MAGA Report Cards — Louisiana

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

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

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

The argument they signed is the part worth reading twice.

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

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

What the brief actually argues

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

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

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

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

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

Who signed it

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

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

Some of these names carry their own history

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the argument matters beyond this case

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

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

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

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

What the filing shows

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

Nobody is doing the thing the bill bans

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

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

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

This is control, not freedom

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

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

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

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

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

Two Republicans said no

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

The bill now goes to the Senate.

The choice they made

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

Every Republican we track who voted yes

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

Iowa: Ashley Hinson, Zach Nunn

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

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

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the SAVE America Act would actually do to voters

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

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

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

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

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

The emergency the resolution describes

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

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

It cites a federal investigation that charged four people.

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

What was actually in front of them that week

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

Outside the chamber:

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

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

In their own words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 189 who voted yes

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

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho — Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas — Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi — Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey — Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

The number nine is not in the Constitution

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

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

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

What they were actually voting on

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

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

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

The timing

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

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

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

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

Who pushed it

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who voted to freeze the Court

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey: Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

Miami-Dade Ended Universal Free Meals at All But 121 of Its 500-Plus Schools. Free Meal Funding Is Tied to SNAP Enrollment, and All Three Republicans Who Represent the County Voted for the SNAP Cuts.

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:57:03 +0000

Miami-Dade County Public Schools is the largest school system in Florida. This summer it announced it would stop offering universal free meals at all but 121 of its 500-plus schools. At the rest, children have to apply individually.

The district did not say its families had gotten richer. What changed was a number in a federal funding formula.

How a food stamp cut reaches a cafeteria

Most people assume free school meals and food stamps are separate programs. They are wired together, in two ways.

Individually: a lot of students get free meals automatically because their household is on SNAP or Medicaid. Take the household off SNAP and the automatic qualification goes with it.

Institutionally: the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Community Eligibility Provision lets a whole school serve free meals to every student, and reimburses it based on the percentage of its students who qualify for SNAP and similar programs. Push SNAP enrollment down in a neighborhood and the school's reimbursement rate falls with it — even for the children who were never on SNAP at all.

That is Marion County, Kentucky, where nutrition director Jennifer Wheeler told Stateline that her district's current certification reimburses about 93% of its students at the maximum rate — but at today's SNAP enrollment, it would be about 75%.

"Which then is a huge financial impact on our program," she said. Her program is self-funded. Federal reimbursements pay for the food, the labor and the kitchen equipment for 3,000 students across seven schools.

"Cuts to SNAP are not going to stop at the grocery store," said Clarissa Hayes of the Food Research & Action Center. "They really are going to threaten children's access to school meals."

She added: "We are really only starting to see the beginning."

The numbers behind it

Between May 2025 and May 2026, more than 5.6 million people lost SNAP coverage — a 13.5% drop in a single year. That is faster than the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted when it analyzed the 2025 budget bill.

More than 1 million American children have lost SNAP under the law.

About 36.6 million people were still receiving SNAP in May, at an average of roughly $187 per person per month.

More cuts are queued up as the law is fully implemented, including billions in administrative costs and benefit spending pushed onto the states.

Who voted for it

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act added new eligibility rules and work requirements to SNAP and shifted costs to states. On July 3, 2025, the House passed it on final passage. The clerk's roll call records the three Republicans who represent Miami-Dade County all voting aye:

Carlos Gimenez
Mario Diaz-Balart
Maria Elvira Salazar

Their constituents' children are among the ones now filling out individual applications.

When Congress passed the bill, Republicans who supported the food stamp cuts said the changes would strip waste and fraud out of the program. Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, was among them.

Five point six million people is not a fraud rate. It is a program being taken away from people who qualify for it.

What it looks like from a kitchen table

Anthony Bonner is a 38-year-old campaign organizer and barber in Memphis. He and his 14-year-old son lost their $250 monthly SNAP benefit in March, when the federal change ended the work requirement exemption for parents of children 14 and over. His current contract job does not satisfy the work requirement.

He has cut back on fresh meat and produce and moved to frozen vegetables and ramen.

"It's one thing to cut me off, but I should have been able to get benefits for him," he said. "I still have yet to really have enough food that I feel comfortable with that me and my son can eat for the month."

The first day of school was a relief, because his son's school still serves free breakfast and lunch to everyone. That is the reimbursement formula holding — for now.

A survey by the nonprofit No Kid Hungry found more than two-thirds of low-income parents worried this back-to-school season that they would have to choose between paying bills and buying healthy food. More than half had already cut back on groceries.

This keeps happening, state by state

The pattern in this story is the one we have been tracking all year.

In Pennsylvania, SNAP rolls fell by 220,000 in a year, with the state attributing nearly half of it directly to the budget bill — and all nine Pennsylvania Republicans voted for it, including the Agriculture chairman who had promised "absolutely no reductions."

Nationally, 4 million people had come off food stamps between July 2025 and April 2026, and Republicans described the collapse as a sign the economy was improving — while unemployment held flat and grocery prices kept rising.

Now the same formula is reaching the lunch line.

What it adds up to

More than 5.6 million people, including over 1 million children, have lost SNAP in a year under the 2025 budget bill — faster than the Congressional Budget Office predicted. Federal free-school-meal funding is tied to rates of SNAP participation, which is why anti-hunger groups have spent the year warning that school meals are next. Miami-Dade County Public Schools, Florida's largest district, has already ended universal free meals at all but 121 of its 500-plus schools. The three Republicans who represent Miami-Dade all voted for the law, and House Speaker Mike Johnson told the country the changes were about waste and fraud.

Source

Kevin Hardy, "SNAP cuts could lead to kids losing free school breakfast and lunch", Stateline via Florida Phoenix, September 2, 2026. Vote record: U.S. House Clerk, Roll Call 190, July 3, 2025. Photo by Marcus Constantino for West Virginia Watch.

Mike Johnson Says Max Miller Has Been a 'Great Member of Congress.' Miller Is Under an Ethics Investigation for Domestic Violence, and the Accuser's Father Is a Republican Senator.

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:47:21 +0000

The House Ethics Committee opened an investigation in August into whether Rep. Max Miller of Ohio "may have engaged in domestic violence and abuse or illegal drug use," in violation of the House's own conduct rules.

On Monday, August 31, 2026, CNN's Manu Raju asked the Speaker of the House whether he supports Miller's reelection campaign.

Mike Johnson said yes.

"He has been a great member of Congress," Johnson said. "He has some issues in his personal life he's working through. The House Ethics Committee is looking into that and any implications it may have." He added that he would "let due process play out."

What "some issues in his personal life" refers to

Max Miller's ex-wife, Emily Moreno, has accused him of hurling scalding hot water at her, holding a gun to her head, and breaking their 2-year-old daughter's collarbone. The two divorced last year and have been in a custody fight over the child.

Miller denies all of it. He sued his ex-wife for defamation in May, and says he filed his own paperwork to open an ethics investigation to clear his name.

Emily Moreno's father is Bernie Moreno, the Republican senator from Ohio. He is one of several Republicans who have called on Miller to resign. Last month he described what his family has been through:

"My daughter lives in constant fear of this man, not like something that's existential, but deeply in her heart, she fears what this guy is capable of. You can't fathom what that makes me feel like when the dad's number one job is to protect your kids."

Moreno said his family had gone through "the seventh level of hell," and asked Miller to "seek professional help to end the clear pattern of abuse he has left in his wake."

That is the record the Speaker of the House looked at before calling Miller a great member of Congress.

"Due process" is doing work it cannot do

Johnson's answer has a defensible-sounding structure. There is an investigation. Let it finish. Do not prejudge.

Except that is not what he did. He was not asked whether Miller should be expelled or punished. He was asked whether he supports Miller's campaign — a political endorsement, entirely within his discretion, requiring no finding of fact from anyone.

He could have said the honest version of "due process": I'm not going to weigh in on his race while the Ethics Committee is working. Instead he volunteered a character reference.

And the timing is not neutral, either. The Ethics Committee observes a 60-day blackout before an election, which begins September 4. The committee is not expected to report anything before November. "Let due process play out" means, in practice, that voters go to the polls with nothing.

The rest of the party is not united behind this

The striking thing about Johnson's answer is how much company Miller has lost.

Republican senators called on him to resign. A conservative group called him unfit to serve. A poll had him down 14. Miller's response to all of it was to loan his own campaign $1 million and stay on the ballot. Cook Political Report has since moved Ohio's 7th District from "likely Republican" to "toss up."

His own former father-in-law, a sitting Republican senator, wants him gone.

Against that, Johnson is not "letting the process play out." He is picking a side in a fight where much of his own party has already picked the other one.

He is the third Republican leader to take this position, and the pattern is the point

Johnson is not alone, and that is what makes this worth writing down rather than filing as one bad answer on a rope line.

Rep. Jim Jordan, asked on CNN whether Miller should resign, called it "a family matter" and said he hopes Miller wins — weeks after going hard at a Democrat facing similar accusations.

Ohio's Republican nominee for governor, Vivek Ramaswamy, was caught on leaked audio backing Miller "up and down the ticket," explaining that Republican control of the House comes first: "If we compromise that, we're done."

Three Republican leaders, three versions of the same answer. Ramaswamy's is the only one that says the quiet part: the seat matters more.

The party that spent years telling America it stands for family values has settled on a rule for its own members. When the accused is one of ours and the seat is a toss-up, the allegations become a personal matter and the process becomes a reason to wait.

What the record shows

On August 31, 2026, House Speaker Mike Johnson publicly endorsed the reelection of Max Miller, a member under House Ethics Committee investigation for possible domestic violence and abuse, calling him a "great member of Congress" with "some issues in his personal life." The accusations — scalding water, a gun to the head, a 2-year-old's fractured collarbone — come from Miller's ex-wife, whose father is a sitting Republican senator who says she lives in constant fear of him and has asked Miller to resign. The Ethics Committee's pre-election blackout begins September 4, so its findings are not expected to reach voters before they vote.

Source

Sarah Davis, "Johnson says he supports Max Miller's reelection bid: 'Great member of Congress'", The Hill, September 1, 2026. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

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.

Trump Set Federal Workers' 2027 Raise to Zero and Gave Law Enforcement 3.8%. He Blamed Inflation That Has Gone Up on His Own Watch.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:39:41 +0000

On Thursday, August 27, 2026, President Trump sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson telling him that federal employees will not get a raise next year.

"I have therefore decided to set at zero the pay adjustment to be made for the 2027 pay year. This decision will maintain fiscal responsibility without harming the government's ability to recruit and retain well qualified employees."

In the very next paragraph, as Government Executive reported, he instructed the Office of Personnel Management to give federal law enforcement personnel a 3.8% raise — for the second year running — "to increase recruitment and retention."

So withholding a raise does not hurt recruitment and retention, but granting one increases it. Both claims are in the same letter, one paragraph apart.

The reason he gave is not true

Trump's stated justification, in the letter's own words: "Such a large raise for Federal employees while most Americans still struggle with the consequences of the Biden Administration's giant inflation spree is unacceptable and would be unfair."

Government Executive checked it in one line: inflation has risen from 2.8% when Biden left office to 3.3% as of last month.

That is the whole argument. Prices are higher now than when he took over, and the people being told to eat the difference are the ones who process Social Security claims, inspect meat, answer the VA phone line and forecast the weather.

A pay freeze while prices are rising 3.3% a year is not a freeze. It is a pay cut of about 3.3%, taken by everyone in the federal civilian workforce except law enforcement.

He did this last year and backed off. This year is different.

Trump proposed a freeze in his 2026 budget too, and in August 2025 he ended up granting a 1% across-the-board raise for non-law-enforcement workers instead.

The alternative pay plan is a routine, deadline-driven exercise under both parties: presidents have until the end of August to issue one, or much larger automatic locality-pay increases kick in under a 1990 law. Congress can override the president's plan, and has — in early 2019, a newly Democratic-led Congress overrode Trump's plan to freeze federal worker pay that year and delivered a 1.9% average raise retroactively.

Here is what has changed. The House's spending bills this year are silent on federal employee compensation — which, as Government Executive puts it, effectively endorses Trump's plan. Silence is the endorsement. The Senate has not released its draft.

Mike Johnson runs the chamber that writes those bills. Nothing stops the House from putting a raise in one. It has not.

This is the same workforce, being hit the same way, for two years

The pay freeze is not the first thing done to these workers, and it is not the biggest.

Two executive orders, plus an earlier move against TSA screeners, stripped collective bargaining from 84.4% of the unionized federal workforce. A bipartisan bill to restore it passed the House 231–195 — and 195 House Republicans voted to keep the contracts cancelled.
The Agriculture Department told about 2,600 Washington-area employees to move across the country or quit, and lost 20,000 workers.
Republicans in Congress asked for the cuts by name. Glenn Grothman went on public radio during the shutdown and asked Trump to fire up to 200,000 federal workers, saying "a lot of these people are not working very hard at all."

Take a worker who is still there after all of that. Their union contract is gone. Their office may have been told to relocate. Their colleagues were fired. And now their pay is frozen while prices are rising 3.3% a year.

What it adds up to

Trump has formally proposed a zero percent pay adjustment for most of the federal civilian workforce in 2027, while granting federal law enforcement a 3.8% raise for the second straight year. His stated reason is inflation left over from the Biden administration; inflation has risen from 2.8% to 3.3% since Biden left. Because prices keep rising, a freeze is a real pay cut of roughly that much. Congress can override it, and the House's own spending bills — written under Speaker Mike Johnson — say nothing at all, which lets it stand.

Source

Erich Wagner, Trump formally proposes pay freeze for most federal workers, 3.8% increase for law enforcement, Government Executive, August 28, 2026 (photo: Andrew Harnik / Getty Images). See also Torrie Herrington, Trump Plans to Freeze Civilian Federal Worker Pay for Next Year, NOTUS, August 28, 2026.

A NASA Contractor in Julia Letlow's District Gave $100,000 to a Super PAC Backing Her Senate Run. Federal Law Bans Contractors From Giving at All.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:31:54 +0000

There is one rule in federal campaign finance that almost nobody argues about anymore. If your company has a contract with the federal government, you cannot give money to federal candidates or the committees that support them. Not while you're negotiating the contract. Not while you're performing it. Not a dollar.

The reason is obvious enough that a full panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ban unanimously in 2015. If contractors could write checks to the politicians who steer federal money, then contracts and campaign contributions start moving through the same pipe.

On August 26, 2026, the Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging that a Baton Rouge company did exactly that, and that the money went to a super PAC backing Julia Letlow's campaign for the U.S. Senate.

What the complaint says

The company is MMR Constructors, Inc., at 15961 Airline Highway in Baton Rouge. Its parent, MMR Group, describes itself as a world leader in electrical, instrumentation, construction, maintenance, management and technical services.

Here is the timeline the complaint lays out, all of it from public records:

December 15, 2025 – April 17, 2026: MMR Constructors holds an active federal contract with NASA, for high-pressure industrial water services, according to USAspending.gov — the government's own database of federal awards.
March 31, 2026: MMR Constructors contributes $100,000 to Hope in Action PAC, a super PAC. The contribution is disclosed in the PAC's own quarterly FEC filing, listing the same Airline Highway address.

March 31 falls inside December 15 to April 17. That is the whole case. Under 52 U.S.C. § 30119, a federal contractor may not make a contribution to any political committee from the moment contract negotiations begin until performance is complete.

Louisiana's 5th Congressional District takes in part of Baton Rouge, including the Airline Highway address MMR Constructors gave the FEC. Letlow has represented that district since 2021.

Where the money went

Hope in Action PAC is not a general-purpose committee that happens to have given Letlow something. Follow what it did with the money:

It spent $74,130 on independent expenditures directly supporting Letlow during the 2026 cycle.
It gave $2,863,500 to Accountability Project, Inc. — a second super PAC that, in the complaint's words, has exclusively backed Letlow this cycle, and which has spent $9,522,193 on independent expenditures supporting her Senate candidacy.

That second PAC is one we've written about before. In August we traced where the Accountability Project's $9.2 million came from: liquefied natural gas money, Occidental Petroleum, a stack of Louisiana LLCs, four corporations that disclose no donors at all, and $205,586 routed from Letlow's own joint fundraising committee.

Now there's another entry in that chain. Nearly $3 million of what the Accountability Project spent for Letlow came from Hope in Action PAC — and $100,000 of Hope PAC's money, the complaint alleges, came from a company that was legally barred from giving it.

MMR Group, the parent company, had also given Hope PAC $50,000 back on October 19, 2023.

The excuses that don't work

The FEC has already closed most of the exits here, and the complaint walks through them.

"It went to a super PAC, not a candidate." The Commission settled that in 2011. A contractor giving money to a committee that makes independent expenditures is still making a contribution, and contributions are what the statute bans. In 2017 the FEC found reason to believe a contractor violated the ban by giving $200,000 to exactly this kind of committee.

"Federal work is a tiny slice of our business." The FEC has said there is no de minimis exception. A company doesn't stop being a federal contractor because the federal share is small.

"We got the money back." Doesn't matter either. In 2019 the Commission found reason to believe Ring Power Corporation violated the ban with a $50,000 contribution, and held that the company's remedial measures, "including obtaining a refund of the illegal contribution from the IEOPC, do not excuse the violation."

What is and isn't alleged here

Be precise about this, because it matters.

The complaint is against MMR Constructors. It does not accuse Julia Letlow of breaking any law, and no part of it says she solicited the money or knew about it. What the Campaign Legal Center argues is the thing the ban exists to prevent: a federal contractor bankrolling the Senate campaign of the member of Congress who represents the district it operates in — which the complaint calls a bid "to secure access, influence, and future federal contracts."

CLC's attorney, Saurav Ghosh, asks the FEC to find reason to believe the law was broken, open an immediate investigation, and impose penalties large enough to deter the next company that tries it.

The part that lands on Letlow is not a legal question. It's that she is the beneficiary. She won the Republican nomination in a June 27, 2026 runoff, after she and John Fleming knocked off sitting Senator Bill Cassidy in the May 16 primary — a campaign on which a super PAC spending exclusively for her has put more than $9.5 million this cycle. Voters in Louisiana are entitled to know whose money that was. A federal contractor's money is not supposed to be any of it.

What the filings show

Campaign Legal Center's FEC complaint alleges that MMR Constructors, Inc. of Baton Rouge gave $100,000 to Hope in Action PAC on March 31, 2026, while holding an active NASA contract that ran from December 15, 2025 to April 17, 2026 — a period federal law says a contractor may not give at all. Hope in Action PAC spent $74,130 directly supporting Julia Letlow and routed $2,863,500 to a second super PAC that has spent $9,522,193 exclusively on her Senate campaign. MMR Constructors is based in the congressional district Letlow represents. The complaint asks the FEC to investigate and impose penalties; it charges the company, not Letlow.

Source

"CLC Alleges Federal Contractor Illegally Contributed $100,000 to Letlow-Supporting Super PAC" and the complaint filed with the FEC, Campaign Legal Center, August 26, 2026. Photo: U.S. House of Representatives, via Wikimedia Commons.

Five Republicans Took the AI Industry's Money or Bought Its Stock. One of Them Wrote the Bill That Would End Your Town's Say.

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:40:22 +0000

All over the country right now, ordinary people are showing up at city council meetings to ask the same three questions about the data center somebody wants to build near them.

How much of our water will it drink? What happens to our electric bill? And who decided this?

In Luther, Oklahoma, so many people came to that meeting it needed armed security and metal detectors. The town voted for a six-month moratorium. So did Oklahoma City, Edmond and Broken Arrow. California passed the country's first frontier AI safety law. Oklahoma passed a law making the giant power users pay for their own infrastructure instead of putting it on everyone's rates.

That is democracy working exactly the way it's supposed to. People noticed something, went to a meeting, and got a rule written.

The industry's biggest political spender has decided to make those rules impossible.

Its main political vehicle, a super PAC called Leading the Future, raised $125 million in 2025 and opened 2026 with $70 million on hand, CNBC reported. Its funders are Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, SV Angel founder Ron Conway and the AI company Perplexity. Its purpose, as CNBC described it, is backing candidates who support national AI regulations rather than state-by-state rules.

Strip the phrasing out and that means: one set of rules, written in Washington, that cancels the ones Luther and Edmond and Sacramento just wrote.

There is a second AI network in this election, and it wants the opposite thing. Public First Action — a nonprofit the AI company Anthropic gave a self-reported $20 million — bankrolls super PACs whose stated priorities include preserving state authority over AI rather than preempting it. It has spent millions of its own on congressional races. Both networks run their money through blandly named vehicles, and both are writing checks to Republicans. The industry is split on what the rules should say and united on paying the people who will write them.

Here are five Republicans on the receiving end of that money — or holding the stock.

Jay Obernolte wrote the bill that does the preempting

Jay Obernolte of California is the most powerful voice on AI in the House. He chairs the Science Committee's research and technology subcommittee, chaired the House AI Task Force, sits on Energy and Commerce, and is now chair of the House Republican Policy Committee.

On July 23, 2026 he introduced the FRONTIER Act. Section 9 says no state "may adopt or enforce any law, regulation, order, or other requirement that imposes new substantive obligations on artificial intelligence developers" in the covered areas — risk transparency, outside auditing, and incident reporting. There is no sunset date. As written, it is permanent.

Two of those three are things California's own SB 53 requires. The congressman from California wrote a bill that would preempt the core of the AI safety law his own state just passed.

And in October 2025, an AI conference company and a venture fund tapped Obernolte to launch a nonprofit called the AI Coalition, which sells early-stage AI companies — in its own words — "meaningful access to policymakers and influence over the regulations." Membership runs $1,750 to $3,500 a month. We laid out that arrangement in full in August.

At the top of his own contributor list: employees of the AI company Anthropic, at $71,862 on OpenSecrets' current count, with Andreessen Horowitz third.

Kevin Hern got $850,000 in a race he had already won

On June 2, 2026, Leading the Future told the Washington Reporter it would spend $850,000 backing Kevin Hern in his Oklahoma Senate race.

The Reporter's own words for that race: Hern "is on a glide path to the Senate." He had Trump's endorsement, in a state where the Republican nominee wins. He did not need the money.

That is what makes it worth looking at. In a close race, money is trying to win. In a race nobody can lose, money is buying something else — and Hern will spend six years voting on exactly the question Leading the Future was formed to settle. He sits on Ways and Means, which writes the tax treatment that decides how profitable a data center is to build.

Meanwhile four Oklahoma cities were pausing data centers and Gov. Kevin Stitt was signing a law to keep the industry's power costs off residential bills. Only 1% of Hern's money comes from small grassroots donors, ranking him #434 out of 440 House members.

Carlos De La Cruz was outspent by his own backers

Carlos De La Cruz has never held office. He's an Air Force veteran running in Texas's 35th District, a seat the Legislature redrew in 2025 to make winnable for a Republican.

His campaign has raised about $1.05 million. Outside groups have spent about $2.35 million on his behalf — per the FEC's own independent expenditure records. The two biggest: $1,492,321 from an AI-industry super PAC and $615,885 from a crypto one.

The AI group is called Defending Our Values PAC — a name that tells a voter nothing. That is deliberate. The Texas Tribune found AI-linked super PACs behind at least seven Texas congressional candidates, going by "generic-sounding names" and running ads that don't mention the technology — because polling shows most voters don't want data centers near them.

But this is the industry's other side. FEC records show that almost every dollar Defending Our Values has raised this cycle — about $8.2 million — came from Public First Action, the Anthropic-backed nonprofit that wants state AI authority kept, not cancelled. De La Cruz is not being carried by the preemption campaign. He is being carried by the people fighting it — and if he wins in November, he arrives owing them just the same.

Defending Our Values also put $808,341 behind Kevin Hern, who is already getting Leading the Future's money. Both AI camps, the same Oklahoma Republican. We traced the whole $2.1 million in De La Cruz's race in August.

Julia Letlow signed a gag order with Meta, then bought Meta stock

Julia Letlow of Louisiana signed a nondisclosure agreement on June 29, 2024 with Laidley LLC — a shell company belonging to Meta. It gave her confidential details of a $50 billion data center in her own district.

The agreement barred her from even acknowledging that the agreement existed. A member of Congress signed a contract legally preventing her from telling her constituents she was discussing a $50 billion project on their land.

Then, as WWNO and the Gulf States Newsroom reported, she started buying Meta stock — and Nvidia, whose chips run Meta's data centers. Her broker notified her on August 11, 2025, more than a month after she sold her last Meta shares. She did not disclose the trades until January 13, 2026, in the report that carried 210 late-filed trades from the previous two years — 100 of them, the Meta and Nvidia stock included, more than a year late, worth between $225,000 and $3.19 million. The penalty for that is $200, and it is often waived. Her office says she doesn't direct her own trades. We walked through the full record in August.

She is now her party's nominee for the U.S. Senate.

Lisa McClain's family bought into xAI a week before the Pentagon wired it into the military

Lisa McClain of Michigan is the No. 4 Republican in the House. On December 15, 2025 her husband bought between $100,001 and $250,000 of private stock in Elon Musk's AI company, xAI.

Seven days later, the Pentagon announced it was integrating xAI's Grok into its platform for military personnel. Three weeks after that it expanded the deal to classified defense networks. Musk later folded xAI into SpaceX, and when SpaceX went public in June, CNBC reported the family could be sitting on a paper gain of as much as $150,000.

There is no evidence she knew what the Pentagon was planning. What there is: a household with 1,443 trades in three years, two separate late-disclosure violations in a single year, and a seat on the Financial Services Committee. The details are here.

What it looks like where you live

None of this stays in Washington.

In southwest Missouri, hundreds of residents packed meetings to oppose a data center on the west side of Joplin, and most of the letters their city council received said no. One letter said yes. It came from their congressman, Eric Burlison, who told a forum in Carthage that "what the business is doing doesn't matter" and suggested the people asking about the water table were afraid of the unknown.

In Pennsylvania, all ten of the state's Republicans in the U.S. House voted for a ten-year ban on states enforcing their own AI rules, while their constituents absorbed the electricity costs.

And this week, Trump's EPA moved to scrap the federal rule requiring states to tell the public when a facility applies for an air pollution permit at all — so you may not learn a data center is coming until the permit is approved or the concrete is poured.

Every one of those is the same move at a different altitude: take the decision away from the people who live there.

What the money shows

An AI super PAC funded by Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI's president and Palantir's co-founder raised $125 million to elect candidates who will replace state and local AI rules with a single federal one. It committed $850,000 to Kevin Hern in a race he had already won. The industry's rival network — the one that wants states to keep their AI authority — put $1.5 million of the $2.35 million behind first-time candidate Carlos De La Cruz, more than twice what his own campaign raised, and another $808,341 behind Hern. Jay Obernolte, who wrote the bill that would permanently preempt state AI laws, helped launch a nonprofit charging AI startups up to $3,500 a month for "influence over the regulations." Julia Letlow signed a secrecy agreement with Meta and then bought Meta and Nvidia stock she disclosed over a year late, and Lisa McClain's family bought a private stake in xAI a week before the Pentagon wired its product into military systems.

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

Richard Hudson Told House Republicans to Stop Holding In-Person Town Halls. Since Then They Have Held 231. Democrats Have Held 1,042.

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 09:48:32 +0000

Here is a number worth sitting with.

Through June 29 of this year, Republicans in Congress had held 39 in-person town halls — 17% of all the town halls they held at all. Democrats held 451 town halls in the same six months, two-thirds of them in person.

That count comes from LegiStorm, which has been tracking town halls for years. Those 39 are the fewest in-person town halls the company has ever recorded for Republicans in the first half of any year.

It did not used to be this way. In the first half of 2024, Republicans held more town halls than Democrats — 309 to 214 — and 229 of theirs, nearly three quarters, were in person. Then came 2025: Republicans held 378 town halls but only 122 in person, while Democrats jumped to 924. This year Republicans are down to 234 town halls, 39 of them in person.

Something changed between those two years. We know exactly what it was, because it was said out loud in a room full of members of Congress.

The order

On Tuesday, March 4, 2025, House Republicans went into a closed-door conference meeting. Richard Hudson — the North Carolina congressman who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, the group that raises the money and runs the campaigns for every House Republican on the ballot — stood up and told them to stop holding in-person town halls.

NOTUS reported it from the meeting: Hudson told members to switch to tele-town halls or Facebook Lives instead. His stated reason was that they could still hear from constituents that way, without "disruption from activists."

The unstated reason was in the same story. Going online would also avoid "the recent images of Republicans running off stage, getting drowned out by boos and being challenged on unpopular cuts to programs like Medicare and Medicaid." At the time, Congress was writing the budget bill that would cut $2 trillion in spending, much of it out of Medicaid.

Speaker Mike Johnson backed him at his weekly press conference: "There are other avenues to do it than just going in to try to give the other side sound bites."

We wrote about that meeting, and about the tele-town hall Hudson went on to hold himself — 50 minutes, eleven screened callers, and a constituent who asked about Medicaid and got told the cuts were "just rumors". Seventy-two days after he said that, he voted for the cuts.

Now the receipts are in. Since March 2025, Republicans have held 231 in-person town halls. Democrats have held 1,042. The advice worked. Republicans stopped showing up, and they have not started again.

"It's a good way to get shot"

MS NOW's Mychael Schnell asked House Republicans why, and several answered on condition that their names not be used. That detail alone tells you something: these are elected officials who wouldn't put their name on their reason for not meeting voters.

"They're a setup. It's just a setup to get us — get you off something off guard. And for me, personally, it's a good way to get shot. There's a lot of crazies out there right now."

The same lawmaker added: "I just don't feel like there is any gain to be had."

Another said the reasons were political, logistical and about safety: "It's the disruptive factor. It's the screaming factor. But it's also, truthfully, a security factor."

Nobody should wave away the safety part. Political violence in this country is real and members of both parties have been targeted. But Democrats have held 1,042 in-person town halls since Hudson gave that advice, under exactly the same threat environment. Whatever is different here, it isn't the danger. It's the questions.

And listen to the order those reasons come in. Disruptive. Screaming. Then security.

Jeff Van Drew blames the voters

Jeff Van Drew, the New Jersey Republican who switched parties in 2019, gave MS NOW the version with no hedging in it. He endorsed the virtual events fully, and he blamed the people who show up at the real ones.

"The Democrats have bastardized this and ruined town halls."

He called the traditional format "completely nonfunctional and noninformational," and said town halls that are "completely weaponized and abusive and demeaning and crude and rude" don't work for anybody.

This is Van Drew's long-running position, not a new one. He told the Press of Atlantic City last year that in-person events just bring out "the same 50 or 100 people who just don't like you."

On March 13, 2025, about 600 people lined the road outside his Northfield office to ask him to protect Medicaid and Social Security. They brought their concerns in writing to hand in at the door. The doors were locked and the building was closed.

Six hundred is not fifty. And the "crude and rude" framing is how this always gets sold — Mike Bost said his constituents' protests were staged, with paid protesters, and offered nicer-looking signs as evidence. Brian Fitzpatrick went on national television to call in-person town halls a "three-ring circus". Dan Meuser, asked to name a recent town hall, couldn't come up with one — and says he won't turn up at his constituents' weekly protests because he doesn't want to be a "piñata."

Angry voters are not a scheduling problem. They're the feedback.

What replaced it

The replacement is the telephone town hall, and it's worth being clear about what that is. Your congressman's office picks who gets to speak. It picks the order. It cuts the line whenever it wants, and nobody in the room can see anybody else's face — because there is no room.

Rob Bresnahan, the Pennsylvania Republican, is a clean example. In March 2025 he held his first telephone town hall, an hour long, taken from his office in Washington. More than 9,000 constituents dialed in. His office put out another release later celebrating that 15,000-plus people joined a telephone town hall about the government shutdown.

The big participation numbers are always the pitch. They're also the point — 15,000 people on a phone line is 15,000 people who each got, at best, one question and no follow-up.

We've watched how these go. Mike Carey promised to post the call-in number for his telephone town hall, never did, and then put out a press release celebrating that 12,000 people joined. Brad Knott's first three town halls were all by telephone; when a constituent in rural Harnett County got through to ask how he could vote to cut Medicaid, he answered that lawmakers "stand ready" to fix it later.

That is the format Hudson recommended, and that is what it produces.

One Republican still does it

Not everyone took the advice. Mike Flood, who represents a safe Republican district in Nebraska, was lambasted at a forum in May 2025 — and kept holding them. He told MS NOW he promised in 2022 to hold three town halls a year and intends to keep the promise.

"Things only get better when you go to the town square and you have an exchange of ideas. For me, it works."

He also punctured the excuse his colleagues are using. The viral clips, he said, come from a tiny slice of the event: "The reality is, a lot of the times, the same people that might be animated against me, they're clapping with me when I'm talking about supporting Ukraine or where I'm at on certain issues."

One Republican stood in the room, took the shouting, and reports that it's fine. That is the whole case against every excuse in this story, delivered by a Republican.

Someone else is holding their town halls

The seats aren't staying empty. Democrats have been going into Republican districts and holding the events themselves.

In December 2025, Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania traveled into Bresnahan's district — Pennsylvania's 8th — to take questions from voters who aren't his. He told MS NOW he may do it again.

"Republicans know their agenda is deeply unpopular, so they're hiding from their constituents. After voting to gut healthcare, raise costs and shower billionaires with tax breaks, they won't even defend their record back home."

The NRCC's response, from spokesman Mike Marinella, was that "House Republicans are meeting voters where they are, delivering results that matter to working families."

Meeting voters where they are. The voters are in Northeastern Pennsylvania, in Fayetteville, in South Jersey. The congressman is on a phone in Washington choosing which of them gets to talk.

The part that isn't about town halls

A town hall is not a favor. It's the one hour where the person casting votes in your name has to stand in a room, in front of neighbors who can see his face, and account for them — and where the follow-up question is not his to switch off.

That's why they stopped. Not because voters got ruder, but because the votes got harder to defend: Medicaid cuts, rising costs, the Epstein files, a war nobody voted on. Every one of those is a question with no good answer at a microphone, and every one of them is a question a screener can drop.

Hudson didn't invent members ducking their constituents. What he did was turn it into official party guidance, in his capacity as the man who funds their campaigns — and 231 to 1,042 is what that guidance bought.

Source

The Republican town hall is vanishing — and Democrats see an opening — Mychael Schnell, MS NOW, August 20, 2026, and Why Republicans are hiding from their own voters — Nick Hilden, AlterNet, August 20, 2026. Photo of Rep. Richard Hudson: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images.

Trump Promised to Wipe Out the $19 Trillion Debt in Eight Years. This Week It Passed $40 Trillion.

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 12:04:11 +0000

On Wednesday, the national debt passed $40 trillion for the first time.

That is about $117,000 for every person in this country. About $297,000 for every household. It is roughly the size of the economies of China, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and India put together.

When Donald Trump was sworn in the first time in January 2017, the number was $19.95 trillion. It has doubled since.

He said he would pay it off

Ten years ago this spring, Trump told the country he was going to erase the whole thing.

Reason magazine went back and checked the tape on the tenth anniversary. In a March 31, 2016 interview with The Washington Post, Trump said this:

"We're not a rich country. We're a debtor nation. We've got to get rid of the $19 trillion in debt."

The Post's Bob Woodward asked him how long that would take. "Fairly quickly," Trump said. Pressed for a real answer, he gave one:

"Well, I would say over a period of eight years."

Eight years came and went. The debt did not go down. It doubled.

What the second term has actually done

Since Trump took office again in January 2025, the debt has grown by $3.8 trillion — in nineteen months. Across both of his terms it has grown by $11.6 trillion. (For the record, it grew $8.4 trillion under Joe Biden, who never promised to erase it.)

The yearly numbers are worse than the totals suggest:

The government ran a $1.8 trillion deficit in the budget year that ended last September. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a watchdog group that yells at both parties, put it plainly: "The federal government continues to borrow $5 billion per day."
This year is worse. Ten months in, we have already borrowed more than we borrowed in all of last year. The Congressional Budget Office now expects a $2.1 trillion deficit — $200 billion more than it thought in February.
July alone was a $432 billion hole. That is the fourth-worst single month in American history.
The group's president, Maya MacGuineas, updated her math this month: we are now borrowing "nearly $6 billion per day."

Interest on all that borrowing now costs more than $1 trillion a year. It is the second-biggest line in the entire federal budget — bigger than Medicare, bigger than the Pentagon. About a fifth of every tax dollar collected now goes to paying interest on money we already spent.

They were told the price. They voted for it anyway.

None of this was a surprise. The bill that did most of the damage was scored before anyone voted on it.

On July 3, 2025, House Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act 218 to 214. Trump signed it the next day. It extended his 2017 tax cuts, paid for part of them by cutting Medicaid and food aid, and raised the debt ceiling by $5 trillion — the largest increase in American history.

The Congressional Budget Office scored it at $3.4 trillion in new debt over ten years, or $4.1 trillion once the interest on that borrowing was counted. Republican leaders spent the spring telling everyone CBO was wrong.

While the bill was still moving, Speaker Mike Johnson went on CNN and called the deficit projections "dramatically overstated." He said the economy would grow fast enough to make them wrong. His exact words: "we're not buying it."

CBO has now run the numbers again — this time including the faster growth Johnson was counting on. The bill costs $4.7 trillion through 2035, or $4.2 trillion over the same ten-year window it first scored.

The estimate did not come down. Counting the growth added about $125 billion to the cost, because the bill's effect on interest rates outweighed its effect on the economy.

We have seen this exact movie twice before

Here is the part that gets left out of the story most people have in their heads.

In 2017, when Republicans were selling the last round of tax cuts, they said the same thing they said in 2025. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told the country, "Not only will this tax plan pay for itself, but it will pay down debt." Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the plan would "be revenue neutral for the government if not a revenue generator." Speaker Paul Ryan said they were "right there in the sweet spot."

The year after it passed, the deficit jumped 17 percent to $779 billion. Corporate tax collections fell 31 percent. CBO later figured the 2017 cuts would add about $1.8 trillion to deficits through 2028, before counting a dime of interest. The watchdog group's conclusion was seven words long: "Tax cuts do not pay for themselves."

And it had all happened before that. As CNBC noted at the time, deficits also rose after the tax cuts under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Three Republican presidents, three big tax cuts, three sets of promises that the cuts would pay for themselves, three explosions of debt.

"The party of fiscal responsibility"

Republicans have run on being the careful ones with money for forty years. They spent the Obama years, as CNBC put it, relentlessly attacking him over deficits and debt. The actual record runs the other way, and it isn't close.

The A-Mark Foundation, a nonpartisan research group, lined up every president since 1981 and compared the deficit for their first budget to the deficit for their last one. Its finding, in its own words:

"The four Republican presidents since 1981 (Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump—who served one term) increased the federal deficit by 94%, 67%, 1,204% and 317%, respectively."

"In the two completed Democratic presidencies since 1981 (Bill Clinton, Barack Obama), the federal deficit decreased by 150% and 53%, respectively."

Four for four one way. Two for two the other.

PolitiFact checked a version of this claim in 2019 and rated it Mostly True, with a fair caveat: presidents don't control the economy, recessions land on whoever happens to be in office, and a new president inherits the last one's budget.

That caveat is real. So look at the thing presidents do control — the bills they sign. There, the pattern is even cleaner. Reagan cut taxes and deficits rose. Bush cut taxes and deficits rose. Trump cut taxes twice and deficits rose both times.

One more fact worth sitting with: the last time this country ran a surplus was 2001. It was Bill Clinton's last budget.

DOGE was supposed to fix this

Trump's answer to the debt in his second term was DOGE, a cost-cutting operation he handed the job of slashing the federal workforce.

Almost all of what it went after was "discretionary" spending — the smallest slice of the budget. Around 60 percent of the roughly $7 trillion the government spends each year is locked into mandatory programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans' care among them — that grow on their own to keep pace with the cost of living. Another $1.1 trillion is interest.

The debt went up $3.8 trillion anyway.

What this costs you, personally

This is not an abstraction about a big number in Washington. It shows up in what you pay to borrow money.

The Budget Lab at Yale ran the math in March. Federal borrowing since 2015 has pushed long-term interest rates up about 97 basis points. For a family taking out a 30-year mortgage at today's median home price, that is about $2,500 more a year — roughly $76,000 over the life of the loan. A typical car loan costs about $120 more a year. A typical small business loan costs about $770 more.

Margaret Spellings, who runs the Bipartisan Policy Center, said it this way as the $40 trillion mark approached: "Federal debt is already raising the cost of living and choking out other spending and investment."

The debt hawks who voted for the debt

The tell isn't that Republicans borrowed money. Everybody borrows money. The tell is that they campaigned against borrowing right up until the vote.

Aaron Bean founded the House DOGE Caucus in November 2024 because the debt had hit $36 trillion. He called it "a wakeup call." Then he voted for the bill. The caucus stopped meeting, DOGE expired, and the debt went up $4 trillion.
Keith Self tells his constituents the national debt is "an existential threat to our Republic." He voted for the $3.4 trillion bill, then introduced a bill to stop bills like it.
Steve Womack is Arkansas's designated grown-up on the debt — a former Budget Committee chairman who just introduced a bipartisan fix. His press release celebrating the $3.4 trillion bill runs about five hundred words and never mentions the deficit once.
Tim Burchett said he'd probably vote no if the bill added to the deficit. The Senate sent back a version that added about $1 trillion more. He went to the White House, got a souvenir signed by Trump, and voted yes the next day.

There is a name for a party that runs on cutting the debt and then doubles it, twice, using the same promise both times. It isn't fiscal responsibility.

Sources

Al Jazeera and Reuters, "US national debt passes record $40 trillion," August 19, 2026. Photo: AFP.
Eric Boehm, Reason, "10 Years Ago Today, Trump Promised To Eliminate the National Debt. Instead, It Has Doubled," March 31, 2026.

The Republicans Who Voted Against the CHIPS Act — Then Took Credit for the Jobs

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 12:06:19 +0000

On July 28, 2022, the House passed the CHIPS and Science Act 243 to 187. Every single one of those 187 no votes was a Republican. Only 24 Republicans voted yes.

The law has since sent billions of dollars into semiconductor plants, research corridors and tech hubs — a lot of it into districts and states represented by people who voted against it.

That created a problem for those members. Not a policy problem. A photography problem.

Because the ribbon-cuttings happen at home, in front of local news, with hundreds or thousands of new jobs standing behind you. And E&E News found that of the 31 tech hubs designated under the law, 15 would directly assist the administration's climate goals. Ten of those 15 sat in states or districts represented by Republicans who did not vote for the law — and ten of those Republicans were claiming credit or touting the benefits.

Here is what that looks like, member by member. Every vote below is from the official House roll call or the Senate's, where the bill passed 64–33.

Frank Lucas — he wrote it, then voted against it

Start with the most extraordinary one.

Frank Lucas of Oklahoma was the top Republican on the House Science Committee. The science half of the CHIPS and Science Act was, substantially, his.

He said so himself on the House floor, in a statement his own office published under the headline "Regrettably, I Will Not Be Casting My Vote for the CHIPS and Science Act Today":

"I have worked on this bill for more than three years. When I first took leadership of the House Science Committee as Ranking Member in 2019, developing legislation to strengthen American science and technology was my highest priority."

He introduced the comprehensive version in January 2020. He then worked two years with Democratic Chairwoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, gathering stakeholder feedback and holding hearings. His own words:

"This has been an exemplary bipartisan process."

Then Senate Democrats announced a separate budget deal, and Lucas voted no. He opened his floor statement with: "Just 24 hours ago, I expected my remarks on the CHIPS and Science Act to be very different."

Three years of his own work, killed in his own vote, over a deal on a different bill.

And then the sequel: once Republicans took the House and Lucas became Chairman of the Science Committee, he convened a hearing titled "CHIPS on the Table: A One-Year Review of the CHIPS and Science Act."

He gaveled in a review of the law he'd voted to stop.

Claudia Tenney — "inextricably linked," then "honored to lead this effort"

In July 2022, Claudia Tenney of New York explained her no vote by tying the bill to Democrats' budget deal. Senate Democrats had announced their reconciliation agreement, she said, "only hours after" the CHIPS and Science Act passed the Senate — and of that budget bill, which became the Inflation Reduction Act:

"The bill is poised to send our country into a crushing recession even faster, and it is inextricably linked to passage of the CHIPS and Science Act."

Fifteen months later, she thanked colleagues for their "bipartisan support" in helping her secure a tech hub designation for the New York Semiconductor Manufacturing and Research Technology Innovation Corridor — created by the law she had voted against.

Then in January 2026 she stood at the groundbreaking of Micron's plant in Clay, New York — a project worth $100 billion over at least 20 years and up to 50,000 jobs — and posted that she "was honored to lead this effort in the House."

PolitiFact rated that Half True, noting the obvious: "In 2022, Tenney voted against the CHIPS and Science Act, which eventually provided billions of dollars in federal support for the Micron plant."

Tenney did not respond to E&E News' requests for comment. We wrote about this one in full here.

Maria Elvira Salazar — Miami is "ground zero," and she voted no

Maria Elvira Salazar voted against the bill. When the South Florida Climate Resilience Tech Hub was designated, her enthusiasm was, in E&E's word, effusive:

"Miami is ground zero for sea-level rise, and we continue to lead the charge in developing resilient infrastructure."

"The establishment of a Tech Hub in Miami ensures we continue leading in innovation and technological advancement, while creating new jobs, growing our economy, and promoting national security."

Her spokesperson's explanation is worth reading closely, because it's the most honest version of the defense anyone offered:

"Regardless, it still became law, and therefore Rep. Salazar will continue to fight for any wins possible for Miami."

Translated: she opposed the thing, lost, and will now accept the winnings. That is at least coherent. It is not "we continue to lead the charge."

Jim Risch — the press release that credits his own legislation

Jim Risch of Idaho voted no in the Senate. A press release on his own website then credited him with laying the groundwork for the Inland Northwest's American Aerospace Materials Manufacturing Tech Hub — which, it said, was selected

"as a result of Risch's legislation, the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act."

That's an earlier version of the bill, which was expanded and then signed into law — the law Risch voted against. His spokesperson said he's been "a leader and chief supporter of American-led semiconductor technology his entire career," but voted no "due to last-minute changes."

So the CHIPS is his. The Act is not.

Andy Biggs — $8.5 billion, and an empty chair

Andy Biggs took a different approach: silence.

Intel received an $8.5 billion federal grant under the law to expand semiconductor manufacturing in Chandler, Arizona, with up to $11 billion in loans available on top. The administration projected 10,000 manufacturing and construction jobs in the state, plus thousands more indirect.

When President Biden announced it at Intel's Ocotillo Campus on March 20, 2024, Biggs — who voted no — did not attend. The Arizona Republic reported that he "has kept a low profile on the topic," that "his public statements on the 2022 semiconductor law are scarce," and that he did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Biggs is now running for governor of Arizona on an economic platform. The single largest federal manufacturing investment in his state's recent history is one he voted against and has said almost nothing about.

Mike Johnson — "probably will" repeal it, then "apologized profusely"

Mike Johnson voted against the bill as a member. Then he became Speaker of the House.

On November 1, 2024 — campaigning in Syracuse, near the site of the Micron plant — Johnson told reporters Republicans "probably will" try to repeal the semiconductor law if they won Congress and the White House.

The backlash was immediate, and the retreat was faster. Johnson clarified within hours:

"I fully support Micron coming to Central NY, and the CHIPS Act is not on the agenda for repeal."

The local Republican he was campaigning for said Johnson "apologized profusely, saying he misheard the question."

That is the whole dynamic in one afternoon. The Speaker's honest instinct was repeal. The politics of standing near the site of a chip factory made it unsayable. So it became a misheard question.

What the pattern actually is

None of these six is being accused of a crime. Voting against a bill is legitimate. Members are allowed to think a law is bad and still serve the constituents it helps.

But look at what they actually said. Not "I opposed this, I lost, and I'll make sure my district gets its share" — which is Salazar's spokesperson's line, and which is defensible. What they said was that they led the effort. That the hub came as a result of their legislation. That they continue to lead the charge.

That's not constituent service. It's collecting the credit for a result you tried to prevent, and it only works if voters don't check the roll call.

The roll call is right here, and it has 187 names on it.

There is a version of this that would be honest, and Frank Lucas came closest to it — he told the House exactly what he was giving up and why, on the record, before he did it. Then he chaired the victory lap anyway.

When a factory opens near you in 2026 and your member of Congress is at the podium, the question worth asking is simple: how did you vote?

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.

Republicans Spent Millions Calling Brandon Herrera Too Extreme for Congress. Now Mike Johnson Is Raising Money for Him.

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 07:58:13 +0000

Standing in a San Antonio barbecue joint last month, the Speaker of the House told Texas voters they had a clear choice: the "common sense" of the Republican nominee, or the "crazy" positions of his Democratic opponent.

The Republican nominee was Brandon Herrera. And until very recently, the people calling him crazy were Republicans.

The New York Times reported this week on how the party got from there to here. It is a short trip, and nothing about Herrera's record moved.

What Republicans said about him when it was convenient

Herrera, 30, is a YouTuber with more than four million subscribers who built his following on gun reviews and inflammatory jokes. He ran in 2024 against the district's Republican incumbent, Tony Gonzales, and ran again this cycle.

Both times, the party's leadership was against him. In 2024 the leadership roster formally endorsed Gonzales, with Mike Johnson raising money for him in San Antonio that April. This cycle Johnson and President Trump were behind Gonzales again — in January a lawyer for Trump sent Herrera a cease-and-desist letter over a mailer edited to make it look as though the president was posing with him.

Gonzales and his allies spent millions making the case, and the material they used was Herrera's own video archive:

A joke that a Nazi-era submachine gun was "the original ghetto blaster" and "Hitler's street sweeper."
A joke making light of veterans who die by suicide. The Republican Jewish Coalition spent millions in 2024 amplifying that one. Its ad said: "Fools like Brandon Herrera who mock veterans do not belong in Congress or Texas."

His Democratic opponent has since added to the pile, circulating a video of Herrera showing off his ownership of a 1939 English edition of Mein Kampf, along with clips of him joking about Nazi atrocities against Jews. Herrera says the book is part of a historical collection and vehemently denies being antisemitic.

Then Gonzales was forced out — first out of the race, then out of Congress — over a sexual misconduct scandal. And, as the Times puts it, top Republicans quickly closed ranks around Herrera.

That is the entire explanation. Not a retraction, not new information, not an apology. A vacancy.

We documented the same instinct in how Johnson handled the Gonzales scandal itself: a Speaker who calls himself a "zealous guardian of due process" telling reporters it wasn't "time" to discuss a resignation, while rank-and-file Republicans said out loud what he wouldn't.

The timing of Johnson's trip to San Antonio

Here is the detail that makes the reversal hard to explain away.

Johnson headlined a fundraiser for Herrera at Republican congressional campaign headquarters in Washington on July 22, with the committee's chairman, Richard Hudson, co-hosting. In the days that followed, another video surfaced: Herrera, in July 2022, using crude sexualized language to insult Shannon Watts, who founded Moms Demand Action after the Sandy Hook school shooting.

We wrote about what he actually said and about Texas Republicans walking away from reporters rather than answer for it. That post is from July 28. Two days later, Johnson stood next to Herrera in San Antonio and called the district critical to holding the Republican majority.

So this was not a case of the leadership not knowing. The video was in the news that week. Johnson went anyway.

He is not apologizing, and he says so plainly

Asked about the remarks, Herrera told the Times he wouldn't use that language as a candidate, but that he is not sorry:

"I know the difference between the way that you speak in a comedy performance, so to speak, and the way that you speak in a political environment."

And on his critics:

"What they're going to do is they're going to pretend jokes are policy, and they're going to purposely pretend that they don't know the difference."

He also told the Times that the only people who have ever cared about the videos are "either in the media or in D.C."

That last claim is worth testing against the map.

The district includes Uvalde

Texas's 23rd District stretches from San Antonio to El Paso along the border. It contains Uvalde, where 19 children and two teachers were murdered at Robb Elementary School in 2022.

Herrera's position, per the Times, is that he opposes all new restrictions on firearms — including red flag laws, the specific measure designed to take guns from people who have signaled they intend to hurt someone.

His Democratic opponent, Katy Padilla Stout, says she decided to run specifically to stop a gun influencer from representing Uvalde. Her family hunts and owns guns; she supports age and mental health checks.

At a gathering of left-leaning women in the northern hills of San Antonio, she paused before recounting Herrera's remarks about Watts to check that children were out of earshot.

"That is not the type of person you want making decisions for you and your children."

A candidate who jokes about Nazi weapons and mocks veteran suicide, who opposes every new gun restriction, running to represent the town where a gunman killed 19 children in their classroom — that is not a media obsession. That is the job description colliding with the résumé.

Nobody has represented the district since April

There is one more piece of this the Times surfaces, and it belongs to a third Republican.

The seat has been empty since April. Governor Greg Abbott has not called a special election to fill the remainder of Gonzales's term, and his spokesman declined to explain the reasoning.

Padilla Stout's read on it:

"Why wouldn't you call a special election? Because you're scared you're going to lose."

Whatever the motive, the effect is fixed: for months, everyone in this stretch of the Texas border has had no vote in the House at all — and no one to call about a VA claim, a Social Security check, or a Medicaid denial. The party that spent millions arguing Herrera was unfit has been content to leave the seat vacant rather than risk it.

What actually changed

Line the two positions up.

While Gonzales was still running: Johnson endorses Gonzales and raises money for him in San Antonio in 2024, then opposes Herrera again this year. Trump endorses Gonzales too, and his lawyer tells Herrera to stop putting the president's picture on his mail. A Republican group buys millions in ads saying Herrera does not belong in Congress because he mocks veterans.

Once the seat came open: Johnson headlines Herrera's Washington fundraiser, stands beside him in San Antonio days after another video surfaces, and describes him as the "common sense" choice.

Between those two moments, Herrera did not withdraw a single joke. He has said explicitly that he won't. The one thing that changed is that the Republican majority is narrow and this seat is red by 15 points.

That is the whole standard. Not what a candidate said about veterans, or Hitler's weapons, or the mothers of murdered children — just whether the party needs the vote. Herrera understood the arithmetic better than his critics did, and said so:

"After a brutal primary on all sides," he told reporters in San Antonio, "the focus has to be bringing the party together."

It worked. That's the part worth remembering in November.

Sources

The New York Times, "Nazi Jokes and Vulgar Insults: The Edgy Gun Influencer Embraced by the G.O.P." by Bayliss Wagner (August 16, 2026). Photo by Jordan Vonderhaar for The New York Times.
Yahoo News, "Mike Johnson to Fundraise for Candidate Who Joked About Killing Older People" by J.D. Wolf (July 16, 2026).
FOX San Antonio, "Mike Johnson Addresses Border Wall in Big Bend, VA Concerns in San Antonio" by Yami Virgin (July 30, 2026).
The Texas Tribune, "Trump lawyer sends cease-and-desist letter to Brandon Herrera over use of president’s image in campaign ad" by Gabby Birenbaum (February 12, 2026).
The Texas Tribune, "U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales prevails in primary runoff over gun influencer Brandon Herrera" (May 29, 2024).

Clay Higgins Called Jan. 6 Rioters "Victims of Political Persecution." Four Weeks Later He Moved to Brand Antifa a Terrorist Organization.

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 11:43:37 +0000

On June 23, 2026, eight people were sentenced in a federal courthouse in Texas for what happened outside an immigration jail on the Fourth of July the year before. One of them, Benjamin Song, shot a police officer in the neck. He got 100 years.

The other seven did not shoot anyone. They got 30 to 70 years each. Added up with Song’s, the Justice Department announced a combined 450 years — and it led the press release with the fact that this was "the first sentencing of defendants affiliated with Antifa following President Donald J. Trump's executive order designating the group as a Domestic Terrorist Organization in September 2025."

Eight months before that executive order existed, Clay Higgins put his name on a resolution asking Congress to do the same thing.

The resolution

H.Res. 26 is twenty-five "whereas" clauses and one sentence of resolving. Its title says the whole thing: "Deeming certain conduct of members of Antifa as domestic terrorism and designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization."

It was submitted on January 9, 2025 by Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. Higgins was one of four original cosponsors, alongside Andy Biggs of Arizona, Mary Miller of Illinois, and Wesley Hunt of Texas. A fifth Republican, Abraham Hamadeh of Arizona, added his name on October 21, 2025 — a month after Trump had already signed the executive order, and three months after the Prairieland shooting.

The resolution never got a vote. It was referred to the Judiciary Committee on the day it was submitted and has not moved since. But it tells you exactly what these members wanted, and Trump gave it to them by executive order eight months later.

Here is what that designation turned out to mean in practice.

Fifty years for bringing fireworks

Rolling Stone spent weeks on the phone with one of the defendants, a 30-year-old trans woman named Autumn Hill. She went to the July 4 protest outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. She brought fireworks. She left before the shooting.

A jury acquitted her of attempted murder. It acquitted her of the firearms charges. Her lawyer, Cody Cofer, thought the evidence was in his favor: no evidence she had ever held a gun, none that she had trained with Song in firearms, and — in Rolling Stone’s words — "no testimony, even, that she held a firework or a can of spray paint."

She was convicted of riot, of two explosives counts for the fireworks, and of "providing material support to terrorists." Chief U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor sentenced her to 50 years.

Another defendant, Daniel Rolando Sanchez Estrada, was not at the protest at all. He moved a box of anti-fascist literature from one residence to another. The Justice Department charged that as corruptly concealing a document. He got 30 years.

Fifty years is 28 years longer than the longest sentence ever handed down for January 6. That record belonged to Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio, who got 22 years for seditious conspiracy — and who walked out of prison a free man on January 21, 2025, hours after Trump's clemency order.

What Higgins wrote to Trump

Twenty-seven days before he signed the antifa resolution, Higgins sent Trump a letter. It is posted on his own House website, dated December 13, 2024, addressed to the Mar-a-Lago Club.

In it, he describes the people prosecuted for January 6 as:

"American citizens who had dared to engage their First Amendment right to challenge the oppression of election integrity"

In one page, he uses the phrase "J6 victims" eight times — four of those as "J6 victims of political persecution." And he lays out what he wants done, in order:

"Commute the sentences to time served for every J6 victim who has been adjudicated by the biased Biden administration."

"Dismiss all pending adjudications of J6 victims of political persecution."

"Dismiss all ongoing investigations into J6 victims of political persecution."

Nothing in those three is conditional on anything. A fourth bullet does ask for a Justice Department task force — but its job is to review the commutations and dismissals afterward, "for the consideration of full Presidential pardon," a caseload Higgins put at "about 3000 cases." He adds: "Personally, I see no problem with a full pardon of all J6 victims of political persecution under Biden."

Trump did it on January 20, 2025 — about 1,500 pardons and commutations, including people convicted of assaulting police officers. Two days later, Higgins was still posting about the mistreatment of what he calls the J6 political prisoners.

He is not shy about any of this. His office keeps a standing page on his House site titled "J6 Investigative Efforts," cataloging four years of letters, hearings and TV hits. It includes a January 2022 letter demanding "Humane Treatment for January 6 Prisoners." In September 2025, Speaker Mike Johnson appointed him to the new Republican-run subcommittee reinvestigating January 6.

The same man, the same month

Line the two documents up.

In December, Higgins argues that Americans who forced their way into the Capitol to stop the certification of a presidential election were exercising a First Amendment right, that every case against them should be dropped, and that prosecuting them at all was persecution.

In January, he signs a resolution declaring that an entire political philosophy — anti-fascism — is a terrorist organization, and that people who hold it are terrorists.

Higgins is not a bystander to the first half of that. He voted to throw out Arizona's electoral votes on January 6, 2021, and Pennsylvania's the next day. So did Biggs. So did Mary Miller. All three voted to do by ballot what the crowd outside was trying to do by force, and all three later signed the paper declaring the other side's protesters terrorists.

When U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould announced the Prairieland sentences, he said the defendants' acts "were a far cry from a peaceful protest or First Amendment expression." That is the exact standard Higgins refused to apply to January 6.

Why this reaches past antifa

The Prairieland case had real violence in it. An officer was shot. Nobody has to pretend otherwise.

The problem is what the terrorism label does to everyone standing nearby. Hill was tried not only for what she did but for who she knew. And the framework Trump built around that label does not stop at people who show up to protests.

Three days after the antifa executive order, the White House issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7. It says there are "common recurrent motivations and indicia" uniting the conduct it targets, and lists the "common threads" as "anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity" along with "extremism on migration, race, and gender." Those are opinions, not crimes.

It also tells investigators to go after "institutional and individual funders, and officers and employees of organizations," to use RICO — the racketeering law written for the mob — and it orders the IRS Commissioner to make sure "no tax-exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism."

That is a charity-funding shutoff switch, and Congress has been trying to build its own version of it for two years. We wrote about the bill that would let one official strip any nonprofit's tax-exempt status without ever showing it the evidence — it passed the House in 2024 and was quietly reintroduced in December 2025.

Katherine Tomaszewski of the Charity and Security Network, an NGO founded after 9/11 to track how terrorism law gets used, put it plainly to Rolling Stone: the weaponization of these statutes isn't new, the targets have expanded. "It doesn't matter what your politics are," she said. "Republican or Democrat, you should be worried about that kind of power."

Higgins should know. He has spent four years arguing that a president's Justice Department went after people for their politics. He is right that it is a terrible thing to do to Americans. He simply does not think it counts when the Americans are the other kind.

It is a habit with him. Last September, the day after Charlie Kirk was killed, Higgins promised to use his congressional authority to get people banned from the internet, blacklisted from doing business, and stripped of their driver's licenses over what they had posted — two and a half years after voting for a bill that made it illegal for federal officials to lean on companies to take down speech.

He is not alone in the arithmetic, either. Republicans across the House cheered the January 6 pardons in language they would never extend to anyone else — one North Carolina congressman called the mass pardon "leadership rooted in honesty and accountability" in the same statement he used to condemn Joe Biden's pardons.

Autumn Hill is 30. Her sentence runs 50 years, which means her next taste of freedom could come at 80. Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 and walked out in January 2025.

Source

Trump's War on 'Antifa' Sends Protesters to Prison for Decades, Rolling Stone, August 2026. Illustration by Matthew Cooley for Rolling Stone; images via Mehmet Eser/Middle East Images/AFP/Getty Images and Adobe Stock.

A Childhood Abuse Survivor Asked Clay Higgins Why He Was the Only 'No' on the Epstein Files. The Town Hall Went Downhill From There.

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 11:08:39 +0000

Clay Higgins opened his town hall in Crowley on Thursday night with a plea for civility.

"Perhaps you don't agree with the person sitting next to you, politically, or person that lives across the street, maybe you don't vote the same, but you breathe the same air man. We are all Americans we stand in glory underneath the same flag."

"We owe that to each other, so as your Congressional Representative, which I am humbled to be."

According to The Advocate, questions about glyphosate, environmental regulations, SpaceX and the Epstein files then led to heated exchanges — including one in which Higgins told a constituent he would personally carry him out of the building.

The question he came to Crowley to avoid

A resident identified themselves before asking anything:

"As a survivor of over a decade of childhood abuse at the hands of an army veteran, I must ask why you are the only Congressman who voted not to release the Epstein files."

That is not a gotcha. That is a constituent explaining why the question matters to them personally, and then asking it plainly.

Higgins's answer was that releasing the files would violate 200 years of criminal justice procedure by mandating the release of confidential criminal investigative files. He said he wasn't happy about victims' confidential names being released. He said we need to let the justice system play out before politicizing an investigation.

"Innocent until proven guilty, is that not our standard."

We have been through this answer before. When Higgins cast the lone vote against the Epstein Files Transparency Act, 427 to 1, he gave the same explanation — and the bill already let the attorney general redact victims' personal information, child abuse material, and anything touching an ongoing case. The protection he says he was defending was written into the text he voted against.

It's also worth remembering what Higgins does in Congress. He chairs the Oversight subcommittee that voted to subpoena those same files — over his own objection. He is not a bystander to the question a constituent put to him.

Then he offered to carry a man out

The exchange that blew up was about glyphosate — the weed killer sprayed on crops, in a district full of them. A resident asked about it. The back-and-forth escalated.

Here is Higgins:

"If the gentleman would allow me to answer his questions, if you want to run for Congress, knock yourself out."

The resident's reply, per KLFY: "Oh no, we have that in common, I don't like politicians."

Somewhere in that exchange Higgins told the man he would carry him out of the building himself. Another attendee heard it as a threat and shouted:

"These are the people you serve, don't threaten him, I heard you threaten him, it's on video, you said you're going to take him out yourself."

To be precise about what's established: The Advocate reports as fact that Higgins told a constituent he would personally carry him out of the building. The characterization of that as a threat — and the "take him out" phrasing — comes from an attendee in the room, who said it was recorded.

Either way, a sitting congressman who opened the evening asking Americans to respect one another spent part of it telling a voter he'd remove him from the room by hand.

The other thing he wanted to talk about

Higgins also addressed rumors about SpaceX coming to Vermilion Parish, and volunteered his personal regard for Elon Musk:

"I've broken bread with him on a few occasions, he's one of the smartest, and the oddest man I've ever met."

A congressman telling constituents about breaking bread with the world's richest man, at a meeting where they came to ask about pesticide spraying and a child sex trafficking investigation, is its own kind of answer about whose company he keeps.

Why town halls matter here

Republicans in Congress have largely stopped holding these: 39 in-person town halls in the first half of this year, the fewest LegiStorm has ever recorded, and 17% of all the town halls they held. Higgins deserves the narrow credit for showing up in a room where people could ask him things.

But showing up is the floor, not the achievement. What Crowley got was a plea for civility, a recycled explanation for the most conspicuous vote in the House, an anecdote about Elon Musk, and an offer to carry a constituent out of the building.

The survivor who asked that question still doesn't have an answer that matches the bill's actual text.

Source

Joel Thompson, "Clay Higgins calls for unity as Crowley town hall turns heated over key issues," The Advocate, and "Tensions rise during Crowley town hall," KLFY, Aug. 14, 2026. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

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

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

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

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

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

What the judge did

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

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

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

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

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

What the letter asks for

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

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

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

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

The man who led it sells the products

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

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

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

Who signed

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

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

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

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

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

What registration was actually doing

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

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

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the gloves are

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

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

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

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

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

The warnings come from the company that sells them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congress wrote guardrails. They were about equipment.

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

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

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

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

Two votes made this possible

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

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

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

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

The 201 with report cards on this site

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

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

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

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

Source

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

Mike Johnson Calls Himself a 'Zealous Guardian of Due Process.' Watch Who Gets It.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 18:27:17 +0000

On March 4, 2026, Texas Congressman Tony Gonzales went on a conservative radio show and admitted he'd had an affair with a woman who worked in his congressional office. He called it a "mistake" and a "lapse in judgment." Four months earlier, asked about the rumors in public, he had called them "completely untruthful."

The staffer, Regina Santos-Aviles, died in 2025 after setting herself on fire. Her widower released texts in which Gonzales asked her for a "sexy pic" and kept going after she told him he was "going too far." The House Ethics Committee opened an investigation into whether Gonzales "engaged in sexual misconduct towards an individual employed in his congressional office."

Gonzales said he would not resign. And the most powerful Republican in the House agreed with him.

"I don't think it's time"

Nine days before that admission, Mike Johnson was asked whether Gonzales should step down. Here is what the Speaker said:

"I think we have to wait for more of the facts to come out, and I don't think it's time to call for resignation."

He went further:

"If the accusation of something is going to be the litmus test for someone being able to continue to serve in the House, you'll have a lot of people would have to resign or be removed or expelled from Congress."

Some rank-and-file Republicans did speak up. Lauren Boebert called on Gonzales to step down. Anna Paulina Luna said "this is really disgusting to see." Brandon Gill said Gonzales should quit the race because "America deserves better."

Johnson said none of that. Johnson had endorsed Gonzales.

Here's what finally moved leadership, and it wasn't the conduct. Gonzales made his admission the day after the March 3 primary — a primary he came in second in. In Texas you need more than half the vote to win a primary outright, and neither man got there, so Gonzales was headed to a May runoff against a challenger who had just beaten him.

Two days after that result, leadership moved. Barely. They asked him to withdraw from his re-election race, and, as the Texas Tribune noted, pointedly did not ask him to give up his seat. NRCC chair Richard Hudson spelled out the arrangement: Gonzales should quit the runoff "while focusing on his family and serving his constituents for the remainder of his term."

Serving his constituents. That was the deal. Give up the campaign, keep the vote.

The math, not the misconduct

Gonzales kept that vote for another five weeks. He gave it up on April 13 — and not because Republican leaders finally found their conscience.

He quit the same evening Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell did, both of them staring down expulsion resolutions their colleagues had drafted. A Democrat, Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, wrote the one aimed at Gonzales. Luna wrote the one aimed at Swalwell. Each man was given until 2 p.m. to quit or face a vote.

CNN reported the reason it worked out that way: the numbers had to come out even. One Republican and one Democrat meant no net change to Johnson's razor-thin majority. Before the Swalwell allegations surfaced, GOP leaders had asked Gonzales not to run again but hadn't pushed him out of Congress — they couldn't spare the vote.

Fox News laid out the same arithmetic for the four members then facing expulsion: two Democrats, two Republicans. The parity is what made anyone willing to move. As Fox put it, with a majority that tight, Republicans "may not want to cede power to Democrats if the House expels a GOP Member."

That's the standard. Not what a member did. Whether removing him costs a seat.

Same podium, two answers

The morning after those resignations, Johnson stood in front of reporters and was asked about the two members still on the list — Democrat Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick and Republican Cory Mills.

On the Democrat, he had a clear answer:

"I have been a zealous guardian of due process around here. I do think certainly on Cherfilus-McCormick, the Ethics Committee has gone through all of its processes, and they found some alarming facts. I think the facts are indisputable at this point, and so I believe it'll be the consensus of this body that she should be expelled."

On the Republican, in the same remarks, he said he'd be looking into the status of the Ethics Committee's investigation.

To be fair to Johnson: an ethics subcommittee had already proven 25 of 27 counts against Cherfilus-McCormick, and she was under federal indictment. She denies wrongdoing. That's a further-along process than Mills's.

But notice what the Speaker's rule actually produces. When a process finishes on a Democrat, he announces the verdict for the whole chamber. When a process is open on a Republican, the openness of the process becomes the reason to say nothing — and there is always a process, and it is always open. Mills is still in Congress. He's one of four scandal-plagued House Republicans who have turned safe seats into real races.

"The key word there is allegation"

Which brings us to right now.

Max Miller, the Ohio Republican, is accused by his ex-wife of throwing hot water on her and of shoving her against a wall, according to court filings reviewed by CBS News — and, in an account she gave police, of holding a gun to her head. Their 2-year-old daughter turned up with a fractured collarbone. Miller denies all of it. Last week he asked the House Ethics Committee to investigate him, and within hours it agreed — opening a probe into domestic violence and illegal drug use.

Johnson had already answered, on July 21, two weeks before any of that. Here is what he said:

"The key word there is allegation. We have a process here. The House Ethics Committee works on those things."

Two weeks later, with the investigation open, he said more, and it was worse:

"There's all sorts of domestic events going on with 435 members of Congress all the time, it's not my business to get engaged in it."

All sorts of domestic events. A gun to a head is a domestic event. It is not the Speaker's business.

He isn't alone in the dodge. Jim Jordan called the same allegations "a family matter" and said he hopes Miller wins. Trump's own political team told Ohio Republicans to stop pressuring Miller to leave the ballot. The people who did break with Miller — Sens. Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted — are both from Ohio, and Moreno is the accuser's father.

What the same party sounds like when it's a Democrat

Hold Johnson's "zealous guardian of due process" next to how his party talks about people on the other side.

Maine Democrat Graham Platner had a chest tattoo widely recognized as a Nazi symbol. He told the Associated Press he got it during a night of drinking in 2007 while on leave from the Marine Corps in Croatia, that he didn't know what it was, and that he'd had it covered up. The National Republican Senatorial Committee turned it into a months-long campaign — press release after press release, from October 2025 through the following summer.

Then a former girlfriend accused him of forcing her to have sex in 2021 — a claim he called "categorically false" — and his own party did what Johnson's has never done. Platner suspended his campaign in July and formally withdrew days later. The executive director of the Maine Democratic Party said on television that quitting "was the right thing to do" and that the allegations "were very real and they were very credible."

He is not in office. He never was. He had no vote to protect and no majority to preserve.

The day after Platner announced he was quitting, the NRSC's official statement on the race was this, in full:

"Maine Democrats elected a rapist Nazi to be their nominee for Senate, and regardless of who they anoint next, Susan Collins will be re-elected in November."

No process. No waiting for facts. No 435-members-have-domestic-events. For a private citizen with no vote to protect, the Republican Party's campaign arm went straight to "rapist Nazi."

And then look who they nominated

Here's the part that should end the argument.

The challenger who beat Gonzales on March 3 was Brandon Herrera, a gun YouTuber. He finished first, but under 50%, so the two were set to meet again in a May runoff. The split tells the story: the lead Gonzales built during early voting, before the affair had fully come out, evaporated as election day returns came in. Herrera finished ahead 43.3% to 41.8%. When Gonzales quit the runoff, Herrera became the Republican nominee in Texas's 23rd District without another vote being cast.

During their 2024 primary fight, Gonzales called Herrera a "known neo-Nazi." Herrera says that's false: "I am not, nor have I never been a neo-Nazi."

What's documented is on his own channel. Jewish Insider catalogued it in April 2024: a 2022 video showing off a Nazi submachine gun set to "Erika," a Nazi marching song, in which he calls the weapon "the original ghetto blaster" and goose-steps, and which ends with an associate beginning a Hitler salute; a 2020 video on Nazi guns scored with more Nazi marching music; years of Sons of Confederate Veterans videos; and a 2019 photo of him with the group in full Confederate uniform.

The party's response to all of that was to endorse him. Within days of Gonzales quitting, Trump endorsed Herrera, calling him a fighter for the MAGA agenda. So did Boebert — the same member who'd wanted Gonzales gone over the affair — and Mary Miller of Illinois.

The Democrats' campaign arm has since put the seat on its target list, citing Herrera's "disturbing history of extremism, violence, and antisemitic rhetoric." This is a district Trump won by 15 points. It's competitive now because of who Republicans picked — the same candidate who called a child a slur to insult mothers who organize against gun violence.

The standard

Put it in order.

A Democratic Senate candidate with a covered-up tattoo and a denied accusation: rapist Nazi, said in writing, by the party's official Senate committee.

A Republican congressman who admitted an affair with his own employee, a woman who later killed herself: not time to call for resignation — and please stay for the votes.

A Republican congressman accused in court of holding a gun to his wife's head: the key word there is allegation, and anyway, not my business.

A Republican nominee with Nazi songs in his back catalog: endorsed by the President of the United States.

Mike Johnson is not confused about right and wrong. He can state a verdict for the entire House when it suits him. He simply applies one rule to people who cost him nothing and another to people whose votes he needs. That is not due process. That is a headcount.

Source

Gabby Birenbaum, The Texas Tribune, "Rep. Tony Gonzales, forced into runoff, admits to affair with aide who died by suicide" (March 4, 2026). Photo via The New Republic.

"I Run the Protection Program." Mike Johnson Told a Room of Conservative Activists He'd Keep Congress From Investigating Them.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:33:12 +0000

On Friday, June 26, 2026, Mike Johnson stood in a Washington hotel conference room in front of the Faith and Freedom Coalition's annual "Road to Majority" summit and made the closing argument for the midterms.

He did not talk about grocery prices. He did not talk about health premiums. He talked about what would happen to the people in the room if Republicans lost the House.

"Y'all, impeachment's not even the big concern," Johnson said. "They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they'll go after the president's family, the cabinet, his donors and friends."

Then he said the part that traveled:

"Half of you in this room will be targeted. I run the protection program. I'll take care of you."

Sit with that sentence for a second, because the Speaker of the House said it out loud, at a microphone, on purpose.

The thing he's promising to protect them from is his own job

Congressional oversight is not a partisan weapon that one side invented. It is one of the core functions of the legislative branch. Congress writes the laws and appropriates the money, and then it checks whether the executive branch actually followed the law and spent the money the way Congress said to. Committees hold hearings. They issue subpoenas. They demand documents.

That is the "investigative body" Johnson is warning about. He is describing the House doing the thing the House exists to do — and framing it as a danger that a roomful of political allies needs to be shielded from.

And he's not describing it in the abstract. He named who would be shielded: the president's family, the cabinet, his donors and his friends. Not the country. Not Louisiana. Not his own constituents in Shreveport and Bossier City. Donors and friends.

"I run the protection program" is a startling description of the Speaker's chair, but it is an honest one. The Speaker decides which committees get money and staff, which investigations get leadership's blessing, which subpoenas get backed up, and — most powerfully — which bills and resolutions ever reach the floor for a vote.

Johnson is telling supporters he will use every one of those levers to make sure nobody with power gets looked at.

He has already shown exactly how the protection program works

This wasn't a hypothetical. Johnson has a record of running it.

The Epstein files. When a bipartisan group of members moved to force the Justice Department to release its files on Jeffrey Epstein, Johnson used the machinery of his office to stall them for months. He kept the House out of session for nearly two months — its longest absence in recent memory — and refused to swear in newly elected Rep. Adelita Grijalva, whose signature was the decisive 218th on the petition that would force the vote. She sat in an empty office for weeks with, in her words, "no staff... The phones don't work. There's no computer." He blamed the shutdown, though he had sworn in new members of both parties within days of their elections before.

He gave in only after Trump stopped resisting. On the morning of the vote he spent a press conference calling the bill "a raw and obvious political exercise" — and then voted for it, because "none of us want to go on record and in any way be accused of not being for maximum transparency." It passed 427 to 1.

January 6. On May 19, 2021, Johnson voted against creating an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate the attack on the Capitol. It passed the House 252-175 without him. He had also voted against impeaching Trump for inciting it — after leading the Supreme Court brief, signed by more than 100 House Republicans, that asked the Court to throw out Biden's wins in four states. The New York Times called him "the most important architect of the Electoral College objections."

His own members. Asked over and over why Rep. Max Miller — facing detailed domestic violence allegations — remains in the Republican conference, Johnson has retreated to process: "I'm not in the business of commenting on investigations as they're in process." The Ethics Committee, he says, will handle it. The Ethics Committee only acts when someone asks it to, and for months the people asking were not Republicans.

Three different situations. Same instinct every time: make sure the investigation doesn't happen, and call it respect for the process.

Nobody in that room is a constituent

Johnson represents Louisiana's 4th District. Nearly 290,000 people there — about 38% of the population — are on Medicaid, and about 118,000 have coverage only because of the Affordable Care Act's expansion.

In February 2025, Johnson drove a budget resolution through the House calling for at least $880 billion in cuts over a decade from a pool of money that includes Medicaid. He defended it by saying the program is "not for 29-year-old males sitting on their couches playing video games."

Those are the people he was elected to protect. They are not who he meant by "I'll take care of you."

He does not, as a rule, take unscreened questions from them either. When House Republicans started getting shouted at in their districts in March 2025, Johnson stood at a news conference and told his members to stop holding in-person town halls — advice a lot of them took, swapping real meetings for phone calls where staff pick which callers get to speak.

Why he said it out loud

The math explains the panic. When he spoke, after a run of resignations and deaths, Republicans held 218 seats to Democrats' 212 — a six-seat gap in a chamber where 216 was a majority.

So Johnson and his party have been trying to change the board rather than win on it. At Trump's request, Texas Republicans convened a special session to redraw the state's congressional map and manufacture five new Republican-leaning districts. Missouri Republicans ran the same play. Indiana's attempt failed. California answered with a ballot measure creating five Democratic-leaning seats of its own.

And when redistricting isn't enough, there's the pitch he made in that hotel room: a Democratic House would investigate you, and I am the man who makes sure it can't.

He has been on the road making it in person, too — flying to Alaska for a Nick Begich event with a secret address, an ID check and no press allowed, and to Omaha to sell Brinker Harding's voters on "no tax on tips."

The Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee had the best response to the Faith and Freedom speech. Their X account answered him with one line: "We are the Homeland Security Committee Democrats and we approve this message."

It's funny because he did their work for them. The Speaker of the House told the country, in his own words, that the reason to keep him in power is that he will stop Congress from asking questions.

That's not a campaign promise. That's a confession.

Source

Eric Garcia, "'I run the protection program': Mike Johnson warns roomful of conservatives to reelect Republicans or face prison," The Independent, June 26, 2026. Photo: Nathan Howard / Reuters.

"David Duke Without the Baggage": The Line Steve Scalise Has Never Been Able to Explain Away

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:52:34 +0000

In July 2026, The Hill described Steve Scalise as having reached "his peak elder statesman era" — the House Majority Leader who provides "institutional memory" for the Republican conference, and who is an obvious contender to take over the conference's top job if Speaker Mike Johnson departs after the midterms.

Before he gets there, Louisiana and the country should sit with a sentence he said out loud, to a reporter, about thirty years before that.

"David Duke without the baggage"

Stephanie Grace was a new reporter covering Jefferson Parish when she first met Scalise, then a young state legislator. Here is how she opened her column in The Advocate on December 31, 2014:

"This is what I remember about the first time I met Steve Scalise nearly 20 years ago: He told me he was like David Duke without the baggage."

Grace spelled out what the word "baggage" was doing in that sentence:

"The 'baggage,' of course, was Duke's past, his racist and anti-Semitic views and his former role as a KKK grand wizard."

David Duke is not an obscure figure in Louisiana. He is a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan who won more than 600,000 votes running for U.S. Senate in 1990 and for governor in 1991.

Scalise's pitch, as the reporter who heard it understood it, was that he could carry Duke's politics into respectable rooms.

The speech to Duke's group

In December 2014, a Louisiana blogger named Lamar White Jr. found an account, on a white supremacist forum, of Scalise speaking in 2002 to the European-American Unity and Rights Organization — EURO, a hate group founded by Duke.

Scalise's story moved. As CNN laid out the sequence: his aides first called it "probable," then "likely." Then he said he didn't specifically remember it, and that in 2002 he "went and spoke to any group that called" while campaigning against a state tax plan. Then came the statement:

"One of the many groups that I spoke to regarding this critical legislation was a group whose views I wholeheartedly condemn. It was a mistake I regret."

The Southern Poverty Law Center went through the excuses one at a time in its 2015 report, and found that they did not hold together:

The "I didn't know who they were" defense. Scalise was in his 20s, and from Duke's own Jefferson Parish, when Duke ran for the U.S. Senate in 1990 and governor in 1991, and Duke and his organizations "received enormous amounts of publicity between 1989 and the 2002 meeting." SPLC's conclusion: "Scalise's claim of ignorance was almost impossible to believe."
The "he was really at a neighborhood meeting" defense. A longtime Duke aide, Kenny Knight, first told The Washington Post that Scalise attended the EURO meeting and was the first to speak — then told the Times-Picayune that Scalise had actually been at a neighborhood association meeting in the same hotel room a few hours earlier. SPLC checked: "There is no record at all of the association cited by Knight."
The "I was fighting a tax plan" defense. The tax plan Scalise named "had not even been heard in a legislative committee yet," and the campaign against it "only began months after the EURO meeting."

The votes underneath the speech

A single appearance can be a mistake. A voting record is a pattern. From the same SPLC report:

In 1999 and again in 2004, Scalise was among "lonely groups of three and six Louisiana legislators, respectively, who voted against a state Martin Luther King Jr. holiday."
In 1996, he "was one of two legislative committee members who tried to kill a resolution apologizing for slavery."

And in 1999, Roll Call reported that Scalise "said he embraces many of the same 'conservative' views as Duke, but is more viable."

That's the same idea as the "baggage" line, said to a second outlet, years apart. It is the argument that the only real problem with David Duke was that David Duke couldn't win.

Scalise made that argument explicitly. Asked by Roll Call in 1999 why Duke wouldn't be a good congressional candidate, here is what he said was "the first and most important thing":

"The novelty of David Duke has worn off. The voters in this district are smart enough to realize that they need to get behind someone who not only believes in the issues they care about, but also can get elected. Duke has proven that he can't get elected, and that's the first and most important thing."

Not the Klan. Not the anti-Semitism. Electability.

Then he put out a statement about Dr. King

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in January 2015 — weeks after all of this became national news — Scalise issued a statement praising King. The Advocate ran it next to the fact that he had twice voted against recognizing King's birthday in his own state:

"Dr. King challenged our country to fulfill the promises of liberty, equality, and justice prescribed in the founding of our great nation."

He was one of three votes against the holiday in 1999. He was one of six in 2004. Then he wrote that.

Why we're bringing it up in 2026

Because he kept the job, and then he got bigger ones.

SPLC wrote in 2015 that if Scalise "were linked to any other racist groups or events," his career "would be gone with the wind." He wasn't, and it wasn't. He stayed Majority Whip. He became Majority Leader — the man who decides which bills reach the House floor. He is now, by The Hill's account, the institutional memory of the House Republican conference and the obvious contender to take its top job if Mike Johnson goes.

Nobody in Republican leadership has ever required him to answer the actual question, which is not "did you know who EURO was." It's the one Stephanie Grace wrote down: what did he mean when he told a reporter he was David Duke without the baggage, and does he still think the problem with Duke was the packaging?

He has never said. His party has never made him.

This is a party that has gotten very comfortable with this — a congressman whose son-in-law posts Nazi propaganda, another who spoke at a white nationalist conference two years running, another who wore blackface and then went on TV to argue it wasn't "truly" blackface. Scalise is the one who got promoted to the top of it.

We deserve better.

Sources

Stephanie Grace, Scalise's pitch to Duke supporters seems plausible — The Advocate, December 31, 2014
Steve Scalise: What do I need to know? — CNN, December 31, 2014
House Whip Survives Hate Group Scandal, at Least for Now — Southern Poverty Law Center, Intelligence Report, Spring 2015
Emily Brooks, Scalise embraces House GOP's elder statesman role amid leadership shake-up speculation — The Hill, July 23, 2026

Steve Scalise Has Now Been Shot At Twice. He Takes More Gun Money Than Any Other House Member on Record.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:48:28 +0000

On the night of April 25, 2026, Steve Scalise was inside the ballroom of the Washington Hilton when the gunshots started.

A man had charged the security checkpoint at the White House Correspondents' Dinner carrying two firearms. Secret Service agents rushed toward the president and vice president. Waitstaff dove for cover.

Scalise had been here before.

"Some bad memories started coming back," he told NOTUS.

Nine years earlier, in June 2017, a gunman opened fire on the Republican congressional baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia. A bullet went through Scalise's hip and shattered his pelvis. He nearly died. It took months of surgeries and rehab before he could walk again.

Two shootings. Nine years apart. Both times, he was in the room.

What he said the first time

Four months after he was shot — and two days after a gunman killed 59 people in Las Vegas — Fox News's Martha MacCallum asked Scalise whether nearly dying had changed how he thought about guns.

His answer:

"I think it's fortified it."

He added that Congress shouldn't be "promoting our political agenda" at a moment like that, and that the focus belonged on victims and law enforcement.

The Hill noted in that same piece that Scalise's own congressional website advertised his A+ rating from the National Rifle Association, and that the bills he backed would make it easier to buy guns across state lines and force every state to honor other states' concealed-carry permits.

There's a comparison the reporting made at the time and it still lands. Gabby Giffords was shot in the head at a constituent event in 2011. She spent the years after it building an organization to change gun laws. Scalise was shot in 2017 and spent the years after it voting to loosen them.

What he actually did

This isn't about words. Look at the votes.

Six months after he was shot, on December 6, 2017, the House passed the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, 231 to 198. It would force every state to recognize concealed-carry permits issued by every other state — including states with the loosest standards in the country. Scalise voted yes. (It's the same bill Richard Hudson is still pushing today, over the objections of the Fraternal Order of Police.)

March 11, 2021 — the House passed the Bipartisan Background Checks Act, 227 to 203, requiring a background check on essentially every gun sale, including private and online sales. Scalise voted no.

June 24, 2022 — one month after Uvalde, the House gave final approval to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, 234 to 193. The law was the first significant federal gun safety measure in nearly thirty years — money for school mental health, an incentive for state red-flag laws, tougher background checks for buyers under 21, and a narrowing of the "boyfriend loophole." Fourteen House Republicans voted for it.

Scalise, then the second-ranking Republican in the House, voted no. He also voted against even letting the bill come to the floor.

July 29, 2022 — the House passed an assault weapons ban, 217 to 213. Scalise voted no.

Nobody in the history of the House has taken more

OpenSecrets tracks money from gun rights groups — their PACs, and the people who work for them — to members of Congress from 1990 through 2024. Among all U.S. Representatives across all those years, the number one recipient is Steve Scalise, at $871,215.

Not the top ten. Number one. More than Paul Ryan, more than Kevin McCarthy, more than Jim Jordan, more than anyone else in the data.

That's not a coincidence of longevity. It's a relationship. And he isn't just casting his own vote — as House Majority Leader he is the man who decides what legislation reaches the floor. Every background-check bill, every red-flag bill, every magazine limit that dies without a vote dies at a desk he controls.

Louisiana pays for this

Scalise represents Louisiana's 1st District. Louisiana loses about 22.9 people per 100,000 to gun-related injuries — one of the highest rates in the country, more than a thousand Louisianians a year. His constituents do not get a security detail.

And in his own account of the April shooting, given days after it happened, guns never come up. He talks about his security detail. He talks about grabbing Rep. Jared Moskowitz on the way to the exit. He talks about calling his wife. He praises law enforcement: "It's a special calling to be a law enforcement officer."

All of that is true and none of it is a policy. The Capitol Police officers who saved his life in 2017, and the agents who cleared that ballroom in 2026, are the people we send toward the gunfire after the gun is already in the room. Scalise's entire legislative record is about making sure nothing stops it from getting there.

He is not alone in this — we've written about the Republicans with the worst records on guns, and it's a long list. But no one else on it has been shot, been shot at again, and cashed nearly $900,000 in gun-lobby money in between.

Twice now, Steve Scalise has been close enough to hear the shots. Twice he has come out the other side and gone back to work protecting the industry that puts the guns there.

We deserve better.

Source

Reese Gorman, Correspondents' Dinner shooting brought back 'bad memories' for Scalise — NOTUS, published by Verite News, April 28, 2026. Photo via Verite News.

Julia Letlow Signed a Secrecy Deal With Meta. Then She Started Buying Meta Stock.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:28:42 +0000

On June 29, 2024, Louisiana Congresswoman Julia Letlow signed a nondisclosure agreement with a company called Laidley LLC.

Laidley LLC is not really a company. It is a shell — the data center subsidiary of Meta, the corporation that owns Facebook and Instagram. Signing that paper gave Letlow access to confidential details about Meta's plans to build a $50 billion data center in Richland Parish, right in her own district.

Within months, she started buying stock in Meta. She also started buying stock in Nvidia — the company whose chips make Meta's data centers run.

Then she didn't tell anybody for more than a year.

That is the finding of a Gulf States Newsroom investigation by reporter Drew Hawkins, built on the NDA itself, which Louisiana Economic Development released in response to a public records request.

What the law says she was supposed to do

There is a federal law for exactly this situation. It is called the STOCK Act, and it does two simple things. It bars members of Congress from trading on nonpublic information they get through their job. And it gives them 45 days to report any trade they make.

Forty-five days. That's it. Tell the public what you bought and what you sold.

Letlow blew past that deadline by more than a year on the Meta and Nvidia trades.

Here is the timeline the records show:

June 29, 2024 — Letlow signs the NDA with Meta's shell company.
Six months later — she speaks at the public announcement of the data center, celebrating it.
Jan. 31, 2025 — she sells part of her Nvidia holdings and buys between $1,001 and $15,000 more Meta stock.
A week later — she sells part of her Meta holdings.
July 2, 2025 — she sells the rest of her Meta shares.
Aug. 11, 2025 — her broker notifies her. That is the notification date sitting beside all six Meta and Nvidia lines.
Jan. 13, 2026 — she finally discloses them, in a periodic transaction report she signed that day. More than six months after the last sale, and more than a year after the first purchase.

At that public launch event, Letlow was delighted. "What a day for Richland Parish. I'm so honored to be here with all of you today," she said. "I was so excited about it, I even skipped a vote in Washington. Don't tell anybody, please."

She skipped a vote she was elected to cast, to appear at an event for a company whose stock she was buying. And she joked about it.

Her office says she didn't know

Letlow would not do an interview. Her spokesperson, Matt Smith, sent a written statement saying she had no role in directing any of her trades, including the Meta ones, and that the NDA had nothing to do with them because she was unaware the trades were even happening.

That is a familiar defense. Robert Hogan, a political science professor at Louisiana State University who studies elections, said members of Congress use it constantly — and that it's almost impossible to check.

"A lot of members make this argument," Hogan said. "Maybe that's the case. It's hard to tell."

There is a problem with the "it was limited in scope" part of the explanation, though. Smith said the NDA was narrow — just about "protecting preliminary business information."

The actual document is broader than that. Its definition of confidential information covers financial information, pricing, discounts and proposed terms. And it explicitly includes "the existence of this Agreement and the fact or nature of the discussions between the parties."

Read that again. The agreement barred Letlow from even admitting the agreement existed. A sitting member of Congress signed a contract with a private corporation that legally gagged her from telling her own constituents that she was talking to that corporation about a $50 billion project on their land.

Watchdogs say the whole thing is strange

The first thing that struck experts was not the stock. It was the NDA itself.

Kedric Payne is general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center and used to be deputy chief counsel at the House Office of Congressional Ethics. Meta's data center is a state economic development project, he pointed out — not a federal one. So why is a member of Congress involved deeply enough to need a secrecy agreement?

"That doesn't completely add up," Payne said.

Then there's the trading. Payne said this is a different and rarer category of problem than the usual congressional stock complaints.

"What we see here is that you have a lawmaker who appears to have access to non-public information and trades stock in a company related to that non-public information."

Nvidia wasn't a party to the NDA. Payne said that doesn't make those trades irrelevant. "You do not know what all was discussed with the NDA," he said, "but you can reasonably conclude that it would involve the business partners of Meta."

Hogan was careful not to overstate what a timeline alone can prove. "It's very hard to tell — did this motivate her purchase and sale? There are a lot of unknowns. But at the very least, it raises serious questions," he said.

The Meta trades were not a one-time slip

This is the part that should end any "honest mistake" reading.

In a report filed this January, Letlow disclosed 210 individual stock trades from the previous two years that she had failed to report on time. One hundred of them — including the Meta and Nvidia stock — were more than a year late.

Added up, those trades were worth somewhere between $225,000 and $3,185,000.

And the timing problem goes past Meta. On July 23, 2025, the House Appropriations Committee — which Letlow sits on — debated and approved budgets covering national security, the State Department and international lending institutions. Within two days, Letlow traded 16 stocks, including Boeing, Goldman Sachs, Taiwan Semiconductor and Visa. Combined value: between $16,000 and $240,000.

Letlow is not alone in ignoring this law. We found that 45 of the Republicans on this site broke the STOCK Act's disclosure rule — Letlow among them. The penalty is $200, and it is often waived. That is the entire consequence.

Payne's answer to anyone who wants to argue the sums are small:

"All trades are worth paying attention to. It's not about the value of the trade. It's about improper use of your official position, and about complying with the law."

Hogan put it in Louisiana terms. "Even on the low end of the range, $6,000 is a lot to the average Louisiana voter that she represents," he said. "It doesn't necessarily have to be a large sum in order for there to be nefarious possibilities there."

And she voted to ban the thing she was doing

Last month, the House passed the Stop Insider Trading Act, which would bar members of Congress from buying stocks and require them to give public notice before selling.

Letlow supported it.

She supported it while sitting on a pile of 210 late-disclosed trades, including stock in a company she had signed a secrecy agreement with.

Hogan named it plainly: "Perhaps there's some degree of irony here that she's busy trading stocks, not disclosing appropriately as she was required to by law and then voting for a law that clamps down on this behavior even more."

Payne was blunter about why that's not the contradiction it looks like. "There are many members of Congress who currently trade stocks and support banning the trade of such stocks," he said.

Voting for a rule is free. Following one is the hard part.

Who is actually going to look into this?

Here is the honest answer: probably nobody.

The House Ethics Committee has jurisdiction. It is controlled by Letlow's own party.

"If the potential investigators were Democrats, I think that things might look very different for her," Hogan said. "I think they may be less curious than Democrats would be."

That is the whole system in one sentence. The referee is on her team.

Why this matters for Louisiana

Letlow is not a backbencher. Since signing that NDA she got Trump's endorsement, beat incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy and state Treasurer John Fleming in the Republican primary, and is now her party's nominee for the U.S. Senate. She faces Democrat James Davis in November.

We've written before about how she got there — she backed censuring Cassidy in 2021 for voting to convict Trump, and five years later she took his seat. And we've traced the $9.2 million super PAC that helped put her there, funded by LNG money, Occidental Petroleum, a stack of Louisiana LLCs and four corporations that don't disclose their donors.

Now add this: a secrecy contract with a corporation that spent more than $26 million lobbying the federal government in 2025.

Letlow's NDA wasn't unique in Louisiana. At least 54 elected officials in the state have signed similar agreements tied to big industrial projects since Gov. Jeff Landry took office, and Landry personally signed the same Meta agreement in April 2024 — two months before Letlow did. More than 100 Louisiana state employees have signed NDAs with Landry's office.

That's the culture. Deals about Louisiana's land, water and power get made behind a legal gag, and the people who live there find out when somebody decides to tell them.

Hogan's point is the one worth sitting with:

"Citizens should expect members of Congress to be able to tell them the truth straight up about what they know, and these kinds of agreements hamper that free flow of information."

You are supposed to be able to ask your representative what's happening in your parish. Letlow signed a contract that made answering that question a breach of agreement — and then traded the stock of the company she signed it with.

Source

Rep. Julia Letlow bought Meta stock after signing an NDA with the company, records show — Drew Hawkins, WWNO / Gulf States Newsroom, August 10, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/Jack Brook.

$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.

Lauren Boebert's New Bill Would Repeal the 78-Year-Old Law That Keeps Handguns Out of the Mail

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 07:36:00 +0000

On July 30, 2026, Lauren Boebert introduced a bill with a friendly name and a very specific effect.

H.R. 9979, the "Freedom to Ship Act," runs five pages. Most of it is about shipping companies. The last line is the part worth reading. Section 2(c) of the bill says:

"Section 1715 of chapter 83 of title 18, United States Code (and the item relating to such section in the analysis of such chapter), is repealed."

That is a citation, not an argument, so here is what it means.

18 U.S.C. § 1715 is titled "Firearms as nonmailable; regulations." It says: "Pistols, revolvers, and other firearms capable of being concealed on the person are nonmailable and shall not be deposited in or carried by the mails or delivered by any officer or employee of the Postal Service." It carves out exceptions for police, the military, government watchmen, and gun manufacturers and dealers shipping to one another. And it says anyone who knowingly puts a handgun in the mail "shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."

That section has been on the books since 1948, and the ban it carried forward dates to 1927 — Boebert's own press release puts it at "nearly 100 years." Her bill deletes it — the ban and the penalty both.

She said so herself. Announcing the bill on X, Boebert wrote that her legislation "protects privacy, holds companies accountable and restores the ability to mail handguns through USPS."

Three other Republicans put their names on it as original cosponsors: Sheri Biggs of South Carolina, Michael Cloud of Texas, and Clay Higgins of Louisiana.

The other half: making it illegal for UPS to say no

The rest of the bill is aimed at private shipping companies.

It adds a new section to federal transportation law, "Interference with lawful transportation of arms." Under it, a motor carrier — UPS, FedEx, a freight company — may not "interfere" with a gun shipment, and the bill gives four specific examples of what that includes:

Declining to carry it. A carrier that says "we don't ship firearms" is in violation.
Imposing conditions beyond what federal gun law already requires, where they restrict the owner's ability to transfer or dispose of the gun.
Charging more for a gun than for another package of similar size, weight and hazard class.
Requiring the shipper's consent to disclose information as a condition of taking the shipment.

A fifth item sweeps in "any other like conduct" with the same effect.

The penalty is civil: $10,000 to the federal government for every violation, plus a private lawsuit from the shipper for "all compensatory and consequential damages."

Sit with that for a second. This is a bill that tells private companies they are legally forbidden from declining a category of business, on pain of a $10,000 federal fine per package and open-ended civil liability. From the party that says the federal government should not tell businesses what to sell or who to serve.

The rationale Boebert gave is that under the Biden administration, some carriers made licensed gun dealers sign take-it-or-leave-it contracts. Her remedy is not to give dealers more bargaining power. It is to remove the companies' ability to decide at all.

What Boebert is not working on

Colorado has about 15.3 gun deaths per 100,000 people — 19.5% higher than the national average. Roughly 1,000 Coloradans die from gun violence every year. That is a plane crash a month, in her own state.

Boebert has been in Congress since 2021. Here is her record when the House actually voted on gun policy:

She voted against the Bipartisan Background Checks Act, which would have required a background check on nearly all gun sales.
She voted against the Enhanced Background Checks Act, which would have closed the loophole that let the Charleston church shooter buy his gun.
She voted against the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — the first significant federal gun safety law in nearly 30 years, passed after Uvalde.

Against all three. And the bill she chose to write herself, in the summer of an election year, makes it easier to put a handgun in a mailbox.

This is not an isolated priority. It is what this group of Republicans does with their legislative time. Rep. Andrew Clyde, who owns two gun stores, spent this month demanding the ATF destroy the firearm transaction records police use to trace guns found at crime scenes. Rep. Barry Moore wrote a bill to make the AR-15 the national gun of the United States.

"Criminals still shipped guns through the mail"

The gun-media coverage of Boebert's bill is worth quoting, because it makes the argument more plainly than she does.

Writing at Bearing Arms, Tom Knighton argued the ban never worked anyway: "criminals still shipped guns through the mail if they wanted to. They just lied about what they were shipping, and there's no way the USPS can check every single box."

That is the case for repeal: the law is broken because people break it. It is not an argument anyone makes about laws they like.

Knighton also framed the timing honestly. He wrote that "Having a Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate allows pro-freedom lawmakers the leeway to introduce Second Amendment-friendly legislation that will actually be considered and likely voted on."

In other words: this is not a message bill. They think it can pass.

Where it stands

H.R. 9979 was referred to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the House Judiciary Committee on the day it was introduced. It has four Republican names on it and no Democrats.

Boebert co-chairs the Congressional Second Amendment Caucus. Repealing the mail ban is the kind of thing that caucus exists to do. The question for voters in Colorado's 4th District — and in the districts represented by Biggs, Cloud and Higgins — is whether that is what they sent someone to Washington for.

Source

Boebert Introduces Bill to Protect Right to Ship Guns — Bearing Arms, August 8, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/David Zalubowski.
Bill text and cosponsors: H.R. 9979 as introduced, 119th Congress.

Julia Letlow's Signature Bill Makes Schools Hand Parents a List of Every Book in the Library. It Died in the Senate. Now She's One Election From There.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:20:08 +0000

Julia Letlow is a former university administrator with a doctorate, and education is the thing she says she came to Congress to do. Her one signature piece of legislation is the Parents Bill of Rights Act, H.R. 5.

She introduced it in 2021, reintroduced it in 2023, and pushed it through the House on March 24, 2023 by 213 to 208 — every voting Democrat against, plus five Republicans. It went to the Senate and died there.

In June she won the Republican nomination for the Senate seat Bill Cassidy is losing. The general election is November 3.

What the bill actually says

Republicans spent the floor debate insisting the bill has nothing to do with banning books. Rep. Virginia Foxx, then the Education Committee chair, said so repeatedly. Rep. Chip Roy said on the floor that the bill is there "to just ensure that parents know what is in the libraries and what is in the curriculum. It does nothing more."

Here is the operative text, verbatim. It gives parents the right to receive:

"(i) a list of the books and other reading materials available in the library of their child's school; and (ii) inspect such books or other reading materials"

and separately requires that every school receiving federal Title I funds provide parents exactly that list and that opportunity.

Roy is right that the word "ban" doesn't appear. But the bill's opponents weren't arguing that it bans books. They were arguing that a federally mandated, parent-facing inventory of every book in every school library is the machinery a ban runs on. PEN America counted bans on 1,648 individual titles in school libraries and classrooms in the 2021–22 school year alone — removals, and removals pending review. Of those titles, 41% dealt with LGBTQ+ themes or characters and 40% had protagonists or prominent secondary characters of color.

Roy, for his part, didn't hide the ball on the floor: "Yes. Some local jurisdictions are removing certain books—absolutely, and God bless them for it—books about explicit sex acts."

The part about students

The bill does two separate things here. Elementary schools and middle schools that take Education Department money have to get parental consent before:

"(1) changing a minor child's gender markers, pronouns, or preferred name on any school form; or (2) allowing a child to change the child's sex-based accommodations, including locker rooms or bathrooms"

And every school in a district that takes Title I money — high schools included — has to notify parents whenever "a school employee or contractor acts to ... change a minor child's gender markers, pronouns, or preferred name." No form has to be involved, and no consent is asked for. In practice that means a school cannot call a student by the name that student asks to be called without the parents being told.

Rep. Mark Pocan, then chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, said the effect would be to force "schools to forcibly out transgender students, even if it puts those youth in harm's way." Rep. Melanie Stansbury said the bill was "modeled after bills passed at the state level" that have censored teaching and endangered students.

And then the House added to it. Two amendments from Rep. Lauren Boebert were adopted before passage: one establishing a parental right to know whether the school allows transgender girls to play in girls' sports, and another establishing a parental right to know whether the school allows a transgender girl to use a bathroom or changing room matching her gender.

Those are now part of the bill Letlow authored.

What Letlow said about her own bill

On the House floor, she told her colleagues:

"This bill is not complex or complicated. Nor should it be partisan or polarizing, and contrary to what you may hear from my colleagues on the other side of the aisle, it is not an attack on our hard-working teachers, who will always be the heroes in my eyes."

"It is not an attempt to have Congress dictate their curriculum or determine the books in the library. Instead, this bill aims to bring more transparency and accountability to education."

Both halves of that can't hold at once. A bill that requires every school in every district taking federal Title I money to hand parents a list of its library holdings at the start of each school year is Congress reaching into what's in the library. That may be a defensible thing to do — reasonable people think parents should be able to see it — but it is not "not an attempt."

And a bill that is "not partisan or polarizing" doesn't pass with zero votes from the other party.

Why it matters now

Letlow's district is one of the poorest in the country. When she was first elected, nearly 30% of families with children in Louisiana's 5th were under the poverty line, and she told CNN that education "can be used as a catalyst to lift a region out of poverty."

That is the right diagnosis. It's the kind of thing a former university administrator in a poor rural district is uniquely positioned to act on — school funding, teacher pay, broadband, early literacy, the community and technical colleges that feed the region's workforce.

Her signature contribution to the education debate instead was a bill about library inventories and pronoun disclosure. It received no Democratic votes and never became law.

If she wins in November, she will spend January in the chamber that killed it. It will be back.

We deserve better.

Sources

H.R. 5, the Parents Bill of Rights Act, as passed by the House (118th Congress)
House Roll Call 161, March 24, 2023 — passed 213–208
Congressional Record, House, March 23, 2023 — floor debate on H.R. 5, including the Letlow, Foxx and Roy remarks
PEN America, "Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools", September 19, 2022
Lexi Lonas Cochran and Mychael Schnell, "House Republicans pass Parents Bill of Rights" — The Hill, March 24, 2023
Christopher Kane, "House Republicans pass anti-LGBTQ Parents Bill of Rights Act" — Washington Blade, March 24, 2023
Photo: Greg Nash / The Hill

One Super PAC Spent $9.2 Million to Make Julia Letlow a Senator. Here's Who Paid for It.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:20:07 +0000

Julia Letlow won the Republican nomination for Louisiana's Senate seat on June 27. The general election is November 3, and in a state Trump has carried three times by 18 points or more, the nomination is effectively the seat.

Outside groups spent $11,266,466 supporting her campaign, according to Federal Election Commission records. 82% of it — $9,247,706 — came from a single super PAC: Accountability Project Inc.

Small donations account for 1% of the $17.9 million that has reached her campaigns and the super PACs backing her since 2020, which ranks her 427th of 440 House members on grassroots funding.

So the interesting question isn't how much was spent. It's who wrote the checks. FEC filings answer that, and the answer is unusually specific.

The energy money

Louisiana's LNG export build-out is the biggest industrial story in the state, and the industry paid to pick this senator.

Commonwealth LNG LLC (Houston) — $500,000 total: $250,000 direct to the Accountability Project on April 23, and another $250,000 to Hope in Action PAC, which passed millions on to the Accountability Project.
MAGA Energy Project Inc. (New Orleans) — $400,000, June 12.
Responsible Energy Voter Coalition (Prairieville, LA) — $345,000 across four checks in May and June.
Occidental Petroleum (Houston) — $100,000, June 20.

That's roughly $1.3 million from the oil, gas and LNG side alone.

Letlow has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025 and 4% lifetime.

The corporations you can't see through

Four of the largest contributions to the Accountability Project came from entities that are not registered federal political committees — meaning they file nothing with the FEC about where their own money came from:

Securing American Greatness Inc. — $1,000,000, April 29
Alliance for Economic Freedom (Portland, Michigan) — $500,000, June 2
MAGA Energy Project Inc. — $400,000
Hope in Action Policy (Baton Rouge) — $446,000 across two payments

A search of the FEC's committee database returns no registered committee named Securing American Greatness. It's a corporation. Its donors are, as a matter of law, nobody's business.

That is $2.35 million — a quarter of everything the Accountability Project spent on Letlow — that traces back to a dead end.

The hometown pipeline

The single biggest funder of the Accountability Project wasn't a company. It was Hope in Action PAC, a super PAC registered in Monroe, Louisiana — Letlow's hometown, in the district she has represented since 2021.

Hope in Action PAC moved about $3.3 million into the Accountability Project across twelve payments between March and June 2026, then spent another $74,130 supporting Letlow directly.

Its own money came from Louisiana industry and Louisiana money: Central Port LLC ($250,000), Commonwealth LNG ($250,000), MMR Constructors ($100,000), the law firm Morris & Dewett ($100,000), Access Healthcare Management ($100,000), Bee Hive Group LLC, Progressive Merchants, RMB Properties, and individuals including Frank Scott Moran ($250,000) and Mark Friedman of New York ($100,000).

And one more entry, on March 24, 2026:

LETLOW VICTORY FUND → HOPE IN ACTION PAC — $205,586.20

The Letlow Victory Fund is Julia Letlow's own joint fundraising committee. Its other disbursements that cycle went where you'd expect — $1,526,145 in five transfers to Julia Letlow for Louisiana, $577,353 to her old House committee, and $333,282 to Start Rising PAC, her leadership PAC.

And $205,586.20 — followed by another $10,692.30 a month later — to the super PAC whose money became the super PAC that spent $9.2 million on the "independent" case for electing her.

None of that is illegal. Joint fundraising committees are allowed to include super PACs, and candidates are allowed to raise for them within limits. But "independent expenditure" is the legal category that makes unlimited corporate spending constitutional in the first place, and it's worth knowing that in this race, some of the money made a round trip.

The rest of the list

The remaining large contributions to the Accountability Project read like a directory of who wants something from a Louisiana senator:

C Port LLC and C Logistics LLC of Cut Off, Louisiana — $125,000 each, same day, Gulf marine services
Caturas LLC (Houston) — $200,000
Republicans for a Better NOLA PAC — $250,000
River Birch LLC (Avondale) — $100,000, the landfill company
Ocean Harvesters (Suffolk, Virginia) — $50,000, the operator of the menhaden fleet that fishes Louisiana's coast
American Society of Anesthesiologists PAC — $50,000
Gordon McKernan Injury Attorneys — $50,000
Energy Transfer PAC, HNTB Holdings PAC, Viemed PAC, and individual donors including James A. Barnette of West Monroe ($200,000 across two checks), Jonathan Bruser of Baton Rouge ($100,000) and Robin P. Arkley of Eureka, California ($50,000)

What this buys

Letlow's House record already reflects these interests. She has cosponsored House Republicans' oil-and-gas deregulation bills — the Lower Energy Costs Act, the Unleashing American Energy Act, and the Unlocking our Domestic LNG Potential Act in two Congresses. Her largest disclosed sources of direct money this cycle are the owners and employees of two firms: Petro Land Services South ($108,500) and MMR, the industrial contractor ($100,884). Not one dollar of either came from a company PAC — but the company itself, MMR Constructors, put $100,000 into Hope in Action PAC, where corporate checks are legal.

Now she's headed to the Senate, where a single member can hold up a nomination, place a hold on a bill, or decide whether an LNG terminal's permit fight gets a hearing. The people who paid $9.2 million to put her there know that.

Louisiana voters got a wall of TV ads out of this. What the funders bought is a Senate seat, and unlike the voters, a quarter of the money behind it never had to carry a name.

We deserve better.

Sources

All figures from Federal Election Commission filings:

Independent expenditures for and against Julia Letlow, 2026 cycle
Receipts of Accountability Project Inc. (C00940957)
Receipts of Hope in Action PAC (C00829952)
Disbursements of Letlow Victory Fund (C00816058)
Committee search: "Securing American Greatness" — no registered federal committee
Grassroots funding share: Who Bought My Rep
Julia Letlow's largest contributor organizations, 2026 cycle — OpenSecrets
League of Conservation Voters scorecard
Photo: official congressional portrait, 117th Congress