MAGA Report Cards — Maine

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

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

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

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

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

How the spending breaks down

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

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

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

Nearly three-quarters of the money is an attack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the man writing the checks wanted

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

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

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

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

Why this matters where you live

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

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

What the filings show

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

Source

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

In One Sitting, Susan Collins Voted Against Equal Pay, Paid Sick Days, and the Right to Join a Union. She Also Backed an Amendment to Cut Seasonal Workers Out of the Sick Leave Bill.

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:57:26 +0000

Susan Collins calls herself a moderate. At one committee markup in June 2023, she had three chances to prove it, on three of the plainest questions in American working life: should women be paid the same as men for the same work, should workers get paid days off when they are sick, and should workers be able to organize a union without being punished for it.

She voted no on all three.

What was on the table

On June 21, 2023, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee — the committee that writes the country's labor law — took up three bills in one markup:

The Paycheck Fairness Act (S. 728). It would limit an employer's ability to defend a pay gap between men and women by calling it "a factor other than sex," stop companies from forcing workers to sign contracts that bar them from discussing their pay, strengthen protection against retaliation, and raise the penalties for breaking equal-pay law.

The Healthy Families Act (S. 1664). It would let workers at businesses with 15 or more employees earn up to seven paid sick days a year — one hour of sick time for every 30 hours worked. At smaller businesses, the days would be unpaid but job-protected.

The Protecting the Right to Organize Act (S. 567). It would make it harder for employers to punish workers for organizing, close the loophole that lets companies call employees "independent contractors" to strip their rights, and ban the forced-arbitration clauses that keep workplace disputes out of court.

All three passed the committee 11 to 10, along party lines. Collins is a Republican member of that committee. She was on the losing side of all three votes.

She did not just vote no. She tried to make the bills weaker first.

Voting against a bill is a position. Amending it to do less is a choice about what you would accept even if it passed.

On the equal-pay bill, Collins backed two amendments that would have gutted it. One would have let an employer escape liability for paying women less by having run a recent pay-equity audit and taken reasonable steps to correct what it found. The other went after the requirement that pay differences be tied to merit at all. Neither passed.

On the paid sick leave bill, American Journal News reports that she supported an amendment to carve seasonal workers out of it entirely.

Think about who that carve-out covers. Summer hospitality, the harvest, winter tourism — the seasonal jobs Maine's coastal and rural economies run on. Those are the workers least likely to already have paid leave from an employer, and Collins moved to make sure the bill would not reach them.

What it means to have no paid sick days

Seven days a year is not a generous benefit. It is the difference between staying home with the flu and serving food with it. For a parent, it is whether a sick child means a lost shift or a lost job.

A worker without paid sick leave who takes a day off loses the day's pay, and often risks discipline for it. That is the status quo Collins voted three times to preserve — no federal right to paid sick days, no strengthened equal-pay enforcement, and no new protection for workers trying to organize.

The pattern this fits

Collins has represented Maine in the Senate since 1997 — 29 years. She has built her brand on being the reasonable one. The record keeps landing somewhere else.

She is running this year with Elon Musk's America PAC targeting Maine as one of eight states, and the Senate Leadership Fund committing $42 million of its own. Her campaign also made a man named on the Oath Keepers' leaked membership rolls a town chair.

The labor votes are the quietest part of that record, because committee votes do not make the evening news. They are also the part that shows up in a paycheck.

What the record shows

On June 21, 2023, Susan Collins sat on the Senate committee that writes labor law and voted against all three bills before it: equal pay enforcement, seven paid sick days a year, and the right to organize a union. Each passed the committee 11 to 10 on a party-line vote with her in the minority. She additionally backed two amendments to weaken the equal-pay bill and one to exclude seasonal workers from paid sick leave altogether.

Source

"Susan Collins voted against pay equity, sick leave," by Jesse Valentine, American Journal News, September 8, 2026 — the source for the three amendments Collins backed. The June 21, 2023 markup, the three bill numbers and the 11-10 party-line tallies were confirmed against the committee summary published by CUPA-HR, the Senate HELP Committee's own executive-session record, and Congress.gov, which shows all three bills ordered reported on June 21, 2023. The sick-leave thresholds are from the text of S. 1664. Photo: official U.S. Senate portrait, via Wikimedia Commons.

Bobby Charles Says Lobbyists Give Money Because 'You're Going to Buy a Favor.' He Ran a Lobbying Firm That Took $512,000 From Companies Caught Doing Exactly That.

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 06:47:53 +0000

Bobby Charles, the Republican nominee for governor of Maine, has built his campaign on a promise to clean up government. Fraud, waste, no-bid contracts — that is the pitch. He told WGAN recently what he thinks is going on when a lobbyist writes a check: "you're essentially believing that you're going to buy a favor."

He would know. He has been a lobbyist for most of this century.

The firm he still runs

Maine Beacon reported on August 31 that Charles spent 16 of the 17 years between 2000 and 2016 as a registered lobbyist. He founded The Charles Group, and he still leads it. Its website listed him as "president and managing member" in April of this year — about a year after he announced his run for governor. The firm reported lobbying activity as recently as the first three months of 2026.

That is not a former career he left behind before entering public life. It is a business he is running while asking Mainers to put him in charge of state contracting.

Maine Beacon's review of his firm's disclosures found it collected at least $512,000 from clients that overcharged taxpayers, held lucrative no-bid federal contracts, or ended up in federal fraud and bribery cases. Federal lobbying registrations are public, filed with Congress and searchable in the Senate's lobbying disclosure database.

The client whose CEO went to prison for bribing a congressman

The clearest example is MZM Inc., which paid The Charles Group to lobby in 2005.

At the time, MZM was holding a no-bid Defense Department contract worth up to $250 million, and had already collected more than $150 million under it. A no-bid federal contract is precisely the thing Charles now tells Maine voters he will stamp out.

A year later, MZM's founder and chief executive, Mitchell Wade, pleaded guilty to bribing then-Representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham in exchange for government business. The Justice Department's account of the plea is blunt: Wade admitted bribing Cunningham, providing improper benefits to Pentagon officials and employees, and funding political contributions made in someone else's name. Cunningham took more than $1 million. Wade also admitted routing nearly $80,000 in illegal campaign money to two other House members.

MZM and Wade agreed to pay a $1 million penalty over the straw contributions — money given in other people's names to get around the limits.

Charles' firm was not accused of any of that. It was paid to open doors for the company while the company was doing it.

The other one

Maine Beacon also found that The Charles Group took at least $276,000 lobbying for Bell Helicopter and its parent company Textron between 2000 and 2007. Bell later paid more than $16.5 million to settle claims that it had overbilled the Defense Department.

Overbilling the federal government is the second half of Charles' stump speech. He has spent this campaign telling Mainers that people are getting rich off public money and that he is the man to stop it.

He has done this before

The gap between what Charles says his record proves and what his record actually shows is the recurring feature of this campaign, not a one-off:

He says his federal experience qualifies him to fix Maine's finances. More than a dozen audits found the State Department bureau he ran couldn't account for billions of dollars.
He cut an ad promising to cut your property taxes. He doesn't use the property tax break Maine already offers.
Maine's Ethics Commission opened an investigation into an anonymous site attacking his primary rival. His campaign admitted building two others.

Each time, the claim is about integrity, and each time the documents underneath say something else.

What the filings show

Bobby Charles is running for governor of Maine on a promise to end fraud, waste, and no-bid contracts, and he has said publicly that lobbyists give money expecting to buy favors. His own lobbying firm — which he still leads, and which reported activity as recently as this year — collected at least $512,000 from clients that defrauded or overbilled the federal government or ended up in bribery cases. One of them, MZM Inc., was holding a no-bid Pentagon contract worth up to $250 million when it hired him, and its chief executive later pleaded guilty to bribing a member of Congress.

Source

Channa Steinmetz, "Longtime lobbyist Bobby Charles rails against lobbyists, pledges to fight practices his clients engaged in", Maine Beacon, August 31, 2026. Photo: Charles campaign official photo, via Maine Beacon.

Susan Collins Voted to Convict Trump Over January 6. Her Campaign Made a Man From the Oath Keepers' Membership Rolls a Town Chair.

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 06:46:11 +0000

On February 13, 2021, Susan Collins was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Donald Trump for inciting the January 6 attack on the Capitol. It is the vote her allies reach for whenever anyone calls her a rubber stamp.

In June of this year, her campaign named Wayne Erkkinen its town chair in Greenville. The Anti-Defamation League had already identified Erkkinen, four years earlier, as one of the Mainers on the Oath Keepers' membership rolls.

Who Erkkinen is, and how he was identified

Erkkinen, 81, is a Piscataquis County commissioner. As town chair, he is responsible for grassroots organizing and voter outreach in Greenville — the kind of job that puts a person in front of neighbors, at doors, on phones, for a campaign that is fighting for its life.

His name surfaced in 2022. The Portland Press Herald reported that the ADL's Center on Extremism had gone through a five-gigabyte cache of Oath Keepers emails, chat logs, and membership data leaked by the transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets. The rolls held 38,000 names. Nationwide, the ADL found more than 370 members of law enforcement, more than 100 military members, and more than 80 elected officials. In Maine, 215 people had at some point been paying members.

The ADL released Erkkinen's name at the Press Herald's request, along with that of a Gorham town councilor. It withheld the names of a Maine police officer and two first-responders it had also identified, saying the report was not meant to "unmask" rank-and-file personnel.

Erkkinen did not respond to a phone message left at his home in Greenville Junction in 2022.

What the group was

This matters because of what the Oath Keepers actually did.

Its founder, Stewart Rhodes, was indicted for seditious conspiracy against the United States for his role in planning the January 6 assault. Seventeen members faced federal charges over the attack. Rhodes was convicted and sentenced to 18 years in prison in May 2023 — the longest sentence handed down over January 6, and the first to carry a terrorism enhancement. Trump released him on his first day back in office.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks violent extremist groups, describes the Oath Keepers as an anti-government organization built on the belief that federal authorities are conspiring to impose martial law, confiscate weapons, and herd opponents into camps.

That is the group. Not a veterans' club with a bad news cycle.

What Erkkinen says now

Asked about it this week, Erkkinen told the Daily Beast he joined in 2010 thinking it was an organization for law enforcement and military veterans who had sworn to defend the Constitution. He said he quit "years ago," before January 6, because he didn't want to be part of something violent.

"It wasn't what I thought it would be," he said.

Take him at his word. It changes nothing about the decision Collins' campaign made. A national organization had published his name in 2022, a Maine newspaper had printed it, and four years later her campaign handed him a job running voter outreach.

Collins' campaign, per the Daily Beast, argued that it cannot be expected to keep tabs on every grassroots volunteer on its books.

The vetting she says she does

This is a campaign that has spent 2026 telling Mainers that Collins is different from the rest of her party — a senator, in the Daily Beast's words, "who claims to be right in the weeds of Maine's issues." She has represented Maine in the Senate since 1997.

A town chair is not a stranger who signed up on a website. It is a named appointment the campaign announces. Someone chose him and someone published it.

And the January 6 vote is the whole argument for her independence. If that vote meant what she says it meant, the people who show up in her name in Maine towns are exactly where it should be visible.

The pattern this fits

It is not the first time this year that what Collins does has diverged from what her January 6 vote is supposed to prove. On July 28 she voted to confirm a director of national intelligence who would not say Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

Her deciding-vote record tells a related story. Collins has cast 200 deciding votes in the Senate. The Maine Democratic Party counts 19 of them as confirming Trump nominees, and none as stopping one.

The short version

Susan Collins voted to convict Trump for inciting January 6. In June 2026, her Senate campaign named as its Greenville town chair a man the Anti-Defamation League had publicly identified in 2022 as one of 215 Mainers on the Oath Keepers' leaked membership rolls — the group whose founder was convicted of seditious conspiracy for planning that same attack. Her campaign's answer is that it cannot keep tabs on every volunteer.

Source

Thomas Kika, "Collins Re-Election Bid Stumbles Over 'Oath Keeper' On Campaign Staff", The National Memo, September 2, 2026, reporting on the Daily Beast's story; and Matt Byrne, "Gorham councilor, Piscataquis County commissioner appear on Oath Keepers member lists", Portland Press Herald, September 7, 2022. Photo: official Senate portrait.

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

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

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

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

Then a second missile killed them.

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

Congress never voted to authorize any of it.

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

We do not know who most of these people were

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

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

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

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

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

What the Senate actually voted on

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

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

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

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

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

It failed, 48 to 51.

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

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

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

Two of them switching sides would have carried it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The legal case for all this is classified

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The House looked into it for ten days

The Senate is not the only chamber that folded.

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Source

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

Susan Collins' Super PAC Took $2 Million From a Billionaire Named in the Epstein Files. Two and a Half Months Later She Voted to Kill the Amendment Forcing Their Release.

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:04:20 +0000

On June 27, 2025, Blackstone chief executive Stephen Schwarzman wrote a check for $2 million to Pine Tree Results PAC — the super PAC formed to reelect Susan Collins. The contribution is in the Federal Election Commission's own records of his giving.

Two and a half months later, on September 10, 2025, Collins voted to defeat an amendment that would have forced the Justice Department to release the Jeffrey Epstein case files.

Schwarzman's name appears in the Epstein files 23 times, The Daily Beast has reported, including one email in which Epstein called him "terrific." The story that surfaced his giving to Collins describes him as "associated with Epstein through New York's exclusive Core Club." He has not been accused of wrongdoing by any of Epstein's victims, and there is no allegation that he did anything illegal. What is true is narrow and documented: his name is in the material Collins voted not to force into the open, and his money is in the committee spending millions to keep her in the Senate.

The vote

The Senate voted 51–49 to dismiss the language, the Portland Press Herald reported. Republican Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Rand Paul of Kentucky were the only two who crossed over to join every Democrat. Collins voted with her party.

Schumer offered the language as an amendment to the annual defense bill, and Republicans voted to table it — a procedural motion that killed it without a vote on the merits. Collins' written explanation, issued through her office, was about process:

"In July, the Senate Appropriations Committee, which I chair, approved unanimously on a bipartisan basis a similar provision to compile and report the Epstein files as part of the Commerce, Justice, Science (CJS) funding bill... If Democrats hadn't blocked it from going to the floor, this amendment could have already been passed by the Senate as part of a bill that funds the Department of Justice."

She is not wrong that there was another vehicle. Two months later the Senate passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act by unanimous consent — no recorded vote — and it became law; the Daily Beast notes that Collins voted against the 2025 procedural efforts "before later supporting legislation requiring their release." But the vote in front of her in September was the one that would have forced disclosure that day, and she voted it down. Two Republicans in the chamber decided the vehicle mattered less than the disclosure.

The money kept coming after the vote

Schwarzman did not stop. On June 26, 2026 — nine and a half months after the vote — he gave Pine Tree Results another $1 million, bringing his total to $3 million for this cycle.

Pine Tree Results is not a mystery committee. The Press Herald calls it, plainly, the "pro-Collins super PAC", and it has spent the cycle running attack ads against her Democratic opponents. FEC filings show it raised $20.6 million in the 2026 cycle and had spent $12.4 million by the most recent report. Its largest single independent expenditures are all ads opposing Maine Democrats Graham Platner and Troy Jackson — nearly $2 million and $2.2 million a shot.

Schwarzman is not the only billionaire in it. Bloomberg Government reported that billionaire Paul Singer helped the pro-Collins super PAC bank $10 million, and the Maine Monitor counted nearly 100 billionaires and their spouses donating to reelect her.

We have written this exact story before, about a different Republican

Susan Collins is not the only Republican on a 2026 Senate ballot whose Epstein-files position and Epstein-files donors point in the same direction.

Ashley Hinson, running for Senate in Iowa, refused to sign the House discharge petition that would have forced the files out — while taking nearly $90,000 from billionaires named in those files, including $30,500 during the window she was refusing to sign.

Two states, two Senate races, the same shape.

What Mainers wanted

Maine Democratic Party spokesman Tommy Garcia cited a recent poll that suggested an overwhelming majority of Mainers believed all the documents should be released.

"Yesterday, Susan Collins chose to protect Donald Trump and the rich and powerful instead of standing up for victims and the American people."

That is a partisan opponent talking, and it should be read as one. The FEC filings are not partisan, and they say the same thing about who is funding the campaign.

What the filings show

Stephen Schwarzman, whose name appears in the Jeffrey Epstein files, has given $3 million to the super PAC working to reelect Susan Collins — $2 million of it two and a half months before she voted, 51–49, to kill the amendment that would have forced the Justice Department to release those files, and another $1 million nine and a half months after. That super PAC has raised $20.6 million this cycle and spent it attacking her opponents. Two Senate Republicans voted the other way on the amendment. Collins was not one of them.

Source

Embattled Republican Senator Susan Collins Blasted Over 'Epstein Donors' — The Daily Beast, August 31, 2026. Contribution amounts and dates verified independently against Federal Election Commission filings.

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

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

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

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

He told them it had nothing to do with vaccines.

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

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

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

What Kennedy did not tell the senators

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

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

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

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

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

The fourteen votes

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

Fourteen of those yes votes came from Republicans we track:

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

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

What Susan Collins was promised

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

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

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

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

What happened to the promises

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

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

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

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

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

The MMR vaccine is now the target

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who would have to investigate

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Source

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

Bobby Charles Says He'll Ask Trump's Border Czar to Put ICE Agents at Maine's Voting Booths. Federal Law Makes That a Crime.

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:09:41 +0000

On Thursday, August 20, Bobby Charles stood in front of a room of young Republicans in Arundel and told them what he plans to do about Maine's election in November.

He plans to call the White House border czar and ask him to send federal agents to where you vote.

"I'm going to ask Tom — three or four weeks before the election, maybe three — I'm going to make an appeal for ICE and marshals to be at our voting booths."

Then he added a punchline for the room:

"Do you think the illegals who are being paid money are going to like that?"

The audio was obtained exclusively by the Bangor Daily News. The "Tom" is Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, who Charles described to the room as an old friend from their years together on Fox News.

There is no evidence that anyone is being paid to vote in Maine. Charles offered none.

And the thing he says he's going to ask for is against the law.

The law is not ambiguous, and it is not new

There is a federal statute on the books — 18 U.S.C. § 592, written in the 1800s — that makes it a crime for any federal officer to bring or keep "troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held." The only exception is if armed force is genuinely needed to fight off an attack on the United States.

The punishment is spelled out in the same paragraph: a fine, or up to five years in prison, or both — plus being "disqualified from holding any office of honor, profit, or trust."

The Brennan Center for Justice looked at exactly this question last month and put it in one sentence: "Sending armed federal agents, including those from ICE, to election sites is illegal." The statute covers any "person in the civil, military, or naval service of the United States," not just soldiers — which is what makes it reach federal law enforcement.

Maine's Secretary of State, Shenna Bellows, was blunter.

"ICE and federal law enforcement are prohibited from being at the polls on Election Day. Bobby Charles can call whoever he wants, but he can't change the Constitution or the law."

Even the Trump administration isn't claiming it can do this. The Department of Homeland Security pointed a reporter back to what Secretary Markwayne Mullin said at his confirmation hearing in March: agents would go to a polling place only in response to a specific threat, and never for "intimidation."

Charles's campaign did not deny he said it. His campaign manager, Dale Crafts Jr., said Charles "will do everything legally possible to prevent illegal voting in Maine." That answer skips the actual problem. The thing Charles described is not legally possible. That's the whole story.

The same day, in a different town, he said he doesn't even know Trump

Here is what makes this more than a bad answer at a small event.

August 20 was a busy day for Bobby Charles. In Arundel, in front of a room of party activists, he said he'd personally phone Trump's border czar and get ICE to Maine's polling places.

That same day, at a campaign stop in Gorham, he made a point of telling reporters that the governor's race is "not about national politics." And he said this:

"I do not know President Trump. I have never met him. But, I will work with him. I will also stand up against him if he opposes something Maine needs. I am running to serve one group of people: the people of Maine."

Four days later, Vice President JD Vance came to Brewer and told the crowd to vote for Charles. Charles didn't go. His spokesperson said he was already booked to meet with people in Maine's addiction and recovery community, and had no plans to see Vance at any point during the trip.

So the version of Bobby Charles that reporters got is a man who has never met the president, doesn't want to talk about national politics, and can't make it to a rally being held for him. The version the Young Republicans got, the same calendar day, is a man on a first-name basis with the border czar who intends to ask him for a favor involving Maine's polling places.

One of those two men is the one asking Mainers for their vote.

Homan was already here

The favor may not even have been necessary.

Homan was in Maine on August 18 — two days before the Arundel event — eating dinner in Presque Isle, about 15 miles from the nearest Canadian border crossing. Earlier that day he told a border seminar in New York that he was heading to Maine to "find out what the hell is going on up there."

In a video that a Maine Republican state representative posted himself, Homan promised "a lot more enforcement action" in Maine, and turned to the people here on Temporary Protected Status — a program that lets people stay when war or disaster makes going home unsafe.

"A lot of TPS people in Maine. They're not going to be there much longer either now that the Supreme Court said we can end TPS."

There are 715 people with that status in Maine, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data. That is the entire population Homan was calling "a lot." Nationwide the figure is about 1.3 million.

This is the same national push Charles has been cheering for a year. Last summer he posted that Florida's Everglades detention camp deserved "kudos" and that "We need our own version in Maine", then ran a petition on it. Florida shut that camp down in June, less than a year after it opened, having spent $1.2 billion on it. He also wants to repeal Maine's law keeping state law enforcement out of federal immigration operations. And he has spent his campaign insisting a Somali-born Maine legislator isn't really American, which is where a lot of this started.

The fraud he keeps describing has never shown up

Charles's pitch rests on a claim: that noncitizens are voting in Maine in numbers that matter. He has been making it for a year.

In an August 2025 column he wrote that Maine's elections were battered by "proven allegations of double voter cards, illegals with driver's licenses and permits," accused Democrats of trying "to legalize voting by illegal aliens," and said the voter ID referendum had been "fraudulently interfered with by the shameless Mills Mafia." He urged Mainers to "send a message to the corrupt Democrat Machine in Augusta" by voting for that referendum. They didn't. It failed 64% to 36% — 315,008 votes against, 175,751 for — losing in Portland and in rural western Maine alike.

The evidence has not improved since. Bellows said this week:

"Despite many allegations from multiple sources, no one has presented me with evidence that there is a specific non-citizen on Maine's voting rolls that has voted illegally."

The national picture is the same. The Brennan Center's review of the actual cases found election officials referred about 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting out of 23.5 million votes counted — 0.0001 percent. A New York Times survey of the 2016 election turned up two possible instances out of 137.7 million voters. Florida screened a list of 180,000 suspected noncitizens and ended up removing 85 names and convicting one person.

The one real recent case cuts against him too. In New Jersey, about 6,600 noncitizens were wrongly registered between June 2023 and June 2024 — because of a software error in the state's motor vehicle system, which was found and fixed in June 2024. Fewer than 400 of them cast a ballot in three years of elections. As Keith Ingram, Texas's former elections director, put it: "noncitizen voting is a very small problem, if it's a problem at all, and this doesn't change that opinion at all."

A software bug is not a conspiracy, and it is certainly not people "being paid money."

We went through the administration's own best evidence earlier this month — a seven-page Census Bureau report with no named authors, claiming 24,000 noncitizen votes in 2020. That works out to less than 0.019 percent of the voters it checked, and the report has no way to know who any of them voted for.

What armed agents at a polling place actually do

Set aside whether anyone is voting illegally. Ask what the proposal accomplishes.

An ICE agent posted outside a polling place cannot tell who is a citizen by looking. What that agent can do is change who walks in the door. A green-card holder with a citizen spouse. A naturalized citizen who remembers January's ICE surge in southern Maine. A grandmother who doesn't want a scene. None of them are voting illegally. All of them would think twice.

That is not a side effect of the plan. Charles said so himself in Arundel — the point, in his telling, is that certain people won't "like that." Scaring people away from the polls isn't a flaw in this idea. It's how it would work.

Maine isn't the only place this is being tried. In New Hampshire, federal officials are set to monitor polls in the state's two largest cities this fall, and Gov. Kelly Ayotte said she'd "welcome anyone" — in the same press conference where she vowed to fight the national Democratic Party for bumping New Hampshire out of its first-in-the-nation primary slot.

The bottom line

Bobby Charles told supporters on August 20 that he intends to ask Trump's border czar for ICE agents and federal marshals at Maine's voting booths — something a federal law has made a crime, punishable by up to five years in prison, since the 1800s. He justified it with a claim that people are being paid to vote illegally, for which he offered no evidence and none exists. Maine's Secretary of State says that in all the years of allegations, nobody has ever shown her a single noncitizen on Maine's rolls who cast a ballot. The same day Charles said it, he told reporters he doesn't know Donald Trump and has never met him.

Source

Michael Shepherd, "Bobby Charles said he'll ask Donald Trump's border czar to send ICE to Maine polls," Bangor Daily News, August 26, 2026. Photo: Linda Coan O'Kresik / BDN.

Susan Collins Is Asking Mainers for $5 to Help Buy Fuel for Her Campaign Tour. She Voted Five Times to Keep Going the War That Raised Fuel Prices.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:57:35 +0000

On Monday, Susan Collins' campaign sent Mainers an email asking for donations — as little as $5 — to fund a statewide tour running the length of the state, Kittery to Madawaska.

The pitch, as reported by the Daily Beast:

"Organizing a tour of this scale takes a lot of coordination, enthusiasm, and quite literally fuel."

Fuel. That's the word her campaign chose, in the year Mainers have been watching pump prices climb because of a war Collins spent two months voting to continue.

The 60 days

When Trump launched airstrikes on Iran in February 2026, Congress had a tool to stop it. The War Powers Act gives Congress 60 days to end a war a president starts without its approval.

Democrats forced vote after vote. Five times between March 4 and April 22, Collins voted against them, saying it "would send the wrong message to Iran and to our troops."

Then the 60-day deadline arrived on April 30. And on that day, Collins voted to end the war. She was one of only two Republicans to do so.

Her vote came too late to matter. The resolution failed 47–50. The war continued.

This is worth stating precisely, because Collins' campaign points to that April 30 vote as proof she opposed the war. What the record shows is that she voted with her party against five straight attempts to stop it, from March 4 through April 22, and broke ranks only in the last 48 hours of the window — voting yes on the 60th day, when the outcome was already set.

It's a familiar move. She voted against Trump's budget bill too, but only after her own procedural vote had already sent it to the Senate floor. She votes no when her no changes nothing. It reads as moderation and functions as consent.

And her family owns the upside

Here is the part that turns an awkward email into a real conflict.

Collins' annual financial report for 2025 shows her husband, Thomas Daffron, holds up to $150,000 in corporate securities issued by ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66 — petroleum companies whose fortunes rise when fuel prices do.

In fairness, Collins' office says Daffron's investment decisions are made exclusively by a third-party adviser, without his consultation. We take that at face value. Nobody is alleging Collins voted on Iran to move an oil stock.

But the arrangement is still the arrangement. For two months, a senator voted to keep going a war that pushed fuel prices up. Her household's portfolio was positioned to benefit from exactly that. And now the campaign is asking Mainers — who have no such hedge — to chip in $5 for gas.

Mainers paying at the pump absorbed a cost. The Daffron portfolio absorbed a gain. The email asks the first group to help with the second's travel budget.

This is the pattern voters keep finding

Collins' financial record has been a recurring problem, and not because opponents invented it:

Her net worth was negative as recently as 2011. It is now up to $9.8 million. Her opponent's campaign puts her investment income at $342,520 a year — more than most Maine households earn from a full year of work.
She failed to report up to $395,000 in stock trades — 24 transactions filed more than 100 days late between 2013 and 2018 — violating the STOCK Act, the same law she championed and helped pass in 2012.
In 2026 she also failed to disclose a Pfizer purchase on time.
Her opponent's campaign says she owns the eighth best-performing stock portfolio in the Senate.
And she opposes a full ban on congressional stock trading, though 81% of Americans support one, including most Republicans.

We've written before about how the math on her "decisive" votes actually works. The shape is consistent: the public position is careful, the paperwork is late, and the portfolio does well.

Maine isn't the only place this happened

The Iran war's cost at the pump has been showing up in Republican districts all year, and members who voted to continue it have gotten creative about explaining the prices:

Mike Flood called $4.06 gas "the hand you're dealt" after voting to keep the war going.
Ashley Hinson took oil money and voted the same way.
Jon Husted's Chevron ties sat alongside his Iran war votes.

Collins' version is distinguished only by the email. The others at least didn't ask constituents to underwrite the fuel.

What Mainers should ask

Collins is running for a sixth term after promising, back at the start, to serve only two.

Two questions are fair to put to her on the tour itself:

If ending the war was the right vote on April 30, why was it the wrong vote in March? The facts didn't change on the 60th day. Only the consequences of her vote did.
Will she divest the petroleum holdings, or at least support the stock-trading ban that 81% of Americans want? "A third party manages it" answers a question about intent. It does not answer a question about incentive.

Maine deserves a senator who pays the same price at the pump that Mainers do — and doesn't pass the hat for it.

Sources

Vulnerable GOP Maine Senator Susan Collins Begs for Gas Money After Upholding Trump's War — Julia Ornedo, The Daily Beast, August 18, 2026.
Collins' Iran war powers vote reversal — The Maine Monitor.
Democratic ad attacks Collins on healthcare, Iran war — FactCheck.org.

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.

Susan Collins Has Cast 200 Deciding Votes in the Senate. 19 of Them Confirmed Trump Nominees. Zero Stopped One.

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 08:02:02 +0000

The oldest argument in Maine politics is whether Susan Collins is actually independent or just times her independence for when it can't change anything.

The Bangor Daily News decided to stop arguing about it and count. Reporters Benjamin Kail and Michael Shepherd went through roll-call data from VoteView covering all 10,076 votes Collins has cast since 1997, and isolated the ones where her vote alone would have changed the outcome.

The answer is genuinely complicated, and both sides of it are worth stating plainly.

What the numbers actually show

Collins has cast 200 deciding votes — 2% of every vote of her career.

Of those 200, 144 helped her own party. That's 72%. The other 56 delivered the outcome Democrats preferred.

Fifty-six is not nothing. It is, according to the BDN's review, the most party-breaking decisive votes cast by any senator over the span of Collins's tenure. By rate she ranks seventh, behind several senators with much shorter careers.

So the flat claim that Collins never breaks with Republicans when it counts is not supported by the data. She has, 56 times, over 29 years.

The problem is what happened to that number recently.

The trend line

Here is the BDN's count of decisive votes Collins has cast against her own party, administration by administration back to George W. Bush. Collins took office in 1997, under Bill Clinton, and the review does not break out those first four years:

George W. Bush, two terms — 13
Barack Obama, two terms — 16
Donald Trump, first term — 9
Joe Biden — 12
Donald Trump, second term, so far — 4

The senator whose brand is independence has broken with her party decisively four times during what the Bangor Daily News calls a time of unprecedented expansion of White House power.

And on the specific category that has defined this Congress, the Maine Democratic Party's number is the one that stings: Collins has cast 19 deciding votes to confirm Trump nominees, and not one deciding vote against one.

The "too little, too late" list

Democrats' version of the argument is that Collins's famous "no" votes arrive after the outcome is already locked. They point to her votes against Todd Blanche, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and a motion to advance an Affordable Care Act repeal — all cast, they say, once it was clear the result was decided.

Collins's team disputes two of those directly, and the objection is fair enough to record: they say she was the first Republican to come out against Blanche before his confirmation was secured, and the first in her party to oppose Obamacare repeal in 2017.

On Blanche in particular, though, the sequence is worth looking at. Collins voted to confirm Todd Blanche as deputy attorney general in March 2025. She announced her no vote on his attorney general nomination hours after the two Republicans with real leverage cut their deal and let him out of committee. He was confirmed anyway.

The clearest example of the pattern isn't a nominee at all. On Trump's budget bill, Collins voted against final passage — after casting the procedural vote that let the bill get to the floor. Her campaign now runs an ad saying she "stood up for Maine" on Medicaid. The ad leaves out the procedural vote, which a fellow Republican publicly thanked her for.

Her team's answer is that the procedural vote is what gave her the standing to push for an amendment. That is a real argument about how the Senate works. It is also, precisely, the mechanism critics are describing.

"Hall passes"

Kyle Kondik, managing editor of the nonpartisan Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, gave the BDN the least partisan description of the phenomenon:

Some votes by vulnerable members of both parties "end up being hall passes, where somebody's vote is not actually needed."

Kondik also noted that hall passes are not unique to Collins, and that it is nothing new for critics to tie a lawmaker to an unpopular president. What has changed is that there is almost nobody left in her position — twenty years ago, he said, Congress had red-state Democrats and blue-state Republicans, and now it basically doesn't.

That is context, and it's true. It does not answer the question a Maine voter is actually asking, which is whether the 19-to-0 record on deciding votes for Trump nominees describes a moderate.

The number Collins's campaign offers instead

Her campaign points to a different statistic: in the first years of the last several administrations going back to Bush, Collins voted with the president's position between 85% and 95% of the time, regardless of which party held the White House.

They add a caveat that is fair enough to record. The Washington Post reported in December that 2025 saw 659 roll-call votes — more than any odd-numbered year this century. Her team's argument is that many of those were noncontroversial nominees who in earlier eras may have cleared by voice vote or unanimous consent, which inflates the Trump-alignment percentage with routine confirmations.

Her spokesperson, Blake Kernen, said Collins "takes every single vote seriously and carefully considers her decision to act in the best interest of Maine and America," and said she has often been recognized as the most bipartisan senator, in "stark contrast" to Democratic nominee Troy Jackson.

Jackson's spokesperson, Maggie Amjad, put the other side of it: "While Susan Collins has spent 30 years in Washington selling out Maine and putting billionaires first, Troy Jackson will stand up and fight for Mainers."

What this leaves Maine voters with

Two things are true at once, and the BDN's math is what makes it possible to say so:

Collins really has broken with her party on decisive votes more than any other senator of her era. That is not a myth her office invented.
The overwhelming majority of her deciding votes — 72% — went the Republican way, that rate of independence has fallen to its lowest point of her career under the current administration, and by the Maine Democratic Party's count she has never once been the vote that stopped a Trump nominee.

Maine's most consequential Collins vote is still the one that put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court on the assurance that Roe was settled law. He voted to overturn it. Asked in Maine this summer whether she'd do it again, she said yes.

Independence isn't a personality. It's a count. The count is public now.

Source

Does Susan Collins only vote with Democrats when it doesn't matter? We did the math. — Benjamin Kail and Michael Shepherd, Bangor Daily News, August 13, 2026. Photo: Robert F. Bukaty/AP.

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.

A Maine Woman Wrote Susan Collins Again and Again About Her Detained Husband. She Got Back a Newsletter.

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:30:08 +0000

On August 11, 2026, more than 150 people lined Main Street outside Susan Collins' office in Biddeford, Maine.

They were there about a vote. In June, Collins voted to give U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement roughly $70 billion in new funding with no reforms attached — one of the Republican senators who did. They were also there about a killing. On July 13, an ICE officer shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian father, during a vehicle stop in the middle of Biddeford. He was not the person ICE was looking for.

But the moment from that protest worth sitting with is smaller than either of those things.

Seven months, and a newsletter

Alessia Gaspar Da Silva's husband, Marcos, was taken by ICE in January. He is still in custody.

She told the crowd what those months have been like for him: fed once every 30 hours, denied medical care, moved to different states without anyone telling her.

"He's been gone for seven months. It feels like a lifetime," she said.

Then she said what happened when she asked her senator for help. She reached out to Collins' office repeatedly. What came back was a newsletter, listing the senator's accomplishments.

"Collins has not done anything. She has no accountability. No transparency. No transparency for the people that are … being terrorized."

A constituent whose husband has been held for seven months wrote her senator and received a list of that senator's achievements. That is not a policy disagreement. That is a constituent service failure, and it is the kind of thing a 30-year incumbent is supposed to be good at.

Why the bodycam promise lands badly here

Collins has an answer ready when Maine asks her about ICE. Two and a half weeks after Guerrero was killed, she announced that ICE would deploy body cameras nationwide by the end of August, and that "at my request" the agency had agreed to send Maine's first.

We went through that claim when she made it. The short version: at 2:48 in the morning on June 5, the Senate voted on an amendment setting aside at least $300 million to put body cameras on immigration officers and to make the footage available to Congress and to the people filmed. Collins voted against it. Less than two hours later she voted for the $70 billion with no strings attached.

The agents in Biddeford were not wearing body cameras. There is no body camera footage of what happened to Guerrero.

So when Collins offers Maine a bodycam announcement, she is offering a fix for a gap she voted twice to leave open.

What the neighbors saw

Monica Davis lives a few blocks from Guerrero's family. She was helping a friend move when she saw a girl running down the road saying, "They've just killed someone, ICE just killed someone in the street."

"I will just never forget that moment of discovering that it had happened right here in the center of town, right next to our home."

Pam Ericson teaches in Lewiston public schools and came from Bath. She described what the enforcement surge has done to her classroom: "I work with kids who just came to the United States, and they don't come to school. I have to give them rides, their families won't go to work. It's very scary."

State Sen. Henry Ingwersen of York County was blunter: "Susan's vote to fund ICE with no strings attached was shameful."

The hearing down the street

The protest happened the same day Rep. Chellie Pingree announced that members of Congress will hold a field hearing in Biddeford on ICE's use of force in the Guerrero case. It is set for 11 a.m. on Monday, August 17, at Biddeford High School's Little Theater, and it is open to the public. Pingree will be joined by Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, and Rep. Katherine Clark of Massachusetts.

Biddeford Mayor Liam LaFountain said he hopes Republicans show up too:

"Johan's family and the people of Biddeford deserve a full and independent understanding of what occurred. Federal authority must come with federal accountability, and Congress has an important role to play in providing that oversight when the exercise of federal authority results in the death of a member of our community."

The family's attorney, Ben Gideon, told Maine Public that the family is cooperating with the Maine Attorney General's investigation, but that no federal investigators have reached out to them.

The gap

Susan Collins' whole political identity rests on being the senator who is different — the moderate who breaks with her party when Maine needs her to.

Here is what Maine got. She voted against $300 million for body cameras and for footage the public could see. She voted for $70 billion with no oversight. An ICE officer killed a young father in a Maine downtown. She announced a bodycam program as her own achievement. A woman whose husband has been detained for seven months got a newsletter.

And on August 17 there will be a hearing about all of it, in the same city as that office, open to anyone who wants to come.

Source

Biddeford protest targets Sen. Collins over ICE funding by Eesha Pendharkar, Maine Morning Star, August 11, 2026. Photo: Eesha Pendharkar/Maine Morning Star.

45 Republicans We Cover Broke the Law That's Supposed to Stop Insider Trading in Congress

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:36:26 +0000

On July 22, 2026, the U.S. House passed a bill called the Stop Insider Trading Act. It passed 232 to 198, and every single Republican who voted — all 218 of them — voted yes.

Watching that, you'd think Congress had finally decided to deal with its stock trading problem.

Congress does have a stock trading problem. But there is already a law on the books meant to handle the most basic part of it, and it has been there since 2012. It asks members of Congress to do one simple thing.

We went through the report cards on this site and counted how many of the Republicans we cover have failed to do that one simple thing.

The answer is 45.

What the STOCK Act actually asks

The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act — the STOCK Act — was signed into law on April 4, 2012 after a national scandal over lawmakers appearing to profit from what they learned on the job. The Brennan Center describes it as closing part of a loophole that had exempted Congress from rules other traders had lived under since 1934.

The core requirement is almost embarrassingly easy. If you, your spouse, or your kids buy or sell a stock, a bond, or crypto worth more than $1,000, you file a form. You have 30 days from when you find out about it, and no more than 45 days from the trade itself.

That's the whole thing. It doesn't stop anyone from trading. It doesn't limit what they can own. It just says: tell us.

And there's a good reason it says that. Members of Congress know things before we do. They know which company is about to win a federal contract, which industry is about to get a tax break, whether the tariffs are real. If we can see what they bought and when they bought it, we can hold their trades up against their votes and decide for ourselves who they're working for.

Disclosure is the only tool voters get. Miss the deadline, and by the time we find out, the vote has happened, the profit is banked, and the election is over.

The roll call

Here's what "breaking a transparency law" looks like in practice. All of these are Republicans with report cards on this site.

The biggest offenders:

Rick Allen (GA) — failed to properly report 136 transactions worth between $3.05 million and $8.56 million. The oldest was a Monsanto purchase from February 2017 that he didn't disclose until August 2023 — roughly six and a half years late.
Diana Harshbarger (TN) — late on more than 700 stock trades worth between $728,000 and $10.9 million.
Julia Letlow (LA) — late on more than 210 stock and bond trades worth $225,000 to $3.3 million, some by more than a year.
Tommy Tuberville (AL) — in his first year in the Senate, disclosed 132 trades late, worth at least $894,000.
John James (MI) — 145 stock trades not disclosed on time, worth up to $2.2 million, the oldest more than eight months late. The campaign finance group End Citizens United filed an ethics complaint over them.
Lisa McClain (MI) — the No. 4 Republican in House leadership broke the law twice in 2025: first on more than 500 transactions, then again months later on $360,000 to $900,000 of her husband's trades, including up to $450,000 of Palantir stock.
Byron Donalds (FL) — months late on up to $1.6 million in trades.
Blake Moore (UT) — broke it more than 70 times in his first six months in office, on trades worth as much as $1.1 million.

The two the ethics office formally looked at. In May 2022 the nonpartisan Office of Congressional Ethics found "substantial reason to believe" that two Republicans had violated the law. Pat Fallon (TX) had failed to timely disclose 122 transactions worth between $9 million and $21 million in 2021 alone. John Rutherford (FL) had 157 late transactions worth $652,000 to $3.5 million, stretching back to the year he was sworn in.

Caught by watchdogs and reporters. A 2021 Campaign Legal Center complaint reported by NPR named three Republicans. Roger Williams (TX) filed no transaction reports for three of his wife's 2019 stock sales — General Electric, Nvidia and Disney. Warren Davidson (OH) sold $50,000 to $100,000 in Workhorse Group stock in 2020 with no disclosure form on file at all. And Lance Gooden (TX) reported a dozen stock purchases worth between $60,019 and $376,000 on his annual disclosure — American Airlines, Delta, Royal Caribbean, Hertz, Marathon Oil and others — without ever filing the transaction reports for them. All three sat on the House Financial Services Committee. What made that complaint unusual, NPR noted, is that these members appeared never to have filed reports at all. NOTUS's August 2025 investigation into late filings named Scott Franklin (FL), Brandon Gill (TX), Tim Moore (NC), Austin Scott (GA) and Dan Meuser (PA). A 2021 Business Insider review flagged Victoria Spartz (IN) and Mike Kelly (PA), whose wife's purchase of Beauty Health Company stock went unreported for more than seven weeks past the deadline.

And the rest. Raw Story's September 2024 investigation into 62 members of Congress who broke the law included Stephanie Bice (OK), Ron Estes (KS), Russ Fulcher (ID), Glenn Grothman (WI), Bill Hagerty (TN), Bill Huizenga (MI), David Joyce (OH), Tom Kean Jr. (NJ), Darin LaHood (IL), Nicole Malliotakis (NY), Maria Elvira Salazar (FL), Adrian Smith (NE), Rob Wittman (VA) and Mike Collins (GA). Add Dan Sullivan (AK), who sold Mowi and Five Below stock in August 2022 and didn't report either sale until November 3; Mike Rounds (SD), more than five months late on a $1 million to $5 million stock sale; Kevin Hern (OK), nearly two dozen trades worth up to $2.7 million; Brian Mast (FL), a year and a half late on an Ideal Power sale; Carol Miller (WV), almost a year late on at least $217,000 of her husband's trades; August Pfluger (TX), late on family trades worth up to $150,000; Juan Ciscomani (AZ), about nine months late on a Treasury bond worth up to $50,000; plus Susan Collins (ME), Roger Marshall (KS), Chuck Fleischmann (TN) and Pete Sessions (TX), whose stories are below.

Not all of these are the same size. Bill Huizenga filed an annual report ten days late. Nicole Malliotakis was late on two transactions in the $1,001-to-$15,000 range. That is nothing like Rick Allen's six and a half years, and we're saying so.

The point isn't that all 45 are equally bad. The point is that 45 of them couldn't clear a bar this low.

"My broker did it"

Read the responses side by side and a script emerges.

Rick Allen's office said his trades are "handled by a financial adviser" and blamed a compliance firm. Harshbarger's chief of staff blamed a financial advisor's "gross oversight." Julia Letlow's spokesman said she was "two layers removed" because Merrill Lynch had discretionary trading authority and "did not consult with the congresswoman." Mike Rounds's office said the sale "happened via a third-party investment firm" and that the senator "does not have direct involvement." Susan Collins's spokesperson blamed "a delay in notification from the third-party advisor." Tom Kean Jr. blamed an attorney and a family trust. Kevin Hern's office said he and his accountant forgot to hit send. Bill Hagerty called it a "clerical error."

Chuck Fleischmann's office went one better. He first reported that "a dependent child had made these trades" — then acknowledged he has no dependent children, and filed an amended disclosure six days later saying it was his financial advisor after all.

This got common enough that NOTUS ran a whole piece on it in August 2025, headlined "Lawmakers' New Botched Stock Disclosure Scapegoat: Financial Advisers." That story quoted the House Ethics Committee's own written guidance, which settles the argument in one sentence:

"You are personally responsible for incomplete and inaccurate information contained in your [financial reports], regardless of who assisted in preparation."

If you hire someone and they don't do the job, it's still your problem. Every one of us knows that from our own lives. A late mortgage payment doesn't get forgiven because the bank's website was confusing.

The penalty is $200

Here's why none of them seem especially worried.

The fine for filing late is $200 — what the Campaign Legal Center calls "a hardly impactful deterrence from the potential millions to be made off the stock market." Blake Moore broke the law more than 70 times and, as we've written before, paid $200 total. Dan Meuser was more than a year late reporting as much as $600,000 in family trades made at the very bottom of the pandemic market crash. He paid $200.

It gets softer than that. A January 2023 House Ethics memo says a report "is late if submitted any time after the due date, but there is a 30-day grace period before late fees are imposed." Chuck Fleischmann's office used exactly that to avoid paying anything at all. And the fees that do get assessed are frequently waived by the ethics committees.

The criminal side is emptier still. No member of Congress has ever been prosecuted for insider trading under the STOCK Act. The Bangor Daily News reported the same thing this June, alongside the long-standing criticism that the law "has no teeth."

So the deal on offer to a member of Congress is this: disclose your trades and let voters judge you, or don't, and risk a $200 fee you can ask to have waived. Forty-five of the Republicans on this site took the second option.

Why the timing is the whole story

A late form sounds like a paperwork problem. It isn't. It matters because of what stays hidden and for how long.

Tim Moore failed to disclose 12 trades made around Trump's April 2025 tariff announcement — the announcement that moved every market in the country.
Ron Estes was about four months late reporting up to $45,000 in Treasury savings bonds. He sits on the Ways and Means Committee, which oversees the nation's bonded debt.
Blake Moore bought up to $60,000 of Raytheon stock while sitting on the House Armed Services Committee, and didn't report it on time.
David Joyce was nearly two years late on trades that included Boeing, Citigroup and TC Energy.
Scott Franklin's late-reported trades included General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin — federal contractors.

None of that is proof anybody traded on inside information. That's exactly the point. The disclosure rule exists so the question can be asked while it still matters. When a member reports a trade two years after making it, nobody can hold it up against the vote he cast that week. The delay isn't a side effect of breaking the rule. The delay is what the rule was written to prevent.

We know what it looks like when the timeline is visible. Mike Kelly's wife bought 5,000 shares of Cleveland-Cliffs the morning after his office learned the Butler steel plant would get the federal help he had been lobbying for, then sold at a $64,476 profit — and the House Ethics Committee voted unanimously to formally reprove him, one of the very few times any of this produced a real consequence. Rob Bresnahan sold six figures of Medicaid company stock a week before voting to cut Medicaid. We only know either of those things because the filings eventually surfaced.

The ones who campaigned on this

The hypocrisy isn't incidental. It's the pattern.

Susan Collins helped write the law. She helped write it in 2012, alongside the late Sen. Joe Lieberman. In February 2026 she disclosed her husband's purchase of a Pfizer corporate bond five days after the deadline — a violation FactCheck.org confirmed even while knocking down a separate Democratic attack ad against her as false. A review of her earlier filings found 24 transactions from 2013 to 2018 reported more than 100 days late, worth up to $395,000. Her campaign notes she has never personally bought or sold an individual stock — her husband's outside advisor makes those calls.

Byron Donalds went on television in March 2022 to demand consequences for members who violate the STOCK Act — "That's when you have to have sanctions and the House has to get real" — and then broke it himself. He is now running for governor of Florida.

Maria Elvira Salazar attacked her Democratic predecessor in April 2020 over financial disclosure problems, writing that Donna Shalala "violates and skirts federal law with her own finances." Then she filed late herself — more than two months past the deadline on a Cano Health transaction worth up to $500,000 — and asked for the $200 penalty to be waived.

Tom Kean Jr. won his seat in 2022 by hammering his opponent over late stock disclosures and promising "the highest level of ethics and transparency." He has violated the STOCK Act repeatedly since.

Roger Marshall hid a dependent child's pandemic-era trades for 17 months — then, in March 2026, put his name on a bill to ban exactly that.

Mike Collins endorsed a ban on congressional stock trading while being one of the busiest crypto traders in Congress. He was also late reporting two Ethereum purchases.

And then there's Pete Sessions, who is at least consistent. He opposes banning congressional stock trading, calling it a "populist move" and saying, "I think we have enough rules and regulations." His argument for leaving things as they are was this: "If you have nothing to hide, then transparency is your friend."

He has been late on his own disclosures twice.

Back to that July vote

Which brings us back to the bill all 218 voting Republicans supported on July 22.

The Stop Insider Trading Act bans members from making new purchases of individual stocks — but lets them keep everything they already own, reinvest the dividends, and sell later. Rep. Pramila Jayapal called it a "so-called stock trading ban that literally does nothing of the sort." Rep. Joe Morelle said it was "so filled with holes, it would make Swiss cheese blush." And the bill carried a second payload most people never heard about: a set of strict new voter ID rules that would bar student IDs and require voters to photocopy their ID to vote by mail.

So the same members who couldn't be bothered to file a form got to vote for a "ban" that grandfathers in everything they already hold — and attached new hurdles for the rest of us to vote, on the way through.

The bottom line

Nobody here is on trial. Most of these are late forms, and late forms are boring.

But a democracy runs on a handful of small, boring obligations, and this is one of them. Congress wrote itself the gentlest possible rule — trade all you want, just tell us within 45 days — attached a $200 fine, waived the fine much of the time, and has never once prosecuted anyone under it. Forty-five of the Republicans we cover still couldn't follow it.

Every time one of them misses that deadline, we lose the only thing the law was ever designed to give us: the ability to look at what they bought, look at how they voted, and draw our own conclusions while it still matters.

They know that. That's why the deadline keeps getting missed.

We deserve better.

At 4:36 in the Morning, 52 Republican Senators Voted to Put a New Hurdle Between You and the Ballot Box

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 13:55:00 +0000

The U.S. Senate stayed up all night on Friday. Then, at 4:36 in the morning on Saturday, August 8, 2026, it took a vote on whether Americans should have to show a photo ID to vote in a federal election.

The vote failed, 52 to 46. It needed 60. Every Democrat who was there voted no.

Then the senators went home for a month.

That's the part worth sitting with. The Senate pulled an all-nighter, confirmed a new attorney general, passed a bill to keep the government's lights on — and squeezed in one more vote on making it harder to cast a ballot. Then everyone left for August recess.

The bill was three days old

The measure was S. 5271, and it is about as fresh as legislation gets. According to the official record at Congress.gov, it was introduced on August 5, 2026 — three days before the Senate voted on it. Its full official title is "A bill to amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require voters to provide photo identification."

The sponsor was Jon Husted, the Republican senator from Ohio.

It picked up exactly two cosponsors, both on August 7 — the day before the vote. They were Ashley Moody of Florida and Dan Sullivan of Alaska.

So: a bill written by one senator, signed onto by two more, introduced on a Wednesday, and voted on before dawn on a Saturday. That is not how you pass a law. That is how you stage a vote.

What "show your ID" actually means for millions of people

Here's the thing about a photo ID requirement. It sounds like nothing. Most of us have a driver's license in our wallet right now. So what's the problem?

The problem is the people who don't — and the people whose ID doesn't match.

A national study from the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland found that about 2.6 million U.S. citizens over 18 have no government-issued photo ID of any kind.

And the bigger number is the one nobody talks about. That same study estimated that 34.5 million people don't have a driver's license or state ID card with their current name and address on it.

Think about who that is. Someone who just moved. Someone who got married and changed their name. A college student. A young person who's lived at three addresses in two years. An older widow who never updated her license. None of them committed fraud. All of them could get turned away.

Noncitizens, meanwhile, are already barred from voting in state, federal and almost all local elections. That has been true this whole time.

This is the same fight, wearing a different hat

Husted's photo ID bill isn't a standalone idea. It's a piece broken off from the SAVE America Act — the bigger Republican bill that would require voters to show documentary proof of citizenship when they register and a photo ID when they vote.

We've written about that bill a lot, because Republicans keep bringing it back. The SAVE Act is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist — and the citizenship-document half of it is even harsher than the ID half. The Brennan Center and its partners found that 21.3 million American citizens of voting age don't have ready access to a document proving citizenship.

President Trump has pushed hard for it. He wanted the Senate to skip its recess and stay in Washington until it passed. Republican leaders told him repeatedly that the votes aren't there — and Saturday morning proved them right.

Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, one of the loudest voices for the bill, wasn't discouraged. "This fight's not over," he said afterward. "We're just getting started."

Believe him. Republicans have tried to attach voter restrictions to an affordable housing bill and to a party-line budget bill. When the front door is locked, they try the windows.

The fifteen we track

Fifteen of the Republicans on this site voted yes on Saturday morning. Here they are, with what we already knew about each one.

Jon Husted wrote the bill. This is the same senator whose state lost more Obamacare coverage than any other in America — a man with plenty of real problems back home who chose to spend his August writing a new voting restriction instead.

Ashley Moody and Dan Sullivan put their names on it as cosponsors the day before the vote.

Darline Graham of South Carolina was sworn in only days ago to fill her late brother's seat — and the very first bill she cosponsored was the SAVE Act. Her South Carolina primary is Tuesday, August 11.

Roger Marshall of Kansas spent the week before this vote demanding a floor vote on the SAVE Act on Fox News while describing it to Kansans as a simple "voter ID" bill. It isn't, and this week's separate photo ID vote makes that plain: if the SAVE Act were just voter ID, Husted wouldn't have needed to write a voter ID bill.

Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, now running for governor, has his own history of repeating SAVE Act talking points that don't survive contact with the bill text.

And the rest voted yes without much comment: Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Susan Collins of Maine, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, Jim Risch of Idaho, and Mike Rounds of South Dakota.

Two senators didn't vote at all: Republican Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who is recovering from a health issue, and Democrat Peter Welch of Vermont.

What they didn't do before they left

It's worth naming what else was on the table that week, because it tells you what the Senate treats as urgent.

The Senate did pass a stopgap funding bill, 90 to 6, to keep the government running through December 11 — though the House passed a different version, so that isn't settled. It confirmed Todd Blanche as attorney general, with Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski voting no. It passed a Russia sanctions package, 86 to 11.

What it did not do was lower anyone's grocery bill, or their rent, or their electric bill, or their premiums.

It did find time, at 4:36 a.m., to vote on making people prove who they are at the polls.

Fifty-two Republicans thought that was worth staying up for.

Source

Reporting by Shauneen Miranda for States Newsroom: "US Senate leaves town for recess after passing stopgap spending bill, blocking photo ID for voting" (Michigan Advance, August 7, 2026). Photo by Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom. Roll call details from Senate vote #231.

Bobby Charles Says His Federal Record Qualifies Him to Fix Maine. More Than a Dozen Audits Found the Bureau He Ran Couldn't Account for Billions.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:04:00 +0000

At a debate in Auburn in February 2026, Bobby Charles raised his hand and listed what he had done in Washington.

"I was brought in by [Secretary of State] Colin Powell and the president to clean up that place. At the same time as I cut bureaucrats and cut the budget, I trained the Iraqi police. I trained the Iraqi police and the Afghan police."

That 18 months is the center of his pitch for governor. Charles tells Maine voters that running a big, complicated federal operation is what separates him from the rest of the field — and that it's why he can be trusted to hunt down waste and fraud in Augusta.

So the Bangor Daily News went and read the audits of the operation he ran.

What the watchdogs found

Charles was Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs — the bureau that fights drugs and crime abroad — from October 2003 to March 2005. After the invasions, his team was handed the job of rebuilding the police forces of both Iraq and Afghanistan. The State Department contracted with DynCorp International to do the work in early 2004.

More than a dozen federal audits criticized that bureau. They came from the State Department, the Pentagon, the Government Accountability Office and other watchdogs. Auditors found poor management, billions spent without accountability, and failure to accomplish the bureau's primary foreign policy goals — the two biggest being training national police and countering narcotics.

Some specifics from the reporting:

The U.S. paid $43.8 million between 2004 and 2006 for trailers meant to house the American police trainers rebuilding Iraq's security forces. They were built in Italy and sat unassembled in storage at the Baghdad airport for more than two years. Officials couldn't say whether they'd received what they paid for.
A federal audit found the bureau had accepted a contractor's word about the status of work without checking, paid invoices before the work was even contracted, and let millions in unauthorized construction go through without objection — including a swimming pool at the Adnan Palace in Baghdad.
On counternarcotics, audits found that in Afghanistan the only industry that grew after the U.S. invasion was the opium market. That is the exact opposite of what the bureau existed to do.
All told, the U.S. poured more than $21 billion into the police training effort over two decades and came away with little to show for it, according to a 2022 report led by the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction.

In February 2005 — one month before Charles left — Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice a confidential memo from commanders in Afghanistan titled "ANP Horror Stories." It described an Afghan police force that was illiterate and largely untrained despite years of American investment.

"This is a serious problem," Rumsfeld wrote.

John Sopko spent nearly 13 years as the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction and oversaw more than 700 reports and investigations. Asked about the police training effort, he was blunt:

"I don't know why anybody in their right mind would take credit for this. I mean, it was a total disaster, and our reports confirm that."

The audit that covers his desk, in his own building

Charles's central defense is a timing argument, and it deserves to be stated fairly: the audits do not mention him by name. They refer to the position he held, and to work that began during his period. Many of them span two decades — far longer than the year and a half he was there.

But one of them is squarely about his tenure.

A 2005 State Department audit found the bureau suffered from "periodic leadership vacuums" and a front office that was "structurally dysfunctional" during Charles's time in charge. Morale was poor. Internal tensions had grown severe enough that the State Department's civil rights office had to send in a mediator.

The bureau also lost standing inside its own department under his leadership. That leadership, the audit said, was:

"perceived as preoccupied with defending its turf, too ready to embroil itself in sterile interagency strife, and as ineffective in presenting its positions in interagency forums"

The result, according to the audit, was a bureau that had become "isolated and marginalized."

That is not a report about the twenty years after he left. That is a contemporaneous review of the shop he was running.

What he says back

Charles's campaign declined an interview with the BDN and did not answer specific questions about his service. He referred to the paper in a post as the "Bobby Derangement Network," and later called the reporting an attack from the "[Gov. Janet] Mills-funded media."

In a statement, he said: "Our operation began with essentially zero police infrastructure, and my team helped build systems to keep people safe under extremely difficult conditions. We trained police, stood up institutions, and took on some of the toughest assignments in the world."

The next morning he went on WVOM's Maine's Morning News with Ric Tyler and made a fuller case. He called it "the season of fake news." He said he'd brought former colleagues and an acting inspector general to the paper and "of course, they ignored virtually everything that I brought to them." He listed accomplishments: counter-narcotics work tied to Plan Colombia, raising the State Department air wing's readiness from about 60% to 85% ("No more hangar queens"), and training what he said was 35,000 Iraqi police.

He said he was the one who called inspectors general into the bureau in the first place: "I want investigators to rip this place apart so that we know where all the fraud is." And he argued that reformers make enemies — "If you're an agent of change, they hate you."

Two people who worked with him back him up. William E. Todd, a career diplomat who was later ambassador to Brunei and Cambodia and worked with Charles directly from 2003 to 2005, said the bureaucracy resisted change and that Charles "brought into INL — which had been running on cruise control for a long time — fiscal responsibility." Retired Air Force Col. John Mosbey, who worked under Charles on police training, described an impossible situation: "The whole situation was complicated, really complicated. I think we made it work."

Pressed on whether any of the audit criticism was fair, Charles allowed that some was, framing it as normal for reform under wartime conditions: "Every business, every government is imperfect."

Those are real answers, and the job was genuinely brutal. The position had sat vacant for 14 months before he took it. Nobody rebuilt a national police force from nothing in a war zone.

Two answers worth looking at twice

On the $43.8 million in trailers, Charles told Tyler flatly: "That happened after me, Ric."

The payments ran from 2004 to 2006. He was in the job until March 2005. The spending started on his watch and continued after he left. "After me" is not what the record shows.

On the Rumsfeld memo describing Afghan police as illiterate and untrained, Charles said he wasn't concerned by it — Rumsfeld sent memos like that all the time, and he and Powell didn't get along. "We used to call them snowflakes, nasty grams."

And on the underlying failure, his explanation was the trainees: "The Afghans are illiterate, that's the problem." He repeated it: "The reason that the Afghanistan police program over the years became more difficult is because it is difficult to train people, period, who can't read."

Set that next to the debate line he opened with — "I trained the Iraqi police and the Afghan police." When it's an accomplishment, he trained them. When the audits come in, the problem is that they couldn't read.

Why this matters in Maine

None of this is ancient history the voters can safely skip, because Charles is the one who put it on the ballot. He isn't running on a Maine record — he doesn't have one. He is running on those 18 months, and on a promise to bring that same management to state government. He told Tyler the point of the whole story is that Maine "literally ha[s] to get accountability, fiscal management, outcomes, efficiency, and law enforcement."

Accountability and fiscal management are exactly what more than a dozen audits say his bureau lacked.

His campaign has a pattern here, and we wrote about another version of it this week: a television ad promising to quadruple Maine's homestead exemption — a tax break he had never signed up for himself — with no answer for how the state would pay for it. Big number, confident delivery, no arithmetic underneath.

When the Bangor Daily News checked the one credential his campaign is built on, he declined the interview, refused the specific questions, and called the paper fake news.

That is the tell. A candidate proud of his management record answers questions about it.

Mainers deserve a governor whose central qualification survives being read. We deserve better.

Source

Sawyer Loftus, "Bobby Charles ran a bureau that spent billions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Watchdogs say it failed." — Bangor Daily News / Maine Focus, May 6, 2026, republished by The Maine Monitor. BDN writer Michael Shepherd contributed. The BDN also published the underlying watchdog reports. Photo by Michael Shepherd / Bangor Daily News.

Maine's Ethics Commission Opened an Investigation Into an Anonymous Site Attacking Bobby Charles's Rival. His Campaign Admits Building Two Others.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:36:00 +0000

On the morning of May 27, 2026 — thirteen days before Maine's Republican primary for governor — the state's ethics commission voted to open an investigation into a website.

The site was called midgleyexposed.com. It attacked Bobby Charles's primary opponent, Ben Midgley. It went up in late March, and by the time the commission took up the question it had already been taken down.

The commission's job was to answer a narrow question: who paid for it, and did the disclosure statement on it tell the truth?

What the complaint said

Midgley's campaign manager was Lauren LePage, the daughter of former Gov. Paul LePage. On May 18 she asked the Maine Commission on Governmental Ethics and Election Practices to investigate, arguing that the disclosure statement on the anonymous site was false and that the Charles campaign was behind it.

Her evidence was a paper trail. The Charles campaign reported a $50 expenditure on March 26 to Harris Media for services at GoDaddy. midgleyexposed.com was registered with GoDaddy that same day.

Maine law requires political communications to say who paid for them. That's the entire point of a disclosure statement — a voter reading an attack should be able to find out whose attack it is.

LePage also told the commission the complaint rested on more than one $50 line item:

"This was a line of attack that has been uniquely attributed to the Charles campaign."

The denial — and what came with it

Anna Mackin, an attorney for the Charles campaign, told the commission the campaign had nothing to do with midgleyexposed.com and that the $50 payment was for a different domain.

But the campaign's own filing is the part worth sitting with.

Ahead of the meeting, Charles's media consultant Vincent Harris submitted a signed affidavit. In it he confirmed that the campaign did build two other negative websites targeting its own primary rivals:

therealbenmidgley.com — against Ben Midgley
therealgarrettmason.com — against former Maine Senate Majority Leader Garrett Mason

The affidavit maintained the campaign followed all required disclosure laws on those two, and that it had no involvement in midgleyexposed.com.

So the defense is not that the Charles campaign doesn't build attack websites about fellow Republicans. The defense is that it builds them properly, and that this particular one wasn't theirs.

The commission voted 4-0 to open an investigation into midgleyexposed.com to determine who financed it and, based on that, whether the site should have carried a different disclosure statement.

One clarification matters here, and Maine Morning Star issued a correction to make it: the commission did not vote to investigate Bobby Charles. It authorized its staff to investigate the website.

No public answer, and he won anyway

We could find no public findings from that investigation. The commission authorized the probe on May 27 and the timeline was never clear.

The primary went ahead on June 9. Charles won it, taking 60.3% of the vote in the final round of ranked-choice tabulation over Midgley when the count was finished on June 19.

That's how these things usually go. The vote happens on the schedule of the election. The accountability happens, if it happens, on the schedule of a state agency.

Why anonymous sites are the point

There is a reason disclosure law exists, and it isn't paperwork for its own sake.

An attack site with no fingerprints on it does something a signed attack ad can't. It lets a campaign say a thing while keeping its own name clean, and it lets voters mistake a rival's opposition research for something they stumbled onto themselves.

We reported last week on a version of this operating at national scale: One Nation, the Senate GOP's dark money arm, runs at least six websites designed to look like local newspapers — with headlines, a news section, and unsigned articles — built to flatter Republican senators in competitive races. Readers are never told who is paying.

The Maine version is smaller and cruder. It's also aimed at fellow Republicans.

Charles ran a primary campaign heavy on social media and artificial intelligence, built around attacking his opponents. His rivals banded together against him over it. Five of them declined to say whether they would even support him if he became the nominee.

He became the nominee anyway.

The bottom line

Bobby Charles is asking Mainers to make him the person who enforces the state's laws. Along the way, his campaign was reported to the state's ethics commission over an anonymous website attacking a fellow Republican, and answered by swearing out an affidavit confirming it had built two other attack sites — just not that one.

The commission voted unanimously to go find out who paid. As far as we can tell, Maine voters still don't have the answer.

Mainers deserve a governor who doesn't need an ethics investigation to explain his campaign tactics. We deserve better.

Source

Emma Davis, "Ethics Commission to investigate website attacking gubernatorial candidate Ben Midgley" — Maine Morning Star, May 27, 2026. Image via Maine Morning Star (official campaign photos).

Bobby Charles Built His Campaign on Telling a Somali-Born Maine Lawmaker She Isn't Really American

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:24:00 +0000

In the summer of 2025, the race for governor of Maine was more than a year away and crowded with candidates. Bobby Charles found a way to stand out.

He did it by repeatedly questioning whether one of the Maine Legislature's three Somali-born members is loyal to the United States.

Four words

The target was Rep. Deqa Dhalac, D-South Portland. She fled war-torn Somalia and came to the U.S. 30 years ago, became a naturalized citizen, and in 2022 was elected mayor of South Portland — the first Somali-born mayor in the United States.

That milestone brought national press, including an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America." An interviewer asked what she was hearing from people back in Somalia. Here is what she actually said:

"They are asking, 'what can we do back home in Somalia, how we can change policies, how can the politics in Somalia resonate what we have in the United States — the democracy we have — how can you help us, you know, be a better country and build back what we used to have a long time ago.' So hopefully we will be able to help our country, our former country, Somalia, and show what we can do here and that it can also be built into other countries."

She is describing exporting American democracy. She calls Somalia "our former country" in the same breath.

Three years later, on July 23, 2025, a right-wing account called End Wokeness posted a clip of that interview to its 3.5 million followers. It compressed her answer down to four words, presented as her goal: helping "our country of Somalia."

This is the same account that helped spread the baseless claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating people's pets — a smear that traveled far enough that Donald Trump repeated it on a debate stage in 2024.

About three hours later, the official account of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — the agency running the administration's mass deportation campaign — boosted the post to its own 2.5 million followers with a one-word comment: "Pause." It followed with a second post featuring a photo of Trump.

Then Bobby Charles picked it up.

Roughly 20 posts about one of 151 legislators

In a Facebook video, Charles said:

"A Maine representative, a Democrat, Deqa Dhalac, today went out and said that her goal is to protect 'our country, Somalia.' Ms. Dhalac, with all due respect, you are an American, and if you are an American your country is the United States of America."

She had not said that. She had said the opposite of that, in a 2022 interview, in the full quote above.

Charles kept going. His later posts questioned Dhalac's allegiance to the United States and suggested she had no business representing Maine taxpayers if her priority was Somalia. Dhalac is one member of a 151-seat House of Representatives. Since August 1 of that year, Charles posted about her or about the backlash to his own statements roughly 20 times — and more often than that on X, where commenters cheered him on and called for Dhalac and other Somali immigrants to be deported.

He circulated a petition calling on her to apologize or resign, and tried to deliver the signed copies to the House majority office at the State House.

He also turned her into a cartoon: a woman in a hijab sitting in a classroom, with "reading assignments" that included the U.S. Constitution and the Pledge of Allegiance.

Charles wasn't originating this. The Maine Wire, a conservative site backed by judicial activist and seasonal Maine resident Leonard Leo, had been accusing Dhalac of putting "America last" and "Somalia first" since at least that March. The site then amplified Charles's attacks back out to its own audience. He later wrote in a Portland Press Herald column that the Homeland Security posts justified his criticism of her.

House Speaker Ryan Fecteau, in a joint statement with his leadership team, said:

"There is no place in Maine for disgusting smear campaigns."

Dhalac didn't respond publicly at the time. She thanked the people who defended her in a Facebook post.

Maine Public tried to reach Charles about his statements. He did not respond to a message left on his mobile phone. That same week, he called on the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate the Mills administration, and for ICE to "wire brush every last illegal alien from Maine's streets."

From one lawmaker to a whole religion

The Dhalac campaign wasn't a one-off. It was the opening.

On May 22, 2026 — 18 days before the Republican primary — Charles released what his campaign billed as a three-step plan to stop the "Islamification" of Maine, promoting it as the first such plan from any candidate for governor in New England.

The plan would:

Bar Maine courts from enforcing foreign or religious legal codes that conflict with the Constitution or state law, and restrict universities from using state or federal money to support designated terrorist organizations — modeled on Florida.
Ban "foreign-linked Islamic compounds," modeled on Texas's action against a proposed development in North Texas.
Direct Maine's Attorney General to designate organizations as terrorist groups under state law, restrict their ability to buy property, and bar state dollars, university resources, or school facilities from supporting them. The campaign named the Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR — the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim civil rights organization in the country.

His summary of it: "One country. One law."

He pushed the plan in the final days of the primary, and it drew allegations of racism from Democrats. The executive director of the Maine Democratic Party, Devon Murphy-Anderson, called him "a far-right extremist who doesn't stand a chance at the ballot box this November." Charles won the primary 18 days later.

Charles's plan does not identify a single Maine case in which any court enforced a religious legal code, or name a single Maine development it would ban. The models it borrows from are all somewhere else.

We have followed this playbook in two other states, and it ends the same way both times.

In Texas, Greg Abbott declared CAIR a terrorist organization. Texas Monthly obtained 1,300 pages of emails and found that twelve of the thirteen points in his proclamation matched a report written by a fellow at a think tank the Southern Poverty Law Center lists as an anti-Muslim hate group.

In Arkansas, the governor and attorney general mobilized against a Sharia takeover — and when we traced the panic to its source, it came down to a hate group's blog post and a small subdivision of five houses, two of which are lived in by Christians.

Charles is now proposing to import that to Maine, with the state's chief law enforcement officer as the instrument.

Why this matters for a governor

A governor is not a talk show host. The office Charles is running for controls the Attorney General's priorities, the state police, school policy, and the machinery that decides which Mainers get treated as suspects.

He has already shown what he does with a platform and an unverified clip: roughly 20 posts, a resignation petition, and a cartoon aimed at a naturalized citizen elected by her neighbors. He did it while running for office, before he had any power at all.

Some of Dhalac's defenders made a simple point that got lost in the noise. Immigrants often feel responsible for the people they left behind — many still have family there. The World Bank tracked $656 billion in remittances worldwide in 2023, including $54 billion to the Sub-Saharan African countries that include Somalia. Sending help home is not disloyalty. It is one of the most ordinary things immigrants do.

Deqa Dhalac is an American citizen who was elected by South Portland twice — once as mayor, once to the Legislature. Bobby Charles decided that was worth 20 posts and a petition.

Mainers deserve a governor who represents all of them. We deserve better.

Source

Steve Mistler and Kevin Miller, "GOP gubernatorial hopeful takes aim at one of Maine's Somali-American lawmakers" — Maine Public, August 14, 2025. Photo: courtesy photo via Maine Public.

Bobby Charles Made an Ad Promising to Cut Your Property Taxes. He Never Signed Up for the Tax Break Maine Already Offers.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 15:12:00 +0000

Bobby Charles sits behind the wheel of his SUV in a new campaign ad. He points out that the vehicle is a 2015 with 260,000 miles on it. It still runs better than the Democratic state government, he says.

Then he makes a promise.

"I'm going to cut your property taxes by raising the homestead exemption."

Earlier in the same ad, he tells Mainers: "I pay property taxes that keep going up, just like you."

There is a problem with the ad. The tax break Charles is promising to expand is one Maine has offered for nearly thirty years — and according to his own town office, he has never claimed it.

What the homestead exemption actually is

Maine's homestead exemption knocks up to $25,000 off the value of your home for property tax purposes. For most homeowners that works out to savings of a few hundred dollars a year. It isn't a loophole or a program you have to fight for. You fill out a form.

To qualify you have to be a permanent Maine resident who has owned the home for at least 12 months, and it has to be your primary residence. Second homes and camps don't count.

The program has existed since 1998. The amount was last raised in 2020, when the maximum went from $20,000 to $25,000.

In the 2025 tax year, more than 327,000 Maine taxpayers claimed it. The state pays municipalities back for 76% of the revenue they lose to the program — a reimbursement that came to $82 million in 2025.

So this is not an obscure break. It is one of the most widely used tax programs in the state. Roughly a third of a million of Charles's neighbors are already in it.

He isn't

Charles grew up in Maine. But he spent most of his career working for the federal government and running a consulting business in the Washington, D.C., area. Property records show he has owned his home in Leeds since 2006 — and that he didn't move back full time until 2022, the same year he sold a home in Maryland.

Staff at the Leeds town office say Charles has not claimed a homestead exemption since he moved back.

His campaign doesn't dispute that he's eligible. It says he doesn't rent or own homes anywhere else, and that he qualifies for the program. The explanation offered was that his accountant made an oversight, and that he plans to use it going forward.

Here is how his senior strategist, Vincent Harris, put it:

"He's going to get it and will save whatever money he's able to save going forward, which is not enough because he's suffering under these crazy, insane property taxes put on Mainers by the incumbent insider politicians."

Read that again. The defense of a candidate who never filed for an available tax break is that the tax break is too small to matter.

Both of his opponents in the November race already receive the exemption, according to property tax records in their hometowns — Democrat Hannah Pingree in North Haven and independent Rick Bennett in Oxford.

The part where the math doesn't show up

All three candidates for governor have pledged to expand the homestead exemption. What separates them is whether they've said how.

Pingree has proposed doubling it to $50,000, paired with a change to state law letting towns tax second homes owned by non-Maine residents at higher rates. Bennett has proposed raising it for Mainers 65 and older and increasing the state's reimbursement rate to towns by three percentage points a year until the program is fully state-funded.

Charles wants to raise it to $100,000 — four times the current level. Asked how he would pay for that, his campaign said details would be released soon.

That is a real question, not a gotcha. The state currently reimburses towns for 76% of what the exemption costs them, at $82 million a year. Quadrupling the exemption without a funding plan doesn't make the cost disappear. It moves it — either onto the state budget or onto the towns, which raise property taxes to cover their gaps.

And it lands on top of everything else Charles has promised to cut. His campaign platform pledges to abolish the state income tax outright and to slash regulation. That platform contains no dollar figures, no percentage targets, and no accounting for what replaces the revenue.

A spokesperson for Pingree, Mary-Erin Casale, put the objection this way:

"You can't promise a $4 billion budget cut and a tax break at the same time. The math doesn't work, and Maine families deserve a plan that does."

This is the pattern, not the exception

The homestead ad is a small thing on its own. What makes it worth writing down is that it is the same move Charles has made all year: a confident number, delivered with certainty, with nothing underneath it.

He has promised to end the income tax that funds schools and roads. He has promised to slash regulation and wasteful spending. He has now promised to quadruple a property tax break. Not one of those promises has arrived with an explanation of what gets cut to pay for it.

Maine's affordability problem is real. Property taxes here genuinely do keep climbing, and people genuinely are being squeezed. That's exactly why a plan needs to survive contact with a calculator.

There is also something worth noticing about who Charles is describing when he says "just like you." He is a lawyer and former Assistant Secretary of State who spent most of the last three decades working in and around Washington. He didn't live in Maine full time until four years ago. The 2015 SUV in the ad is doing a lot of work.

We've seen this shape before. Pennsylvania's Rob Bresnahan sells himself as a blue-collar everyman who "learned the value of hard work early" — and chartered a $23,000 private jet while quietly flying his own helicopter. The persona is the product. The record is the thing to check.

The bottom line

Bobby Charles is running an ad promising to cut your property taxes by expanding a program that 327,000 Mainers use and he doesn't. When a reporter asked why, his campaign blamed an accountant and said he'll sign up now.

He wants to raise that exemption to $100,000 and hasn't said how he'd pay for it. He wants to eliminate the state income tax and hasn't said what replaces it.

Mainers deserve a governor who does the arithmetic before he films the ad. We deserve better.

Source

Rachel Ohm, "Bobby Charles wants to expand Maine's homestead exemption. He doesn't use it." — Portland Press Herald, August 5, 2026. Image: screenshot via the Charles campaign.

Four Republican Senators Are Being Boosted by Fake Local News Sites Run by a Dark Money Group

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 09:05:00 +0000

There is a website called the Alaska Navigator. It calls itself "independent news covering the Last Frontier." It has headlines, a news section, and articles with no byline.

It is not a news outlet. It is owned and operated by One Nation, the dark money group that works hand in hand with the Senate Leadership Fund — the super PAC that exists to elect Senate Republicans. One Nation has handed that super PAC over $70 million this election cycle alone.

And the Alaska Navigator is not the only one. Popular Information found at least six of these fake local news sites, one in each state with a competitive Senate race. Four of them are built around Republicans we track: Dan Sullivan in Alaska, Susan Collins in Maine, Jon Husted in Ohio, and Ashley Hinson in Iowa.

If you live in one of those states and you have scrolled past one of these articles on Facebook, you were the target.

What the Alaska site told voters about Dan Sullivan

On June 10, the Alaska Navigator published a piece headlined "As Fentanyl Deaths Rise in Alaska, Sullivan Pushes Tougher Penalties and Enforcement." It has no author's name on it. It says Dan Sullivan "is leading efforts to combat fentanyl trafficking and support law enforcement agencies confronting the epidemic."

Sullivan has been a senator for more than a decade. To back up the claim that he is "leading" on fentanyl, the article offers exactly one thing: his vote for the HALT Fentanyl Act in March 2025.

Eighty-four senators voted for that bill. Sullivan did not write it. He was not one of its 16 original cosponsors. He signed on about a week before it passed.

That is not leadership. That is being present.

The article also credits a retired Alaska Wildlife Trooper director with praising Sullivan — without a single direct quote from him, without explaining what Sullivan supposedly did, and without mentioning that the man is himself running for the state legislature as a Republican. Popular Information could find no record of him ever saying anything publicly about Sullivan on fentanyl or anything else.

Then One Nation spent tens of thousands of dollars pushing this article into Alaskans' Facebook feeds — with an ad announcing a "New Bill to Crack Down on Fentanyl Trafficking, Supported By Dan Sullivan." There was no new bill. The only bill in the article was signed into law in July 2025.

The site was built to look older than it is

The domain thealaskanavigator.com was registered on March 20, 2026 — a few months before it started flooding Facebook.

But the site carries an article dated January 2026, which makes it look like an outlet with some history behind it. According to the website's own source code, that article was generated with a WordPress plugin called FakerPress, which advertises itself as "a clean way to generate fake and dummy content."

They faked a back catalog so the propaganda would look like a newspaper.

Maine, Ohio, and Iowa got their own versions

The other sites run the same play with the same design and the same purpose.

Maine Policy Updates calls itself "Maine's News Source." Its front page is a wall of praise for Susan Collins: "Susan Collins Secures $150 Million+ for Maine Water Projects," "Senator Susan Collins Delivers $190M Lifeline for Rural Health Care in Maine," "Senator Collins Secures Record Diabetes Research Funding." It has been running since January — longer than any of the others.

Ohio Pulse bills itself as "your trusted source for local news, investigative journalism, and community stories across the Buckeye State." Its investigative journalism includes "Husted Announces $19.5M For East Toledo Project" and "Husted Announces $60 Million For Ohio Military Installations." Jon Husted is on the ballot in Ohio this year, and nearly every headline on the site is an announcement of money he says he delivered.

Iowa Voice — "Stay Informed. Stay Iowa" — is built around Ashley Hinson, including "Iowa Congresswoman Hinson Co-Sponsoring Bill to Limit Birthright Citizenship" and an item literally headlined "OPINION: Ignore The Lies; Ashley Hinson Bill Backs Farmers, Consumers."

There is one more detail worth knowing. The image files on these "independent" outlets are served from numbered folders on a single shared WordPress installation — Maine is site 2, Ohio is site 12, Iowa is site 13. Six local newspapers, one machine.

And at the bottom of each homepage, in small faint type, the same four words: "Paid for by One Nation."

The other two sites run the opposite play

Georgia and New Hampshire are the states in this group where the seat is held or sought by a Democrat. Those sites don't praise a Republican. They go after the Democrat.

Peach State Post — "Georgia's Premier News Source" — leads with a July 30 piece headlined "Jon Ossoff Tax Vote Renews Debate Over Expiring Tax Cuts and Their Impact on Georgia Families," which falsely suggests Georgia's Democratic senator opposes increasing the Child Tax Credit — the same attack running in a One Nation TV ad. The rest of the front page is Trump: his Georgia visit, his endorsements.

New Hampshire Daily — "an independent news organization dedicated to covering the stories that matter most to Granite State residents" — runs as its top story a letter to the editor headlined "Chris Pappas raises taxes, while John Sununu cuts." Below it: "Questions About Congressional Ethics Resurface Over of Rep. Chris Pappas Relationship With Amazon Lobbyist." (The garbled "Over of" is theirs.)

So the network has two settings. Where a Republican holds the seat, it's a praise machine. Where a Democrat does, it's an attack machine. Same platform, same funder, same disclosure buried in the footer.

The Iowa story that quoted no Iowans

Iowa Voice ran a piece headlined "Iowa Farmers Say Potential 'Death Tax' Threatens Family Succession Plans." It praises Hinson for being an original cosponsor of the Death Tax Repeal Act, which would wipe out the federal estate tax.

That part is true. Congressional records confirm Hinson signed on to H.R. 1301 as an original cosponsor on February 13, 2025, alongside 174 other Republicans.

Here is what the article leaves out. The federal estate tax barely touches farms at all. The USDA's own economists estimate that about 0.3 percent of farm estates — 141 estates in 2024 — would owe any estate tax. Repealing it is a tax cut for the wealthiest estates in the country, dressed up as saving the family farm.

And despite the headline claiming "Iowa Farmers Say," the piece does not quote or paraphrase a single farmer.

This is the same playbook Hinson's own campaign used when it attacked her opponent with three claims he had never made within an hour of him winning his primary. The difference is that an attack ad says who paid for it.

You are not supposed to know who is behind it

That is the whole point.

One Nation is organized as a 501(c)(4), which means it never has to say who gives it money. So nobody knows who is funding these websites. When One Nation buys a Facebook ad pushing one of these articles, the ad discloses that One Nation paid for it — but never that One Nation owns the website the ad points to. That fact appears only in small, faint type at the very bottom of each site.

The sites also borrow credibility from real journalists — and they do it more than once.

Peach State Post republished an entire 11Alive story about former Atlanta officials being denied clemency, presented it as its own work, and tacked "Read more here" onto the end — even though there was nothing more to read.

New Hampshire Daily does the same thing to public radio. Its story "Police on patrol in NH now have quicker access to bail information," bylined "Josh Rogers, Dan Tuohy," is NHPR's reporting, published by NHPR on June 29, 2026 — reporters' names and all, sitting on a site owned by a Senate super PAC's dark money arm.

That is the trick that makes the rest work. Real journalism from real newsrooms is used as ballast, so the paid attacks alongside it look like they came from the same place.

Across all six sites, One Nation has spent between $198,900 and $274,640 on Meta ads. One Nation did not respond to Popular Information's request for comment.

Why this matters more than a normal ad

Sullivan, Collins, Husted, and Hinson all have real records. Voters can look up how they voted on healthcare, on food assistance, on taxes, and decide.

These websites exist so that voters don't do that. They are built to intercept people who are trying to be informed — someone searching for local news about their senator, someone scrolling past what looks like a hometown paper. Real local newsrooms have been closing across all four of these states for years. Dark money moved into the empty space and put up a storefront.

None of these four senators has said a word about it.

We have written before about the money that surrounds them: the billionaire super PAC money flowing into Maine for Collins, and the utility and tech companies funding Husted while Ohioans' electric bills climb. Those are at least disclosed. This is the version where the spending hides inside something that looks like the news.

If you see a story about your senator on a site you have never heard of, check who owns it. In at least six states right now, the answer is a super PAC.

Source

Senate Republicans launch network of fake news sites — Judd Legum, Popular Information, August 6, 2026. Image: Popular Information.

The Richest Man on Earth Is Coming to Maine to Keep Susan Collins in Office

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 08:25:00 +0000

Elon Musk is planning to spend heavily to keep Susan Collins in the United States Senate.

The New York Times reported that Musk has authorized his super PAC to spend up to $120 million across at least eight states this fall — and Maine is one of the early targets. The Bangor Daily News confirmed that the money is expected to land on Collins' side of Maine's Senate race.

The vehicle is America PAC, the same group that, in the BDN's words, "dumped nearly $300 million supporting President Donald Trump in 2024."

Maine has about 1.4 million residents. One man is preparing to spend a nine-figure sum across a handful of states to decide who represents them.

He said he was done with this

The timing is worth noting, because Musk spent this summer telling people he was stepping back.

"I think I got a little too involved in politics, got carried away frankly," he told The Economist in late July, per Forbes. He'd said something similar to Bloomberg back in May 2025 about his political spending: "I'm going to do a lot less in the future."

Days after the Economist interview, the $120 million plan leaked. The early Senate targets are Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan and Ohio, with conversations underway about North Carolina and Texas. The money is going largely into a turnout operation — door-knockers, digital ads, direct mail — rather than TV.

That is a specific kind of spending. TV ads argue for a candidate. A ground operation goes and gets the votes. Musk isn't buying a message in Maine. He's buying the machinery.

What makes this strange

Here's the part that doesn't fit the obvious story.

Collins is not a Musk ally. She chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee — the most powerful spending panel in the federal government — and she was, as ABC News reported at the time, the most vocally skeptical Republican on the bill that wrote Musk's DOGE cuts into law — a bill that clawed back roughly $9 billion Congress had already approved for public broadcasting and USAID. Her stated objection was to the public broadcasting piece: "There is a lot of what the Corporation for Public Broadcasting does that I support, such as the 70 percent of the money that goes to the emergency fund to local stations."

When that bill came to the Senate floor at 2:18 in the morning on July 17, 2025, the official roll call shows it passed 51-48. Exactly two Republicans voted no. Collins was one of them. Lisa Murkowski was the other.

So the man whose signature project she voted against now wants to spend millions keeping her in office.

That tells you what this money is actually for. It is not a reward for a vote. It is not an argument about Maine. Musk is not buying Susan Collins — he is buying the Senate, and Maine is one of the seats it runs through. Whether Collins personally agrees with him on any given bill is beside the point, which is exactly why nobody in Maine gets a say in it.

Update, August 14: Musk isn't even the biggest check

Since this was published, the scale of the outside money behind Collins has gotten clearer — and Musk turns out to be a junior partner in it.

The Senate Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with Senate Republican leadership, has committed $42 million to defending Collins. The Bangor Daily News reported the figure in January; it is the group's largest-ever investment in Maine, and nearly $37 million of it is earmarked for broadcast, cable, digital and radio advertising across a state of 1.4 million people.

Its nonprofit sister organization, One Nation, has raised its own Maine spending to $30 million from $25 million. One Nation is the same dark-money group that runs at least six websites designed to look like local newspapers — one of which exists to flatter Collins, with readers never told who pays for it.

On August 12, SLF went on the air with a 30-second spot attacking Democratic nominee Troy Jackson over his son's lobbying work and calling him "another dirty politician."

One number worth keeping straight: the $42 million is a commitment, not money out the door. We pulled the Senate Leadership Fund's independent-expenditure filings from the FEC to see what has actually landed in Maine. Through August 4, 2026 — de-duplicating the 24-hour notices that get refiled on the periodic reports — SLF has reported spending $776,326 in the race:

Target	Amount
Against Troy Jackson	$292,500
Against Graham Platner (before he left the race)	$250,000
Supporting Susan Collins	$233,826

So the ad deluge has barely started. About 98% of the $42 million is still to come, and nearly all of it is booked for the fall.

Jackson's response to the whole arrangement, in a video posted the day after the ad launched:

"The billionaires in the country know whose side they're on, and it's not ours... They're here to prop up Susan Collins because they want her to continue to be a rubber stamp and get their income tax cuts."

The pattern this fits into

Musk is not new. He is one of several.

Collins' reelection is already, in the BDN's phrasing, backed by "a cluster of well-heeled groups" — and the pattern of who funds her, and what happens afterward, is long and documented.

Her top donors are the Wall Street private equity firms whose tax treatment she is in a position to protect: KKR, Blackstone, Apollo Global Management, Oaktree, Goldman Sachs. Blackstone's CEO Steve Schwarzman gave $2 million to her PAC the day before she helped advance Trump's budget bill, Rolling Stone reported. ProPublica documented the broader arrangement in a piece whose headline says the whole thing: "Susan Collins Backed Down From a Fight With Private Equity — Now They're Underwriting Her Reelection."

Her Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson, made the point about Musk bluntly on social media:

"He doesn't care about us. He really doesn't care about Susan. He cares about him."

The independence brand and the bill

Collins' entire political identity is that she is the independent one — the Republican who breaks with her party when Maine needs her to.

That vote is real, and it counts. But it also fits a shape Mainers have seen before: a highly visible no vote on the last step, after the earlier steps that made the outcome possible. We laid this out in detail when her campaign ran an ad claiming she "stood up for Maine" on Medicaid — she voted no at the end, after casting the procedural vote that sent Trump's Medicaid-cutting budget bill to the floor in the first place. A fellow Republican thanked her for it.

A no vote you can put in an ad is worth a great deal. It is also, from a donor's perspective, cheap — as long as the bill passes anyway.

That is the arrangement Musk's $120 million is joining. Collins gets to keep the independent label. Her funders get the majority. And when the bills that matter to them come up, the votes are already there.

What Mainers should ask

There's a straightforward question here, and it doesn't require anyone to guess at motives.

Collins has spent thirty years telling Maine that she works for Maine. She promised in 1996 to serve only two terms — "twelve years is long enough," she said on camera — and she is now running for a sixth.

The question for her is simple: does she want this money?

She can say no. Super PACs are legally independent of campaigns, so she can't coordinate with America PAC — but nothing stops a candidate from standing up and publicly asking an outside group to stay out of her race.

If she won't say that, Maine voters can draw their own conclusion about who this campaign is being run for.

Sources

"Elon Musk plans boost for Susan Collins' reelection campaign" — Bangor Daily News / Maine Public, August 4, 2026
"Musk Investing Up To $120 Million To Help GOP In Midterms, Report Says" — Sara Dorn, Forbes, July 30, 2026
"Senate to vote to formalize DOGE cuts to public broadcasting, USAID" — ABC News, July 2025
Senate Roll Call Vote 119-1-411, On Passage of H.R. 4 — U.S. Senate, July 17, 2025
"Troy Jackson Slams 'Failed Trillionaire Elon Musk' as Billionaires Dump Millions Into Maine US Senate Race" — Common Dreams, August 13, 2026
"Conservative groups launch ad deluge in Maine Senate race" — Semafor, August 12, 2026
Senate Leadership Fund (C00571703) independent expenditures, 2026 cycle — FEC Schedule E, retrieved August 14, 2026

Photo: Associated Press, via Bangor Daily News.

Todd Blanche Told a Private Prayer Call He'd Make Abortion Bans 'Permanent in Every Single State.' Ashley Moody Voted to Advance Him to Attorney General.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 22:15:00 +0000

For four years, Republicans have told us the same thing about abortion: it's up to the states now. That's what the Supreme Court said in 2022 when it overturned Roe v. Wade. Every state gets to decide for itself. No national ban. Just let the people vote.

That was never the plan.

On a private call hosted by the White House Faith Office, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told the religious group Intercessors for America that the Justice Department is "working hand-in-hand" with federal health agencies, the White House and President Trump's team "to get permanent solutions so the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state."

Every single state. Not just the ones with bans. All of them.

Blanche admitted the work is "taking longer than we want." But he promised it's coming.

"We don't have complete victory yet, but we will have victory, and victory will be soon, and it will be permanent."

The group posted the recording on YouTube. Politico found it. The Hill confirmed it on August 4, 2026 — the same day Senate Republicans voted to make Blanche the permanent attorney general of the United States.

What "permanent in every single state" actually means

Since Roe fell, abortion hasn't gone away. It's gone in the mail.

Most abortions in America now use pills, not a clinic — 63% of them by 2023, up from 53% in 2020. In 2023, the Biden administration ended the rule that made women pick up mifepristone in person. Blue states passed "shield laws" that protect doctors from being prosecuted for prescribing to patients in states with bans. Put those two things together and a woman in a banned state can still get care.

That's what Blanche says he's going to stop.

"If states have said, 'We are going to protect the unborn and we're going to protect every life from the moment of conception,' we're putting practices and policies in place so that other states and other organizations can't attack that. They can't do things like they're doing with mailing in mail-order drugs."

Read that again. The "other states" he wants to stop aren't breaking any law. They passed their own laws, in their own legislatures, to protect their own doctors. Blanche is saying the federal government will override them.

The tool for that is a law from 1873. The Comstock Act was an anti-obscenity law written before women could vote, and it bans mailing "every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion." In 2022, the Justice Department concluded it doesn't apply to mailing abortion pills unless the sender knows they'll be used illegally. A different Justice Department can simply write a different opinion — and then start prosecuting. It would hit every state, including the ones where abortion is legal.

Blanche wouldn't say whether that's his plan. But he didn't say it wasn't.

What he said under oath vs. what he said in private

At his confirmation hearing on July 15, Blanche was careful. He told senators he'd make mifepristone a priority but wouldn't give specifics. He said the administration opposed the Biden-era mail-order rule and that the DOJ "could review it." He said the FDA was taking "a real look" at whether the pills are safe.

"We are not in any way defending what Biden and what his administration did," he said.

That's hedging. On the prayer call, there was no hedging at all — just a promise of total, permanent victory in all 50 states.

When The Hill asked about it, the Justice Department said the comments "have been mischaracterized and need to be understood in their full context, which was with respect to mail order abortion drugs, not a broader expansion of federal control over states."

But blocking one state from mailing pills into another state is federal control over states. That's the whole idea.

Ashley Moody voted to hand him the job

Ashley Moody sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee. On August 4, that committee voted 12–10, straight down party lines, to send Blanche's nomination to the Senate floor. Every Republican on the panel voted yes. Moody is one of the twelve Republicans on that committee.

She didn't just vote for him. She campaigned for him. Moody publicly endorsed Blanche, calling him "an excellent attorney, a former federal prosecutor, and a dedicated public servant" and saying she looked forward to "our continued work together." The anti-abortion group Americans United for Life backed him too.

None of this is out of character. Before DeSantis appointed her to the Senate, Moody spent six years as Florida's attorney general, and she used that job to try to keep Floridians from ever voting on abortion at all. In 2023 she filed a 39-page brief asking the Florida Supreme Court to strip the abortion-rights amendment off the 2024 ballot, calling it an attempt to "hoodwink" voters.

The court let it on the ballot anyway. And then something remarkable happened: 57.17% of Floridians voted yes. A clear majority. It still failed, because Florida requires 60% to amend the constitution.

So Florida is still enforcing a six-week ban. Nearly six in ten Floridians voted to change that. Moody fought to keep them from getting the chance, and now she's voted to confirm the man who says he'll make that ban permanent.

Susan Collins says no — four years too late

Hours after the committee vote, Susan Collins announced she'd oppose Blanche on the floor. Her reason wasn't abortion. "While I believe Mr. Blanche is a capable lawyer, the Department of Justice has become increasingly political," she said. "Mr. Blanche has taken several actions that have further eroded the Department's independence."

Collins is the Senate's most famous self-described pro-choice Republican. She also put the fifth vote to overturn Roe on the Supreme Court.

In 2018, she voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh, who was seated 50–48. She told Mainers he had assured her privately that Roe was "settled law" and an important precedent. Four years later Kavanaugh wrote that Roe was "wrongly decided" and "should be overruled." Collins called the ruling a "sudden and radical jolt to the country."

She has never taken it back. This June, asked on Fox News whether the Kavanaugh vote is a problem for her reelection, she claimed it didn't matter: "Whether Justice Kavanaugh were confirmed or not, Roe v. Wade would have been overturned, given the 6-3 vote."

That's not what happened. The 6-3 part of Dobbs upheld Mississippi's 15-week ban. The part that threw out Roe entirely was 5-4 — and Kavanaugh was in that five. Her own spokesperson later acknowledged she misspoke.

Here's why it lands so hard right now. Maine has a shield law, in effect since August 2024, that protects Maine doctors who provide reproductive care from out-of-state investigations. Maine providers are exactly the "other states and other organizations" Blanche says he's building policies to stop. The protections Collins points to when she calls herself pro-choice are the next target.

A "no" vote this week doesn't undo a "yes" vote in 2018.

What happens next

Blanche's nomination is on the Senate floor. Republicans hold 53 seats. With Mitch McConnell still absent and Collins a no, Blanche can lose exactly one more Republican and still be confirmed. He is expected to get there.

If he does, the man who privately promised to make the Dobbs decision "permanent in every single state" will run the Justice Department, control the Comstock Act, and decide who gets prosecuted for putting a pill in the mail.

They told us it would be left to the states. It was a talking point with an expiration date.

We deserve better.

Source

FactPost on X, reporting on Blanche pledges to make Dobbs decision 'permanent' in every state by Nathaniel Weixel, The Hill, August 4, 2026. Photo: The Hill.

Susan Collins Voted to Put Todd Blanche at the Justice Department. Now She's Voting No.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:55:00 +0000

On Tuesday afternoon, Susan Collins put out a statement saying she will vote against Todd Blanche for attorney general.

Her reason: "While I believe Mr. Blanche is a capable lawyer, the Department of Justice has become increasingly political. Mr. Blanche has taken several actions that have further eroded the Department's independence, and that is the basis for my vote to oppose his confirmation."

Read that again. The Justice Department "has become" political. It "has become" that way while Todd Blanche was running it — as deputy attorney general, and then as acting attorney general.

And Susan Collins is the one who voted to put him there.

She already confirmed him once

On March 5, 2025, the Senate voted on Todd Blanche's nomination to be deputy attorney general — the number two job at the Justice Department. He got the job 52 to 46.

Collins voted yes.

This was not a mystery hire. Blanche was Trump's personal criminal defense lawyer. He was lead defense attorney in the hush-money trial, and he defended Trump in the two federal cases brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith. That was the entire objection at the time: you should not hand the Justice Department to the president's own defense attorney.

Collins voted yes anyway.

A month earlier, on February 4, 2025, she also voted to confirm Pam Bondi as attorney general, 54 to 46. Bondi was pushed out in April 2026, and Trump made Blanche acting attorney general.

So when Collins says the Justice Department "has become increasingly political," she is describing a building she helped staff. Every single thing she now lists as disqualifying happened on the job she voted to give him.

The timing tells you everything

Here is what actually happened on Tuesday, August 4, in order.

Tuesday morning: The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced Blanche's nomination on a 12–10 party-line vote. That was the last real chokepoint.

It only got there because two Republicans folded first. Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis had been holding the nomination up. They wanted written promises about two things: a $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization fund" at DOJ, and a deal shielding Trump from IRS audits. Late Sunday night, Blanche handed them two documents. On Monday they said they were satisfied. Sen. John Curtis, who also had concerns, said Tuesday he'd support Blanche too.

Tuesday afternoon, 4:30 PM: Collins announces she's a no.

She waited until the people with actual leverage had already used theirs — and given it away. Then she stepped forward.

Axios put the math plainly: "Collins' vote won't sink Blanche's nomination on its own." With Mitch McConnell still absent from the Senate, Blanche can lose two Republicans and still be confirmed. Collins is one. It takes two more — and the only Republicans still undecided are Bill Cassidy and Lisa Murkowski.

A floor vote could come as early as Saturday.

This is the whole act

Mainers have seen this movie enough times to know how it ends.

Trump's budget bill. Collins voted to advance it out of her own Appropriations Committee, and let the motion to proceed go through, before casting a "no" on final passage. It passed anyway, 51–50, on the Vice President's tiebreaker. Her campaign ad now brags that she "stood up for Maine" on Medicaid.
The Iran war. For 60 days she voted against every attempt to stop it. Once the War Powers Act deadline passed and the vote no longer had teeth, she voted yes. It failed 47–50.
Pete Hegseth. She voted no. So did Murkowski and McConnell. Vance broke the tie and Hegseth was confirmed 51–50.
Brett Kavanaugh. She cast the deciding vote to confirm him on his private assurance that Roe was settled law. He overturned it. Asked this summer if she'd do it again, she said yes.

TIME described her protest votes as "as strategic as they are symbolic." That's the polite version.

The pattern is simple. She votes no when no is free.

What she's letting through

The things Collins listed in her own statement are real, and they are serious. She named four:

The $1.8 billion fund. The Justice Department created a $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund. As NPR's Ryan Lucas explained on Morning Edition, that was $1.8 billion of taxpayer money the DOJ said could be handed out to, in essence, anyone — "That includes rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6 and beat up cops." Blanche says he cancelled it. Legal experts told NPR the document isn't actually legally binding. And ABC reported the agreement contains no language preventing the fund from being recreated under a different name.

The audit immunity deal. A tax deal covering Trump, two of his sons, and the Trump Organization. Cornyn himself said it gives Trump benefits no other American taxpayer could get. Blanche's letter "narrowed" it. As NPR put it, those benefits "still very much remain in place."

Abortion pills. At his July 15 confirmation hearing, Ted Cruz asked Blanche to review the DOJ opinion that currently allows abortion medication to be mailed nationwide. Blanche answered: "Yes, I will." That opens the door to using an 1873 law to block those pills in every state — including Maine.

Prosecuting senators. Collins pointed to the Justice Department's attempts to indict two sitting U.S. senators, Mark Kelly and Elissa Slotkin.

And more than 1,200 former Justice Department employees signed a letter urging senators to reject him. Their words: "Since his confirmation as Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche has shown time and again that his guiding star is fealty to the President, not the Constitution."

Every one of those things is an argument for stopping this nomination. None of them is an argument for waiting until the committee has already voted.

Nobody's buying it

The replies to the news were not kind. Under the post announcing her no vote, one person wrote that Collins "got confirmation he's gonna pass, and there's no actual political danger for her if she votes no. It's all theater." Another: "She waited until they had enough votes to play this lying card. That's what she does."

And this one: "She knows she needs this to win her election. If she weren't up for reelection this year, she'd be voting yes to confirm him."

That last point isn't just a hunch. Collins is the only Republican senator running for reelection this year in a state Trump lost. She is on the ballot in November. She has not held a public town hall in Maine in years, so Mainers rarely get to ask her about any of this in person.

What a real no looks like

There was a version of this where Collins's opposition mattered. She could have said months ago, when Cornyn and Tillis were holding the line, that she was a hard no — and made the math impossible before Blanche got a chance to paper over the problems with two non-binding letters.

She could have voted no on Blanche in March 2025, when he was a president's defense lawyer being handed the second-most-powerful job at the Justice Department and the damage hadn't been done yet.

Instead she voted yes then, and she's voting no now, seventeen months and one wrecked institution later, on a vote that by her own party's count doesn't decide anything by itself.

She will send out a press release about it. Her campaign will put it in an ad. And Todd Blanche will very likely be confirmed anyway.

We deserve better.

Source

Laura Weiss of Punchbowl News broke Collins's statement on August 4, 2026. Additional reporting from Axios, ABC News, and NPR. Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.

ICE Is Reading Your Posts. Congress Paid for It.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A round-the-clock dragnet

Here is what the Journal found.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reddit said no. The government kept going.

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

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

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

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

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

No charges have been filed in any of them.

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

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

What actually counts as "doxxing"

The administration has been rewriting a word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The number they won't show you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congress wrote the check

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

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

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

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

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

The Senate: 52 to 47

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

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

The House: 214 to 212

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source

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

14 Republican Senators Just Voted to Let Your Child Care Bill Go Up

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 11:06:01 +0000

Child care is one of the biggest bills a working family pays. It now runs more than $13,000 a year per child, and it went up another 5% between August 2024 and August 2025.

On Thursday, July 30, 2026, the Senate had a simple, direct chance to stop that bill from going up even more for about a million low-income families. It voted 47 to 52 not to.

What the rule did — and what Trump's HHS did to it

There's a federal program called the Child Care and Development Fund. It helps roughly 994,000 low-income families pay for child care so parents can work, go to school, or train for a job.

In 2024, the government set some basic ground rules for it. The most important one: a family's copayment couldn't exceed 7% of their household income. That's the federally recognized benchmark for what "affordable" child care actually means. Two other rules made providers more stable — states had to pay them up front and based on enrollment rather than daily attendance, and had to use grants and contracts to build up child care supply in places the market wasn't serving.

In May 2026, Trump's Department of Health and Human Services published a rule called "Restoring Flexibility in the Child Care and Development Fund" that wiped out all three. It took effect July 13.

Note what HHS did not do: it didn't replace the 7% cap with a different affordability standard. It didn't propose a cheaper path. It just removed the ceiling and left nothing in its place. As the Southern Education Foundation noted in its analysis, before the 2024 rule several Southern states were charging families well above the benchmark — Alabama 10%, Florida 9%, North Carolina 10%, Missouri 14%. With the cap gone, those rates can come right back.

Ohio families lose the most

The Center for American Progress ran the numbers in April. Ten states still hadn't reached the 7% benchmark, with maximum copayments running from 7.8% of income in Wisconsin all the way up to 27% of income in Ohio. Families in those states stood to save between $440 and more than $15,000 a year once the cap kicked in.

Ohio was the worst case in the country. An Ohio family at the top of the eligibility range could have saved as much as $15,482 a year — a figure reported by Common Dreams from that CAP analysis. That's not a rounding error. For a family scraping by on the kind of income that qualifies for child care assistance, $15,000 is the difference between making rent and not.

Ohio Senator Jon Husted voted to keep that money out of his own constituents' pockets.

Maine is on that list too — it was operating under a waiver from the cap as of December 2024, meaning Maine families hadn't seen the savings yet either. Susan Collins voted no as well.

The 2024 rule required states to work toward the 7% threshold, with waivers for states that needed more time. Scrapping it means states are no longer obligated to get there at all. Families in those states now have no path to relief — not a slower path, no path.

It was a one-page vote

This wasn't a complicated bill with tradeoffs buried in the fine print. Senator Patty Murray brought it under the Congressional Review Act, which exists precisely so Congress can cancel an executive branch rule it disagrees with. A simple majority would have done it.

Murray was blunt about the stakes on the floor: "If Trump had simply done nothing, and left the seven percent cap in place, some of these families would have ended up saving as much as $15,000 a year for their family. This is really a slap in the face to moms and dads all over the country."

She also named the tradeoff these same senators keep making. "How about instead of a $1.5 trillion war budget, we make sure every working family in America can afford child care?" she asked — pointing out that Trump's tariffs already tax diapers, formula, and car seats before you even get to the child care bill.

Every Republican in the chamber voted against it except Mitch McConnell, who was absent.

The senators who voted no

Fourteen of them have report cards on this site. Each one cast a Nay:

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

Two of them — Tuberville in Alabama and Moody in Florida — represent states that were already charging families above the 7% benchmark before the cap existed.

The part that should stick

These are the same senators who talk constantly about the cost of living and about supporting families. Here was a vote where those two things were the entire question. No amendments, no procedural fog, no partisan poison pill. Just: should a working parent have to hand over more than 7% of their paycheck for child care?

They said yes, she should. And the program only reaches 13% of eligible families in the first place — so this was a vote to make an already-thin lifeline thinner.

How they voted

The record is public and permanent: the official Senate roll call for vote 215 on S.J.Res. 199, July 30, 2026.

Susan Collins Says She'd Vote for Brett Kavanaugh Again. In 2022 She Said He Misled Her.

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 11:30:00 +0000

In October 2018, Susan Collins stood on the Senate floor and cast the vote that put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. She was the swing vote. Without her, he doesn't get confirmed.

She explained her reasoning at length. She said Kavanaugh had assured her — under oath and privately — that Roe v. Wade was "settled law." She said he called it "precedent on precedent," because Planned Parenthood v. Casey had reaffirmed it. She said he told her it "should be extremely rare that it be overturned."

And she was explicit about her own red line. On 60 Minutes Overtime, she put it this way:

"I could not vote for a judge who had demonstrated hostility to Roe v. Wade because it would indicate a lack of respect for precedent."

Four years later, Kavanaugh joined the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization and overturned Roe.

When the draft opinion leaked in May 2022, Collins said it would be "completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings." In plain English: she said she had been misled.

Now she says she'd do it again

Collins is up for reelection this year — her first Senate race since Roe fell — and the question keeps following her around Maine.

In June, in Portland, she told reporters: "I do not regret that vote."

Then, after an event at a fire station in Randolph, Maine, she went further. Asked whether she would confirm Kavanaugh again, she said:

"I would vote for him again, yes, if that's what you're asking."

The remark was captured on audio by an operative for the Democratic super PAC American Bridge and reported by Lisa Lerer and Beth Reinhard in the New York Times on August 1, 2026.

Both things cannot be true

Line the three statements up:

2018: I could not vote for a judge hostile to Roe. He told me it was settled law.
2022: What he did is completely inconsistent with what he told me.
2026: I would vote for him again.

If the 2022 statement was sincere — if she genuinely believed a nominee had given her private assurances and then broken them — there is no version of "I'd do it again" that follows. You don't rehire the person you say deceived you.

Which leaves two possibilities, and neither is good.

Either the assurances never actually mattered. In which case her 2018 floor speech, the long explanation of precedent and stare decisis, the careful reasoning about why this particular nominee was safe — all of it was cover for a vote she was going to cast anyway.

Or the 2022 statement was for show. A statement of disappointment issued at the exact moment Maine women were realizing what had happened, from a senator who has spent a career being the Republican who feels bad about it.

Collins has never had to pick between those two answers, because she's never been asked to. Now she's answered anyway, on tape, outside a fire station in Randolph.

What it actually cost

This is not an abstract debate about judicial philosophy.

Dobbs ended the federal constitutional right to abortion. In the years since, states across the country have banned or severely restricted it. Women have been turned away from emergency rooms while miscarrying. Doctors have left states rather than risk prosecution. People travel hundreds of miles for care that used to be a legal right everywhere in America.

Collins is one of only two Senate Republicans who describes herself as supporting abortion rights. She had the single vote that determined whether the justice who would end Roe got a seat. She used it to confirm him.

Saying she'd do it again is the most consequential thing she has said in this campaign.

The pattern Mainers already know

This fits a shape that shows up over and over in Collins's record: the carefully worded objection, followed by the vote that makes it irrelevant.

She said she opposed Trump's Medicaid cuts — after casting the procedural vote that sent that budget bill to the Senate floor. She voted against the Iran war powers resolutions for 60 days, then voted for one only after the legal deadline had passed and the outcome no longer mattered. She votes no when no is free.

She has not held a public town hall in Maine in years, preferring invitation-only meetings — which is part of why it took a super PAC staffer with a recorder outside a fire station to get a straight answer out of her on the most important vote of her career.

Maine voters get to decide in November whether "I would vote for him again" is an acceptable answer. We deserve better.

Source

Lisa Lerer and Beth Reinhard, reporting for The New York Times, August 1, 2026, surfaced by the Maine Democratic Party. Collins's 2018 and 2022 statements as compiled by Newsweek.

Susan Collins Voted Against $300 Million for ICE Body Cameras. Now She's Taking Credit for Getting Them.

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 18:30:00 +0000

On July 13, ICE agents in Biddeford, Maine shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian father, during a vehicle stop outside his house. He was not the person they were looking for. His three-year-old daughter was seen crying afterward. Maine erupted.

There was no body camera footage, because the agents in Biddeford did not have body cameras.

Two and a half weeks later, Susan Collins had an announcement. She had sat in on a meeting with ICE's acting director, and she told Semafor:

"By the end of August, body-worn cameras will be deployed nationwide and worn by all ICE agents in the field. At my request, Acting Director Venturella agreed to prioritize their delivery to Maine."

Read the second sentence again. The nationwide rollout is being paid for with $20 million Congress had already appropriated. The thing she asked for, and got, was Maine's place at the front of the line.

Here is what she left out

At 2:48 in the morning on June 5, the Senate voted on an amendment setting aside at least $300 million to put body cameras on immigration officers — and to store the footage and make it available to Congress and to the people in it.

Collins voted against it. It failed 46-53.

Less than two hours later she voted to give ICE $70 billion with, as The New Republic's Greg Sargent put it, zero reforms attached — no oversight requirements, no transparency requirements, no accountability of any kind. Our own breakdown of that vote walks through what was in it.

So the sequence is:

June 5, 2:48 a.m.: Vote no on $300 million for bodycams and releasable footage.
June 5, 4:42 a.m.: Vote yes on $70 billion for ICE with no strings.
July 13: An ICE agent kills a young father in Maine, with no body camera footage of what happened.
July 30: Announce that ICE will have cameras by the end of August, Maine first, at her request.

She voted against the money and against the rule that would have let his family see the footage. Then, when an agent with no camera killed a man in her state, she went and asked nicely instead — and took the credit.

A request is not a law

Notice what she actually secured. Not a rule. Not a statute. Not an enforceable mandate with penalties for agents who turn the camera off.

A commitment. From an agency. In an interview.

We already know how much those are worth with this administration, because Collins tried the same move in the days right after the shooting. She said she had privately talked to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, and credited herself with getting him to halt non-urgent ICE vehicle stops.

It did not hold. We wrote about what happened next: ICE's own leadership paused most vehicle stops for a safety review after two men were killed in a single week — Durán Guerrero in Maine and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston, neither of them the intended target. Only hours later, Trump reversed his own secretary and ordered the stops to continue.

Collins's private assurance from the Homeland Security secretary lasted a matter of hours. Her private assurance about cameras is the same kind of promise, from the same people.

The difference between an amendment and a request is that one of them survives the next phone call.

This is her signature move

If this feels familiar, it should. It is the exact pattern Mainers have watched for years.

Two weeks ago, Collins ran an ad saying she "stood up for Maine" on Medicaid — after casting the procedural vote that let the cuts reach the floor in the first place.

On Iran, she voted against five straight attempts to stop the war — March 4, March 18, March 24, April 15 and April 22 — saying that passing such a resolution "would send the wrong message to Iran and to our troops." In mid-April she let it be known that her position would "very likely" change if the fighting ran past 60 days. On April 30, with that deadline arriving, she voted to end it and issued a statement about it. The resolution failed 47-50.

The formula never changes:

Cast the vote that does the damage, when it counts.
Cast the symbolic vote against it, when it doesn't.
Issue the press release.

It has kept her in office in a state that Trump lost by seven points in 2024 — a state no Republican presidential candidate has carried since 1988.

What Mainers are actually being asked to accept

Strip away the press release and the trade is simple.

Susan Collins gave ICE $70 billion and, two hours earlier, voted down the $300 million that would have put cameras on the agents spending it. An agent then killed a man in a Maine driveway with no camera running. And her answer is a promise that the agency will start wearing them, sometime in August, with Maine's shipment first because she asked.

Troy Jackson's campaign put the question to her directly: "If she wants credit for a bodycam headline this week, she can start by explaining why she voted to fund ICE with a blank check and zero accountability attached."

She hasn't. And she isn't likely to be asked in person — Collins has not held a public town hall in over 25 years.

Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero's family will never get the footage of what happened to him. That's not because the technology didn't exist. It's because the Senate voted on whether to pay for the cameras and release what they record, and Maine's senator voted no.

Source

Greg Sargent, "What Susan Collins Just Did on Trump and ICE Should Worry All Dems", The New Republic, July 31, 2026. Additional reporting: Maine Public. Photo: Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images.

Susan Collins Just Voted to Confirm a Spy Chief Who Wouldn't Say Joe Biden Won

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 13:16:00 +0000

On the evening of Tuesday, July 28, 2026, the Senate confirmed Walter "Jay" Clayton as Director of National Intelligence by a vote of 51 to 47.

Susan Collins voted yes.

The reason that matters: during his confirmation process, Clayton was asked — repeatedly, by more than one senator — a question with a factual answer. Who won the 2020 election?

He would not say.

The question he wouldn't answer

Clayton didn't deny the 2020 result. He did something more careful than that.

He acknowledged that Joe Biden was certified as the winner. What he would not do, after being pressed repeatedly, was say that Biden won.

That gap between "certified" and "won" is not an accident of phrasing. It's the exact space the last six years of election denial have lived in — the suggestion that the paperwork said one thing while the truth said another. A nominee who will say the first word but not the second is telling you something on purpose.

Maine's independent Sen. Angus King was among those who pushed him on it. Clayton kept redirecting to his qualifications rather than answer.

You can watch the exchange. It is not ambiguous.

Collins' explanation

Asked about it by CNN's Manu Raju, Collins didn't dispute that Clayton dodged. She argued it didn't matter:

"[DNI] does not certify elections, and he made very clear over and over again that Joe Biden had been certified as the winner of the election."

She said she wasn't sure what Democrats were looking for beyond that.

Here's what they were looking for: a straight answer from the person about to run American intelligence.

Collins is technically correct that the Director of National Intelligence doesn't certify elections. That's a true fact, and it's beside the point. Nobody asked Clayton to certify anything. They asked him to state, out loud, a documented outcome of an American election — the kind of basic factual claim the entire intelligence apparatus exists to get right.

The job of the DNI is to tell the President and Congress the truth about what is real, especially when the truth is unwelcome. The single most consequential lie in recent American politics is the claim that the 2020 election was stolen. A DNI nominee who won't plainly reject that lie in a confirmation hearing has failed the one test that maps directly onto the job.

Collins looked at that and voted yes.

This office in particular

The Director of National Intelligence is not a random post to be casual about.

Talking Points Memo laid out how the office was warped in recent years to feed election conspiracy theories — the specific institution that Clayton now leads, with the specific history of being pointed at 2020.

That context is what turns a hearing-room dodge into a real problem. Confirming someone who won't say Biden won, to the office that was previously used to cast doubt on Biden winning, is not a technicality. It's the whole question.

The pattern with Collins

None of this is new for Susan Collins, and that's the point.

The pattern is consistent enough to predict: she expresses concern, she gets described as a moderate, and then she votes with her party when the vote is actually held. The concern is the product. The vote is the outcome.

Mainers have watched this before on health care — Collins helped advance the cuts that put Medicaid and Medicare at risk for people in her own state after voicing reservations about them.

Here it took a slightly different shape. She didn't even express concern. She constructed a reason the dodge was fine — the DNI doesn't certify elections — and moved on.

The vote was 51 to 47. It was close. Collins was not a spare vote on a foregone conclusion; she was part of a four-vote margin. If she had wanted an answer out of Clayton before confirming him, she had all the leverage she needed to get one.

She didn't ask for it. We deserve better.

Source

Reporting by Maine Beacon (July 2026), with additional reporting from Raw Story and Talking Points Memo. Roll call: U.S. Senate Vote #211, July 28, 2026.

The Republicans With the Worst Records on Health Care

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 07:00:59 +0000

Health care in America got a lot more expensive this year, and it wasn't an accident. Somebody voted for it.

The "One Big Beautiful Bill" that House Republicans passed on July 3, 2025 cuts more than $900 billion out of federal Medicaid spending over a decade — the Congressional Budget Office projects that alone will push about 7.5 million more people into the ranks of the uninsured. Then Congress let the enhanced ACA tax credits lapse at the end of 2025. The result showed up in January: the average person buying their own insurance saw their monthly premium payment jump 58%, deductibles hit a record $3,786, and roughly 4.8 million people dropped off marketplace coverage — the sharpest one-year drop since the ACA began.

Congress got one clean chance to undo the premium spike. On January 8, 2026, the House passed a three-year extension of the subsidies, 230–196 — 17 Republicans broke with their own leadership to do it. Every House Republican below voted no.

Here's who did the most damage, and what they told us while they did it.

Tim Moore spent a decade telling uninsured people to get a job

Before he came to Congress, Tim Moore ran the North Carolina House for ten years, and for most of them he personally kept Medicaid expansion off the table. His reason, in his own words: "the best thing that folks can do is to get a job." The same WRAL editorial put a price on that philosophy — roughly $20 billion in federal Medicaid money North Carolina walked away from since 2015, plus $5.7 billion in hospital reimbursements. In the meantime seven rural North Carolina hospitals closed, squeezed by patients who had no coverage and no way to pay.

He finally relented in 2023. Then he got to Congress and voted for the bill that could undo it all. North Carolina's expansion law contains a trigger: if federal funding drops below 90% of costs, the program automatically shuts off — for all 680,000 people who've gained coverage since 2023. A Chapel Hill doctor described what that means for her young Type 1 diabetes patients: "If they lose Medicaid, life is over. Like, it's just over. They're not going to make it to 30."

In July 2025, about a hundred clergy and neighbors carried an empty black casket to Moore's Gastonia office. It bore a portrait of Michael Danforth, who died at 33 after waiting 37 months for Medicaid disability assistance. "Blood is on the hands of the people who voted for the big bill," said his mother.

Chuck Edwards reassured a town hall, then complained the cuts were too small

In March 2025, Chuck Edwards stood in a packed auditorium in Asheville and told a furious crowd that the budget resolution he'd voted for "did not mention cutting those programs" and that there was "no intent from President Trump nor from the Congress" to disrupt anyone's benefits. The resolution required $880 billion in savings from the committee that runs Medicaid. There was no arithmetic that got there without cutting it.

Two months later, in the Budget Committee markup, Edwards said the quiet part out loud: "the flaw of this bill is that it doesn't go far enough, fast enough." He voted for it anyway, and voted for the final version, and then voted against restoring the ACA subsidies in January.

North Carolina paid for it faster than anywhere else in the country. ACA enrollment in the state fell about 22% for 2026 — roughly 214,000 fewer people covered, the largest drop in the United States.

David Schweikert called the people losing coverage bedwetters

David Schweikert voted for the bill, and when Arizonans got scared about what it would do to them, he went on a conservative radio show and said: "Think of the whining and the bedwetting over the Medicaid changes." More than 300,000 Arizonans are projected to lose health insurance because of the bill, including over 30,000 in his own district.

It isn't only coverage. Five rural Arizona hospitals — in Page, Winslow, Bisbee, Nogales, and Globe — are at risk of closing as the Medicaid money dries up. "Those people aren't going to get their care, and it's going to be a crisis," said the CEO of Cobre Valley Regional Medical Center. Schweikert also voted no on restoring the ACA subsidies. He is now running for governor of Arizona.

Abraham Hamadeh put "no cuts to Medicaid" in writing

The day the House sent the bill to Trump, Abraham Hamadeh issued a press release listing what he'd just voted for. Bullet point five: "Includes no cuts to Medicaid."

The CBO scored the same bill as cutting more than $900 billion from federal Medicaid spending. PolitiFact rated the "we're not changing Medicaid" line False, pointing to new work requirements, new copays, and a shortened retroactive coverage window — none of which is fraud enforcement.

Hamadeh voted no on the January subsidy extension too, while his constituents opened their 2026 renewal notices. The University of Arizona's Center for Rural Health documented one retired Scottsdale couple whose bronze plan went from $513 a month to $2,218.

Tony Wied promised he would never touch it

Running for the seat in 2024, Tony Wied was asked about the Affordable Care Act and said: "I would never do anything to pull that." In February 2025 he added, of Medicaid, "I would never be in favor of cutting benefits to those that need it" — the budget had merely "unlocked the potential to look into waste, fraud and abuse."

Five months later he voted for the bill, and in January he voted against putting the subsidies back. About 277,000 Wisconsin marketplace enrollees were getting those subsidies. One Milwaukee County enrollee described the new bill for the identical plan: "Instead of paying about $400, I'll be paying over a thousand dollars" a month — roughly $8,000 more a year.

Dan Sullivan and Susan Collins: the senators who objected once it was safe

Dan Sullivan voted for the bill and then told Alaskans — where about 260,000 people, one in three residents, are on Medicaid — that "the only people objectively and factually trying to cut Medicaid for Alaskans are Chuck Schumer and Senate Democrats." In December, with premiums about to spike and his own re-election coming, he finally voted to advance a subsidy extension — one that everybody in the room already knew was short of the 60 votes it needed. It failed.

Susan Collins runs the same play with better press. She let the big bill clear an early test vote while she negotiated for rural-hospital protections she never got, then cast the 50th and final "no" — which simply handed the tiebreaker to Vice President Vance and passed the bill 51–50. TIME's read: her protest votes are "as strategic as they are symbolic." Four months earlier she'd voted to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, 52–48, on his assurance that he wouldn't restrict the polio vaccine.

The excuse doesn't survive contact with the receipts

Seven politicians, five states, one script. Promise nobody will lose coverage. Vote for the bill. Put "no cuts to Medicaid" in a press release. When the bills arrive, call the people opening them bedwetters, or cast a no vote timed to land after it can't change anything.

The tell is January 8. Seventeen Republicans looked at what the expired subsidies were doing to their constituents and voted to fix it. It wasn't impossible, and it wasn't disloyal — it was a choice. Every person on this page made the other one, and 4.8 million Americans lost their coverage.

They'll be asking for our votes with the receipts already printed.

52 Republican Senators Just Voted to Hand ICE Nearly $70 Billion

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 20:47:12 +0000

At 4:42 in the morning on June 5, 2026, the Senate did something with your money that most people were asleep for. By a vote of 52 to 47, Republicans passed S. 2 — the so-called "Secure America Act" — a bill that hands nearly $70 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol. The House followed a few days later, and President Trump signed it into law.

That's not a typo. Seventy billion dollars — on top of the mass-deportation money Congress already approved less than a year ago. Combined, the two laws commit nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars to arrests, detention, and deportations. It's roughly eight years of ICE funding, dumped in all at once.

Where the money goes

The breakdown is staggering:

$38 billion to ICE to expand arrests, detention, deportation operations, and partnerships with state and local police.
$26 billion to Customs and Border Protection to hire agents and expand surveillance and enforcement.
$5 billion to the Department of Homeland Security for more deportation and detention work.

ICE now has more money than most militaries around the world. And this money doesn't just keep the agency running at its old size — it's designed to scale enforcement up nationwide and lock in mass-deportation spending through the end of the current administration.

No guardrails — on purpose

Here's the part that should worry everyone, no matter how you feel about immigration. Republicans didn't pass this through the normal, bipartisan appropriations process. They used a fast-track budget process — one that needs only a simple majority instead of the usual 60 votes — to jam it through on party lines, which let them strip out the basic guardrails that come with regular funding bills: required oversight of detention conditions, transparency rules forcing ICE to report basic data to the public, and civil-rights protections in enforcement.

This law includes none of those. It's tens of billions of dollars with no strings attached, handed to an agency at a moment when, in the same year, two American citizens were killed by ICE, multiple people have died in the agency's custody this year — and detainees are holding hunger strikes over the conditions they face.

A slush fund for political payback

Hours before the first Senate vote, Republicans quietly added Section 202(9): $350 million set aside for ICE to carry out enforcement in cities and states that DHS decides are "non-cooperating" — places that decline to sign 287(g) agreements or don't meet vague, shifting federal "compliance" standards.

In plain English, Congress just funded immigration enforcement as a tool of political retaliation, aimed at communities based on their local politics. The provision also expands who ICE can target with the money — including people once charged with unauthorized entry even after the charges were dropped, and people flagged for almost any minor offense. That's a machine that can sweep up longtime residents, asylum seekers, and even U.S. citizens wrongly identified as noncitizens.

The senators who voted yes

Fifty-two Republican senators voted for this. All but one of the chamber's Republicans went along with it. Fourteen of them have report cards on this site:

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

Every one of them cast a Yea on final passage. Not one demanded the oversight, transparency, or civil-rights protections that normal funding bills carry. They voted to write a blank check.

And they're not done. Even with this law barely on the books, House Republicans are already drafting tens of billions more for ICE and CBP in the next spending bill. The $70 billion isn't a one-time deal — it's the new baseline.

Meanwhile, families across the country are struggling to afford health care, food, and housing. Congress had a choice about where to put a quarter-trillion dollars. These senators chose this.

How they voted

The record is public and permanent: the official Senate roll call for vote 163 on S. 2, June 5, 2026.