MAGA Report Cards — Kentucky

Andy Barr Says the $50 Billion Rural Health Fund Will Save Kentucky's Hospitals. Kentucky's Governor Says the Rules Forbid Spending It on the Hospitals at Risk.

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 06:00:05 +0000

Governor Andy Beshear has said since June 2025 that 35 Kentucky rural hospitals are at risk of closing because of the 2025 Republican budget bill — Barr's own office dates the first statement to June 23 of that year. On September 4, 2026, Andy Barr stood at the Lexington Clinic with Dr. Mehmet Oz, who runs Medicare and Medicaid for the Trump administration, and said the premise is simply false.

"This idea that the governor here in Kentucky and others around the country, the critics of the president, the critics of our law, are saying that somehow this is a cut is wrong."

Barr is running for Mitch McConnell's Senate seat. He voted for the bill. We wrote in August about the letter he sent Beshear demanding he prove the 35 hospitals are at risk — a letter that never mentioned his own vote.

This is the next round, and it turns on one specific claim.

Barr's defense is a $50 billion fund

Barr's argument is that the study naming 35 at-risk Kentucky hospitals was done before Congress created the Rural Health Transformation Program, which puts $50 billion into rural health care between 2026 and 2030. Kentucky's first-year share is $212.9 million, awarded by the Trump administration on December 29, 2025. Barr's own letter says the state "has now received" it.

In other words: yes, Medicaid is changing, but here is money to cover it.

Beshear answered that in a letter Barr's office received on Tuesday. His answer is not that the money is too small. It is that the money is not allowed to go where the problem is.

Under the program's federal guidelines, Beshear wrote, the funds are barred from being used on financially struggling hospitals.

What he pointed to, Beshear said, was the op-ed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Oz published when the program was announced. Their words: "Throwing money at struggling hospital operations is like a Band-Aid on a severed artery, leaving a broken system in place."

That is the whole argument in one sentence. Barr's proof that the at-risk hospitals will be fine is a fund the state says cannot be spent on hospitals in financial trouble.

What is actually changing

Barr describes the changes as saving Medicaid from fraud, waste and abuse, and says Medicaid spending will rise by $250 billion over ten years.

Here is what the law does to people in Kentucky, with the effective date the law itself sets for each:

Work requirements, by December 31, 2026 — adults covered by the Medicaid expansion have to complete 80 hours a month of work or a qualifying activity. Where the state cannot verify that from data it already holds, it must send a notice of noncompliance and drop the person if they cannot show compliance within 30 days.
Six-month eligibility renewals, for renewals scheduled on or after December 31, 2026 — twice the paperwork of the annual renewal it replaces.
Minimum out-of-pocket payments, October 1, 2028 — up to $35 a service for expansion adults earning between 100 and 138 percent of the poverty line. This one is two years out, not next year.

Barr's framing for the first one:

"We want work requirements so that people can graduate out of Medicaid into work-provided health insurance, commercial health insurance that reimburses providers, physicians, hospitals, and nurses on a more market-based level."

"Graduate" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. A person who loses coverage because they missed a renewal deadline has not graduated into anything.

Oz threatened to take the money back

The most striking thing said at that press conference did not come from Barr.

Oz explained that the rural health money goes to governors because people trust governors to spend it correctly. Then he added a condition:

"I don't want to do it. But if the money is not used wisely to improve the state of health in rural parts of Kentucky ... then we're going to have to take steps that we don't want to have to take."

So the $212.9 million that Barr is holding up as the answer to the hospital closures comes with a federal official standing beside him saying that "if for whatever reason the governor cannot use the money as promised in the grant, it will be taken by the federal government" — while the state says the rules already forbid spending it on the hospitals most at risk.

The part that hasn't changed

Barr's whole position rests on the claim that a law he voted for will not close hospitals. His evidence is a fund the state says it cannot aim at the hospitals in question, administered by an official who says he may take it back.

Meanwhile the changes themselves — work paperwork and six-month renewals from the end of this year, new out-of-pocket costs for low-income Kentuckians in 2028 — are not in dispute. Barr is not arguing they won't happen. He is arguing they are not a cut.

What the record shows

Andy Barr voted for the 2025 budget bill and now says its Medicaid changes are not cuts. His evidence is Kentucky's $212.9 million first-year share of a $50 billion rural health fund, awarded last December. Governor Beshear says federal rules bar that money from going to financially struggling hospitals, which are the ones the closure warnings are about. Standing next to Barr, the federal official who runs Medicaid warned the money could be taken back. Work requirements and six-month renewals start at the end of this year; the new out-of-pocket costs follow in 2028.

Sources

Hannah Pinski, Andy Barr and Dr. Oz defend changes coming to the Medicaid program, Lexington Herald-Leader (September 4, 2026).
Oz says rural health funding responsibility falls to governor, WKYT (September 4, 2026).
Christian Wohlfeil, Gov. Beshear defends rural hospital funding after scathing letter from Rep. Barr, LEX 18.
Barr Calls Out Beshear Over Inaccurate Rural Hospital Claims, Office of Rep. Andy Barr (August 25, 2026).
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mehmet Oz, Rural America's health care is collapsing. Here's how we transform it., USA TODAY (September 15, 2025).
Congressman Rogers Announces Nearly $213 Million Award for Rural Healthcare in Kentucky, Office of Rep. Hal Rogers (December 29, 2025).
Health Provisions in the 2025 Federal Budget Reconciliation Law, KFF.

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

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

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

Not immigration money. Housing money.

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

Any grant. All of them.

What that money actually pays for

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

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

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

How wide the net is

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

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

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

The Montana communities in the crosshairs

Downing has said what he thinks:

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

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

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

Downing did not respond.

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

Nineteen Republicans on this site signed it

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

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

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

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

The part nobody is saying out loud

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

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

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

What the bill does

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

Sources

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

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

Trump Pushed a Rival Out of the Kentucky Senate Race for Andy Barr in May. By Late July, Barr's Website Had Deleted the 'Trump-Endorsed' Badge and the Rally Photo.

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 07:15:51 +0000

On May 1, 2026, Donald Trump did more for Andy Barr than endorse him. He endorsed Barr for Mitch McConnell's open Senate seat and pushed one of Barr's rivals, businessman Nate Morris, out of the race entirely — offering him an ambassadorship instead. Morris took the deal and endorsed Barr. Eighteen days later, Barr swept the Republican primary.

Eight weeks after that, Barr's campaign website started deleting Trump.

What came off the site

We checked this ourselves against the Internet Archive rather than take anyone's word for it. Here is the Barr for Senate homepage on July 8, 2026, compared to the same page on July 28, 2026.

Gone from the homepage in those three weeks:

The red "Trump-Endorsed" badge sitting directly under his name.
The photo of Barr and Trump onstage at a rally, arms raised together — replaced with a picture of Barr walking outdoors with two children.
The "Endorsed by President Trump" pop-up, with its embedded video.
"Close the Border" as a section heading.
"Stand Proudly for Life" — deleted as a policy plank.
"Cut Waste, Grow Freedom" — also deleted.

Added in the same edit: "Backing the Blue" and "Fighting for Farmers." The rewritten issues page also named his Democratic opponent, Charles Booker, for the first time.

The count of the word "Trump" in the homepage's visible text went from five to two. The visible slogan changed too: "Kentucky Tough. 100% America First." became "Kentucky Tough, Kentucky First, Always."

America First, out. Kentucky First, in.

The Lexington Times, which first spotted the edits, dated them to July 16 using the site's own WordPress "last modified" timestamps, and counted 16 Trump references removed across the whole site — the homepage, the biography page and the issues page. On the biography page, according to the Times, three sentences disappeared, including the boasts that Barr was the first member of Kentucky's delegation to endorse Trump in 2024 and served as chairman of Trump's Kentucky primary campaign.

What stayed

The rewrite was not a clean break. Those same two boasts survive on the homepage, in the short "Meet Andy" summary, where they still read "First Member of Kentucky Delegation to Endorse President Trump" and "The Kentucky Chairman for President Trump's 2024 Primary Campaign." They were cut from the biography page and left standing one click away. The endorsements page still lists "President Donald J. Trump" first under "Key Endorsements," and the campaign's May 1 press release announcing that endorsement is still online.

And the hidden description that search engines and social networks display when someone shares the homepage was never touched. It still reads "Andy Barr. Kentucky Tough. 100% America First." — on the July 8 capture, on the July 28 capture, and on the live site today.

The campaign's answer

Asked what happened, Barr's communications director, Alex Bellizzi, did not explain the deletions. He said this instead:

"Kentuckians know that Andy Barr is proud to have President Trump's endorsement. He's laser focused on defending Kentucky common sense versus crazy Socialism. Andy Barr can't wait to keep fighting for Kentucky alongside President Trump as our next U.S. Senator."

That is a statement about how proud Barr is, offered in place of an answer about why the proof of it was taken down.

Why this is worth noticing

Kentucky is not a swing state. Trump carried it by roughly 30 points in 2024, and nonpartisan forecasters rate this Senate seat safe or solid Republican. Barr is not scrubbing Trump because he is scared of losing Kentucky.

He is doing it because a candidate's website is the one piece of campaign material the candidate fully controls, and what a campaign puts on it is a calculation about who they need in the room. In May, when the primary was the whole ballgame, the badge and the rally photo were the first things a visitor saw. By late July, with a general election ahead, they were a liability worth deleting — quietly, without a word to anyone, and without dropping the endorsement itself.

That is the tell. Barr didn't return the endorsement. He didn't disagree with Trump about anything. He kept the benefit and hid the receipt.

It is the same maneuver he ran in reverse in the primary, when he spent $1 million on an ad telling Kentucky "it's not a sin to be white" while running against a Black opponent. Barr calibrates what he says to whoever is listening. And when Kentucky's own hospitals said the budget bill he voted for would be devastating, he demanded the governor prove they were closing rather than answer for the vote.

Kentuckians vote on November 3.

What the archive shows

Donald Trump endorsed Andy Barr on May 1, 2026, and cleared his strongest rival out of the primary with the offer of an ambassadorship. Barr won the nomination eighteen days later. Between July 8 and July 28 — the Lexington Times pins it to July 16 — Barr's campaign homepage deleted the "Trump-Endorsed" badge, the photo of the two men together, the "Endorsed by President Trump" pop-up, the "Close the Border" heading and the "Stand Proudly for Life" plank, cutting mentions of Trump in that page's visible text from five to two. Internet Archive captures confirm every one of those removals. Barr's campaign was asked why and did not say.

Source

Barr's Senate campaign website dropped its "Trump-Endorsed" banner, rally photo and 16 Trump references in a July 16 rewrite — The Lexington Times, August 29, 2026. We independently verified the homepage changes against Internet Archive captures of barrforsenate.com from July 8, 2026 and July 28, 2026, and the surviving Trump material against the live site on August 30, 2026. Before-and-after image: The Lexington Times.

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.

Andy Barr Voted for the Bill Kentucky's Own Hospitals Called Devastating. Now He Wants the Governor to Prove They're Closing.

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:03:43 +0000

Andy Barr has represented central Kentucky in Congress since 2013. He is now running for the U.S. Senate.

Governor Andy Beshear has said for more than a year that 35 Kentucky rural hospitals are at risk of closing because of the budget bill Republicans passed in 2025. On August 25, 2026, Barr sent him a letter demanding that he produce his evidence. Barr wants the receipts, hospital by hospital, and wants Beshear to "publicly correct the record" if he can't produce them.

Two days later Beshear answered. He called the letter misleading and inaccurate, and then said the part Barr's letter never mentions.

The vote the letter leaves out

Barr's letter runs to a list of demands and several hundred words about what the governor should have to prove. It does not mention that Barr voted for the bill.

Beshear did mention it.

"Doing the president's bidding, [he] cut $21 billion over 10 years in Medicaid funding for Kentucky. Of course it's going to force closures where the margins are the smallest; that is just basic math."

Kentucky is not a random example. When the bill passed, KFF's analysis found it would hit Kentucky's rural health care harder than any other state in the country. The Kentucky Center for Economic Policy projects about 210,000 Kentuckians will lose Medicaid coverage, and rural Kentucky will lose $12.3 billion in Medicaid spending.

Barr's response to all of that, at the time, was that the law was "protecting and strengthening Medicaid for Kentuckians who truly need it — not ineligible recipients or illegal immigrants."

"They're still open"

Barr's central argument is that the warnings have not come true. He put it this way after Beshear responded:

"Medicaid spending is rising year-over-year, Kentucky's $212.9M is year-one funding, not five-year funding, and all 35 hospitals he said, 'will close' are still open."

Read that again. The cut Beshear describes runs over ten years. The law was signed a little over a year ago. Barr's evidence that a decade of cuts will not close hospitals is that the hospitals have not closed in the first year.

The other half of the argument does the same trick with a bigger number. Barr's letter notes that federal Medicaid and CHIP spending is projected to rise from $668 billion in 2026 to $892 billion in 2036. That is true, and it is beside the point. Health costs and enrollment both grow on their own. The cut is measured against what would otherwise have been spent — and in Kentucky that is $12.3 billion out of rural Medicaid and coverage gone for about 210,000 people. A budget that grows more slowly than the need it covers is still a cut to the person who loses coverage.

The fund he keeps pointing at

Barr's letter is built around $212.9 million Kentucky received from the Rural Health Transformation Program — the $50 billion fund Republicans created in the same bill. If hospitals are really in danger, Barr asks, why doesn't Beshear's plan spend the money on those 35 hospitals?

Beshear's answer is that he isn't allowed to.

He said Trump administration officials published an op-ed in USA Today when the program launched, telling states plainly that the fund was not for propping up struggling hospitals and that plans routing money to rural hospitals would not be approved. A Kentucky health official testified in June 2026 that the federal government had set strict rules demanding systemic change rather than more money for existing models.

"Next time before firing off letters, Barr should do a quick Google search," Beshear said. "Because you can find all of those statements, understand where money can and can't be sent from the administration that he supports."

This is not a Kentucky quirk. The fund covers roughly a third of the rural damage the same law does — $50 billion against $137 billion cut from rural Medicaid, by KFF's estimate — and the law never required the money to reach rural hospitals at all.

Barr is also not the first Republican to vote for the cuts and then campaign on the fund. Jake Ellzey of Texas announced a "historic investment" in rural health care from the same program he voted twice to pay for with Medicaid cuts. Mark Alford of Missouri voted for the bill and then, nearly eight months later, introduced legislation to keep rural hospitals open.

What the hospitals themselves say

Barr's letter attacks the source of the 35-hospital number, arguing that the Sheps Center analysis identified financially vulnerable hospitals nationally and never concluded that Kentucky's would close.

Beshear pointed him to the hospitals' own trade group. That group, Beshear said, "has been clear in their warnings, even stating that our state faces the highest number of rural hospitals at risk of shutting down [in] the country." Beshear said 350,000 Kentuckians would lose health coverage and 20,000 health care workers could lose their jobs.

A spokesperson for Barr said his office has talked with the association and continues to work with it, and that the group endorsed the House version of the bill — the version the Sheps Center analyzed. The spokesperson also said the association raised concerns about Senate changes, and that Barr's office helped preserve state-directed payment rates worth an additional $5.2 billion for Kentucky hospitals.

That is an admission, not a defense. The bill got worse for hospitals in the Senate. Barr voted for the final version anyway.

The short version

Andy Barr voted for a law that Governor Beshear says cuts $21 billion in Medicaid from Kentucky over ten years, in the state KFF found would be hit hardest in the country, with about 210,000 Kentuckians projected to lose coverage. More than a year later he wrote the governor demanding proof that rural hospitals are in danger, and offered as his own evidence that none of them have closed yet. His letter never mentions his vote.

Source

Margaret Vancampen, WHAS11: "Beshear, Barr trade barbs over Medicaid cuts to rural hospitals" (August 27, 2026). Photo credit AP/WHAS11 News.

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

Your Town Fought a Data Center. Seven Republicans Decided You Might Be Working for China.

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 07:10:18 +0000

Data centers are enormous warehouses full of computers that run AI. They drink electricity and water, and somebody has to build the power plants and power lines that feed them. That somebody is everyone else on the grid.

So people have started showing up at county meetings to say no. Not activists — county commissioners, farmers, retirees, parents worried about a well.

They are not a fringe. Gallup found that 71% of Americans oppose building a data center in their area — far more than the 53% who oppose a nuclear plant nearby. Seven in ten of your neighbors.

Seven Republicans have landed on the same answer to those seven in ten. Not "here's why you're wrong." Not "here's how we'll protect your bill."

They have decided you might be on a foreign payroll — and several of them have asked federal law enforcement to find out.

Tom Cotton asked the Justice Department to investigate the objectors

On June 10, 2026, Tom Cotton sent a two-page letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche asking DOJ to "investigate foreign influence efforts targeting the buildout of American AI infrastructure."

Not the companies building them. The people objecting to them. The specific ask was an investigation under the Foreign Agents Registration Act — the law for people secretly working for foreign governments.

The remarkable part is what's in the middle of his own letter:

"Americans certainly have valid concerns about potential rising energy costs and strains on natural resources related to data centers, and we should implement common sense regulations and legislation to protect communities from adverse effects."

He agrees with them in writing, then asks the federal government's top law enforcement agency to open a file on them anyway.

His evidence names one person and reaches for a professor who appeared on a panel. That's the case.

Bob Latta, Brett Guthrie and John Joyce wrote to the FBI

Six days earlier, on June 4, three House Republicans signed a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel asking what the administration was doing about "foreign influence campaigns" behind the data center backlash.

Bob Latta chairs the Energy Subcommittee. Brett Guthrie chairs the full Energy and Commerce Committee. John Joyce chairs its Oversight Subcommittee. These are the three men in the House with the most direct power to actually do something about an electric bill.

Their press release quotes Guthrie: "Americans deserve to know who is bankrolling the disinformation campaign that seeks to block critical infrastructure investments."

The letter leans on two reports — one from the Bitcoin Policy Institute, one from a group called Power the Future. Neither establishes any link between a foreign government and a township meeting in Ohio or Kentucky.

Latta's problem is the calendar. Thirty-six days before he signed it, he gaveled in his own subcommittee hearing and said this in his opening statement:

"Many question whether AI, and the data centers that power it, will ultimately do more harm than good, particularly when it comes to individual energy costs. These concerns deserve to be taken seriously."

In April the concerns deserved to be taken seriously. In June they were an FBI matter. Nothing changed in between except that the backlash got louder — because the bills got bigger. We laid out the whole timeline on Latta.

Guthrie's problem is his own district. Breckinridge County passed a one-year moratorium. Daviess County passed one too. Meade County killed a project outright after 3,000 people signed a petition. Three county governments in a deep-red Kentucky district, hitting the brakes — and the woman who started the Daviess petition said she'd never engaged with Guthrie's office at all. The chairman of the committee that governs the grid, and his constituents took their grid fight to the county courthouse instead.

Derrick Van Orden and Tim Burchett skipped the paperwork

Derrick Van Orden represents Wisconsin's 3rd District, where a data center is planned in Wisconsin Rapids. Asked about opposition, he said a lot of the information against the project comes "from the Chinese companies" who are "paying people to say this stuff."

Tim Burchett of Tennessee put it at one remove. There is "a lot of misinformation out there," he said, and "there's talk that the Chinese are putting it out because they're the ones that want to be in the business of it."

No letter, no FBI request. Just the theory, aired in public about their own constituents.

Tommy Tuberville called his neighbors' concerns "bull crap"

At least ten Alabama communities — Cullman, Birmingham, Leeds, Homewood, Fort Payne, Bessemer, Pinson, Wilsonville, Fairfield, Mobile — have pushed back on data centers. Cullman's city council voted unanimously for a one-year moratorium.

Tommy Tuberville, the Republican nominee for governor, told the Alabama Sheriffs Association:

"It's going to ruin the climate — bull crap. They are listening to all this nonsense they see on social media that's coming from China because China does not want us to grow."

Then he told them it wouldn't matter what they decided: "You can forget about doing away with it because it's coming."

The things Alabama city councils have actually been debating are water use, noise, electrical demand and landscaping. That's zoning, not a foreign influence campaign.

Somebody actually checked

This is the part that should end the argument.

NPR went looking for the Chinese campaign. Darren Linvill co-leads the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson, which tracks foreign influence operations online. His finding:

"We haven't found much."

His larger point was that the premise doesn't hold together. China runs enormous bot networks, but they're not interested in your county zoning board. As he put it, China "tends to care a lot more about what you think about China and China's economy than they tend to do about what you think about your neighbor and what's happening in your own backyard."

He told NPR he can't rule out that China is quietly paying influencers to oppose data centers. His point is that there would be no need to.

And on the people organizing:

"I think in this case, the people talking about data centers are real people with real passions and real perspectives and real opinions."

There is one real case. OpenAI banned a cluster of likely Chinese accounts generating anti-data-center content — probably a private Chinese firm working for provincial government clients. Read what OpenAI's own threat investigations lead, Ben Nimmo, said about it:

"This was not a case of an influence operation creating a debate. The debate existed already. This was an influence operation from China trying to interfere in it. We didn't see any signs that they succeeded."

The debate existed already. Seventy-one percent.

What this actually is

Strip the national-security language off and look at the structure.

Seven in ten Americans object to something. The politicians who want it built anyway cannot answer the objection on the merits — because the merits are a water table and an electric bill, and those are measurable. So the objection itself gets reclassified as a hostile act.

That move has a cost beyond this one fight. Cotton chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose job is to keep the surveillance apparatus pointed outward and inside the law. Latta, Guthrie and Joyce run the committee that decides what your utility can charge you. Every one of them chose to aim the government at the people asking questions rather than at the problem.

The neighbors in Cullman and Meade County and Wisconsin Rapids did not get a foreign wire transfer. They got a bill.

Sources

Geoff Brumfiel, "The theory taking the rich by storm: China funds data center haters," NPR, June 10, 2026 — Linvill, Nimmo and the OpenAI takedown. Van Orden's and Burchett's quotes are from "The data centers are coming. Is Congress ready?" Roll Call, Aug. 12, 2026. Cotton's request is in his June 10, 2026 letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, reported by Fox News; the Guthrie, Joyce and Latta letter to FBI Director Kash Patel is in their own June 4, 2026 press release. Tuberville's remarks to the Alabama Sheriffs Association were reported by WBRC, July 14, 2026, and by Yellowhammer News, July 14, 2026, which has the "forget about doing away with it" line. The list of Alabama communities is Brian Lyman's in the Alabama Reflector, July 27, 2026. Polling: Gallup, "Americans Oppose Data Centers in Their Area". Photo: protesters at the Utah state Capitol in Salt Lake City on May 23, 2026, opposing the Stratos data center in Box Elder County, by Natalie Behring / Getty Images, via NPR.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is actually being taken away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And TSA screeners got the same treatment

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

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

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

The House had a bill to end it permanently

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

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

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

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

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

The 20 Republicans who voted yes

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

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

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

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

The 195 who voted no

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

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

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

Colorado — Lauren Boebert, Jeff Crank, Jeff Hurd

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

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

Idaho — Russ Fulcher, Mike Simpson

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mary Miller

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

Iowa — Ashley Hinson

Kansas — Ron Estes, Tracey Mann, Derek Schmidt

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

Minnesota — Tom Emmer, Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach

Mississippi — Mike Ezell, Michael Guest, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Mike Flood, Adrian Smith

New York — Nick Langworthy, Claudia Tenney

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Mike Kennedy, Celeste Maloy, Blake Moore

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

The Senate has done nothing for eight months

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

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

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

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

This is not a fringe position they're protecting

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

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

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

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

We deserve better.

How they voted

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two of them were sworn in before Reagan was inaugurated

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

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

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

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

Here is the part that should end the argument.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why they don't leave: eleven of thirteen gavels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ones who won't even stand in a room

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

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

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

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

And then there's Grassley

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

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

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

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

This was supposed to be a job you leave

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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.

Hal Rogers Said the Bill "Strengthens Medicaid." Kentucky Takes the Biggest Hit in the Country, and 35 of Its Rural Hospitals Are at Risk.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:51:59 +0000

On July 3, 2025, the House sent Trump's budget bill to his desk. Hal Rogers voted yes, and then put out a statement about what he had just done.

He said the bill "strengthens Medicaid and SNAP benefits."

Rogers represents Kentucky's 5th District — the eastern Kentucky coalfield, one of the most Medicaid-dependent congressional districts in the United States. So it is worth checking that sentence against what the bill actually does to the people who live there.

What the analysts found

KFF, a nonpartisan health research organization, ran the numbers on the bill's effect on rural health care state by state. Kentucky came out worst in the country — a projected $10 billion decline in Medicaid payments to rural providers over ten years, and 130,000 rural Kentuckians expected to lose Medicaid coverage.

The Kentucky Hospital Association warned the law would eliminate 33,000 jobs as Medicaid underfunding pushed hospitals to cut services or close. Its president told the Kentucky Lantern the final version "effectively eliminates" the supplemental Medicaid payments Kentucky hospitals say are critical to staying open.

Then there's the hospital list. Using research from the Sheps Center at the University of North Carolina, the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy identified 35 Kentucky rural hospitals at heightened risk of closing — more than any other state. As they put it: for every ten hospitals at risk of closure in the country, at least one is in Kentucky.

Read the names on that list and you are reading a map of Hal Rogers's district:

Whitesburg ARH Hospital
Harlan ARH Hospital
Middlesboro ARH Hospital
Barbourville ARH Hospital
McDowell ARH Hospital
Mary Breckinridge ARH Hospital
Highlands ARH Regional Medical Center

Whitesburg, Harlan, Middlesboro, Barbourville, McDowell, Hyden, Prestonsburg. Those are eastern Kentucky coalfield towns, and they are all in Hal Rogers's district. When a hospital closes in a place like Harlan, there is no second hospital across town.

The SNAP half of his sentence doesn't hold up either. The law trims future food assistance funding and pushes part of the cost onto states. 575,000 Kentuckians are on SNAP.

"Able-bodied adults... who choose not to work"

Rogers went further than one adjective. His statement explained the reasoning:

"The bill protects the longevity of Medicaid benefits for our most vulnerable population by slashing waste, fraud and abuse of the program. With 4.8 million able-bodied adults receiving Medicaid, who choose not to work, the bill enforces a 20-hour weekly work requirement for those individuals who do not have small kids. Without question, we are adding integrity and strength to Medicaid and SNAP assistance for those who need it most in the years ahead."

The phrase "who choose not to work" is doing all the work in that paragraph, and it isn't true.

KFF's analysis of Medicaid adults aged 19 to 64 — leaving out people on Medicare or receiving disability benefits — found that 92% are either working or not working because of caregiving responsibilities, illness or disability, or school. Sixty-four percent hold a full- or part-time job. The remaining 8% gave reasons including retirement or being unable to find work.

That is not a population choosing idleness. It's a population of people with jobs, people caring for a relative, people who are sick, and students.

And the thing that actually removes people from the rolls isn't a work test. It's paperwork. Kentucky's requirements start in January 2027, and the state is still working out how to run them. Emily Beauregard of Kentucky Voices for Health told WUKY this month that the state's Medicaid department "is still trying to understand how they'll implement these incredibly complicated new requirements," and that the paperwork and more frequent reporting will catch even the most vulnerable people. The Kentucky Center for Economic Policy found the counties most exposed are in eastern and southern Kentucky.

People who qualify will lose coverage anyway, because they missed a form.

He knew

The part of Rogers's statement that got less attention is the part where he says the quiet thing.

"While the House-version of the bill would have been far better for rural healthcare, the Senate added a $50 billion safety net for rural healthcare providers..."

He is telling you, on the record, that he understood the version he voted for was worse for rural hospitals than the one the House had written. He voted for it anyway.

And then:

"Ultimately, this is not the end of our reconciliation work, and as a cardinal member of the House Appropriations Committee, I will continue working to improve funding options for our rural hospitals and clinics."

Translated: he voted for something he knew would hurt hospitals in his district, and promised to try to fix it later using a different job. He has held that different job — senior appropriator — for three decades. If the fix were available, it would not be waiting on a promise.

Words versus arithmetic

There are two ways to read "strengthens Medicaid."

One is that Rogers believes work requirements make the program more sustainable, and everything else is a detail. The other is that he represents a district so safely Republican that the vote was never in doubt, and the statement was written for people who would never check.

Either way the arithmetic doesn't move. Kentucky is projected to lose more rural Medicaid money than any state in the country. Thirty-five of its hospitals are on a closure-risk list. At least seven of them are in his district. And 130,000 rural Kentuckians are expected to lose coverage in a place where losing coverage often means driving two counties over, or not going.

This is a habit with him. Kentucky has more black lung recipients than any state, they live in his district, and when local Republicans asked Washington to raise their benefits, Rogers wouldn't back the bill. He has spent 45 years being extremely effective at moving federal money — toward contractors, toward a $17 million airport with no airline, toward a national ID card plant in a town of 8,000. The hospitals can wait.

Rogers is 88 and running for a 24th term. Kentucky's rural hospitals may not get 24 more years.

Sources

Kentucky Republicans in Congress hail passage of bill the state's hospitals call 'devastating' — Jamie Lucke, Kentucky Lantern, July 3, 2025
Kentucky Faces the Nation's Highest Number of Rural Hospitals at Risk of Closure if Congress Cuts Medicaid — Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, June 17, 2025
Understanding the Intersection of Medicaid and Work: An Update — KFF
Eligible Kentuckians could lose coverage under Medicaid changes — Nadia Ramlagan, WUKY, August 10, 2026. Photo: KNC/Adobe Stock, via WUKY.

Hal Rogers Put Language in a Spending Bill Ordering Homeland Security to Hire the Trade Group That Flew Him to Hawaii Six Times.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:50:01 +0000

On May 19, 2026, Hal Rogers won the Republican nomination in Kentucky's 5th Congressional District, beating four primary challengers. He is 88 years old. He has been in Congress since 1981. If he wins in November, it will be his 24th term.

Forty-five years is long enough to judge somebody by results. So here are the results.

Kentucky has more economically "distressed" counties than any other state, according to the Appalachian Regional Commission's most recent county rankings. Distressed means the worst 10% of counties in the entire country. As James Branscome, a former ARC staffer, laid out in the Kentucky Lantern, in many eastern Kentucky counties the poverty rate runs at double Appalachia's own ten-year average, and federal transfer payments — Social Security, black lung benefits — make up well over half of taxpayer income. Rogers's district is the state's Appalachian coalfield: Harlan, Letcher, Perry, Owsley, McCreary, Knott, Pike and two dozen more counties like them.

That is what southeastern Kentucky looks like after nearly half a century of being represented by one of the most powerful appropriators in Washington.

It is not that Rogers failed to bring money home. The Lexington Herald-Leader nicknamed him the "Prince of Pork." The question is where the money went, and who else got paid along the way.

"Something stinks in Corbin"

In 2006, New York Times reporter Eric Lipton published an investigation into why the Department of Homeland Security, four years and tens of millions of dollars into building a tamperproof ID card for airport, rail and port workers, still hadn't produced a single one.

The answer he found was that the program kept taking detours through Hal Rogers's district. Rogers chaired the House subcommittee that controlled the entire Homeland Security budget.

The Times documented what those detours produced:

Rogers inserted language into appropriations bills that pushed the government to use older green-card technology and to produce the new card in Corbin, Kentucky — a town of 8,000 in his district. Homeland Security had already identified a smart-card approach as more secure and more flexible. It had to spend $4 million on a study to compare them anyway. The study concluded the smart card was far superior.
When contractors started printing prototype cards in Pennsylvania to save time, the government made them ship the equipment to Corbin, because Rogers's mandate had been written into the contract. Only about 5,000 test cards were being printed. It added cost and caused another delay.
John Rogers, the congressman's son, was hired as a computer systems administrator by Senture, a Kentucky call-center company that landed Homeland Security work on the program. Rogers had attended Senture's ribbon-cutting in 2003 and arranged financing for a $4 million department contract for the company in 2004. His son said the job "has nothing to do with who my father is."
Since 2000, a Virginia trade association — the American Association of Airport Executives — had paid for more than $75,000 in travel for Rogers and his wife: six trips to Hawaii, four to California, one to Ireland. In one year alone he spent two weeks traveling on their tab. Political Money Line ranked him seventh out of all 535 members of Congress in travel gifts accepted over five years.
Rogers's staff spent years pressing Homeland Security to hire that same trade association for the ID card program. When the department wouldn't, Rogers put language in the 2006 appropriations bill ordering it to. The association promptly went looking for investors willing to put up as much as $25 million to share in the for-profit venture it created to cash in.
In all, the Times found, about $100,000 in contributions had come to Rogers from parties with at least some ties to the ID card effort.

An industry official called the arrangement "sleazy." A watchdog called it "a perversion of every part of the contracting process." A securities analyst who followed the ID card industry put it more bluntly: "Something stinks in Corbin."

The no-bid contract was killed days before the story ran, after competitors complained to Congress. The mandate requiring the cards be made in Corbin was not.

Rogers's public response to all of it was a statement saying he had been "extremely frustrated with the slow, wandering pace of the program." He declined to say anything else.

The pattern, in his own words

When the Herald-Leader called him the Prince of Pork, Rogers had an answer that explains a lot:

"I'm two people. I'm a national legislator and I'm a local Congressman."

The Center for Public Integrity reported in 2010 that Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington alleged Rogers had steered roughly $30 million in 2009 earmarks to companies that gave $48,000 to his political committees. It also noted that in 2010 alone he ranked fourth in the House with 34 earmarks worth more than $68.3 million.

Two more from that era, reported by ABC News' Jonathan Karl and quoted by HuffPost as he was about to take the Appropriations Committee gavel:

A tiny airport near his hometown got $17 million in federal dollars and had so little traffic that its last commercial airline service ended.
Rogers pushed through a $5 million measure for conservation groups working with endangered wild cats. One of the few groups eligible was the Namibia-based Cheetah Conservation Fund — which employed his daughter.

None of this was illegal. That's the thing worth sitting with. Steering federal money toward your donors, your district's favored firms, and the occasional organization that employs your own child is, under the rules Congress writes for itself, ordinary business.

Who pays him now

Rogers chairs the Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science and sits on the Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense. His five biggest PAC donors since 2020 are the defense contractors whose federal contracts those subcommittees fund: Boeing, RTX, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics. Blue Origin is on the list too.

The job is the same as it was in 2006. The committee is bigger.

What eastern Kentucky got instead

Here is the part that should decide the November election.

Rogers represents one of the most Medicaid-dependent districts in America. In July 2025 he voted for Trump's budget bill and put out a statement claiming it "strengthens Medicaid and SNAP benefits" — while Kentucky's hospitals called the same bill "devastating."

His district is the heart of black lung country. Kentucky has more black lung benefit recipients than any state. Local Republicans in eastern Kentucky have been publicly asking Washington to raise those benefits, and Rogers won't back the bill.

He is not an obscure backbencher who couldn't deliver. He is the Dean of the House, a former chairman of the full Appropriations Committee, a man who has been able to move federal money at will for four decades. He moved a national security program to a town of 8,000 people because he could. He moved $17 million to an airport with no airline.

And after all of it, his constituents live in the counties the federal government itself classifies as the worst-off in the country.

Forty-five years. Twenty-four terms, if voters give him one more. Somebody in Kentucky's 5th has done very well out of that arrangement. It isn't most of the people who live there.

Sources

In Kentucky Hills, a Homeland Security Bonanza — Eric Lipton, The New York Times, May 14, 2006
Hal Rogers: Appropriations Committee? — Peter H. Stone, Center for Public Integrity, November 4, 2010
Hal Rogers, 'Prince Of Pork,' To Be Appointed GOP Chairman Of House Appropriations Committee — HuffPost, December 7, 2010
Why US should not abandon its debt to Appalachia — James Branscome, Kentucky Lantern, July 14, 2025

The Chemical Industry Spent $80,276 on TV Ads Praising Brett Guthrie — Months After He Started Rewriting the Law That Regulates It

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:49:00 +0000

Trade associations don't usually buy television time to say nice things about a congressman who has done nothing for them.

On May 5, 2026, the American Chemistry Council — the trade group for America's chemical manufacturers — spent $80,276 on a "television and online advertisement" supporting Brett Guthrie. It reported the expenditure to the Federal Election Commission the next day.

The ad ran for about two weeks across Kentucky's 2nd Congressional District. It praised his work on taxes and energy, and it asked his own constituents to call his office and tell him to keep it up.

Guthrie chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee. That committee writes the nation's chemical safety law.

What happened four months earlier

On January 15, 2026, Guthrie and Gary Palmer, who chairs the Environment Subcommittee, released a discussion draft of a bill to rewrite the Toxic Substances Control Act — TSCA, the main federal law governing industrial chemicals. It was last significantly updated in 2016.

Guthrie and Palmer's framing, in the announcement:

"Targeted and measured reforms will increase accountability, strengthen domestic manufacturing, and safeguard the health and safety of our communities."

The chemical industry's reaction was immediate and warm. ACC chief executive Chris Jahn, in a statement dated the same day:

"Getting TSCA back on track is critical for American chemistry... this bill will help provide the durable fixes to TSCA — for both new and existing chemicals — that make the U.S. the most competitive place in the world to manufacture chemicals."

Environmental and public-health groups read the same draft and saw the opposite. Melanie Benesh of the Environmental Working Group:

"President [Donald J.] Trump promised to 'Make America Healthy Again,' but this legislation would do the opposite, flooding the market with chemicals whose risks are unknown and potentially dangerous, and drastically undermining chemical safety in the workplace."

And Joanna Slaney of the Environmental Defense Fund said the draft "also severely undermines EPA's ability to protect Americans from the worst toxic chemicals already in use, like cancer-causing formaldehyde and vinyl chloride."

The committee held its hearing on the draft on January 22.

Then the ads

Sequence matters here, so here it is plainly:

January 15, 2026 — Guthrie's committee releases the TSCA rewrite draft.
January 15 — the American Chemistry Council publicly praises it, hours later.
January 22 — Guthrie's committee holds the hearing.
May 5 — the American Chemistry Council spends $80,276 on television and online ads in Guthrie's district, telling his constituents he's doing a great job.

The $80,276 is not an estimate. It is the amount on ACC's own FEC filing, reported as an independent expenditure supporting Guthrie. (The filing appears twice in FEC records — once as a 24-hour notice and once on the periodic report. It is one $80,276 buy, not two.)

The ACC's political action committee has been giving to Guthrie's campaign directly for years, too — $27,000 since 2008, according to his committee's FEC filings. Ten thousand dollars of that came in a single day, March 10, 2025 — his first months as chairman.

Why a chairman is worth this much

Energy and Commerce is not a normal committee. Its jurisdiction runs across health care, energy, telecommunications, consumer protection and the environment — your doctor's bill, your phone bill and your power bill all pass through it. Guthrie was elected to chair it on December 9, 2024, taking the gavel at the start of the current Congress.

Chemical safety sits inside it. So when a chairman decides to open TSCA up, the industry regulated by TSCA has an enormous amount riding on how he does it — and on whether the law's provisions get weaker or stronger in the process.

There was a specific reason the law was going to be reopened in 2026 at all: TSCA's authority for the EPA to collect fees from industry to fund chemical reviews was expiring. Environmental groups warned all through the previous year that cracking the statute open to fix the fees would create an opening to weaken everything else in it. Then the draft came out, and that is what they said had happened.

The pattern on this committee

Guthrie is also the chairman who handed the Environment Subcommittee — the panel that handles the Clean Air Act, chemical safety, hazardous waste and Superfund — to Gary Palmer, a member with a 1% lifetime environmental record and $33,000 from Alabama's biggest coal company.

Palmer is the subcommittee chair whose name is on the TSCA announcement alongside Guthrie's. He is also on the same FEC filing. The report that disclosed the $80,276 for Guthrie disclosed $131,018 for Palmer, on the same day, through the same ad agency, for the same kind of television and online advertisement — $211,294 between the two of them.

What Guthrie's record already says

Guthrie has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025, and a 5% lifetime score. Over 17 years in Congress, that is a record with almost no tension in it — a lifetime score of 5% means he sided with the environmental position on roughly one vote in twenty.

And it's not only chemicals. The industries his committee regulates run his donor list. His three biggest organizational totals this cycle are Alphabet at $54,500, AT&T at $51,500 and Comcast at $40,062 — money from those companies' PACs, employees and their families rather than from the corporations themselves; the Alphabet total is entirely employee money. On the PAC ledger since 2020, the drugmaker Amgen has given him $40,000 and the Louisville health insurer Humana $38,500.

The chemical industry's ad campaign is just the most public version of the arrangement. Most donors write the check quietly. The ACC bought airtime to tell his constituents how pleased it is.

The thing to hold onto

An industry trade group does not spend $80,276 in a congressman's district as a thank-you note. It spends it because it wants the same thing to keep happening.

What was happening, in this case, was a rewrite of the law that decides which chemicals can be sold in this country and how carefully anyone has to check them first — written by a chairman whose lifetime environmental record is 5%, and whose subcommittee chair's is 1%.

The people in Kentucky's 2nd District who saw that ad in May were being asked to call their congressman and thank him for it.

Source

American Chemistry Council, "ACC Launches Ad Highlighting Rep. Brett Guthrie's Work on Taxes and Energy", May 5, 2026; and Larry Pearl, "Republicans release draft proposal to update TSCA", Chemical & Engineering News, January 16, 2026. Photo: Associated Press, via C&EN.

Three Counties in Brett Guthrie's District Voted to Slow Down Data Centers. He Chairs the Committee That Could Actually Help Them.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:47:00 +0000

People in Kentucky's 2nd Congressional District have been showing up at county meetings with signs that say "listen to the people."

They are not there about Washington. They are there about data centers — the enormous warehouses of computers that run artificial intelligence, that drink electricity and water, and that require somebody to build new power plants to feed them. Somebody, meaning everyone else on the grid.

Their congressman is Brett Guthrie, and he is not a backbencher on this. He is the Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee — the committee in Congress with jurisdiction over the electric grid. If there is one member of the House who could do something about what data centers do to a power bill, it is him.

Here is what his own district has done, and what he has done back.

The revolt in KY-02

E&E News laid out the count in June. In Guthrie's district:

Breckinridge County passed a one-year moratorium in November 2025.
Daviess County passed a one-year moratorium on construction.
Meade County voted a data center proposal down after 3,000 people signed a petition against it.

That's three counties. Not activists bused in from somewhere — county governments in a deep-red district, hitting the brakes.

Maranda McDaniel, a Guthrie constituent who started the Daviess County petition, told E&E she was "really surprised" by how fast it took off. She also said something worth noting: she and the other organizers have been working county and city officials, and had not engaged with Guthrie's office at all.

The chairman of the committee that governs the grid, and the people in his district fighting a grid fight went to the county courthouse instead.

Meanwhile, in Hancock County, the Bitcoin mining company TeraWulf is planning to build on the site of a former aluminum smelter — a project that could draw as much as $14 billion and rank among the largest private investments in Kentucky history.

A Change.org petition against that one, quoted by E&E, gets at why people are uneasy:

"[The smelter plant] was a source of real, family-supporting jobs for Hancock County... More than 600 workers were left waiting and hoping production would one day return. Now, those hopes have been replaced with a very different proposal."

Six hundred jobs became a computer warehouse. That's the trade people are being asked to accept.

What Guthrie said

Asked about the pushback, Guthrie was careful:

"I hear from people, I do. I think it's fair to be concerned. Now, to say, 'don't do anything,' I think that can take our communities out of what could be the industry of the future. But anytime there's anything developing, it makes people anxious, and it's fair to have concerns."

And later in the same story:

"I do not minimize the concerns people have about data centers or just AI. You should be anxious about it."

That is a man who has heard his constituents and does not intend to do what they're asking.

What he did

Two things, and they point in different directions.

First, he asked the federal government to investigate the opposition. In June, Guthrie signed a letter asking the FBI and the White House science advisers to look into whether China is behind some of the campaign against data centers. "Americans deserve to know who is bankrolling the disinformation campaign that seeks to block critical infrastructure investments," he said.

We've written about that letter and the two advocacy-group reports it leans on — Bob Latta of Ohio signed it too, five weeks after telling a hearing that constituents' concerns "deserve to be taken seriously". Neither report establishes any link between a foreign government and a county meeting in Kentucky.

The head of the industry's own trade group, the Data Center Coalition, was more honest about it than the chairmen were. Asked about the China claims, Josh Levi told E&E: "I have no reason to disbelieve that there is some of that happening, but I also indicated we know that there's also organic opposition in communities."

Three thousand signatures in Meade County is organic opposition in a community.

Second, he moved a bill. On July 21, 2026, Guthrie's committee approved H.R. 9340, the Ratepayer Protection Act by 52-0. It was introduced by Gabe Evans of Colorado, with Kathy Castor of Florida as its lead Democratic cosponsor — not by Guthrie, who is not on it at all — but he has made it a priority and predicted a floor vote.

Guthrie's pitch for it: "As we continue to build the infrastructure needed to win the AI race with China to AI dominance, it's critical that the companies building data centers are the ones paying for their own electric bills."

That sounds like exactly what the people at those county meetings want. Read the bill and it is considerably less than that.

What the Ratepayer Protection Act actually does

It amends a 1978 law called the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act, and the mechanism it uses is the one that law is known for: it creates a federal standard and then tells states to think about it.

From the bill text: within one year of enactment, each state regulatory authority "shall commence consideration... or set a hearing date for consideration" of the standard. Within two years, each "shall complete the consideration and make the determination."

Consider. Determine. Nowhere does the bill require a state to adopt the standard. A state utility commission can hold the hearing, decide against it, and be in full compliance with the law.

The bill goes further in the other direction, too. A whole subsection says the requirement doesn't apply at all if, before enactment, the state already "conducted a proceeding to consider implementation of the standard (or a comparable standard)" — or if the state legislature merely "has voted on" it. A proceeding that considered it and said no still counts.

So: a bill that requires states to hold a meeting, with an exemption for states that already held a meeting.

There is a reason it passed 52-0. The earlier, broader version of it carried endorsements from Microsoft and Google — the companies building the data centers. Before the markup, committee leaders narrowed it to cover data centers alone rather than every customer drawing 100 megawatts or more, and the industry's trade group objected to that change. Microsoft and Google have not publicly changed their positions.

Alphabet, Google's parent company, is the largest single organization on Guthrie's 2026 contributor list at $54,500 — all of it from people who work there, none from the company's PAC. Amazon accounts for $33,500, $10,000 of it straight from its PAC. Both are named on his own report card.

The bills are already going up

None of this is hypothetical for Kentuckians.

In February 2026, the Kentucky Public Service Commission approved rate increases for the state's largest electric utility: 4.73% for the average residential LG&E electric customer — about $5.14 a month — and 6.54% for Kentucky Utilities customers, about $8.73 a month. The utility had asked for more, and the commission cut it back.

Buried in the same order, per the Kentucky Lantern's account, were new regulations for handling the electricity load from power-hungry data centers. The state commission was already writing data center rules while Guthrie's bill was still asking states to consider writing them.

That's the shape of this whole story. The states, counties and utility commissions are the ones actually deciding what data centers pay. The one federal official with the most direct power over the grid asked the FBI about the people complaining, and moved a bill that tells the states to think it over.

The chairman's job

Guthrie has been in Congress since 2009 — 17 years — and he runs one of the most powerful committees in the House. He is the person who decides which bills his committee takes up and which ones it doesn't. He gets to set the agenda.

He used that agenda to hold a hearing, advance a bill that requires nothing, and go after "who is bankrolling" the opposition.

Three counties in his own district have already voted. They did not need a briefing from the FBI to figure out what they think.

Source

Amelia Davidson and Nico Portuondo, "Powerful House Republican getting pressure on data centers back home", E&E News by POLITICO, June 16, 2026. Photo: Francis Chung/POLITICO.

$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.

James Comer Spent Two Years Subpoenaing the Bidens. On Epstein, He Let the Attorney General Skip the Oath and the Camera.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:21:25 +0000

James Comer runs the congressional investigation into how the federal government handled the Jeffrey Epstein files. As chairman of the House Oversight Committee, he decides who gets called, in what format, under what rules, and whether the public ever sees it.

We know what Comer looks like when he wants answers. We watched him do it for two years to the Biden family — subpoenas, depositions, an impeachment inquiry, a nearly 300-page report.

The Epstein investigation does not look like that.

The Attorney General Didn't Have to Be Sworn In

In March 2026, the Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Attorney General Pam Bondi over the Justice Department's handling of the Epstein files. She was scheduled to sit for a deposition on April 14. That deposition never happened; she was removed as attorney general around that time.

She finally appeared on May 29 — and by then the terms had changed.

Instead of a deposition, Comer agreed to a voluntary, closed-door transcribed interview. She was not sworn in. It was not videotaped. She brought Justice Department lawyers with her, including Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, attending as agency counsel rather than as her personal attorney. The committee would release a transcript, but no video.

Every one of those is a choice, and every one of them made the session weaker. Not under oath means no perjury exposure. No video means no clip of a witness pausing, deflecting, or looking at her lawyer. Agency counsel in the room means someone is there to object.

Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the committee, said afterward:

"We continue to be incredibly disappointed of the decision to not have this interview videotaped and then released to the American public."

And on the central question, it didn't matter what anyone asked. According to the transcript, Bondi declined to answer questions about President Trump's involvement in the handling of the files — including when she and Trump first discussed the Epstein investigation.

The chairman had subpoena power. He used it to get a conversation.

He Won't Call the People the Reporting Points At

In June 2026, The New York Times reported that Vice President JD Vance and other top advisers had repeatedly met in the White House Situation Room in 2025 to discuss public demands for the Epstein records.

Garcia wrote to Comer asking him to bring White House officials in. As he put it to reporters:

"We have reporting now, I think pretty substantial reporting, that the vice president is leading meetings in the Situation Room about the Epstein files, so they have a responsibility to come forward and explain to us why the hell that's happening."

Asked directly about Vance and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Comer told Spectrum News he would not call them in. His answer was about Democrats, not about the meetings:

"All they go and imply is the Epstein files is just three million pages about Donald Trump and his cabinet, and that's not true. We're bringing anybody."

"We're bringing anybody" was said in the same interview in which he ruled out calling the vice president.

He is willing to lean on witnesses outside the White House. When Alan Dershowitz skipped a scheduled transcribed interview in July, Comer wrote to him that "your counsel failed to provide a reason for your refusal to testify" and that "this is unacceptable," and warned that the committee would "explore all available tools at its disposal, including the use of the compulsory process" if Dershowitz didn't appear on September 2.

So the chairman does know how to threaten a subpoena. He just doesn't aim it at the White House.

He Stopped Holding Hearings on Epstein

In May 2026, Democrats on the committee flew to Palm Beach and held their own field hearing with Epstein survivors — because, as members of the minority, they can't schedule an official one.

Rep. Maxwell Frost explained why they had to:

"We want to host this here in D.C., but James Comer doesn't want to call any more hearings, because he knows that we would be able to successfully issue more subpoenas to move this investigation forward."

Frost said the committee had shifted to round tables, "which are unofficial hearings that are actually off the record, not under oath", and accused Comer of "obstructing this investigation and completely doing everything he can to help the White House cover this up."

That word — "unofficial" — is the whole design. A formal hearing creates a record, a transcript, and a procedural path to more subpoenas. A round table creates a conversation nobody has to answer for.

The Pattern Started With the First Subpoena

This isn't new as of 2026. It showed up in the very first round of Epstein subpoenas.

In July 2025, two of Comer's subcommittees told him to issue two subpoenas. He moved on them at very different speeds.

On July 22, a subcommittee adopted Tim Burchett's motion to subpoena Ghislaine Maxwell. Comer issued that subpoena the next day.

The subpoena for the Justice Department's actual Epstein files didn't go out until August 5 — "nearly two weeks after Republicans on one of the panel's subcommittees joined with Democrats and voted to direct committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., to subpoena the DOJ," as NPR reported.

One day for the convicted associate already sitting in federal prison. Nearly two weeks for the Trump administration.

There's one more. In March 2026, Comer went on Fox News and said the federal government "asked New Mexico to stop their investigation" of Epstein's ranch — a state criminal probe shut down in 2019, during Trump's first term, when the Justice Department was run by Attorney General William Barr. Comer said it out loud, on television, as chairman of the committee with subpoena power.

He has not hauled in the officials who made that call. New Mexico eventually had to sue the Justice Department itself to get at its own investigation.

Compare It to the Investigation He Wanted

The contrast isn't hypothetical. Comer ran a very different investigation, in the same chair, with the same tools.

For nearly two years he co-led an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden and his family. Depositions. Subpoenas. Public hearings. It ended in August 2024 with a nearly 300-page report from his committee and two others that rehashed familiar allegations and recommended no specific articles of impeachment, leaving the next step to the full House. Biden was never impeached.

And when the shoe was on the other foot, Comer said the quiet part plainly. In January 2023 he announced an investigation into classified documents found at Biden's home — then said days later that his committee would not investigate Trump's handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago:

"There have been so many investigations of President Trump. I don't feel like we need to spend a whole lot of time investigating President Trump."

That was 2023. Nothing in 2026 suggests he changed his mind.

Why This Matters to People in Kentucky

It's easy to read all this as a Washington fight between two parties over a chairman's calendar. It isn't.

The Oversight Committee is one of the only tools the public has to force the federal government to explain itself. It's not a partisan asset — it's a public one. When the person holding it decides in advance which side of the building he won't point it at, the tool stops working for everybody, including the people in Kentucky's 1st District who sent him there.

The survivors of Jeffrey Epstein have spent years being told the government will get to the bottom of it. Comer says so himself — "the government has failed the survivors of Epstein," he told Spectrum News, "and that dates back several administrations."

He is right about that. He is also the person currently in charge of doing something about it, and he's the one who decided the attorney general didn't need to raise her right hand.

Comer isn't hard to find on this. He's just hard to ask — he skipped a town hall his own constituents organized in July 2025 after they reached out to his office eight times trying to find a date.

We've seen this shape before, one floor up in the same party. House Majority Whip Tom Emmer amplifies one Oversight Committee investigation while saying nothing about the Epstein one. The difference is that Emmer only has to stay quiet. Comer is the one holding the gavel.

Source

Spectrum News, "Rep. James Comer rejects calls for White House officials' Epstein testimony" (June 2026). Photo: Thomas Lau/Spectrum News.

James Comer Wrote a Bill to Take D.C.'s Tax Code Away. DoorDash Wrote In to Back It.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:17:19 +0000

On July 16, 2026, James Comer introduced a bill to take the District of Columbia's tax code away from the people who live there. Six days later his committee advanced it on a party-line vote.

He said at that markup what it was for. Not a budget crisis, not any particular tax — the next set of people D.C. voters had just elected. The bill, Comer said, "enhances Congress's constitutional oversight authority over D.C. to restrain irresponsible policies pursued by future socialist and ultra-progressive D.C. Democrats." A month before he filed it, D.C. Democrats had picked a democratic socialist, Ward 4 Council member Janeese Lewis George, in a primary she is expected to win in November.

Nine days before he filed it, the D.C. Council had voted to add a 20-cent fee to third-party food deliveries. Twenty cents. Not a tax on income, not a tax on property. Two dimes on a burrito. DoorDash — a company with an $81 billion market capitalization and $14 billion in annual revenue — had fought that fee at the Council and lost, with a petition, social media ads, a commissioned poll and a mobile digital display parked outside the Wilson Building.

So when Comer's bill reached markup, DoorDash wrote in to back it, and Comer entered the company's letter into the official record.

What the Bill Actually Does

Right now, when the D.C. Council changes a tax, the change takes effect after a 30-day window unless Congress votes to stop it. Congress already has a veto. It just has to bother using it.

Comer's bill flips that around. Under H.R. 9720, no tax or fee change in the District could take effect at all unless a joint resolution approving it passed both chambers of Congress within 60 days and was then signed into law by the president. Debate would be capped at one hour per chamber.

Think about what that means in practice. A city government would need the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate to stop what they're doing and hold a vote before it could adjust a parking fee.

D.C. Council Chair Phil Mendelson wrote to Comer to point out the part Comer's own framing leaves out: the bill applies to decreases as well as increases. It would, Mendelson wrote, "straightjacket the District because it would paralyze our tax code," and would "also freeze our General License Law." He warned it would likely trigger a downgrade of the District's bond rating.

At-Large Councilmember Robert White put it more plainly:

"It would let a Congress that can't even keep its own government open decide whether D.C. can fund its own police, schools, and services. … It's a veto over our own city … We've balanced our budget more than 30 years running. We've earned the right to run our own city."

The bill was also opposed by AFSCME, which said it "endangers public services in D.C.," and by the League of Women Voters, which called it "the latest in a long line of attacks on DC's democracy and the stability of its finances."

The Oversight Committee reported it out 23–18 on July 22.

The Company That Wrote In to Back It

Comer framed the bill, on the day he filed it and again at the markup, as a fight against ideology:

"Radical D.C. Democrats want to solve their spending problem by reaching deeper into taxpayers' pockets and driving further on the path to socialism."

But the loudest voice on the bill's side isn't a taxpayer. It's a corporation with a delivery-fee problem.

DoorDash's head of North American policy, John Horton, sent Comer a letter on July 22 backing H.R. 9720 — and Comer entered it into the committee record. Horton's letter described the bill as requiring congressional approval "before the District of Columbia can impose or increase a tax or fee."

That description leaves out the half that Mendelson flagged in his own letter to Comer. The bill reaches everything in title 47 of the D.C. Code — taxation, licensing, permits, assessments, and fees — in both directions. A tax cut would need the same act of Congress as a tax hike.

Horton is a lobbyist. Before DoorDash, he lobbied for the vaping company Juul and for Lyft, after working on Capitol Hill for a House committee chairman.

Residents noticed. The group Free DC launched a campaign asking people to delete the DoorDash app and post screenshots of their cancellations. Horton, in a statement to WUSA9, said DoorDash supports D.C. Home Rule — while his letter backing a bill to override home rule sat in the committee record.

Comer Helped Blow the Hole He Says D.C. Should Have Fixed by Cutting

Here is the part that makes this more than a bad bill.

Comer's argument is that D.C. has "a spending problem" and, as he told the Washington Times the day he filed the bill, that "the D.C. Council has rejected necessary spending reforms and is instead now considering tax increases that would punish residents, burden businesses, and further weaken the District's economy." The District does have a budget hole of more than a billion dollars. But the reason it opened up is not a mystery, and Comer had a hand in it.

D.C. lost about 22,356 net federal jobs in 2025, jobs that carried $3.66 billion in annual pay, according to federal personnel data reviewed by WTOP. Federal workers make up roughly a quarter of D.C.'s workforce, against about 1.4 percent nationally. The city's chief financial officer projected D.C. would lose more than $1 billion in revenue compared with earlier estimates, and forecast a mild recession in the District.

Those cuts were DOGE. And Comer wasn't a bystander to DOGE — he was its partner in Congress. As Oversight chairman he told his committee in February 2025:

"This committee intends to work in partnership with DOGE. We want to reinforce its efforts, and not blunt the momentum it's generating."

He created a subcommittee dedicated to working with DOGE — the one that later spent a hearing on the exhibit labels at a Smithsonian museum — and in June 2025 his committee held a hearing titled "Locking in the DOGE Cuts: Ending Waste, Fraud, and Abuse for Good."

Mayor Muriel Bowser made the connection when the committee advanced Comer's bill. The D.C. Taxing Authority Review Act, she said, "would render the District incapable of recovering from the debilitating impacts of COVID, federal remote work and DOGE."

That's the sequence. Help cut tens of thousands of federal jobs out of a city's tax base. Watch its revenue fall. Then introduce a bill to stop it from replacing the revenue, and call the shortfall a spending problem.

Nobody He's Regulating Can Vote Against Him

The residents whose tax code this bill would freeze have no vote in the House or the Senate. That's the whole point of the D.C. House Voting Rights Act, a bill that would have given D.C. a voting House member — it passed the House in 2007 and the Senate in 2009 and still never became law.

So there is no accountability loop here at all. Comer represents Kentucky's 1st District. If D.C. residents think this bill is an outrage, there is nothing they can do about it at the ballot box, and Comer knows it.

Compare that to how he treats the constituents who can vote against him. When Kentuckians in his district organized a town hall in July 2025 and reached out to his office eight times looking for a date, Comer neither attended nor sent a staffer. When protesters showed up outside his Paducah office in chicken suits asking him to face voters, his spokesperson said he "does not plan on holding therapy sessions for left-wing activists suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome."

He won't hold a public meeting in Paducah. He will hold a markup on Paducah's behalf about a fee on burritos in Washington.

What It Costs Us

It is easy to file this under "D.C. problem" if you don't live there. It isn't one.

The precedent is the point. A city government's power to set its own taxes and fees becomes something Congress hands back one vote at a time. The bill would not even undo the 20-cent fee — it applies only to acts D.C. sends to Congress after it becomes law. It reaches every tax and fee that comes after.

And look at who turned up for it. A corporation with $14 billion in revenue lost a 20-cent argument at a city council, and two weeks later was writing to a congressional committee to endorse taking that council's taxing power away. It did not have to ask anyone for the bill. The bill was already there.

Comer chairs the committee that is supposed to guard the public against exactly that kind of influence. He put the company's letter in the record.

Source

Washington City Paper, "House Committee Advances the D.C. Taxing Authority Review Act" (July 23, 2026); Hill Heat, "DoorDash Declares War on DC Home Rule Over A 20-Cent Fee" (July 22, 2026); The Washington Times, "Comer moves to give Congress veto power over D.C. tax hikes" — Mary McCue Bell, July 16, 2026; and NOTUS, "House Committee Advances Bill Limiting D.C.'s Ability to Raise Taxes" and "That Food Delivery Is Soon Going To Cost You a Little More in D.C." — Martin Austermuhle, July 22 and July 8, 2026. Bill text: H.R. 9720.

James Comer Voted Against the Infrastructure Law and Said Its Money Was Going to Things That 'Do Not Affect' His District. Now He's Taking Credit for $24 Million of It.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:12:47 +0000

On July 1, 2026, James Comer put out a press release with good news for western Kentucky. The U.S. Department of Transportation had awarded $24 million to the Paducah-McCracken County Riverport Authority to build Riverport West, an expansion of the region's main public port.

He called it "a major win for McCracken County" that "will help unlock new opportunities for economic growth across our region." His office laid out the work he'd done to land it: eight months of calls to senior officials at the Department of Transportation, a letter to Secretary Sean Duffy, a meeting he set up between Paducah leaders and DOT staff in Washington.

It is a good project. Paducah sits where the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers meet, and 23 barge companies have operations or headquarters in the city. The existing port has leased out nearly every parcel it has. The new one will add a 650-foot dock, three barge berths, and more than a mile of rail.

There is just one thing missing from Comer's announcement.

Where the $24 Million Came From

The grant is a BUILD grant — the Department of Transportation's program for local and regional transportation projects. Comer's press release says so four times. What it never says is where the money in that program comes from.

The opening section of the Department of Transportation's own funding notice for the 2026 BUILD round spells it out in a single sentence:

"The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (Pub. L. 117-58, November 15, 2021, IIJA) authorized and appropriated $1.5 billion to be awarded by the Department of Transportation ('DOT') for FY 2026 for Local and Regional Project Assistance Program Grants under National Infrastructure Investments."

That's the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. It set aside $1.5 billion a year for these grants, for five years running, through 2026. Paducah's $24 million came out of the last of those five pots.

Comer voted against that law.

The Vote

On November 5, 2021, the House passed the infrastructure bill 228–206. Comer voted no (Roll Call 369). It passed anyway, because 13 Republicans crossed over and made up for the Democrats who voted against it.

Kentucky's senior senator had already voted for it three months earlier. The Senate passed the same bill 69–30 on August 10, 2021, and Mitch McConnell voted yes. Rand Paul voted no.

So the money Comer spent eight months chasing exists because other members of Congress — including the Republican leader from his own state — voted to create it, while he voted to kill it.

What He Said At the Time

This isn't a case of a congressman quietly voting no on a big bill and hoping nobody notices the details. Comer explained his vote, at length, in a statement his office sent to Kentucky newspapers on November 10, 2021.

Here is what he said:

"I voted NO on the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that passed Congress in the dark of night. Less than 10% of the bill contained surface infrastructure, like roads and bridges, with significant money going toward things that do not affect Kentucky's 1st District — like mass transit and green energy."

Read that last part again. Things that do not affect Kentucky's 1st District.

Paducah is in Kentucky's 1st District. McCracken County is in Kentucky's 1st District. The port Comer just spent eight months lobbying for is in Kentucky's 1st District, and the $24 million he's celebrating came out of the bill whose money he told his constituents was going somewhere else.

He was wrong. That's allowed — people get big bills wrong. What's harder to defend is going back four and a half years later and taking a victory lap for the money without ever mentioning you tried to stop it from existing.

He Even Told Us the Rule

The same 2021 statement contains a line that reads very differently in 2026. Comer was warning his colleagues about what a yes vote would mean:

"Any member of Congress who voted yes can also take credit for passage of the massive socialist spending bill — which will undoubtedly lead to more inflation and government dependency."

Comer's position in 2021 was that a vote is a claim of ownership. Vote yes on something, and you own it. That was his argument for why voting yes was so dangerous.

By his own rule, he doesn't get to own this one. He voted no.

Who Does Get Credit

Comer's press release says he will "continue to work with our community leaders and the Trump Administration to support investments" like this one. The Riverport Authority's executive director, in a quote included in that same release, thanked Comer along with Senators McConnell and Paul.

Nobody in the announcement thanks the law that put the $24 million on the table.

That is the whole trick. The program has a name — BUILD — that sounds like it has always existed. Federal money arrives with a Department of Transportation letterhead, not a roll-call number. Unless somebody goes and reads the funding notice, there is nothing in the announcement to tell a voter in Paducah that their congressman voted against the bill that paid for their port.

So here is the roll-call number: 369. November 5, 2021. Comer, Nay.

This Is a Playbook, Not an Accident

We've written about this move before, because it keeps happening.

In 2021, every single Republican in Congress voted against the American Rescue Plan — and then a whole group of them put out press releases bragging about the money it sent home, including some who later voted against refilling the same fund they'd told local restaurants to apply for. In North Carolina, Tim Moore spent a decade as House Speaker blocking Medicaid expansion, then called it something "we can all be very proud of" once he finally relented.

The pattern is always the same. Vote no. Let it pass. Wait. Show up for the ribbon cutting.

It works because voting and spending happen years apart, in different places, covered by different reporters. The vote is a five-second entry in a roll call in Washington. The check is a local TV story with a photo of the congressman.

What This Says About How He Represents Us

Comer has now been in Congress for nine years, and he chairs the House Oversight Committee — the committee that is supposed to make sure federal money is spent honestly and that the public can see what its government is doing.

He is also a congressman who does not make himself easy to ask about votes like this one. In July 2025, after Frankfort organizers reached out to his office eight times trying to find a date and finally invited him to a town hall of their own, Comer neither showed up nor sent anyone from his staff. When protesters showed up outside his Paducah office in chicken suits in March 2025 asking him to face voters, his spokesperson said he "does not plan on holding therapy sessions for left-wing activists suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome."

A town hall is exactly where a question like this gets asked. Congressman, you said this bill wouldn't help our district. Now you're announcing $24 million from it for our port. Which was it?

There is a good answer available, and it would take him about ten seconds: I voted against the bill, I still think it spent too much, and I'm glad this piece of it is coming to Paducah. That's honest. It's also not what happened. What happened is a press release that describes eight months of phone calls and never once names the law.

Western Kentucky is getting a port. That's genuinely good for Paducah, and the people at the Riverport Authority who spent years planning it deserve the credit they're getting.

Their congressman voted no.

Source

WPSD Local 6, "Comer secures $24M BUILD grant to extend Paducah's main public port" (July 2026). Photo: BFW/Marcum, via WPSD Local 6.

"Don't Worry About DOGE": Andy Barr Passed Along Elon Musk's Promises to a Lexington Business Crowd. Every One Was Wrong.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 09:10:16 +0000

On March 19, 2025, Andy Barr stood at a podium at a Commerce Lexington Public Policy Luncheon at the Hyatt Regency. Protesters lined High Street outside. He didn't mention them.

Someone in the room asked about the cuts coming to University of Kentucky research funding. Barr's answer, as reported by the Kentucky Lantern, rested entirely on what he said Elon Musk had told him "face to face":

"Don't worry about DOGE with respect to meritorious investments. We're going to continue to fund those."

He named two specific things his own city would be worried about: NIH funding for UK's Markey Cancer Center and the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging — the university's Alzheimer's research center.

He passed along a second Musk assurance too: that Musk was not pursuing broad reductions in the federal workforce.

And he explained the notorious email demanding federal workers list five things they'd accomplished that week. Musk, Barr said, was doing "just a pulse check" to find out if there's "a human being behind those numbers and in many cases there are not."

Sixteen months later, we can check all three.

Claim 1: Don't worry about UK research funding

He was already too late.

A month before that luncheon, UK President Eli Capilouto had said publicly that the NIH's move to slash the "indirect cost" rate — the money that pays for lab space, equipment, and research staff — from as much as 54% down to 15% would cost the university dearly. Louisville Public Media reported on February 11, 2025 that UK expected to lose at least $40 million in health research funding over the next year, against an average of $159 million a year in NIH awards over the prior five years.

Capilouto said the policy "will cost UK tens of millions of dollars annually," and named what it hits: cancer, heart disease, children's health, Alzheimer's, and opioid use disorder.

That is, almost word for word, the list of things Barr told the room not to worry about.

By June 2025, Markey's own director was writing publicly about it. In an op-ed in the Northern Kentucky Tribune, Dr. B. Mark Evers wrote that "the proposed 40% cut to the National Institutes of Health would delay cancer clinical trials, reduce lifesaving screening programs and eliminate research opportunities just when breakthroughs are accelerating." He noted Markey holds more than $37.5 million in NIH funding supporting over 370 research projects.

Barr's answer to a question about all of this was a secondhand reassurance from a man who does not run the NIH.

Claim 2: No broad reductions in the federal workforce

This one has a number.

Federal News Network reported on January 1, 2026, citing Office of Personnel Management data:

"The Trump administration's efforts to reduce staffing across agencies resulted in the loss of more than 317,000 federal employees governmentwide. It's a 13.7% decrease compared with September 2024 workforce numbers."

More than one in every eight federal employees, gone in a year. Against those departures the same report counts 68,000 new hires, leaving a net staffing decrease of about 10.8%. Either way, that is the definition of a broad reduction in the federal workforce.

Barr told a room full of Lexington business leaders the opposite, on Musk's word, nine months before the count came in.

Claim 3: "In many cases there are not" a human being

This is the ugliest of the three, and it deserves to be read exactly as Barr said it. Asked about the "what did you do last week" email, he described it as a pulse check to see whether there's "a human being behind those numbers and in many cases there are not."

He was telling a business audience that a large share of federal employees don't exist. He offered no evidence, and none has surfaced — those 317,000 departures were real people leaving real jobs. Many of them are the people who inspect food, process Social Security claims, and staff VA hospitals.

What DOGE actually turned out to be

Barr wasn't a bystander to this. He sits on the congressional DOGE Caucus, and after voting to lock in more than $9 billion of DOGE's cuts in June 2025, he said: "My message to DOGE is simple: keep the cuts coming."

DOGE, meanwhile, expired on July 4, 2026 — the termination date in Trump's own executive order — with no final report and nobody willing to account for it. It had promised $2 trillion in savings and claimed about $215 billion, a number that never held up. And when the Government Accountability Office tried to audit those savings, DOGE "did not provide sufficient information to verify the method used to calculate 96 percent" of the grant savings it claimed.

The man whose face-to-face assurances Barr relayed to Lexington left the administration months later. The assurances stayed on the record.

The empty chair

The reason this matters is what happened three days after that luncheon.

Barr had refused an invitation to a town hall in his own hometown. A Lexington group, Gathering for Democracy, had asked repeatedly; his staff said he wouldn't come. Barr told reporters he'd learned during Trump's first term that "live in-person massively attended town halls were shouting contests where people were really not respectful."

On March 22, 2025, more than 900 Kentuckians filled the Kentucky Theatre, and speaker after speaker took three minutes each at a microphone beside a chair with Barr's name on it.

His campaign's response called it "a liberal group's attempt to stage a shouting match in Lexington," and said "these organized, often paid, efforts by a small group of liberal activists across the country to disrupt this mandate for change won't work." He later described his own constituents' turnout as "manufactured outrage by paid activists."

Asked by reporters about the protesters outside the Hyatt, Barr said: "Obviously, democracy is alive and well... In fact, we are living in a vibrant democracy."

He is not alone in this. In Kansas, Roger Marshall has gone more than 500 days without holding an open town hall — and when constituents delivered boxes of petitions asking for one, his office called the bomb squad.

Here's the through-line. Barr will stand in front of a paying business luncheon and repeat, uncorroborated, whatever the richest man in the world told him over a handshake. He will not stand in front of 900 of his neighbors and take a question. One of those rooms could have checked his facts.

Source

Barr says don't worry about Trump and Musk, but declines chance to reassure upcoming town hall — by Jamie Lucke, Kentucky Lantern, March 19, 2025. Photo: Kentucky Lantern photo by Kevin Nance.

Andy Barr Co-Chairs the Bourbon Caucus. He Voted to Keep the Tariffs Killing Kentucky Bourbon.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 09:06:25 +0000

On November 1, 2021, Andy Barr put out a press release with the headline "Barr Toasts to Suspension of EU Tariffs on American Distillers." He'd organized a bipartisan letter with more than forty members of Congress asking the administration to get the European Union's tariffs on American whiskey lifted. When it happened, he took the win:

"As Co-Chair of the Congressional Bourbon Caucus, I led multiple letters to both the Trump and Biden Administrations pushing for the full removal of these tariffs. I will always be an advocate for enhanced access to international markets for our distillers, so that they can provide Kentucky spirits and the world's best bourbon to countries across the globe."

Eric Gregory, president of the Kentucky Distillers' Association, was quoted in that same press release: "Representative Barr is a steadfast supporter of our industry and we are grateful to have him on the frontlines fighting for Kentucky distillers."

Four and a half years later, the tariffs are back, they're worse, and Barr is on the other side.

What the tariffs have done to Kentucky bourbon

The numbers come from the Kentucky Distillers' Association's own economic impact report, covered by WKMS in February 2026:

Kentucky whiskey exports were down 12% from January through October 2025 compared with the year before.
Exports to Canada — the industry's biggest single-country market — fell 42%. Canada put a 25% tariff on American liquor in March 2025 in response to Trump's tariffs, and most Canadian provinces pulled American alcohol off the shelves entirely.
Exports to the European Union fell 13%.

Then it stopped being about numbers on a page. Jim Beam paused whiskey production at its main Clermont facility for all of 2026. Bulleit's parent company had already halted production for a few months at its Lebanon site in 2025.

Kentucky distilling is a $10.6 billion industry, up from $1.8 billion in 2012, and Kentucky accounts for 27% of everybody working in distilled spirits in the United States — the next state, Tennessee, has 8.4%. When Clermont goes quiet, it isn't just Jim Beam. As Gregory put it: "That's not just going to impact distilleries. That's going to impact a lot of supply chain jobs down the line."

That's coopers, corn farmers, truckers, bottlers, and the small towns built around a rickhouse.

Barr's answer: "short-term turbulence"

In April 2025, with Canadian provinces already clearing American bourbon off their shelves, Barr was asked about the tariffs. He told Spectrum News 1 on April 28:

"My message is that for short-term turbulence with the tariffs, in the long-term, this is the policy that is good for distillers."

He added that "what the Trump administration is doing with their trade policy is actually working towards better, more free, more fair reciprocal trade."

Mitch McConnell — the senator whose seat Barr is now running for — went the other way, opposing the tariffs in part because of what they do to Kentucky's bourbon sector.

Then he had a chance to actually stop it, and voted no

On February 11, 2026, the House voted on a resolution to terminate the national emergency Trump used to impose the tariffs on Canada.

Barr voted Nay. Canada is the market where Kentucky's exports had just fallen 42%.

It was one of the rare tariff votes where the House had a real choice — the resolution passed 219 to 211. Only 6 Republicans voted yes; 210 voted no. Barr was one of the 210. Five months later Trump announced a 50% tariff on Canadian products, and WUKY reported in July 2026 that Kentucky bourbon was in the crosshairs again.

British Columbia's premier, David Eby, responded at a meeting of Canadian premiers in Charlottetown: "There is not a chance in hell that U.S. alcohol is going back on the shelf in British Columbia."

That's the market Barr voted to keep locked.

Kentucky is not the only place this pattern shows up — a 119-year-old New Hampshire dairy farm is getting crushed by the same Canada tariffs while its senator says she disagrees with them and declines to do anything about it.

The damage doesn't bounce back

Barr's framing — short-term turbulence, long-term gain — assumes markets snap back once a trade fight ends. Kentucky already ran that experiment.

The Kentucky Distillers' Association's own report lays out the last round. Other countries retaliated against Trump's 2018 metal tariffs by taxing American spirits, and Kentucky's exports fell 35% in a single year. Those tariffs were later rescinded. Exports still didn't come back: in 2024, Kentucky's whiskey exports were $363 million, 26% below their 2019 peak. Distributors found other whiskeys, shelf space got reallocated, and it stayed gone.

Barr knew this. In 2021 he was the one writing letters to two administrations explaining it.

What changed wasn't the economics

Nothing about bourbon changed between 2021 and 2025. What changed is that the tariffs became Trump's tariffs, and Barr started running for Senate.

He still runs on bourbon. The title he used in that 2021 press release — Co-Chair of the Congressional Bourbon Caucus — is the same one he's carried through this entire fight. He just no longer treats access to foreign markets as something worth crossing his party for.

And he won't take the question in a room full of Kentuckians. Barr holds telephone town halls instead of in-person ones, having concluded during Trump's first term that "live in-person massively attended town halls were shouting contests." When Lexington constituents invited him to one in March 2025 — the same month Canada's tariff on American liquor took effect — more than 900 people showed up and spoke to an empty chair with his name on it.

"I will always be an advocate," he said in 2021.

Always turned out to have a deadline.

Source

New tariffs again place Kentucky bourbon in the crosshairs — WUKY, July 24, 2026. Photo: AP.

Andy Barr Spent $1 Million Telling Kentucky "It's Not a Sin to Be White" — Against a Black Opponent

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 09:03:39 +0000

In February 2026, Andy Barr put the first television ad of his campaign for Mitch McConnell's Senate seat on the air with a $1 million buy. Here is the ad, in full, as his own campaign published it:

Barr: You know what DEI really stands for? Dumb, Evil, Indoctrination. Woke liberals spew it, corporate losers fall for it. But thanks to Trump, America is rejecting that trash.

Barr: And I'm leading the fight to end it for good. I'm Andy Barr, it's not a sin to be white, it's not against the law to be male, and it shouldn't be disqualifying to be a Christian.

Barr: I'm Andy Barr and I approve this message to give woke liberals something else to cry about.

His campaign's own headline for the press release was "Barr Stop DEI Ad Inflames Woke Leftists, Kicks off $1M Buy Throughout the Commonwealth." The same release touted endorsements from Nick Sandmann and Riley Gaines for what it called his "leadership fighting woke ideology."

He was running, at the time, against Daniel Cameron — Kentucky's former attorney general, and a Black man.

Where that line comes from

"It's not a sin to be white" is "It's OK to be white" with "OK" swapped for "not a sin."

The Anti-Defamation League catalogs "It's Okay To Be White" in its Hate on Display database, under hate slogans. The ADL's account of it: the phrase was "popularized in late 2017 as a trolling campaign by members of the controversial discussion forum 4chan," and "white supremacists quickly began to promote the campaign—often adding Internet links to white supremacist websites to the fliers or combining the phrase with white supremacist language or imagery." The ADL notes white supremacists had used the phrase before that, too.

That's not a coincidence you fall into by accident. It's a phrase with a documented history, and a campaign that spends $1 million on thirty seconds of television has lawyers, consultants, and pollsters who read every word first.

Kentucky's own political press called it what it was

Al Cross has covered Kentucky politics for decades. His February 20, 2026 column, published in the Kentucky Lantern and the Northern Kentucky Tribune, did not hedge:

"Now U.S. Rep. Andy Barr is running the most overtly racist statewide campaign we can remember in Kentucky."

On the ad's central claim, Cross was equally direct: Barr says DEI stands for "dumb, evil indoctrination" — "That's almost entirely false, but the line is just a tee-up for the rest of the spot." As for the kicker about being white, male, and Christian, Cross wrote that "the lines about being male and Christian have no factual basis."

And on what the ad is actually doing:

"Barr's ad not only appeals to racial and ethnic resentment, it stokes it. Most American politicians in the last 50 years have avoided that, following what seemed to be a broad consensus that racism should be suppressed."

Cross also named the part Barr's campaign would rather nobody said out loud. The ad was aimed at businessman Nate Morris, who was running third. But, Cross wrote, "While the ad clearly targets Morris, stoking racial resentment likely also hurts Cameron."

The people who've known him longest were the ones most upset

The most damning detail in Cross's column isn't about strategy. It's about the people in Lexington who have known Barr for most of his life, and who wrote letters to the Lexington Herald-Leader after the ad ran. Cross quoted one:

"Pre-Donald J. Trump, I used to think of Andy as a good man, a good Republican. I'm so disappointed in him."

Cross's read on why Barr did it anyway: Trump's endorsement was the prize, Morris had backing from Donald Trump Jr. and JD Vance, and the ad "could also be aimed at showing Trump that he can be a tough, Trumpy campaigner on Trump's favorite issue."

It worked, which is the worst part

On May 1, 2026, Trump got Morris out of the race with an ambassadorship and endorsed Barr. On May 19, Barr won the primary, beating Cameron by more than two to one. Louisville Public Media reported he "rode an endorsement from President Donald Trump" to the win.

Barr got exactly what he paid $1 million for. Which means the ad is not a gaffe he'll walk back. It's the thing that worked, and it's now the closest thing he has to a governing philosophy heading into November.

This isn't new territory for him

Barr's record on who gets equal treatment under the law didn't start in February.

He scored a zero on the Human Rights Campaign's congressional scorecard for the 114th Congress. When the Supreme Court guaranteed same-sex couples the right to marry in 2015, he called the ruling "inappropriate and inconsistent with the constitutionally limited role of the judiciary" and said "marriage is defined as a union between one man and one woman."

And he has been running from the people who'd like to ask him about any of it. Barr holds telephone town halls instead of in-person ones, having decided during Trump's first term that "live in-person massively attended town halls were shouting contests where people were really not respectful." When a Lexington group invited him to a real one in March 2025, his staff said no. More than 900 Kentuckians came anyway and addressed an empty chair marked "Reserved for Congressman Andy Barr." Barr's response was to call it "manufactured outrage by paid activists."

That's the pattern. He will spend a million dollars to talk at Kentuckians about race. He will not sit in a room and take a question from one.

Source

Why did Andy Barr run a racist ad? It's all about Donald Trump — commentary by Al Cross, Kentucky Lantern / Northern Kentucky Tribune, February 20, 2026. Image: still from Barr's campaign ad, via the Barr campaign.

ICE Is Reading Your Posts. Congress Paid for It.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A round-the-clock dragnet

Here is what the Journal found.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reddit said no. The government kept going.

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

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

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

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

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

No charges have been filed in any of them.

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

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

What actually counts as "doxxing"

The administration has been rewriting a word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The number they won't show you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congress wrote the check

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

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

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

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

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

The Senate: 52 to 47

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

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

The House: 214 to 212

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source

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

She Sells Her Blood Twice a Week and Has $3.78 in the Bank. Republicans Just Took Food Away From 4.5 Million People.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:26:25 +0000

Trinity Goodman is 44 years old and lives in Oklahoma City. She had $3.78 in her checking account, one cent in savings to keep the account open, and six pennies in a piggy bank. She had a bandage on her arm, because the way she stays alive is by selling her blood plasma twice a week.

"That's my full assets," she said.

Her food stamps come to $298 a month. You can't buy toilet paper with food stamps. You can't buy tampons with them either. So she goes to church pantries and hopes. She has never in her life been to a barber.

"I've never been to a barber or any of those places," she told New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who met her on a 1,000-mile road trip through Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky. "Never. I don't have that luxury."

And now there is a real chance her $298 goes away too.

This is not the economy. This is a law.

Here is the part that should end the argument.

Unemployment has been flat at about 4 percent since July 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nothing about the job market suddenly got better. Nobody stopped needing groceries.

And yet, in that same stretch, SNAP enrollment fell by more than 4.5 million people — about 11 percent — according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Participation dropped in every single state except Alaska. It fell by 10 percent or more in 23 states.

The Center is blunt about what that means: "It's very unlikely that reduced need is driving the decline."

The last time this many people fell off food assistance this fast — outside of a temporary spike after a natural disaster — was nearly thirty years ago, after Congress gutted the old Food Stamp Program in 1996.

So what changed in July 2025? Republicans passed the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act." The Congressional Budget Office scores it as cutting SNAP by nearly $187 billion — the largest cut to food assistance in American history.

They didn't cut it because the economy improved. They cut it because they wanted to.

They took food from 1.5 million kids

Of the people pushed off SNAP, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that more than 1.5 million are children. In the 19 states where the data is public, kids made up nearly half of everyone who lost benefits.

Children are already the age group most likely to live in poverty in America — especially children under 2 years old.

You cannot accuse a two-year-old of being lazy. You cannot accuse a two-year-old of gaming the system. There is no version of "personal responsibility" that explains taking food off a toddler's table.

Read who they specifically decided to stop protecting

This is the detail that tells you everything.

Under the old rules, a handful of groups were shielded from SNAP's harsh time limits, because Congress had recognized these were people in genuine crisis. Republicans went in and deleted those protections one by one:

Veterans.
People experiencing homelessness.
Young people who just aged out of foster care.

They also raised the age you're subject to work rules from 54 to 64, and extended the rules to parents caring for kids as young as 14.

Now hold that next to another person Kristof met in Oklahoma City. Courtney Williams, 31, was put into foster care at age 6, after she saw her younger sister killed. She was moved through foster homes in seven different states, carrying everything she owned in a trash bag. In one home, at age 11, the family padlocked the refrigerator, the freezer and the food cabinets. She was hungry.

When she turned 17, the checks stopped coming and her foster mother put her out. She spent roughly the next decade homeless.

Today she is caring for a new baby and hoping her $298 a month in food stamps survives.

Congress had specifically written a protection into the law for kids coming out of exactly that system. Republicans took it out. They also took out the one for homeless adults — which is the other category Williams spent ten years in.

Taxpayers paid to incarcerate her three times. We would not pay to feed her.

And it's not just food

The same crew came for health care in the same bill.

Marketplace enrollment is projected to fall to about 17.5 million people in 2026, down from 22.3 million in 2025 — a drop of roughly 4.8 million — after Republicans let the enhanced premium tax credits expire. For the people who managed to hang on, KFF found the average out-of-pocket premium jumped 58% and the average deductible climbed 37%, to $3,786 a year.

That's the trick. You don't have to repeal someone's insurance. You just make it cost more than they have.

In the states Kristof drove through, the damage is already mapped out:

In Oklahoma, an estimated 174,000 people are at risk of losing SoonerCare, with another 95,000 projected to go uninsured. About 694,200 Oklahomans rely on SNAP every month — one of the highest rates in the country — and 1 in 4 Oklahoma kids already faces hunger.
In Arkansas — which has the highest food insecurity rate in the nation, where 1 in 4 kids goes hungry — SNAP enrollment is already down about 9 percent, nearly 21,000 people, including almost 7,900 children. The state stands to lose an estimated $8.9 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade, with rural hospitals expected to close.

These are not blue states being punished. Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky send Republicans to Washington. Those Republicans voted for this.

This has names attached to it

It is easy to say "Republicans did this" and let everyone off the hook. So here is the roll call.

The House passed the final version on July 3, 2025, by 218 to 214. Every single Republican from these four states voted yes:

Oklahoma: Stephanie Bice, Josh Brecheen, Tom Cole, Kevin Hern and Frank Lucas — the entire delegation, in a state where 1 in 4 kids already faces hunger.
Arkansas: Rick Crawford, French Hill, Steve Womack and Bruce Westerman — the whole delegation of the hungriest state in America. Pine Bluff, where Latoya Foster is behind on rent and where Kristof found seniors saying life was more livable under Jim Crow, sits in Westerman's district. He keeps a district office there.
Tennessee: Diana Harshbarger, Tim Burchett, Chuck Fleischmann, Scott DesJarlais, Andy Ogles, John Rose and David Kustoff.
Kentucky: James Comer, Brett Guthrie, Hal Rogers and Andy Barr.

Only two Republicans in the entire House voted no. One of them was Kentucky's Thomas Massie — so Kentucky's delegation had a live example, from their own state, of what voting no looked like. Comer, Guthrie, Rogers and Barr voted yes anyway.

In the Senate, the bill passed 50 to 50 on July 1, 2025, with Vice President Vance breaking the tie. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, and Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, all voted yes.

It was a tie. Any one of them could have stopped it. Cotton represents the state with the worst food insecurity in the country.

Two who weren't there — and one who did something else

Two names on this list didn't cast that vote, and it's worth being precise about it.

Matt Van Epps wasn't in Congress yet. He won Tennessee's 7th district in a special election on December 2, 2025 and was sworn in two days later — five months after the bill passed. He inherits the consequences rather than owning the vote.

Sarah Sanders is Arkansas's governor, so she never had a vote on a federal bill either. But she has had plenty to say about food assistance — and what she chose to do with it is its own answer.

Arkansas is dead last, #50 out of 50, for food insecurity. No state in America struggles harder to put food on the table. Faced with that, Sanders's signature SNAP initiative was to ask Washington for permission to narrow what hungry Arkansans are allowed to buy — banning soda, certain juices and candy from food stamps, while adding rotisserie chicken. USDA approved the waiver in June 2025, and it took effect July 1, 2026 — one month before Kristof's road trip.

Sanders said the approval "sends a clear message" and that Arkansas "leads the nation in getting unhealthy, ultra-processed foods off food stamps."

Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families had a different read. Their policy director, Christin Harper, told legislators that the better way to fix bad health outcomes is to address the root causes — poverty and access to medical care.

Remember what Trinity Goodman actually can't buy with her $298: toilet paper and feminine hygiene products. The problem in these states was never that poor people had too many options at the register.

"The more I work, the harder stuff gets"

In Pine Bluff, Arkansas, Kristof met Latoya Foster, 31, a single mother of six who works as a shift manager at Taco Bell for $13.40 an hour. Her food stamps — $1,172 a month — were cut off in May over a suspicion she says is simply a mistake in the system. She's now behind on her $650 rent and racking up a $25-a-day late fee.

"I hit rock bottom daily," she said. "The more I work, the harder stuff gets."

Then she broke down and cried.

That is not an accident of the new law. It is the mechanism. Starting in 2027, states have to pay 5 to 15 percent of SNAP benefit costs themselves, and how much they pay depends on their error rates. So states are racing to drive their error rates down — more paperwork, more re-verification, more denials. And here's the catch the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out: wrongly denying benefits to an eligible family doesn't count as an error.

Republicans built a system that financially rewards states for kicking eligible people off.

Who actually gets investigated in this country

The whole thing rests on a story about the "undeserving poor" gaming the system. So look at who the government actually goes after.

ProPublica mapped IRS audit rates by county, and the most heavily audited place in America was not a billionaire enclave. It was Humphreys County, Mississippi — a rural, majority-Black county in the Delta with a median household income of about $26,000. Its audit rate ran 51 percent higher than Loudoun County, Virginia, the richest county in the nation, where the median income was $130,000. The five most-audited counties in America were all rural, predominantly African American counties in the Deep South.

The reason is simple: so many residents there claim the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the IRS audits EITC filers at rates rivaled only by the very richest Americans.

Meanwhile, this same Congress found room in the budget for tax breaks for private jets and a war with Iran.

And when they can't get the cuts through the front door, they take the money anyway. The Government Accountability Office — Congress's own nonpartisan watchdog — found that the administration broke the law by withholding Head Start money. Between January 20 and April 15, 2025, HHS pushed out over $825 million less than the year before, about 65% of the prior year's rate. GAO ruled it violated the Impoundment Control Act. During last fall's shutdown, the administration illegally refused to deliver SNAP benefits at all.

Two-thirds of us can't afford groceries

This is not a story about a distant underclass.

A Washington Post-Ipsos poll taken July 8–13, 2026 found that about two-thirds of Americans now call the cost of groceries unaffordable. Among households earning under $50,000, it's 82 percent. Among households earning over $100,000, it's 56 percent.

Fifty-nine percent of Americans say they don't have a good chance at improving their standard of living in this country. Fifty-four percent say the economy and high prices are the single most important thing driving their vote this year.

So the people who ran on lowering your grocery bill have instead delivered the largest food assistance cut in American history, higher insurance premiums, and record deductibles — while two-thirds of the country says it can't afford to eat.

Trinity Goodman had a message for the president.

"You do not know what you're doing to people who are struggling to live. You got money in the bank. You don't know how it feels to struggle. Live in my shoes for one day. You wouldn't be able to handle it."

She is selling her blood plasma twice a week to stay alive. And there is a real chance they take her $298 anyway.

We deserve better.

Source

Nicholas Kristof, "Meet the Americans Who Can't Afford Haircuts or Toilet Paper," The New York Times, August 1, 2026. Photo: Tamara Reynolds for The New York Times.

Brett Guthrie Called Loan Forgiveness a "Bribe." His Own Company Had $4.4 Million Forgiven.

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 15:15:26 +0000

On July 1, a big chunk of Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill" kicked in for student loan borrowers. The Biden-era SAVE plan — the most generous repayment plan, which more than 7 million people were using — is gone. Graduate students, who used to be able to borrow what their program actually cost, are now capped at $20,500 a year and $100,000 total. Parents are capped too. And the new Republican-designed repayment plan, called RAP, doesn't forgive anything left over until you've been paying for 30 years.

More than 600,000 Kentuckians carry student loan debt. Brett Guthrie voted for that bill on July 3, 2025.

So this is a good moment to look at what Guthrie actually believes about people getting help with debt. Because his record is very clear — and it depends entirely on who is asking.

"A bribe to score political points"

In August 2022, President Biden announced a plan to cancel some federal student loan debt. Guthrie was not happy. He tweeted that it was:

"President Biden's taxpayer-funded student loan debt cancellation plan is a bribe to score political points ahead of the election at the expense of Americans who decided to pursue careers that didn't require taking on student debt or who worked hard to pay off their debt already."

That's the argument. Debt forgiveness is a handout. It's unfair to the people who paid their own way. It's taxpayers footing the bill for someone else's choices.

Remember that argument. He was about to fail his own test.

$4,367,200 in — $4,416,574 out

Guthrie is a director of Trace Die Cast, a Bowling Green auto-parts manufacturer where, as his own campaign site puts it, he "worked as Vice-President." In April 2020, Trace Die Cast got a federal Paycheck Protection Program loan for $4,367,200. Every dollar of it was forgiven — $4,416,574 once you count the interest, according to Small Business Administration records published by ProPublica.

That is taxpayer money. It was a loan. It was cancelled. Nobody paid it back.

And Guthrie isn't a bystander at that company. Back in 2020, the news site Sludge reported that his stake in Trace Die Cast was worth between $500,001 and $1 million, with up to another $5 million held through a family trust — enough to put him in the top 40 richest members of Congress.

Kentucky Democrats did the math and put it next to his tweet: $4.3 million is roughly four years of tuition for about 97 Western Kentucky University students. WKU is in Bowling Green. It's in his district. Those are his constituents.

LEX 18 asked Guthrie about it. He didn't respond.

Here's the thing. You can believe PPP was good policy — a lot of people do, and it kept workers employed during a pandemic. But you cannot believe PPP was good policy and that student loan forgiveness is "a bribe." Both are the federal government cancelling a debt. One helped a nurse who owes $40,000. The other helped a company that made a man in Congress richer.

Guthrie picked the one that helped him.

He didn't just vote against forgiveness. He wrote the bill to kill it.

This isn't a one-time slip. In 2017, Guthrie was chairman of the House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development. He and Chairwoman Virginia Foxx introduced a 542-page rewrite of federal higher education law called the PROSPER Act. Guthrie was its sole original cosponsor.

Buried in those 542 pages: the elimination of Public Service Loan Forgiveness for anyone new to the program, and the end of loan forgiveness after 20 or 25 years of income-based payments.

Public Service Loan Forgiveness is the deal we offer teachers, nurses, firefighters, police officers, and social workers: work full-time in public service for 10 years, make 120 payments, and we'll wipe out what's left. It is the single biggest reason a lot of people can afford to take a public school teaching job in a rural county instead of a corporate job in a city.

Guthrie wanted it gone. And he said so proudly. At the December 12, 2017 markup, he opened with this:

"I am proud to be a cosponsor of the PROSPER Act, and truly believe the measures within this bill are essential to improve access, completion, and accountability across the higher education system."

The PROSPER Act never became law. But that wasn't for lack of effort on Guthrie's part — and eight years later, the bill he did pass got a lot of the way there anyway.

The rules he voted for are the rules Kentucky lives under now

Guthrie's yes vote on the One Big Beautiful Bill is what produced the changes that landed on July 1:

SAVE is dead. Millions of borrowers who had a payment they could afford now get moved onto plans that cost more. Financial aid experts warned NPR this could make a rising wave of student loan defaults worse — a lot of people were on SAVE precisely because their income was low enough to qualify for a $0 payment.
Grad school borrowing is capped at $20,500 a year and $100,000 total, which advocates warn could eventually mean a shortage of nurses and other health care providers.
The new RAP plan makes you wait 30 years for forgiveness, up from 20 or 25.
Parent PLUS borrowers who take out a loan after July 1 can no longer use any income-based plan, and no longer qualify for Public Service Loan Forgiveness at all.

That last one deserves a second read. Guthrie tried to abolish PSLF outright in 2017. He didn't get it. So he voted for a bill that quietly shuts a whole category of borrowers out of it instead.

Meanwhile, the same bill Guthrie helped move — he chairs the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee, which handled its Medicaid cuts — is the one Kentucky's own hospitals called "devastating". He called it a victory.

One more thing about who paid for whose education

Guthrie graduated from West Point in 1987. Tuition at West Point is free. Room, board, and medical care are free. Cadets get a salary. The academy puts the value of that four-year education at more than $250,000, and it is paid for entirely by American taxpayers. In exchange, graduates serve — five years on active duty, three more in the reserves. Guthrie served as a field artillery officer in the 101st Airborne.

He earned that. Nobody should take it from him.

But notice what it is. It is an education fully funded by the public, in return for a commitment to public service.

That is exactly the bargain of Public Service Loan Forgiveness. Same idea, smaller price tag, offered to the teacher in Warren County instead of the cadet on the Hudson.

Brett Guthrie took that deal for himself. Then he wrote the bill to take it away from everyone else. Then his company had $4.4 million forgiven. Then he called forgiveness a bribe.

We deserve better than this

None of this is complicated. Guthrie has spent his career being for government help when it lands on him and his business, and against it when it lands on a 26-year-old with a teaching degree.

He wouldn't answer LEX 18's questions about it in 2022. He hasn't been answering his constituents in person either — around 250 people showed up to a "Brett Guthrie No-Show" town hall in Bowling Green in March 2025 and found his spot filled by a constituent in a chicken suit.

Seventeen years in Washington. A $4.4 million loan forgiven. A bill to kill forgiveness for teachers and nurses. A tweet calling the whole idea a bribe. And a campaign website that still brags he was named a "Taxpayer Hero".

We deserve leaders who play by the same rules they want for everybody else.

Sources

KY dems use PPP loans to claim hypocrisy regarding student loan opinion — LEX 18, August 27, 2022
Trace Die Cast Inc — PPP loan tracker — ProPublica, SBA data
House Republicans May End Student Loan Forgiveness — Forbes, December 6, 2017

Photo: Official congressional portrait, via Wikimedia Commons.

182 House Republicans Just Voted to Keep Us in Trump's Iran War — And Lost

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 08:20:15 +0000

The war with Iran started in February. Congress never voted to authorize it. Five months later, American troops are still dying in it.

On Thursday, July 23, 2026, the House of Representatives voted 214 to 208 to order the president to pull U.S. forces out of the fighting. The resolution — H. Con. Res. 89, written by Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington — passed.

It passed despite 207 Republicans voting against it. Only four Republicans in the entire House voted yes.

182 of the Republicans who voted no have a report card on this site. Their names are below.

What they were voting on

Nothing complicated. The resolution said: the president does not have authorization from Congress for this war, so bring the troops home.

That's not a partisan idea. It's the War Powers Resolution, the law Congress wrote precisely so a president couldn't keep the country in a war on his own indefinitely. Voting yes meant Congress gets a say. Voting no meant the president decides alone.

182 Republicans we track voted for the president deciding alone.

The cost while they stalled

This isn't an abstract fight over process. According to the Pentagon, 18 U.S. troops have died since the fighting broke out in February — and four of those deaths came after July 17 alone. U.S. forces have suffered nearly 500 injuries, 100 of them in the two weeks before this vote.

The fighting is getting worse, not better. And back home, the bill keeps arriving in other forms: gas prices climbed after the Iran war started, squeezing drivers, farmers, and families who never got a vote on any of it.

A majority of Americans oppose military action in Iran. A majority of the House now agrees. The war continues anyway.

Congress already said no. Twice.

Here's the part that should make you angry.

This was not the first time. On June 3, the House passed an almost identical resolution, H. Con. Res. 86. On June 23, the Senate agreed to that same resolution, 50 to 48.

Both chambers of Congress. The same resolution. Already passed.

The administration ignored it and kept fighting. That's why the House had to vote again on July 23 — and why Rep. Gregory Meeks, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, announced he would file a lawsuit to enforce the resolution Congress already adopted.

And when the second vote came, the same Republicans lined up the same way. Of the 182 Republicans on this list, 181 voted no both times — in June and again in July. They watched Congress get overruled by the White House, and their response was to vote to be overruled again.

The president, for his part, has called these votes "meaningless" and dismissed them as Democrats "fueled by Trump Derangement Syndrome." When 182 members of his own party vote to make Congress irrelevant, it's hard to argue he's wrong about the "meaningless" part.

The Senate blocked the version with teeth

There's a catch in all of this, and it's worth understanding, because it's how the whole thing gets to keep happening.

H. Con. Res. 89 is a concurrent resolution. As Roll Call explained, it "did not go to the president for his signature and therefore had little power to actually force him to withdraw troops from the war." It's a formal statement, not a binding order.

The binding version came up in the Senate the very same day. Sen. Chris Van Hollen's S.J. Res. 180 was a joint resolution — the kind with legal force. The House finished voting at 10:24 a.m. At 11:51 a.m., about ninety minutes later, the Senate rejected the binding version, 47 to 49. Susan Collins of Maine was the only Republican who voted to advance it.

So on one day in July, Congress voted for the version that can't stop the war and voted down the version that could.

Who leads this

Some of the names on this list aren't backbenchers. They're the people who decide what the House does.

Speaker Mike Johnson voted no. So did Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Majority Whip Tom Emmer. The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Brian Mast of Florida, held up photographs of U.S. service members killed in the war during floor debate and said, "To belittle this mission is to belittle and demean the very service these members gave their life for."

That's the argument: because Americans have died, Congress must not be allowed to ask whether they should have been sent. It gets the moral logic exactly backwards. The way you honor a service member's life is by voting before you spend it — not by using their death to shut down the vote.

Jayapal put the other side plainly after the resolution passed: "From the beginning, this war has had no clear mission, no strategy, no end goal. Congress has not been consulted."

Four Republicans managed it

It was possible to vote yes. Four Republicans did: Tom Barrett of Michigan, Warren Davidson of Ohio, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, and Thomas Massie of Kentucky.

Four out of 211. Nobody on the list below can claim there was no room to break ranks — four of their colleagues stood in exactly that room.

The 182 who voted to keep the war going

Every one of these Republicans has a report card on this site, and every one of them is recorded on the official House roll call voting no on ordering U.S. forces out of an unauthorized war:

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

California — Ken Calvert, Vince Fong, Young Kim, Tom McClintock, Jay Obernolte, David Valadao

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

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

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

Idaho — Russ Fulcher, Mike Simpson

Illinois — Mike Bost, Darin LaHood, Mary Miller

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

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

Kansas — Ron Estes, Tracey Mann, Derek Schmidt

Kentucky — James Comer, Brett Guthrie, Hal Rogers

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi — Mike Ezell, Michael Guest, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Mike Flood, Adrian Smith

New Jersey — Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Mike Kennedy, Celeste Maloy, Blake Moore

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

The bottom line

Going to war is the most serious thing a government does. The Constitution deliberately made it hard, and gave the decision to Congress — the branch that has to go home and face the voters.

These 182 Republicans had the simplest possible chance to do that job. Not to end the war on their own, not to overrule the president — just to record that Congress, the branch that represents us, wants the fighting to stop. A majority of their colleagues managed it. Four members of their own party managed it. Both chambers of Congress had already managed it once in June.

They voted no anyway. And they'll vote no again unless something changes.

Eighteen families have buried someone in a war nobody in Congress ever authorized. Nearly 500 more troops have been wounded. When the next vote comes, remember which of your representatives thought the question wasn't worth asking.

We deserve representatives who answer to us — not to a president who calls our Constitution "meaningless."

How they voted

This post is based on the official congressional roll calls:

House Roll Call 282 — H. Con. Res. 89, July 23, 2026 (passed 214–208)
House Roll Call 199 — H. Con. Res. 86, June 3, 2026 (passed 215–208)
Senate Vote 184 — H. Con. Res. 86, June 23, 2026 (agreed to 50–48)
Senate Vote 207 — S.J. Res. 180, July 23, 2026 (rejected 47–49)

With reporting from NPR and Roll Call.

House Republicans Spent a Hearing Asking How to Permanently Kill the Agency That Protects You From Banks

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 23:12:00 +0000

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, was built after the 2008 financial crash to do one thing: protect regular people from getting cheated by banks, payday lenders, debt collectors, and scammers. Over the years it has clawed back billions of dollars for Americans who got ripped off.

The Trump administration has spent this year trying to strangle it — freezing its funding, blocking its investigators, and trying to gut its staff. So when the man leading that effort, budget director Russell Vought, came before the House Financial Services Committee on July 15, you might have hoped the people's representatives would defend the agency that protects the people.

Instead, House Republicans asked Vought how they could help him finish the job.

"How the committee could partner with you"

According to American Banker, GOP lawmakers told Vought that his administrative rollbacks weren't enough — they wanted to write those cuts into permanent law so a future administration couldn't undo them.

Frank Lucas of Oklahoma asked Vought to describe "how the committee could partner with you to… ensure progress that your leadership has made is truly lasting." Andy Barr of Kentucky put it plainly: "If anyone wants to rein in your discretion… it should be the Congress."

They weren't the only ones. Pete Sessions of Texas used his time to press Vought on the bureau's penalties. French Hill of Arkansas, who chairs the committee, has pushed to "reform" the CFPB and stop it from being what he calls an "overreaching regulator." Bill Huizenga of Michigan questioned the agency's oversight, and Dan Meuser of Pennsylvania spent his time attacking Democrats for criticizing Vought at all.

This was a chorus, not a solo.

What they actually want to do

The "reforms" these Republicans asked Vought about aren't small housekeeping. Per American Banker, the wish list includes:

Raising the size threshold for CFPB supervision from $10 billion to $21 billion in assets — meaning a whole tier of large financial firms would escape federal watchdog oversight entirely.
Narrowing the definition of "abusiveness" — making it harder to go after lenders who trap people in predatory products.
Putting the CFPB on the chopping block every year through the appropriations process, so its funding can be squeezed at will.

Translate that out of Washington-speak, and it means: fewer cops on the beat watching the banks, and more room for the financial industry to squeeze ordinary customers.

Who wins, who loses

Ask who benefits when you gut the consumer watchdog. It's not the family fighting a bogus overdraft fee, or the veteran targeted by a shady lender, or the senior citizen hit with junk charges. It's the banks and lenders — the same interests that pour money into these lawmakers' campaigns.

That's the whole story here. The CFPB is one of the few agencies whose entire job is to be on your side against powerful financial companies. And when its future was on the line, these representatives lined up not to protect it, but to ask how they could tear it down for good.

They had a chance to stand up for consumers. They chose to stand up for the banks.

Source

"Republicans ask CFPB's Vought how to curb agency's power," American Banker, July 15, 2026.

Hal Rogers Represents the Heart of Black Lung Country. He Won't Help Raise Miners' Benefits.

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 08:38:03 +0000

Coal miners in eastern Kentucky spent their working lives breathing in the dust that pays for our lights and our steel. A lot of them are dying from it. The disease is called black lung, and once you have it, it never gets better.

The federal government sends those miners a disability check every month. Right now it comes to about $794. That check has not kept up with the cost of living in decades — a miner today gets about 30% less, after inflation, than a miner got in 1969. If the payment had simply kept pace, it would be well over $1,000 a month.

Kentucky has more black lung recipients than any state in the country — more than 4,700 as of 2025. And most of them live in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, in the district represented for the last 45 years by Hal Rogers.

Local leaders in coal country — Republicans and Democrats both — want those checks raised. Rogers won't lift a finger to do it.

Local Republicans are begging Washington to act

This isn't a partisan fight back home. All over Appalachia, county and city governments have passed resolutions asking Congress to boost black lung benefits.

One of them is David Johnston, the Republican Judge-Executive of Ohio County, Kentucky. His uncle died of black lung. His father suffered from it. "The government should have had workplace safety in place to protect them, and they didn't," he told the Kentucky Lantern. "These folks got sick."

Todd DePriest, the Republican mayor of Jenkins, called the money it would take a "drop in the bucket." "They mined the coal that made the steel that won the war," he said.

There is even a bill ready to go. The Support Our Miners Act, introduced at the end of June, would raise the monthly benefit and tie it to inflation so it never falls behind again. It's aimed at helping more than 25,000 miners and their families across the country.

Here's the problem. Not a single Kentucky Republican in Congress has signed on. The only Kentuckian backing it is Democratic Rep. Morgan McGarvey of Louisville. Rogers — whose district has more sick miners than almost anywhere in America — is not on the bill. When the Kentucky Lantern emailed the offices of Rogers' fellow Kentucky Republicans, most didn't even respond.

What Rogers said instead

Rogers did send a statement. He didn't say he'd help. Instead, he blamed Democrats.

He accused them of a "targeted War on Coal" and said they weren't "being transparent about their movement to destroy the trust fund." He said the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund — the government fund that pays miners when their old coal company has gone bankrupt — "needs significant reform."

That sounds responsible until you learn who actually weakened that fund. Because the story of the trust fund is the exact opposite of what Rogers is telling his own constituents.

The fund is broke because Republicans let coal companies stop paying

The Black Lung Disability Trust Fund isn't paid for by taxpayers. It's paid for by a small excise tax on every ton of coal that comes out of the ground. The coal companies are supposed to fund the care for the miners they made sick. That's the deal.

At the end of 2018, Republicans broke that deal. Congress let the coal tax rate collapse — it dropped 55%, from $1.10 a ton down to 50 cents, on underground coal. It didn't happen by accident. The coal lobby — the National Mining Association, Peabody Energy, and others — pushed Republican leaders not to extend it, and they got their way. Coal companies paid less. The fund that pays sick miners got starved.

So who fixed it? Democrats did. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 permanently restored the higher coal tax. It would "ensure that coal companies fund their obligations, not the American taxpayer," as the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense put it.

And Hal Rogers voted against it. On the final House vote, Rogers voted Nay on the Inflation Reduction Act, along with every other House Republican who voted.

Read that again. Rogers now says the trust fund is too weak to afford higher benefits. But when there was a vote to make coal companies pay into that exact fund — the fix that keeps it solvent — Rogers voted no. He is using a problem his own party created as the excuse for why he can't help.

The cost is tiny. He just won't spend it on miners.

Rogers points to the fund's finances. But the numbers make his excuse look thin.

An older version of this legislation, the Black Lung Benefits Improvement Act, was scored by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office in 2022. Giving miners a modest raise and tying it to inflation would cost a little over $5 million a year. That is a rounding error in a federal budget.

For comparison, watchdogs have spent years documenting how Rogers moves money. The Lexington Herald-Leader nicknamed him the "Prince of Pork" for steering hundreds of millions in earmarks to his district — including, watchdogs allege, $30 million to companies that had donated to his political committees. He found $17 million for an airport so empty its last airline had already left.

So the money is there when Rogers wants it there. A $5 million-a-year raise for dying coal miners is not a budget problem. It's a choice.

Forty-five years, and this is what miners get

Rogers has represented Kentucky's 5th District since 1981. He has sat on the Appropriations Committee — the committee that decides where federal money goes — for most of that time. There is almost no one in Congress with more power to help sick miners, and few places in America with more sick miners than his own district.

Advocates put it plainly. Rebecca Shelton of the Appalachian Citizens' Law Center said the cost is so small that "it really doesn't feel like a valid reason to not support this bill." She added: "I cannot imagine anyone in Eastern Kentucky saying that it's a bad idea to support miners with this disability."

Local Republicans agree. The mayors and judges back home agree. The only people who won't get behind it are the Kentucky Republicans in Washington — the ones with the actual votes.

Eastern Kentucky's miners kept the country running. After 45 years, their congressman still won't fight to keep their checks from shrinking. He'd rather blame the other party for a fund his own party bled dry.

Source

Liam Niemeyer, "Local leaders support boosting black lung benefits. That consensus hasn't emerged in Congress." — Kentucky Lantern, July 13, 2026. Lead image: black lung X-rays, National Archives.