcement said up front that he and his co-host would "not give individual tax advice." When KCUR invited all nine members of Congress from the Kansas City metro to take live questions from constituents about DOGE and tariffs in 2025, Schmidt's office was among those that never responded to the invitation.

More than 1,000 people took part anyway, in the room and on the livestream. They had questions about this exact thing.

Source

Davids, Schmidt introduce bipartisan bill to keep USDA offices open for Kansas farmers and ranchers — KWCH, June 18, 2026, and Kansas congressman urges USDA to address staffing shortages at local offices — KWCH, April 23, 2026. Photo: KWCH.

Derek Schmidt Wrote the Gun Industry a Bill That Throws Out Every Gun-Violence Lawsuit Against It — Including the Ones Already Filed

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:33:17 +0000

On June 11, 2026, Derek Schmidt introduced a bill in the U.S. House. He gave it a name that sounds like it's about greedy lawyers: the Stopping Harmful and Outrageous Torts Act. The short version is the SHOT Act.

Read what the bill actually says and it is not about lawyers. It is about the families.

What Section 2 writes into the law is one sentence long. Any lawsuit over the criminal or unlawful misuse of a gun that is sitting in a courtroom on the day this bill becomes law "shall be immediately dismissed by the court in which the action was brought or is currently pending."

Not reviewed. Not argued. Not decided on the facts. Dismissed.

Five days after he filed it, the firearms industry's own trade group — the National Shooting Sports Foundation — put out a press release welcoming it. That is who this bill is for. They didn't have to guess.

What the law does now, and what Schmidt wants it to do

Congress already gave gun makers a shield. In 2005, it passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which blocks most lawsuits against firearms companies when someone criminally misuses their product. It is a level of protection Congress has never given any other industry.

The 2005 law left a handful of narrow doors open. You can still sue if a dealer knowingly handed a gun to someone who was obviously going to hurt people. You can still sue over a broken product. You can still sue if the company knowingly broke a law about how guns are marketed or sold.

Those doors are how the Sandy Hook families got their day in court. Using Connecticut's consumer protection law, they reached a record $73 million settlement with the maker of the rifle used in that school shooting. Eleven states — New York, Delaware, New Jersey, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Washington, Maryland, Connecticut, and Virginia — have passed their own gun industry accountability laws.

Schmidt's bill closes those doors and bricks up the wall.

It kills the cases already filed. Section 2, quoted above. Whatever stage a case is in — discovery, trial, appeal — it ends.

It erases the state laws. Section 5 of the bill adds a new preemption section saying the federal shield "expressly preempt[s] any State and local laws" that let people sue gun makers over the criminal misuse of a gun. Those are the exact 11 state laws NSSF names in its release.

It narrows the broken-product exception. Since 2005 the law has said that if a gun goes off because someone committed a crime with it, that criminal act "shall be considered the sole proximate cause" of the death — even if the gun itself was defective. Schmidt tightens the exception around that sentence: the gun now has to have been "being lawfully used," and the shooter's act no longer has to have "constituted a criminal offense," only to meet "the elements of" one.

It covers more than guns. The bill widens the definition of a protected product to include magazines, clips, optics, and "other products intended to be included in, attached to, or used while attached to" a firearm.

It covers more than companies. The definition of a "seller" is rewritten to include "any owner or employee of the seller," and the definition of a manufacturer is amended to add "any owner and employee of such person." Individual people, personally shielded.

It shields the trade group that endorsed it. The 2005 law already covered trade associations, and every new protection here carries them along — the removal-and-dismissal procedure, the attorney's-fees clause, the ban on foreign governments suing, the preemption of state law. Each one names "a manufacturer or seller of a qualified product, or a trade association." NSSF is a trade association.

And it makes grieving families pay. Section 4 adds this: "A defendant who prevails in asserting the immunity granted in this Act shall be entitled to reasonable attorney's fees and court costs." Sue a gun company, lose on immunity, and you write a check to the gun company's lawyers. Two states, Arkansas and Indiana, already do that to their own residents. Schmidt would do it to all of us.

The industry didn't need the help

Here's the part that makes the "frivolous lawsuits" framing hard to take seriously: the gun industry is winning.

In June 2025, the Supreme Court threw out the government of Mexico's lawsuit against Smith & Wesson and six other manufacturers. The vote was 9-0, in an opinion written by Justice Kagan — every liberal and every conservative on the Court agreed the existing shield already covered the companies.

Schmidt's bill goes further anyway. It adds a flat ban: "No foreign state or government may bring a civil action" against a gun maker at all, and none of the law's exceptions "may be asserted by any foreign state or government in any Federal or State court." The Supreme Court decided that case unanimously. Schmidt wants the courthouse door welded shut so nobody can even knock.

NSSF's general counsel, Lawrence Keane, described the suits Schmidt is killing as "lawfare" backed by "gun control activists, antigun politicians and large 'white shoe' law firms." He did not mention the plaintiffs. The plaintiffs are cities, state attorneys general, and people who lost somebody.

Kansans are being shot, and their congressman is protecting the manufacturers

Schmidt represents Kansas's 2nd District. About 15.2 out of every 100,000 Kansans die from gun-related injuries every year — roughly 446 people, a rate 18.7% higher than the national rate.

Not one line of the SHOT Act does anything for those 446 people or their families. Every line of it does something for the companies.

This is consistent, at least. Schmidt holds an A+ rating from the NRA, the highest score the group gives out, and he earned it over a career of opposing gun safety measures. What's new here is that he isn't just voting the industry's way. He's the one holding the pen.

The same bill, over and over, for whoever is getting sued

Schmidt sits on the House Judiciary Committee — the committee his bill was referred to, and the committee where this particular move has become routine.

In June, that committee advanced a bill by another Republican that would dismiss roughly 500 already-filed lawsuits by workers dying of silicosis from cutting engineered stone countertops. Same structure: immunity for the manufacturer, retroactive dismissal of pending cases. Earlier this month we wrote up a Wyoming Republican's bill to kill the lawsuits communities file against oil companies over climate damage. Same structure again.

Different industry each time. Same sentence buried in the text: the cases already filed go away.

There's an old idea in this country that if a company hurts you, you can stand in front of a jury of your neighbors and make it prove otherwise. That's the thing being repealed here, one industry at a time. Schmidt spent 12 years as Kansas Attorney General — a job that exists to bring cases on behalf of people who can't bring their own. His exception for law enforcement lawsuits covers "the Attorney General" enforcing federal gun statutes. The state laws that let a state's own attorney general sue? Section 5 preempts those.

He knows exactly what he's taking away. He used to hold it.

Source

NSSF Welcomes House Companion SHOT Act Introduction to End Frivolous Public Nuisance Lawsuits — National Shooting Sports Foundation, June 16, 2026. Bill text: H.R. 9298, 119th Congress. Photo: Official portrait, 119th Congress, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Air Safety Bill Failed by One Vote. Tracey Mann Was the Only Kansan Who Voted No.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:58:19 +0000

On January 29, 2025, American Airlines Flight 5342 took off from Wichita, Kansas, headed for Washington, D.C. It never landed. An Army Black Hawk helicopter hit it in the air over the Potomac River. All 67 people aboard the two aircraft were killed. Several of them were Kansans.

Congress wrote a bill about it. The bill is called the ROTOR Act.

On February 24, 2026, it came to the floor of the House of Representatives. It got 264 votes. It needed 265.

Tracey Mann voted no. He was the only member of the Kansas delegation who did.

What the bill would have done

Most aircraft already have to broadcast where they are. That system is called ADS-B Out. It's been required for years.

The ROTOR Act would have required aircraft flying around busy airports to also receive those broadcasts — a system called ADS-B In — so a pilot can see the other planes and helicopters around them on a screen in the cockpit. It would also have made the FAA review crowded airspace at airports across the country.

The National Transportation Safety Board has been recommending exactly this since 2008.

The NTSB found the Army helicopter that hit Flight 5342 was flying above the maximum altitude for its route and was not broadcasting its position over ADS-B. The board's simulation of the crash showed that the crew of Flight 5342 would have received two alerts about the helicopter if their plane had carried an ADS-B-based system.

The vote

The bill came up under a fast-track process called suspension of the rules, which requires a two-thirds majority instead of a simple one. The roll call reads:

264 yes, 133 no. 265 were needed.
Democrats: 187 yes, 1 no.
Republicans: 77 yes, 132 no.

Kansas voted 3–1 for it. Ron Estes, Derek Schmidt, and Sharice Davids all voted yes. Mann voted no.

Consider how alone that is. The bill's lead author in the Senate was Ted Cruz. Its cosponsors included Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas, the chairman of the Senate's aviation subcommittee, and Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas — who held Mann's own House seat before him. The Senate passed it unanimously in December 2025.

Both of Kansas's Republican senators put their names on the bill the day it was introduced, and Moran negotiated it. Both of Kansas's other Republican House members voted for it. Mann, who got his start in politics as a college intern for Jerry Moran, voted against it.

What Mann said

KWCH asked his office why. Here is the heart of his statement:

"Aviation safety is a top priority for me as a member of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, and I care deeply about getting this policy right. The tragic American Eagle collision near Reagan National Airport, which departed from Wichita, demands a serious and thoughtful response from Congress. While I appreciate the intent behind the ROTOR Act, it was drafted prior to the release of the National Transportation Safety Board's investigation and recommendations, which were made public last week. Additionally, the legislation did not have an opportunity to move through the normal Transportation and Infrastructure Committee process, where complex aviation policy is typically vetted and refined in a bipartisan manner."

Two arguments there. The bill was written before the NTSB's final report. And it skipped his committee.

Neither one survives contact with the record

Start with the NTSB. Mann's objection is that the bill predates the board's findings. But the board wasn't neutral on the bill — its chair endorsed it. And the central thing the ROTOR Act does, requiring ADS-B In, is a recommendation the NTSB has been making since 2008, seventeen years before the crash. The final report didn't discover the idea. It confirmed it.

Moran, who negotiated the bill, said so directly:

"The ROTOR Act was the result of months of bipartisan negotiations. The final product was supported by Secretary Duffy and the National Transportation Safety Board and was even supported by the Department of Defense until its last-minute reversal the day before the House was scheduled to vote. The NTSB's yearlong investigation found that lives could have been saved on January 29, 2025, if the policies in the ROTOR Act had been in place. The failure to pass this legislation is disappointing..."

Now the committee argument. It's true the bill didn't go through House Transportation and Infrastructure — it went through Senate Commerce, where it was negotiated between Cruz and ranking member Maria Cantwell and reported out unanimously. That is how a Senate bill gets to the House floor.

Mann's own colleague from Wichita didn't find the process disqualifying. Ron Estes voted yes and said this:

"There are 50 recommendations from the NTSB in their final report and many more findings that warrant legislative consideration, which should be similarly prioritized and considered as quickly as possible. This collision involved an Army Black Hawk helicopter and an American Airlines flight that originated from my hometown of Wichita. This tragedy has left our community shocked, and I am heartbroken that several Kansans were among the victims."

Estes had the same information Mann had. He reached the opposite conclusion: pass this one, then keep going.

The families watched it happen

The relatives of the people killed on Flight 5342 spent months lobbying for this bill, which Cruz introduced six months to the day after the crash. They put out a statement the day it failed:

"Today, a majority of the House voted to pass the ROTOR Act. It was not enough. Under suspension of the rules, the bill fell one vote short of the two-thirds threshold — despite a unanimous Senate, the endorsement of the NTSB Chair, and the support of the pilots who fly these planes every day. This bill was not defeated on its merits... The same risk that killed 67 people thirteen months ago is still in the sky tonight."

One of the Kansans killed was PJ Diaz. His father Pete and stepmother Ruth spoke to KWCH after the vote. Ruth Diaz said: "The longer we wait and the more delay there is, the more chance for fatalities." She added: "It's going to take longer, will be a setback, but we are not going away."

What Mann voted for instead

Mann's objection was that the bill had not been through his committee. The House's own bill had been — Transportation and Infrastructure marked it up in March and reported it in April.

On April 14, 2026, the House passed the ALERT Act, H.R. 7613, 396 to 10. Mann voted yes.

It's worth knowing what rode along inside that bill. As we reported, Missouri Republican Bob Onder — a licensed pilot — wrote Section 105 of the ALERT Act, a provision that would bar state and local governments from using aircraft-location data to figure out who owes taxes on a private plane. Alabama's revenue commissioner estimated it could cost his state and its local governments more than $18 million a year. An amendment to preserve state and local governments' ability to keep using the data for tax collection was not adopted.

So the process Mann held out for produced a bill with a private-plane tax shield tucked into a public safety law. The bill he voted against was the one the victims' families were asking for.

The bottom line

There is a version of Mann's argument that's honest. Complex aviation rules should get careful work. Regular order matters.

But the vote wasn't happening in a vacuum. It was a suspension vote, which means it needed two-thirds — and everybody in that chamber knew a no vote was worth more than a no vote usually is. It failed by one.

Sixty-seven people died on a plane that took off from his state. Both of his state's senators put their names on the fix. Both of his Republican colleagues from Kansas voted for it. The families asked him to vote for it.

He voted no, and it's still not law.

Source

"ROTOR Act, requiring aircraft locator systems that NTSB recommends to prevent midair collisions fails in House," The Associated Press, KWCH Staff and Thomas Lynch, KWCH 12, February 24, 2026. Photo: KWCH. Vote totals from the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Tracey Mann Manages an Opportunity Zone Tax Fund. He Voted to Make the Tax Break Permanent.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:54:14 +0000

There's a tax break in the federal code called the opportunity zone. Here's the short version of how it works.

You sell something for a profit — stock, a building, a business. Normally you owe capital gains tax on that profit. But if you take the money and put it into a fund that invests inside a government-designated "opportunity zone," you get to put off paying that tax. And if you hold the investment for ten years, the profit you make on that investment comes out completely tax-free.

It was sold to the public as a way to get money flowing into poor neighborhoods.

Tracey Mann doesn't just invest in opportunity zones. According to his own filings with the Clerk of the House, he runs one.

What his financial disclosure actually says

Mann's most recent annual financial disclosure, which he signed on August 1, 2025, has a section near the back listing every organization where he holds a position. Three of the entries are opportunity zone vehicles:

Manager — Castle Rock QOF, LLC
Member — AMA Austin QOF, LLC
Member — Del Monte Partners QOZB, LLC

"QOF" is a Qualified Opportunity Fund. "QOZB" is a Qualified Opportunity Zone Business. Mann's own filing describes Del Monte Partners as a "Qualified Opportunity Zone Business investing in property in Austin, Texas."

He isn't a passive investor who bought into somebody else's fund. He is listed as the manager of one of them.

The properties held through those funds are spelled out too. Del Monte Property 1, Property 2, Property 3, and a parcel called Stiles Cove — all in Austin, Texas.

That's worth sitting with for a second. Mann represents the Big First, the 60-county district covering most of western and central Kansas. Not one opportunity zone property on his disclosure is anywhere near it.

Neither is much of the rest of his real estate. The filing lists rental and development property in Austin, Texas; Liberty, Missouri; Kansas City, Missouri; Merriam, Kansas; and Topeka, Kansas. Merriam is a Kansas City suburb. Topeka is 100 miles east of Salina, where Mann lives. His real estate portfolio is an eastern-Kansas-and-Texas portfolio. The people he represents live west of all of it.

He also carries nine separate commercial real estate loans on that filing — six from Keystone Bank and three from Central Bank of the Midwest — four of them in the $250,001–$500,000 range.

In 2021, he cosponsored a bill to extend the break. A watchdog called it out.

On June 30, 2021, Mann signed on as a cosponsor of H.R. 970, the Opportunity Zone Extension Act of 2021. Congress's own summary of the bill opens:

"This bill extends for two years the election and capital gain deferral periods for qualified opportunity zones."

That is the exact tax benefit Mann's funds exist to capture.

Mother Jones caught it, and in February 2022 KCUR followed up. Its report noted that Mann's disclosure at the time showed he held as much as $515,000 in opportunity zone ventures.

Donald Sherman, senior vice president and chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, put it plainly:

"Mr. Mann stands to benefit significantly from the extension of these tax benefits. And it's fair to question why he would co-sponsor legislation that has such a significant impact on his own bottom line."

Sherman's prescription was that Mann get out: "I think disinvestment would be the cleanest and, sort of, the 'highest' standard of ethics."

Mann did not respond to KCUR's request for comment. And he did not take Sherman's advice. Three and a half years later he was still listed as the manager of one opportunity fund and a member of two more entities.

The program's critics say it mostly funds nice buildings

The pitch for opportunity zones was investment in struggling communities. Brett Theodos of the Urban Institute, who studies this program for a living, told KCUR what it turned into:

"It's a really open-ended tax incentive, so you could use it for things that might be considered in the community's interest. But, you can use it for things that you might begin to question why it is that we're subsidizing these as a government. Like, luxury housing, or you know, high end spaces, or other things like self-storage lockers."

There's no requirement that an opportunity zone project help anybody who already lives in the zone. There's no requirement that it create a job. The tax break is the tax break.

Then he voted to make it permanent

The opportunity zone program was written with an expiration date. It was supposed to wind down.

It doesn't anymore.

On July 3, 2025, Mann voted for Trump's budget bill, which passed the House 218 to 214. Buried inside that bill was a rewrite of the opportunity zone rules. The IRS explains the result: the bill made the tax break permanent, scrapping the sunset that would have ended it. Governors start nominating a fresh batch of zones on July 1, 2026, the new map takes effect January 1, 2027, and a new round follows every ten years after that, forever.

A tax shelter that was scheduled to close is now a permanent fixture of the tax code. Mann, who manages a fund built on it, voted yes.

That same bill is the one that cut Medicaid and food assistance. Mann told KSNT in May 2025 that Democrats warning about Medicaid cuts "continue to lie and fearmonger." Then he voted for it anyway.

He is also, as of May 2026, a co-chair of the bipartisan Congressional Real Estate Caucus — a commercial real estate broker by trade, helping steer the House's real estate agenda.

He has filed for a late-disclosure extension every single year

Members of the House have to file an annual report of what they own. It's due May 15. You can ask the Ethics Committee for up to 90 more days.

Mann has asked for the maximum every year he has been in Congress:

Report year	Due	Extension requested	New deadline
2021	05/15/2022	05/12/2022	08/13/2022
2022	05/15/2023	04/27/2023	08/13/2023
2023	05/15/2024	05/06/2024	08/13/2024
2024	05/15/2025	04/16/2025	08/13/2025
2025	05/15/2026	05/06/2026	08/13/2026

Five for five. Every one of them pushed to the last day the rules allow.

Look at what that meant this year. The report covering 2025 — the year he voted to make his own tax break permanent — is due August 13, 2026.

Kansas Republicans voted in their primary on August 4, 2026. Mann won it.

His voters went to the polls nine days before they could see what he owned during the year he cast that vote. Nothing about that is against the rules. He's allowed to ask for the extension, and he asked for it.

But he asked for it every year, always for the full 90 days, always landing after the moment it would have mattered most.

This keeps happening

Mann is not the only one. We've written about Nick Begich, who owns up to $1 million in Bitcoin and then wrote the bill ordering the U.S. Treasury to buy 200,000 coins a year. We've written about Vivek Ramaswamy's plan to wipe out Ohio's capital gains tax, which would have saved him roughly $5.8 million on the gains in his own released tax returns.

The pattern is always the same. The policy is described in the language of helping ordinary people — investment in poor neighborhoods, growth, opportunity. The person pushing it happens to be positioned to collect.

Mann has been told about this, by name, by an ethics watchdog, in public, four years ago. He was told the clean move was to get out.

He is still the manager of the fund.

Source

Steve Kraske and Zach Wilson, "U.S. Rep. Tracey Mann of Kansas supports bill that could lead to conflict of interest," KCUR, February 28, 2022. Photo: Ike Hayman / U.S. House of Representatives. Mann's holdings and positions are from his own filings with the Clerk of the House.

$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.

Ron Estes Flew to El Salvador During the Abrego Garcia Fight. He Has Never Said a Word About It.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:55:56 +0000

In April 2025, the biggest fight in American law was over one man.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father, had been deported to CECOT — El Salvador's mega-prison — without a hearing. The government admitted the deportation was an error. On April 10, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the administration had to facilitate his return. The administration didn't.

That was the week Ron Estes went to El Salvador.

The photo

Estes never announced the trip. What put him there was a picture posted by the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador on Wednesday, April 16, 2025, showing a congressional delegation led by Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri.

Standing in that lineup: Estes, along with Reps. Riley Moore of West Virginia, Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, Mike Kennedy of Utah, Carol Miller of West Virginia and Claudia Tenney of New York.

Independent journalist Marisa Kabas broke the story on April 17. Smith and Moore had already posted their own photographs from inside CECOT — pictures of themselves in front of caged prisoners. Kabas contacted the offices of the five who had posted nothing. Only Hern's answered, and only to say it "cannot confirm or comment on the Congressman's location for security purposes."

Estes's office said nothing at all.

Asked directly. Answered nothing.

Kansas Reflector opinion editor Clay Wirestone emailed Estes spokesman Roman Rodriguez with two straightforward questions: did the congressman go inside the prison, and was he concerned about Abrego Garcia's welfare?

"He did not respond."

That's the whole answer, printed in the column on April 21, 2025. Axios, compiling its own list of lawmakers who had visited CECOT that same week, reported that the remaining offices, Estes's among them, "did not immediately respond to Axios' request for comment."

The Reflector later added an update: Estes did tour the prison, according to a Substack post by the historian Heather Cox Richardson and a photo shared on Jason Smith's Facebook account.

So a sitting member of Congress went inside a foreign prison holding people his own government had shipped there without hearings, and then declined to tell his constituents whether he'd been in the building.

More than a year later, his own press release archive still contains no statement about the trip. No readout, no photo, no paragraph explaining what he saw or why he went.

What CECOT is

This matters because of where he was standing.

Amnesty International's Americas director, Ana Piquer, described El Salvador's mass detention system as "a systematic state policy of massive and arbitrary deprivation of liberty," with more than 85,000 people held "without sufficient admissible evidence."

Human Rights Watch described conditions in CECOT and other Salvadoran prisons as including "cases of torture, ill-treatment, incommunicado detention, severe violations of due process and inhumane conditions, such as lack of access to adequate healthcare and food." People held there are denied contact with relatives and lawyers, appear before courts only in mass online hearings, and — in Human Rights Watch's account — the government has said they "will never leave."

Both of those assessments are quoted in the Kansas Reflector's column. Human Rights Watch adds that it is "not aware of any detainees who have been released from that prison."

The part that isn't about El Salvador

Estes is a member of the legislative branch. When the executive branch defies a unanimous Supreme Court order, checking it is not optional — it is the job.

He had a rare kind of leverage that week. He was on the ground, in the country, with the U.S. embassy hosting the delegation. Sen. Chris Van Hollen showed what was possible: he flew down and met with Abrego Garcia on April 17, the day after the embassy photo.

Estes could have asked to see him. He could have asked the Salvadoran government a single question about a man the United States government conceded it sent there by mistake. He could have come home and told Kansans what he found.

Instead, as Wirestone put it, "he posed for the picture and made no public comment."

It fits the record

None of this is a departure for Estes. He has been backing the enforcement apparatus for years. In 2018, sitting on the Homeland Security Committee, he voted for a resolution supporting ICE and said: "Amidst dangerous and extreme calls to abolish ICE, I voted to show our support for ICE and our men and women in law enforcement."

The trip was consistent with all of that. What's harder to defend is the silence. If Estes believed the trip was right, the ordinary move was to say so — the way Smith and Moore did, loudly, with photographs. Kevin Hern went a step further and told Newsmax the men held there "will never see the light of day" — a statement he at least had to own.

Estes did the trip and skipped the explanation.

The people of Kansas's 4th District are entitled to know what their congressman did on an official trip taken in their name. Estes has spent more than a year not telling them.

Source

Clay Wirestone's April 21, 2025 column for Kansas Reflector: Did Kansas Rep. Ron Estes visit notorious torture prison? We know he was in El Salvador last week.

Ron Estes Is the Congressman in Charge of Protecting Social Security. He Told Newsmax He Was Looking Forward to What DOGE Would Find.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:54:52 +0000

In January 2025, House Ways and Means chairman Jason Smith named Ron Estes chairman of the Subcommittee on Social Security.

That is not a ceremonial post. It is the single job in the House of Representatives whose entire purpose is to watch over the Social Security Administration — the agency that sends a check every month to more than 71 million Americans. When the agency stops working, the subcommittee chairman is the person Congress has designated to do something about it.

Two months into the job, with DOGE already inside the agency, Estes went on Newsmax to explain his priorities.

"Efficiency"

Newsmax's March 18, 2025 write-up opens like this:

"The new chair of the House Social Security Subcommittee, Ron Estes, R-Kan., told Newsmax on Tuesday that his focus is on making the Social Security Administration more efficient and that he also looks forward to any discoveries the Department of Government Efficiency uncovers in aiding that effort."

Here is what Estes himself said on the air:

"My first goal is to make sure that we have good operational efficiencies — that the processes work — that when somebody retires, they're able to get enrolled; if unfortunately their spouse dies, they're able to get the survivor benefits; if they're disabled, that they're able to get those benefits."

"We want to make sure that the agency works well. And so that's our first process: making sure that there's efficiency and that we don't have improper payments or waste, fraud, and abuse in there."

Read that list again, because it is a good list. Retirement enrollment. Survivor benefits. Disability benefits. Those are the three things the agency does that people cannot live without.

Now look at what happened to them.

What DOGE actually did

Estes wasn't a bystander watching this happen to him. He'd signed up early. In November 2024 he joined the DOGE Caucus. In December 2024 he published an op-ed welcoming it:

"With Trump back in the White House as of Jan. 20 and Musk and Ramaswamy heading DOGE, there's hope that Republicans in Congress will have allies in reforming our government."

The "allies" got to work. Between January and November 2025, the Social Security Administration lost 6,645 employees — more than 11% of its workforce, according to a January 2026 analysis by Molly Weston Williamson at the Center for American Progress. She calls it the largest one-year drop in SSA staff in the agency's history.

It wasn't spread evenly, either. In 33 states the agency had at least 10% fewer staff in fiscal 2025 than the year before. Some individual field offices lost a quarter of their people or more.

The federal employees' union put the ratio in plain terms: by June 2025, one SSA staff member was left to serve every 1,480 beneficiaries.

That is the "efficiency" Estes said he was after — an agency doing the same work for the same 71 million people with thousands fewer people to do it.

The subcommittee chairman's job description

There is a specific reason this matters more for Estes than for the average member.

Any of the 435 members of the House can complain about a federal agency. The chairman of the Social Security Subcommittee has tools nobody else has. He can hold hearings. He can subpoena documents. He can put the Commissioner of Social Security under oath in public and make him answer for a wait time. He can hold a bill hostage. That is the whole point of the gavel.

Estes had that gavel the entire time this was happening. He had also, in December 2024, publicly welcomed the people doing the cutting as "allies." When the largest one-year staff loss in the agency's history was underway, the chairman charged with overseeing that agency was on cable television saying he looked forward to what DOGE would turn up.

And then there's what happened to the data

Staffing was only half of it. The other half was the agency's files — the Social Security numbers, birthdates and parents' names of essentially every American who has ever had one.

In August 2025, the agency's own chief data officer went public. Charles Borges, who had held the job since January 2025, disclosed to Congress that DOGE staff had placed a live copy of the Social Security data of more than 300 million Americans in a "vulnerable cloud environment" that circumvented the agency's standard oversight.

SSA's answer was that the data was "walled off from the internet" and that it was "not aware of any compromise."

Three days later, Borges resigned. He called it a constructive discharge, writing to the commissioner that the agency's actions against him made his duties "impossible to perform legally and ethically," and describing "exclusion, isolation, internal strife, and a culture of fear."

Then, in a court filing dated January 16, 2026, the Justice Department confirmed a version of it. A DOGE staffer had shared Social Security data through Cloudflare — a service, in the filing's words, "not approved for storing SSA data and when used in this manner is outside SSA's security protocols." Agency officials didn't know it had happened. And because the server sits outside SSA, the agency cannot determine what was sent, or whether it's still there.

Buried in the same filing was something else. In March 2025, a political advocacy group approached two DOGE members at the Social Security Administration and asked them to analyze state voter rolls — with the stated aim, per the filing, of finding "evidence of voter fraud and to overturn election results in certain States." One of them signed a "Voter Data Agreement" in his official SSA capacity on March 24, 2025. Nobody at the agency reviewed or approved it. SSA discovered the arrangement in November and made two Hatch Act referrals in December.

Every one of those events happened inside the agency Ron Estes was appointed to oversee. He welcomed the people who did it as "allies" three months before the first of them.

The bill for all this comes due in 2032

The other half of Estes's record on Social Security is the money.

He voted for Trump's 2025 budget bill. Sen. Ron Wyden, citing the Social Security actuary's own numbers, said in August 2026 that the bill "plundered Social Security to the tune of $168 billion" — and moved up the date the trust fund runs dry.

That date is now the fourth quarter of 2032, per the trustees report released in June 2026 and reported by CNBC. When it arrives, benefits get cut across the board unless Congress acts.

So the chairman of the Social Security Subcommittee voted for a bill that pulled the deadline closer, while the agency that administers the program was being hollowed out on his watch.

Meanwhile his colleagues are lining up behind a plan to hand the whole question to a 13-member commission whose recommendations Congress would have to vote on without being allowed to amend a word.

What Kansans get

Kansas's 4th District covers Wichita and most of south-central Kansas — a lot of retirees, a lot of people on disability, a lot of small towns where the nearest Social Security office is already a drive.

When a field office loses a quarter of its staff, nobody sends a letter announcing it. You find out when you call and stay on hold, or when the appointment you need is six weeks out, or when a survivor benefit that should take weeks takes months and the bills don't wait.

Estes told Newsmax he wanted to make sure that "when somebody retires, they're able to get enrolled." He had the gavel that could have made that true. He used it to cheer on the people cutting the staff who do the enrolling.

Source

Estes's remarks are from Nick Koutsobinas's March 18, 2025 report, Rep. Estes to Newsmax: Social Security to Focus on Efficiency.

Ron Estes Is Leading the Push to Bring Back a Rule That Cut the Family Planning Program in Half

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:52:06 +0000

On June 1, 2026, Ron Estes announced that he had led a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., asking him to bring back the 2019 Title X rule known as the "Protect Life Rule."

He wasn't one of 159 signatures. He was the person who organized it, alongside Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith and Rep. Virginia Foxx. His office notes he also led the same push back in 2018.

Here's what he said:

"Leading this letter is about restoring basic program integrity... By reissuing the Protect Life Rule, the Trump Administration will once again draw a bright, undeniable line of physical and financial separation between actual family planning services and elective abortion activities."

"Basic program integrity" sounds like paperwork. It isn't. We already know exactly what this rule does, because it was law for about two years, and somebody counted.

What Title X is

Title X is the federal family planning program. It's been around since 1970. It pays for birth control, cancer screenings, testing for sexually transmitted infections, and basic reproductive health care for people who are low-income or uninsured — the person who doesn't have a regular doctor and shows up at a clinic.

Before 2019, the program ran through about 4,000 clinics and served roughly 4 million patients a year, according to KFF.

The 2019 rule Estes wants restored did two things. It banned clinics in the program from referring a patient for an abortion — including a patient who asks. And it required "physical and financial separation," meaning a clinic that also provided abortion care with its own non-federal money had to build separate facilities or leave.

Lots of them left.

The number nobody in that letter mentions

The Guttmacher Institute counted the damage in February 2020. Its findings:

An estimated 981 clinics left the Title X network in 2019 — about one-quarter of every site in the program.
The network's capacity to provide women with contraceptive services fell by at least 46% — roughly 1.6 million patients worth.
Six states ended up with no Title X provider at all: Hawaii, Maine, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington.
In Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland and New York, capacity dropped 90% or more.

The patient count tells the same story. KFF found the number served fell from about 4 million to 1.54 million in 2020 — losses KFF says were compounded by the pandemic. And it never came back. As of 2023, Title X was serving 2.8 million people — a million fewer than before the rule took effect.

That is not "program integrity." That is a program cut roughly in half, and it stayed cut.

Estes's own press release actually concedes the mechanism, in a single sentence: "During the first Trump Administration, the organization withdrew from the program to avoid complying with the rule." He means Planned Parenthood. What he leaves out is that hundreds of clinics that were not Planned Parenthood walked out too — state health departments, university clinics, community health centers — because they could not afford to build a second building or would not agree to withhold information from a patient who asked for it.

The "gag" part

The 2019 rule is called the domestic gag rule for a reason. Under it, a clinician whose patient asked where she could get an abortion was barred from telling her.

Not barred from performing one. Not barred from paying for one — federal law has barred Title X money from being used in programs where abortion is a method of family planning since the program was created. Barred from answering the question.

That is the policy Estes led a letter to bring back, and it's the piece he described as drawing a "bright, undeniable line."

This is a pattern, not a one-off

Estes has been on this specific issue for eight years. When the rule was first proposed in 2018, he led the congressional letter supporting it — his office says so — and on May 21, 2018 he went to the House floor to praise it.

It fits a longer record. He ran for Congress in 2017 promising voters that "one of my top priorities will be to defund Planned Parenthood." He signed a discharge petition trying to force a floor vote on the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. He voted for the 2025 budget bill that blocked Medicaid payments to Planned Parenthood and its affiliates nationwide. He voted against the Women's Health Protection Act, which would have protected abortion access nationwide, and against the Right to Contraception Act. Reproductive Freedom for All scores him 0% for 2025.

The letter is the same project, aimed at the last piece of the program still standing.

What it means in Kansas

Kansas is a state where voters already answered this question. In August 2022, Kansans rejected a constitutional amendment that would have stripped abortion rights from the state constitution — 59% to 41%, an 18-point margin, on a primary ballot, with turnout nobody predicted.

Estes represents the Wichita area. His constituents were part of that vote. Then he went to Washington and organized a letter asking a cabinet secretary to reimpose the rule that emptied out a quarter of the nation's family planning clinics.

The people who lose here are not activists on either side. They are the woman who uses a Title X clinic because it's the only place that will see her without insurance — for her birth control, her Pap smear, her STI test. When 981 clinics walked out last time, those appointments didn't move somewhere else. They just stopped.

Estes is asking for that again, and he's the one holding the pen.

Source

Rep. Estes's own announcement: Rep. Estes Leads Letter to Reissue the Protect Life Rule, June 1, 2026.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The answer is 45.

What the STOCK Act actually asks

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

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

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

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

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

The roll call

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

The biggest offenders:

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

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

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

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

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

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

"My broker did it"

Read the responses side by side and a script emerges.

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

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

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

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

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

The penalty is $200

Here's why none of them seem especially worried.

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

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

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

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

Why the timing is the whole story

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

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

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

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

The ones who campaigned on this

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He has been late on his own disclosures twice.

Back to that July vote

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

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

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

The bottom line

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

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

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

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

We deserve better.

A State Had to Sue the Federal Government to Investigate Child Sex Crimes. Three Days Later, 50 Republicans Promoted the Man It Sued.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 08:23:04 +0000

On Wednesday, August 5, 2026, the state of New Mexico did something states almost never have to do.

It sued the United States Department of Justice.

Not over a regulation. Not over funding. New Mexico sued because it says the federal government is blocking a live criminal investigation into the sexual abuse of women and girls at Jeffrey Epstein's ranch — crimes that happened inside New Mexico's own borders, to New Mexico's own people.

The lawsuit names acting Attorney General Todd Blanche personally.

Three days later, at 4:17 in the morning, fifty Republican senators voted to give Blanche the job permanently.

What New Mexico is asking for

The state's complaint, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., asks a judge to order the Justice Department to hand over unredacted Epstein investigative files.

New Mexico argues the refusal breaks federal law and stomps on the state's basic authority to investigate and prosecute crimes committed on its own soil. That's not a small claim. It's the argument that a state gets to police its own territory.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, a Democrat, put it plainly:

"We asked the Department of Justice to cooperate by providing access to records that may be critical to identifying victims, witnesses, and additional criminal conduct at Zorro Ranch. Their delay is actively hurting our criminal investigation and delaying justice Epstein survivors deserve."

On a call with reporters, Torrez said his office has made ten separate requests for information. Every one has been ignored or denied.

"We have heard repeatedly they will cooperate and what our team has experienced is anything but cooperation."

And:

"Todd Blanche today with a stroke of a pen could grant us the access that he claimed. Instead they have decided to stonewall, to obstruct and to frankly conceal for whatever reason."

This isn't the first time the feds told New Mexico to sit down

Here's the part that should make you angry.

Back in 2019, federal prosecutors asked New Mexico to pause its own investigation. They promised to share what they found when they were done.

They never did.

Former New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas — the man who agreed to that deal — wrote to Torrez in a July 20 letter saying the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York simply failed to honor it.

So the timeline is: the federal government told a state to stand down on a child sex abuse investigation, promised to share the evidence, kept the evidence, and is now refusing to hand it over seven years later.

New Mexico reopened the case in February 2026. Since then, the state — not the FBI, not the Justice Department — conducted the first law enforcement search of Zorro Ranch that has ever been done.

Epstein bought that property in 1993. He died in 2019. Nobody searched it while he was alive.

What they're looking for

A separate bipartisan panel — New Mexico's Truth Commission, a four-person legislative subcommittee with two Democrats and two Republicans on it — released its first report the same day the lawsuit was filed.

The findings so far, reported by FOX 4 and confirmed by the Christian Science Monitor:

Evidence that Epstein abused about five women and girls at Zorro Ranch between 1996 and 2012.
Roughly 30 other people who may have been victims, witnesses, or facilitators — or some combination.
Federal redactions in the released files are actively blocking the commission from verifying what it has.

The commission has issued 20 subpoenas and gotten back more than 100,000 records. Seven of those subpoenas were flat-out ignored — including by the Federal Aviation Administration and by the same U.S. Attorney's Office in New York that told New Mexico to stand down in the first place.

Rep. Andrea Romero, who chairs the commission, described what that silence has cost:

"In the seven years since Jeffrey Epstein died, in the two decades since his crimes first drew attention of law enforcement, no government, federal, state, or local, has ever compiled an account of what he did in New Mexico."

Twenty years. Nobody wrote it down.

The Justice Department's excuse, and what survivors said about it

The Justice Department's answer is that court orders bar it from disclosing "victim-identifying information carte blanche," and that New Mexico hasn't given a lawful reason for such sweeping disclosures. It says protecting victim privacy is a top priority.

Torrez's response was that his office has "provided them with ample legal justifications," and that the department is hiding "behind the Epstein survivors."

The survivors themselves answered that one. In a joint statement to NBC News, some of the women Epstein abused said:

"The DOJ's argument that it won't hand over files in order to protect survivors' identities is laughable, when the DOJ has already revealed their names and personal information. By holding onto these files, Todd Blanche's DOJ is simply continuing to protect abusers."

That is not a partisan talking point. That is the people the policy claims to protect saying the policy is a lie.

It lands harder because the Justice Department's actual record on redactions is a mess. When it began releasing Epstein records in December under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, what came out was largely material that was already public or blacked out so heavily it meant nothing — while accusers' personal details slipped through.

Now: the part that's on Republican senators

New Mexico filed this lawsuit on Wednesday, August 5. It was national news that day and the next.

The Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as attorney general on Saturday, August 8, by a vote of 50 to 49.

Every yes vote was a Republican. The margin was one.

Fourteen of those yes votes came from senators we track: Marsha Blackburn, Shelley Moore Capito, Tom Cotton, Darline Graham, Bill Hagerty, Jon Husted, Cindy Hyde-Smith, Roger Marshall, Ashley Moody, Pete Ricketts, Jim Risch, Mike Rounds, Dan Sullivan, and Tommy Tuberville.

They had the information. A state attorney general had just gone to federal court and accused this man, by name, of obstructing a criminal sex trafficking investigation. Lisa Murkowski, one of only two Republicans who voted no, said the Justice Department's "handling of files" connected to Epstein was part of her reason.

Fifty of her colleagues shrugged and confirmed him before sunrise, then left town for a month of vacation.

They already voted to keep these files sealed once

This is the pattern, and it is on the record.

On September 10, 2025, the Senate voted on an amendment whose stated purpose was, in the Senate's own words, "To direct the Attorney General to make publicly available documents related to Jeffrey Epstein."

Republican leadership moved to table it — the procedural way of killing something without having to vote on it directly. The motion to table passed 51 to 49. Two votes the other way and the files would be public today. Rand Paul and Josh Hawley were the only Republicans who broke ranks.

We pulled the roll call. Every single senator on this list who was in the Senate that day voted to table:

Blackburn. Capito. Cotton. Hagerty. Husted. Hyde-Smith. Marshall. Moody. Ricketts. Risch. Rounds. Sullivan. Tuberville.

Thirteen for thirteen.

The same thirteen then voted to make Todd Blanche deputy attorney general in March 2025, and voted for him again in August 2026 after a state sued him for withholding the very documents they'd voted to keep sealed.

That's three chances. Three times the same answer.

Dan Sullivan's case is the sharpest: he voted to keep the files sealed and then took campaign checks from two men who appear in them. Over in the House, Ashley Hinson refused to sign the petition to force the files open while billionaires named in those files wrote her nearly $90,000 in checks. And Majority Whip Tom Emmer, who never misses a chance to promote his committee's investigations, has stayed conspicuously quiet about the Epstein one — the one his own son runs.

Who this actually hurts

While all of this plays out in Washington, the ranch itself has moved on.

Epstein's estate sold Zorro Ranch in 2023 to the family of Don Huffines, a Texas Republican recently appointed his state's comptroller. Huffines has said the property is being renamed San Rafael Ranch, after a saint associated with healing, and that his family plans to run a Christian retreat there.

A healing retreat, on the property where nobody has finished asking who was hurt.

Meanwhile a New Mexico survivor named Rachel Benavidez sat in a hearing room in Santa Fe last Wednesday and asked, again, for the evidence to be released.

"I use this survivor platform to stand on the right side of every survivor's journey toward truth and justice. I am holding onto faith that real accountability will be achieved."

She is holding onto faith. Her state had to sue the federal government to get a look at the files. And the senators who could have made this a condition of confirming an attorney general — who had the leverage, in a vote decided by one — used it for nothing.

Fourteen of them are on this site. You can look up every one.

We deserve better.

Source

Daniel Miller, "New Mexico sues federal government for release of Epstein files" (FOX 4 Dallas-Fort Worth, August 6, 2026). Additional reporting from NBC News and the Associated Press and Source New Mexico. The Truth Commission's interim report is public. Photo: NBC News.

At 4:17 in the Morning, 50 Republican Senators Handed the Justice Department to Trump's Personal Lawyer

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 22:20:53 +0000

At 4:17 a.m. on Saturday, August 8, 2026, the United States Senate made Todd Blanche the attorney general of the United States.

The vote was 50 to 49. Every one of the 50 yes votes was a Republican. Every Democrat voted no. Two Republicans — Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — voted no with them. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky did not vote.

One vote. That's the whole margin.

Todd Blanche is Donald Trump's personal criminal defense lawyer. Not "was, a long time ago." He was hired in 2023 to defend Trump against criminal charges, he was a lead attorney on Trump's defense team at the hush-money trial in New York, and he defended Trump in the two federal cases brought by the Justice Department he now runs.

Fifty Republican senators looked at that and said: perfect, give him the whole building.

What they actually voted for

This wasn't a close call that turned on some technical dispute. The objections were enormous, they were public for weeks, and several Republicans raised them out loud before folding.

A $1.8 billion fund for Trump's supporters. Trump sued the IRS. Then he settled that lawsuit with his own administration. The settlement created a $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" to pay people who say the criminal justice system mistreated them — and Trump was explicit that he meant the people who attacked the Capitol on January 6. He called them "great American Patriots."

Tax audit immunity for the Trump family. The same settlement shielded Trump, two of his sons, and the Trump Organization from IRS audits and enforcement on past returns. A federal judge who handled the IRS case described Trump's lawsuit as an improper exercise in self-dealing. The union representing IRS workers went to court two days before the vote to try to block the immunity deal.

Prosecuting the president's enemies. Under Blanche, the Justice Department charged former FBI Director James Comey with threatening the president — over a photo of seashells arranged to read "86 47" that Comey posted online. It charged the Southern Poverty Law Center. It opened an investigation into the lawsuits E. Jean Carroll brought and won against Trump for sexual abuse and defamation. Comey's lawyers are asking a judge to throw his case out, accusing the department of misleading judges and withholding key facts.

Blanche's answer to all of this was two letters, written on August 2. One said the order creating the fund "is rescinded and shall have no force or effect." The other narrowed the tax immunity deal.

That was enough for fifty senators.

The letters aren't worth much

Here is the part nobody should skip past.

ABC News reported that the agreement Cornyn and Tillis accepted contains no language preventing the fund from being brought back under a different name or a different method. The Judiciary Committee advanced Blanche anyway on August 4, on a 12–10 vote along party lines.

Brandon DeBot of the Tax Law Center at NYU Law told NPR what the letters were worth:

"These assurances are not worth the paper they're written on. They don't pull back on the attempts to give the president and his affiliates unauthorized immunity from tax audits. And they don't do anything new to stop the president from trying to bring back the fund."

And the president himself spent the week before the vote saying he wanted the fund back. Trump told reporters the fund would have been "very fair," that it could have given "some solace" to Jan. 6 defendants, and: "I view that fund as a positive, and a lot of Republicans do too."

So the deal was: Trump says out loud he still wants it, his own lawyer signs a piece of paper saying it's cancelled, and the Senate calls that a win and goes home for a month.

Thirteen of them had already done this once

This is the fact that should follow every one of these senators around.

On March 5, 2025, the Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as deputy attorney general — the number-two job — by 52 to 46. Everything anyone objected to on Saturday morning happened after that vote, on the job that vote handed him.

Every single Republican we track who was in the Senate in March 2025 voted yes then, too. Blackburn, Capito, Cotton, Hagerty, Husted, Hyde-Smith, Marshall, Moody, Ricketts, Risch, Rounds, Sullivan, Tuberville — all yes, both times.

They didn't get fooled. They got exactly what they voted for, twice.

Susan Collins voted yes in March 2025 as well, and then announced a no vote on August 4 — hours after the two Republicans with real leverage had already given theirs away.

What Blanche did to the Justice Department

Before the vote, more than 1,200 former Justice Department employees — people who served across 14 administrations, including dozens of former U.S. attorneys — signed a letter to the Judiciary Committee urging senators to reject him.

Their director, Stacey Young, put it this way:

"Since his confirmation as Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche has shown time and again that his guiding star is fealty to the President, not the Constitution."

The letter's numbers are the part that should worry anyone who has ever called the FBI or reported a fraud. Under Blanche's watch, over 16,000 employees left the department, including more than a quarter of its attorneys. Agents, analysts, immigration judges and career prosecutors were fired for declining to bring vindictive prosecutions, for refusing to lie in court, or for working assigned cases the president didn't like. Others were pulled off their real work to patrol streets in Washington, D.C.

The letter says the consequences reach far past the Justice Department's own hallways:

"They've meant that much of the department's vital work isn't being done, or isn't being done as well – leaving communities less safe, Americans' rights less protected, and our national security more vulnerable."

That is 1,200 people who spent their careers inside the Justice Department, serving under presidents of both parties, telling the Senate this man should not get the job. Fifty senators voted yes anyway.

The Epstein survivors told them, too

Murkowski, one of the two Republican no votes, said part of her reason was the Justice Department's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. She wasn't alone — Sen. Thom Tillis had pushed Blanche to meet with Epstein survivors, and Blanche finally did in July.

It did not go well. Afterward, survivor Annie Farmer said in a July 16 statement that she found Blanche "abrasive, condescending, and intentionally noncommittal to survivors," and survivors urged senators to block him.

Blanche was the public face of the Epstein files at the Justice Department. He is the official who personally sat down with Ghislaine Maxwell in a Florida courthouse for two days of interviews on July 24 and 25, 2025, after granting her limited immunity so she could talk without fear of being prosecuted over what she said. She told him she never saw Trump act inappropriately. Shortly afterward she was moved from a low-security prison in Florida to a minimum-security camp in Texas. Neither her lawyer nor the Bureau of Prisons has explained why.

Fourteen senators on this site voted to promote him. One of them, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, voted to keep the Epstein files sealed and then took checks from two men named in them.

The fourteen we track

Ashley Moody of Florida spent six years as her state's attorney general before Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed her to the Senate. She knows better than almost anyone in that chamber what it means for a chief law enforcement officer to be independent of the politician above him. She sits on the Judiciary Committee. She voted yes.

Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee also sits on Judiciary, and is running for governor while she does it.

Darline Graham of South Carolina has been a senator since July 14. Nobody elected her — Gov. Henry McMaster appointed her to the seat left vacant by the death of her brother, Lindsey Graham, on Trump's public recommendation. She has never held elected office in her life. She now sits on the Judiciary Committee, and the first bill she put her name on was one that would make it harder for millions of citizens to register to vote. Now she's voted to confirm the president's defense lawyer as attorney general.

Jon Husted of Ohio spent the same week writing a brand-new photo ID bill that the Senate voted on nineteen minutes after it confirmed Blanche. His state lost more Obamacare coverage than any other in the country this year.

Tommy Tuberville of Alabama is running for governor while still holding his Senate seat.

And the rest voted yes without much comment: Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, Jim Risch of Idaho, and Mike Rounds of South Dakota.

The three who talked tough and voted yes anyway

The best part — if you like this sort of thing — is who made the noise.

Cornyn and Tillis spent two weeks holding the nomination hostage. Cornyn accused the Justice Department of having "stonewalled" him and said flatly, "They've simply refused to cooperate." Tillis said the fund was "an insult to the police officers and the people that defended us on January the 6th." Then he said, "It's done. It's been rescinded, and I am satisfied." Both of them voted yes.

Bill Cassidy of Louisiana was the decisive vote. He listed the problems himself — the $1.8 billion fund, the tax immunity deal, the prosecutions of Trump's political opponents — and then said: "This is not a referendum on President Trump. It is a decision regarding Mr. Blanche in very specific circumstances."

Here's what those three men have in common. All of them are on their way out. Cornyn lost his May primary to Ken Paxton after Trump endorsed against him. Tillis isn't running again. Cassidy lost his primary this year to a Trump-backed challenger.

The only Republicans who used any leverage at all were the three with nothing left to lose. And they gave it away for two letters.

That tells you what the other 47 yes votes were really about.

What they did with the night

The Senate pulled an all-nighter to get this done. In the same session it confirmed Blanche, passed a stopgap funding bill, and held a pre-dawn vote on a photo ID requirement for voting. Then everyone went home for a month of recess.

They did not lower anyone's grocery bill. They did not lower anyone's rent, or premiums, or electric bill.

They stayed up until 4:17 in the morning to hand the Justice Department to the president's defense attorney, and then they left town.

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, told them what the moment was before they voted:

"If there is ever a moment in history when we need an Attorney General above reproach, who is clearly dedicated to ending corruption, even at the highest level of our government, it's right now."

Fifty of them heard that and voted for the president's defense attorney anyway.

We deserve better.

Source

Alanna Durkin Richer and Lisa Mascaro, "Todd Blanche narrowly confirmed as Trump's attorney general in overnight vote" (Associated Press via PBS News, August 8, 2026). Additional reporting from the Associated Press, NPR, and The Hill. Roll call from Senate vote #230. Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters.

At 4:36 in the Morning, 52 Republican Senators Voted to Put a New Hurdle Between You and the Ballot Box

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 13:55:00 +0000

The U.S. Senate stayed up all night on Friday. Then, at 4:36 in the morning on Saturday, August 8, 2026, it took a vote on whether Americans should have to show a photo ID to vote in a federal election.

The vote failed, 52 to 46. It needed 60. Every Democrat who was there voted no.

Then the senators went home for a month.

That's the part worth sitting with. The Senate pulled an all-nighter, confirmed a new attorney general, passed a bill to keep the government's lights on — and squeezed in one more vote on making it harder to cast a ballot. Then everyone left for August recess.

The bill was three days old

The measure was S. 5271, and it is about as fresh as legislation gets. According to the official record at Congress.gov, it was introduced on August 5, 2026 — three days before the Senate voted on it. Its full official title is "A bill to amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require voters to provide photo identification."

The sponsor was Jon Husted, the Republican senator from Ohio.

It picked up exactly two cosponsors, both on August 7 — the day before the vote. They were Ashley Moody of Florida and Dan Sullivan of Alaska.

So: a bill written by one senator, signed onto by two more, introduced on a Wednesday, and voted on before dawn on a Saturday. That is not how you pass a law. That is how you stage a vote.

What "show your ID" actually means for millions of people

Here's the thing about a photo ID requirement. It sounds like nothing. Most of us have a driver's license in our wallet right now. So what's the problem?

The problem is the people who don't — and the people whose ID doesn't match.

A national study from the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland found that about 2.6 million U.S. citizens over 18 have no government-issued photo ID of any kind.

And the bigger number is the one nobody talks about. That same study estimated that 34.5 million people don't have a driver's license or state ID card with their current name and address on it.

Think about who that is. Someone who just moved. Someone who got married and changed their name. A college student. A young person who's lived at three addresses in two years. An older widow who never updated her license. None of them committed fraud. All of them could get turned away.

Noncitizens, meanwhile, are already barred from voting in state, federal and almost all local elections. That has been true this whole time.

This is the same fight, wearing a different hat

Husted's photo ID bill isn't a standalone idea. It's a piece broken off from the SAVE America Act — the bigger Republican bill that would require voters to show documentary proof of citizenship when they register and a photo ID when they vote.

We've written about that bill a lot, because Republicans keep bringing it back. The SAVE Act is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist — and the citizenship-document half of it is even harsher than the ID half. The Brennan Center and its partners found that 21.3 million American citizens of voting age don't have ready access to a document proving citizenship.

President Trump has pushed hard for it. He wanted the Senate to skip its recess and stay in Washington until it passed. Republican leaders told him repeatedly that the votes aren't there — and Saturday morning proved them right.

Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, one of the loudest voices for the bill, wasn't discouraged. "This fight's not over," he said afterward. "We're just getting started."

Believe him. Republicans have tried to attach voter restrictions to an affordable housing bill and to a party-line budget bill. When the front door is locked, they try the windows.

The fifteen we track

Fifteen of the Republicans on this site voted yes on Saturday morning. Here they are, with what we already knew about each one.

Jon Husted wrote the bill. This is the same senator whose state lost more Obamacare coverage than any other in America — a man with plenty of real problems back home who chose to spend his August writing a new voting restriction instead.

Ashley Moody and Dan Sullivan put their names on it as cosponsors the day before the vote.

Darline Graham of South Carolina was sworn in only days ago to fill her late brother's seat — and the very first bill she cosponsored was the SAVE Act. Her South Carolina primary is Tuesday, August 11.

Roger Marshall of Kansas spent the week before this vote demanding a floor vote on the SAVE Act on Fox News while describing it to Kansans as a simple "voter ID" bill. It isn't, and this week's separate photo ID vote makes that plain: if the SAVE Act were just voter ID, Husted wouldn't have needed to write a voter ID bill.

Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, now running for governor, has his own history of repeating SAVE Act talking points that don't survive contact with the bill text.

And the rest voted yes without much comment: Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Susan Collins of Maine, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, Jim Risch of Idaho, and Mike Rounds of South Dakota.

Two senators didn't vote at all: Republican Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who is recovering from a health issue, and Democrat Peter Welch of Vermont.

What they didn't do before they left

It's worth naming what else was on the table that week, because it tells you what the Senate treats as urgent.

The Senate did pass a stopgap funding bill, 90 to 6, to keep the government running through December 11 — though the House passed a different version, so that isn't settled. It confirmed Todd Blanche as attorney general, with Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski voting no. It passed a Russia sanctions package, 86 to 11.

What it did not do was lower anyone's grocery bill, or their rent, or their electric bill, or their premiums.

It did find time, at 4:36 a.m., to vote on making people prove who they are at the polls.

Fifty-two Republicans thought that was worth staying up for.

Source

Reporting by Shauneen Miranda for States Newsroom: "US Senate leaves town for recess after passing stopgap spending bill, blocking photo ID for voting" (Michigan Advance, August 7, 2026). Photo by Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom. Roll call details from Senate vote #231.