MAGA Report Cards — Michigan

John James Pitched Repealing Michigan's Marijuana Tax at a Fundraiser the Industry Threw Him. It Raised Nearly $90,000.

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:56:10 +0000

In July, executives of the JARS Cannabis dispensary chain hosted a campaign fundraiser for Michigan's Republican nominee for governor. About 100 people came, by one attendee's count. It brought in nearly $90,000.

At that fundraiser, according to a longtime marijuana advocate who was in the room, the candidate told the industry exactly what it wanted to hear about the new state tax on its product.

"He was clear as a bell: He wants to get rid of that 24% tax," Tim Beck told Bridge Michigan.

Weeks later, in mid-August, John James said it in public: he would "repeal or sharply reduce" Michigan's 24% wholesale marijuana tax.

What that tax was for

The 24% wholesale tax is not a stray line in the budget. It was a central piece of the bipartisan road funding deal Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed last year — the deal meant to put $2 billion a year into fixing Michigan's roads.

The House Fiscal Agency projected the marijuana tax alone would bring in $420 million a year toward that.

It has not. State budget officials reported it produced just $73.4 million in its first six months, below even the revised estimates. James points to exactly that shortfall as his argument for killing it.

Here is what he has not done. James has not said how, or whether, he would replace the road money if the tax goes away. His campaign did not respond to Bridge Michigan's requests for comment.

So the plan, as it stands, is: remove a revenue source dedicated to roads, and leave the roads question blank.

The industry says the arrangement was clear

The people who would benefit are not being coy about it.

Robin Schneider, executive director of the Michigan Cannabis Industry Association, attended the JARS fundraiser. Her association gave James $1,000. She told Bridge that the James campaign came to her about the tax issue before the fundraiser.

"We didn't do anything," she told Bridge. "They made it clear that they support us."

Beck, a member of the association who owns no marijuana business himself, said he feels owners are "pretty united" around James.

Schneider also said her association reached out to the Democratic nominee, Jocelyn Benson, "repeatedly," and has not heard back. Benson has not taken a firm position, calling the tax a "new and emerging issue" and saying she wants to know where the money is going before making changes.

That contrast is the point. One candidate has not committed. The other committed at a fundraiser the industry organized for him, and then said it out loud.

He was against legalization before he was for its tax break

In 2018, Michigan voters legalized recreational marijuana with 56% of the vote. James was running for the U.S. Senate at the time, and he said he would vote against the proposal — while promising to respect the result if it passed.

Eight years later, he says "state government has a responsibility to respect" the voter-approved law while keeping products from children and enforcing the law against bad actors.

There is a version of that evolution that is just a politician learning. There is another version, and the industry group suing over the tax has articulated it: the group argues the wholesale tax violates the will of the 2018 voters. James has landed on the side of the argument that his donors are making in court.

This is the pattern

James' record on who gets heard is already documented here.

He took utility cash while Michigan electric bills kept going up. He says his data center priority is "frankly local control," but he voted three times in committee to bar states and towns from regulating AI for a decade. He attacked an opponent for getting rich in office while his own net worth grew by as much as 1,000% during his time in Congress.

The $90,000 fundraiser was a fraction of the nearly $1.2 million James raised from late July onward. That is the part worth remembering. It did not take much to get a public commitment on a $420 million tax.

Adding it up

Marijuana industry executives hosted a fundraiser for John James in July that raised nearly $90,000, and a participant says James told the room he wanted Michigan's 24% wholesale marijuana tax gone. In mid-August he publicly pledged to repeal or sharply reduce it. That tax was written into the bipartisan road funding deal and projected to raise $420 million a year for Michigan roads. James has not said how he would replace that money, and his campaign did not answer questions about it.

Source

Bridge Michigan, John James pitches marijuana tax repeal, courts industry donors. Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press, via Bridge Michigan.

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.

Tom Barrett Wrote a Budget That Would Have Cut Off Jail Money to Any Michigan County That Wouldn't Hold People for ICE. One of Them Was Ingham, Which He Now Represents.

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:55:04 +0000

Before he went to Congress, Tom Barrett spent eight years in the Michigan Legislature. In 2019 he ran the state Senate subcommittee that writes the corrections budget — the bill that decides, among other things, how much money county jails get back from the state for holding state prisoners.

He used it to go after counties that would not do ICE's work for them.

What the budget language did

In May 2019, Barrett put language in the Senate corrections budget that would withhold jail reimbursement money from any county that adopted or enforced a policy limiting communication or cooperation with federal immigration officials.

This was not a fine or a warning. It was a funding cutoff, aimed at county sheriffs, written into the state budget by the senator who chaired the subcommittee.

The counties that stood to lose money, and what they got each year:

Wayne County — about $1.5 million
Kent County — about $1.1 million
Kalamazoo County — about $975,000
Washtenaw County — about $520,000

Barrett defended it plainly. "I think this is good to require, good to maintain, and I think it should be expected" of law enforcement to work cooperatively, he said.

What those counties had actually done

The policies Barrett was punishing were not refusals to enforce the law. They were decisions about how long a county can hold someone it has no charge against.

An ICE detainer is a request, not a warrant. It asks a jail to keep someone locked up past the point where they would otherwise walk out, so federal agents have time to come get them. Several Michigan counties — including Ingham County, which contains Lansing and sits in the congressional district Barrett represents today — had decided they would not hold people past their booking period on a detainer alone, without a judge's warrant.

There is a reason sheriffs want a warrant first. A detainer is issued by an ICE agent, not a judge, and numerous courts have found that a county which holds someone past their release date on a detainer alone is violating the Fourth Amendment and can be made to pay damages — a federal judge so ruled against Clackamas County, Oregon. A sheriff asking for a warrant is following legal advice, not defying federal law. Barrett's budget would have taken money out of those counties' jails anyway.

Michigan's own corrections department said it wouldn't work

The opposition did not come only from Democrats. The Michigan Department of Corrections opposed the language, warning that it would hit cases that had nothing to do with immigration at all and could push more people into state prisons, at greater cost to the state.

Sen. Adam Hollier, a Detroit Democrat, called it what it was: "The majority is trying to make all of these things into political issues, and make national political issues local issues, and I just don't think that's appropriate in this space."

Barrett said at the time that he had not heard concerns from the Department of Corrections and was not sure how much the penalty would actually cost the counties involved. He was proposing to cut millions from county jails without knowing what it would do to them.

The provision did not survive. Governor Gretchen Whitmer line-item vetoed the anti-sanctuary language out of the budget later that year.

He represents one of those counties now

Ingham County is the center of Michigan's 7th District. Barrett's own Lansing office is in it. In 2019 he wrote a budget that would have taken jail money away from it over a policy its own sheriff had adopted.

He has not made that easy to ask him about. Barrett has refused to hold an in-person town hall in mid-Michigan. He holds telephone town halls instead, and he started doing it on guidance from the House Republicans' campaign arm to avoid backlash at in-person meetings. In March 2025, constituents delivered more than 2,000 petition signatures to that Lansing office asking for a real one. In April, the AFL-CIO and the NAACP held a 7th District town hall without him.

In Congress he has kept going the same direction. Barrett voted for Trump's budget bill in May 2025 — the law that put $45 billion into expanding immigration detention, more than the government spent on housing migrants under the Obama, Biden and first Trump administrations combined, plus billions more to pay state and local governments to help.

What the record shows

In 2019, as chair of Michigan's Senate corrections budget subcommittee, Tom Barrett wrote language that would have stripped jail reimbursement funding from any county limiting cooperation with ICE — about $1.5 million a year from Wayne County, $1.1 million from Kent, $975,000 from Kalamazoo and $520,000 from Washtenaw. Michigan's own Department of Corrections opposed it, warning it would hit unrelated cases and cost the state more. Barrett acknowledged he did not know what the penalty would cost the counties. The governor vetoed it. One of the counties whose policy he was targeting was Ingham, the seat of the district he now represents in Congress, where he has refused to hold an in-person town hall.

Source

"Barrett Wanted to Punish the Jails That Stopped Holding People for ICE," by Pablo Manríquez, Migrant Insider, September 8, 2026. The 2019 budget language and the counties' funding figures were confirmed against Jonathan Oosting's contemporaneous reporting for The Detroit News, May 1, 2019, republished in full by Police1. Photo: official U.S. House portrait, via Wikimedia Commons.

Lisa McClain Says She Supports 'Anybody With an R Behind Their Name.' She Was Talking About Max Miller, Whose Ex-Wife Says He Threw Boiling Water at Her.

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:20:40 +0000

On Sunday, September 6, 2026, Lisa McClain went on CBS's "Face the Nation" and was asked whether she supports the reelection of her Ohio colleague Max Miller, whom Margaret Brennan introduced as "the Ohio Republican congressman who's been accused of domestic abuse by his two former partners."

McClain is the House Republican Conference Chair — the fourth-ranking Republican in the House. Her answer was not that the allegations were false, or that she had looked into them. It was this:

"I support anybody with an R behind their name."

She added, in the same interview: "At the end of the day, he's our nominee right now. I wish the allegations weren't true."

What she is supporting

On July 30, 2026, Miller's ex-wife, Emily Moreno, asked a court for a restraining order barring Miller from contacting her lawyers. In her filings she alleged that Miller verbally and physically abused her and their two-year-old daughter. According to CBS News, she says he threw boiling water at her, pointed a gun at her, and threw her against a wall — and that their daughter suffered a fractured clavicle and bruising.

Emily Moreno's father is Senator Bernie Moreno, Republican of Ohio. He said in August that his daughter "lives in constant fear of this man," that he now picks his granddaughter up at a police station for custody exchanges because he does not know "what this guy's capable of," and that Miller "should not serve in the House of Representatives." We covered that when he said it.

Miller denies everything. On an August 2 livestream he said his former wife "is engaging in a pattern of reporting incredible, serious and destructive allegations with absolutely no evidence." To rebut her, he released a Dropbox folder of documents — which, CBS reported, appeared to include naked photographs of his own daughter.

Her own party has already broken with him

McClain's line was that she supports anybody with an R next to their name. A lot of Republicans with an R next to their names have declined to.

Brennan read her the list on air: Katie Britt of Alabama, Jim Banks of Indiana, Jon Husted of Ohio, Roger Marshall of Kansas and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia have all called on Miller to resign or quit, and Tim Sheehy of Montana said "this guy is clearly a degenerate sociopath. He should step aside and seek help." Miller's former father-in-law, a sitting Republican senator, says he needs "serious psychological help."

President Trump himself called Miller on August 3 — the day before the deadline to withdraw without triggering a special-election primary in Ohio — to raise concerns, CBS reported at the time.

Miller did not withdraw. The deadline passed on August 4.

So the position McClain is defending is not the party's consensus. It is leadership's, and only leadership's. Speaker Mike Johnson took the same line on August 31, calling Miller "a great member of Congress" and describing the allegations as "some issues in his personal life."

"Let the process play out"

McClain's other formulation was that "divorces are ugly" and "at the end of the day, we got to let the process play out."

That is a reasonable thing to say about a contested custody filing. It is a strange thing to say as a reason to actively campaign for someone in the middle of it. Nothing about letting a court process play out requires the fourth-ranking House Republican to go on national television and vouch for the man.

She then explained what the vouching is for:

"I'm focused on winning the House back, taking the House back, keeping the House because we are the only party that's actually putting more money in your pocket, making sure that crime is down, securing the border, and rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse. And Max Miller has been a good advocate for his constituents doing that."

Republicans hold a narrow House majority. The party in the White House usually loses seats in a midterm. That is the whole calculation, and McClain said it out loud: the seat is worth more than the question.

This is not McClain's first careful sentence

McClain told POLITICO in February 2025 that the secret to her leadership job was honesty — "just tell the truth." We went through her record against that standard: in the same interview she repeated a false claim about Social Security, and a month later she told a Michigan mother there were no cuts to Medicaid, then voted for the bill that cut it.

"I support anybody with an R behind their name" is at least candid. It is also a description of a job she is not doing.

What the record shows

Lisa McClain, the fourth-ranking Republican in the House, said on national television on September 6, 2026 that she supports Max Miller's reelection because "I support anybody with an R behind their name." Miller's ex-wife has told an Ohio court he threw boiling water at her, pointed a gun at her, and injured their two-year-old daughter. Six Republican senators named on the program had already called on him to quit, and a seventh, the accuser's own father, says he should not serve in the House. McClain's stated reason for backing him anyway is holding the House majority.

Source

House GOP conference chair says Rep. Max Miller is "our nominee right now" despite abuse allegations by Sophia Vlahakis, CBS News, September 6, 2026, and the program's own transcript. Photo: CBS News.

Four Republicans Filed a Bill to Ban the Government From Preferring Contractors Who Pay Union Wages. Trump's Own Budget Office Kept That Rule in Place.

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 05:51:55 +0000

On September 3, 2026, Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma introduced a bill with a mild-sounding name and one blunt sentence in it.

The bill is called the No Preference Act. Here is what it would add to federal contracting law:

"The head of an executive agency may not require or give preference to an offeror on the basis of whether the offeror will use workers subject to a collective bargaining agreement."

Then it says the same thing again for the Pentagon.

That is the whole bill. Two sentences. It would make it illegal for any federal agency to treat a contractor better because that contractor's workers have a union contract.

Steve Womack of Arkansas signed on the same day as an original cosponsor. John Rutherford of Florida and Jack Bergman of Michigan added their names the next day.

What the rule they're trying to kill actually does

Big federal construction jobs — anything costing $35 million or more — currently have to use something called a project labor agreement, unless the agency can justify an exception. It is a contract, negotiated before the first shovel goes in the ground, that sets the pay and benefits for everybody who works on the site.

The Economic Policy Institute describes what those agreements contain: they "specify workers' wages and fringe benefits," they can set up a process for settling disputes on the job, and they typically bar strikes for the length of the project while also barring the employer from locking workers out.

In other words, the deal cuts both ways. The workers get a wage floor and benefits in writing. The government gets a job site that doesn't shut down.

Take the preference away and the wage floor goes with it. As EPI put it about a Pentagon attempt to do exactly this, workers on those projects "will no longer have the guarantee of negotiating PLAs that include higher pay."

Trump's own administration looked at this and said no

This is the part that ought to end the argument.

In February 2025 the Defense Department tried to stop using these agreements on its large construction projects. A federal judge blocked it in May. And on June 12, 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget — Trump's own budget office, run by Russell Vought — issued a memo saying the requirement stays.

The memo called some agencies' moves to scrap the agreements "overly broad" and stated plainly that further attempts to prohibit them across the board "are precluded."

So the sitting Republican administration reviewed this exact policy and kept it. Bice, Womack, Rutherford and Bergman want Congress to override that.

What they say it's about

Bice frames it as fairness between states:

"Every qualified contractor deserves a fair opportunity to compete for federal projects. The government should not favor one individual over another simply because their workers are part of a union. This legislation ensures that right-to-work states, like Oklahoma, have an equal footing when competing for contracts."

Womack frames it as thrift:

"The playing field shouldn't be skewed toward contractors who choose to use union labor."

Neither of them mentions what the agreements guarantee the workers. That is the thing being removed, and it does not appear in either quote.

Who asked for this

The bill is backed by Associated Builders & Contractors and the Association of Oklahoma General Contractors.

Associated Builders and Contractors is the national trade group for non-union construction companies. Fighting project labor agreements is one of the things it exists to do. This is not a bill a contractor who lost a bid asked for. It is a bill the industry association whose members would collect the work is pushing.

The people on the other side of that transaction are the ones who currently have their wages written into the contract before they show up.

This keeps happening

The four names on this bill are not the only Republicans on this site pushing the same direction. Tom Tiffany has signed on to take right-to-work national, and he was the only member of the entire House who missed the vote on workers' right to organize. In Pennsylvania, the building trades council that endorsed Stacy Garrity in 2024 is now campaigning against her, and her campaign won't say whether she'd sign a right-to-work bill.

The No Preference Act is the federal-contracting version of the same fight. It doesn't ban unions. It just makes sure the government can never prefer the contractor who pays union scale — on a Pentagon base, a courthouse, a dam, or anything else the public is paying for.

What the bill says

Stephanie Bice wrote a two-sentence bill that would bar every federal agency, including the Defense Department, from giving any preference to a contractor whose workers have a union contract. Steve Womack, John Rutherford and Jack Bergman cosponsored it. It is backed by the national trade association for non-union builders. And it targets a rule that Trump's own Office of Management and Budget reviewed in June 2025 and expressly kept in force.

Sources

Bice, Womack seek to eliminate union labor preferences in federal contracts, Ripon Advance (September 4, 2026).
H.R. 10250, the No Preference Act — full text and cosponsor list, 119th Congress.
Department of Defense orders end to project labor agreements, Economic Policy Institute Federal Policy Watch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

Nobody is doing the thing the bill bans

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

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

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

This is control, not freedom

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

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

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

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

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

Two Republicans said no

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

The bill now goes to the Senate.

The choice they made

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

Every Republican we track who voted yes

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

Iowa: Ashley Hinson, Zach Nunn

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

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

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the SAVE America Act would actually do to voters

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

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

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

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

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

The emergency the resolution describes

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

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

It cites a federal investigation that charged four people.

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

What was actually in front of them that week

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

Outside the chamber:

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

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

In their own words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 189 who voted yes

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

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho — Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas — Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi — Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey — Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

The number nine is not in the Constitution

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

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

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

What they were actually voting on

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

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

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

The timing

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

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

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

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

Who pushed it

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who voted to freeze the Court

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey: Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

John James Says His Data Center Priority Is 'Frankly Local Control.' He Voted Three Times in Committee to Ban States and Towns From Regulating AI for a Decade.

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:48:15 +0000

John James, the Republican nominee for governor of Michigan, has built his data center message on one idea. He said it at a gubernatorial debate in early July:

"My priority is frankly local control, protecting our water, protecting and preventing pollution, making sure that electricity bills do not go up... We absolutely cannot have an additional data center until we protect the people and communities."

He said a version of it again on CBS's Face the Nation days before the Michigan Advance published its findings: "My position is we need to have a plan to protect our communities. Until we do, then we have to make sure that we have local control."

In Congress, he voted for a provision that would have taken local control away — for ten years, from every state and town in America — three times in committee, and a fourth time as part of the bill on the House floor.

The provision

The Michigan Advance went back through the votes. In May 2025, James voted for the House version of H.R. 1, Trump's budget bill. Buried inside it was this:

"no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce, during the 10-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act, any law or regulation of that State or a political subdivision thereof limiting, restricting, or otherwise regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems entered into interstate commerce"

Ten years. No state law, no county ordinance, no township rule that singled these facilities out. The bill's own definition of an artificial intelligence system is "any data system, hardware, tool, or utility that operates, in whole or in part, using artificial intelligence" — a data center, in other words. A Michigan community that wanted limits on one would have had nowhere to go.

James did not just vote for the overall bill and let the fine print slide past. He sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where the language was written, and he voted for that specific moratorium three times:

Twice to advance it out of committee.
Once against an amendment that would have stripped it out of the bill.

Someone handed him the chance to delete it, and he voted no.

He was told exactly what it would do

This was not an obscure provision whose effects only became clear later. The National Conference of State Legislatures — a bipartisan group representing state legislatures of both parties — wrote to the Energy and Commerce Committee warning against it.

The ban, its CEO Tim Storey wrote, would "circumvent their authority to regulate the permitting, construction and operation of data centers within their borders," and would "severely limit the ability of states and localities to make decisions regarding the siting and operation of these large-scale projects, raising costs for ratepayers, jeopardizing zoning decisions that protect our mutual constituents and impacting existing infrastructure such as power grids and generating facilities."

Rising ratepayer costs. Zoning stripped. That is the list James now campaigns on protecting Michigan from. He was warned it was the list, and he voted for it anyway — three times in committee.

The moratorium did not survive into the final law. That is not a defense of the votes; it is a description of what happened to the provision after he cast them.

What his campaign said when asked

The Advance put the votes to James's campaign. Spokesperson Alyvia Bailey's answer:

"John James voted for H.R. 1 to deliver historic tax relief to working families across the country. His approach to data centers has been clear: no new data centers until we protect our people."

The Advance reports that Bailey did not directly address the questions about the moratorium votes.

That is the whole answer. He voted for the bill for a different reason, and his current position is his current position.

Michigan is not confused about where it stands

An EPIC-MRA survey taken August 22 through 28 found 73% of Michigan respondents opposed the federal tax breaks and policies designed to speed up data center development.

Meanwhile the head of James's party is on the other side of that. In a Truth Social post on Monday, August 31, Trump said the country should "let Data Reign," and that communities that push back "want to end up being backwards and poor." James has aligned himself closely with Trump and took his endorsement in the primary.

So James is running as the local-control candidate against a president who just called the people asking for local control backwards and poor — with a voting record that matches the president rather than the campaign.

Michigan Republicans keep discovering this issue late

James is the second Michigan Republican we have caught running as a data center skeptic after voting for the AI moratorium.

Tom Barrett's ad says he "stood up to my own party" on data centers. The vote in that ad is from 2015 and was about a single building in Grand Rapids; since then he voted for the tax breaks that handed six AI companies $83 billion, backed the same ten-year state-regulation ban, and took money from Musk, Thiel, and the corporate PACs of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle.

James has his own version of the money problem. He took nearly $50,000 from DTE, Consumers Energy's parent company and their employees while both utilities were asking regulators to raise rates on Michigan families — the same electric bills he now promises to hold down.

He is not alone nationally either: three out of four Americans now oppose a data center near their home, and a run of Republicans who spent the last year helping the build-out along have recently discovered concerns.

What the record shows

John James is campaigning for governor of Michigan on local control over data centers. In May 2025 he voted for a budget bill containing a ten-year ban on any state or local government regulating AI systems, and as a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee he voted for that specific ban three more times — including against an amendment to remove it. A bipartisan group representing state legislatures had warned Congress in writing that the provision would raise ratepayer costs and override local zoning. His campaign, asked about those votes, did not address them.

Source

Katherine Dailey, "As James pushes local control on data centers, past congressional votes sought to limit just that", Michigan Advance, September 2, 2026. Photo by Katherine Dailey/Michigan Advance.

Mike Rogers Wants to Charge You $50 for Preventive Care Your Insurance Has to Cover for Free. 'That's Probably Okay, Right?'

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:38:04 +0000

Right now, if you have health insurance, your blood pressure check is free. So is your diabetes screening. So is your mammogram, your colonoscopy, your cervical cancer screening. If you are a woman, so is the yearly well-woman visit itself. You do not pay a copay. You do not pay a deductible. That is not a favor your insurance company does for you — it is the law, and it has been since the Affordable Care Act took effect: nearly all private plans have to cover a defined list of preventive services at no cost to the patient.

Mike Rogers (MI) would like to change that.

At a private event in Macomb County on March 21, 2026, Michigan's Republican Senate nominee took a question from someone in the audience about how to bring down the cost of health care. He said he would release a full plan in the coming weeks that would "embrace the freedom of the free market." Then he explained one of the ways he would do it.

"You know," Rogers said, "if you go up and have to pay the doctor $50 for your annual physical, that's probably okay, right?"

Bridge Michigan reviewed a recording of the event and reported the quote in April. On Sunday, in a piece for The Bulwark, Jonathan Cohn asked the Rogers campaign to confirm whether charging people for preventive care is still what Rogers wants to do.

The campaign did not answer.

He compared your cancer screening to a burned-out blinker

In the same recorded remarks, Rogers explained why he thinks free preventive care is a bad deal. He said covering it was like having "an auto insurance plan that would pay for your blinker's light going out." A nice thing to have, he argued — but something that drives everyone's costs up.

"We need to start changing the way we look at health care," he said.

The comparison gives away the whole argument. A blinker bulb is a small annoyance you can put off. A colonoscopy is how you find a tumor while it is still small enough to remove. Congress made preventive care free precisely so that people with high-deductible plans would have no reason to skip the visit that catches the thing early.

We know what happens when you put a price on it, because researchers have measured it. Dr. Mark Fendrick directs the Center for Value-Based Insurance Design at the University of Michigan. He told Bridge Michigan that "our work shows very clearly that even increasing cost sharing by a few dollars leads to decreased utilization of services." Not fifty dollars. A few.

Fendrick gave Rogers the narrow point: free preventive services do add to what a health plan spends, and Rogers "is exactly right" about that. The disagreement is about what happens next. Charge copays for preventive care and "in the short term, costs go down," Fendrick said — but overall, "the health of individuals and populations get worse."

Anand Parekh, chief health policy officer at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, who helped formulate the ACA's prevention initiatives, put the money side of it plainly: when people skip screenings, undiagnosed disease gets worse and more expensive. "We end up paying for more costly care for things that could have been prevented, or at least treated at less expense," he said.

So the savings are real for a while, and then the bill comes back bigger, with sicker people attached to it.

There is also an obvious place to look for waste that is not the cancer screening. Fendrick's advice to politicians is to go after care that does nothing — piles of lab tests, or, in his example to Bridge, "CT scans for uncomplicated back pain." Rogers went after the annual physical instead.

He also wants to put sick people in a separate pool

The copay was not the only idea Rogers floated that day. He also proposed what he called "catastrophic funds" for the sickest Americans — separate insurance arrangements for people who need the most care.

"So we're going to pay our premium based on what a normal life would be, not including these people who are really, really sick," Rogers said. And: "We take the really sick people and put them in this fund that we all pay a little bit. The government pays, the hospital pays, Medicare would pay a little bit."

That idea has a name and a history. Before the Affordable Care Act, 35 states ran high-risk pools for people who could not get insurance any other way. The ACA made them unnecessary by simply requiring insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions. KFF's look back at how those pools actually worked is not a close call: premiums were often double what healthy people paid, nearly all of them refused to cover the pre-existing condition you joined for — usually for six to twelve months — most capped what they would pay over your lifetime, and some states limited how many people could get in at all. Republicans put the idea back on the table in the 2017 repeal bills, and it has been proposed steadily since.

Parekh told Bridge that pulling sick patients out does lower premiums for healthier people — but the sick patients still need care, and covering it takes large subsidies. "This turns out to be expensive for consumers and government," he said.

Fendrick was shorter about it. Going back to high-risk pools would be, he said, "just so crazy."

Four months later, he released a plan. It does not mention any of this.

Rogers said in March that the full plan was weeks away. It arrived on July 30, announced through a press release that quotes a friendly column at Townhall describing it. Its three pillars are affordability, accessibility and transparency. What is actually in it: make hospitals and insurers publish their prices and fine the ones that don't, expand a federal bulk-buying program for prescription drugs, speed up approval of generics, and require insurers to publish how often they deny claims.

There is no $50 copay in it. There are no catastrophic funds, no high-risk pools, nothing about preventive care at all. The two ideas Rogers described to a private room in March simply are not in the document he released to the public in July — and his campaign will not say whether he dropped them or just stopped mentioning them.

That is the whole problem. Cohn asked. Bridge asked in April. Neither got an answer.

This fits a twenty-five-year record

None of this is a departure for Rogers. He represented Michigan in the House from 2001 to 2015. He voted against the Affordable Care Act when it came to the floor in March 2010, then voted to repeal it in 2011, again in 2012, and again in 2013. In 2012 the Michigan Republican Party sent out a mailer with his name on it in capital letters: "MIKE ROGERS IS COMMITTED TO REPEALING OBAMACARE."

He has not softened since. In January, Michigan Advance asked him about the ACA tax credits that had expired at the start of the year. He answered, in an emailed statement, that he would start by "phasing out insurance company taxpayer subsidies and giving that money back to patients so they are in charge of their own healthcare." Those credits are what kept marketplace premiums affordable for people who buy their own insurance. They are gone now, which is what 197 Republicans voted for, and in Michigan the individual-market plans they applied to went up about 20 percent this year.

He also praised the Republicans' "One Big Beautiful Bill," the law that cut Medicaid — his campaign built an entire video series around it, under the friendlier name "Working Families Tax Cuts." In the same January statement he called the law a "historic, $50 billion investment in rural healthcare, including $173 million for Michigan alone." Michigan Advance noted that the claim rural communities come out ahead is disputed by health care providers themselves, including the state hospital association.

Cohn asked Rogers's campaign to confirm that he still stands behind letting the subsidies expire, behind the Medicaid cuts, and whether he still supports repealing the law outright. He got no response to any of it.

Michigan is already living with the answer

The numbers moved while the campaign was declining to comment.

About 357,000 Michiganders had active ACA marketplace coverage in February — 130,000 fewer than a year earlier, a 27 percent drop, down from a record 501,806 in June 2025. That is roughly one in four people covered by the program, gone in a year. Michigan had the sixth-largest loss of any state.

The Medicaid cuts have not fully arrived yet. When Republicans were drafting them in May 2025, the state health department warned that more than 700,000 Michiganders could lose Medicaid — nearly a third of everyone enrolled — if the full $880 billion in cuts then on the table landed on the program. KFF's estimate of the law that actually passed is that it leaves about 300,000 more Michiganders uninsured by 2034, or 390,000 once the expired premium credits are counted alongside it.

This is the state where Rogers wants to charge people $50 to see a doctor who is well.

What his campaign will say

Asked about the recording, Rogers's communications director Alyssa Brouillet told Bridge Michigan that Rogers "is exploring ideas with voters to increase affordability of health care, whether that's investing in rural hospitals, ensuring the wealthiest Americans cover their own copays, or improving transparency and access."

Read that again. "Ensuring the wealthiest Americans cover their own copays" is not what Rogers said. He did not say the wealthy should pay $50 for a physical. He said you should — "if you go up and have to pay the doctor $50 for your annual physical" — to a room of supporters, as an illustration of ordinary people having more skin in the game.

To be fair to him, one idea from that March meeting was a good one: forgive medical school debt for doctors who spend five years at a federally qualified health center, the clinics that treat low-income patients and struggle to recruit. Rogers called them "one of those government programs that actually functions." It is a real proposal and it would help. It also, like the price transparency in his July plan, would not change what anybody pays for a mammogram.

There is one more thing worth putting next to a $50 copay. Rogers is a wealthy man who has been collecting a taxpayer-funded state pension while worth millions. And at a town hall last year, he mocked the complaint about prices before it even arrived — "Oh my gosh, coffee went up," he said, imitating what he expected to hear from Democrats.

Fifty dollars is a rounding error to him. It is a reason to skip the appointment for a lot of people in Michigan.

He is not the only one with this record

Cohn offers three other Republicans running statewide this year as case studies, and the record is the same in each.

In Texas, where marketplace enrollment fell by nearly 150,000 people after the credits expired, Senate nominee Ken Paxton spent years trying to erase the law entirely — including the 20-state lawsuit he co-led in 2018 that the Supreme Court rejected 7–2. In Iowa, Ashley Hinson voted for the Medicaid cuts and has publicly defended the new work requirements — while a MercyOne clinic on the south side of Des Moines closed in June, citing staffing shortages, rising costs and pending cuts to Medicaid reimbursement. In Ohio, Jon Husted voted for a law projected to pull roughly $33 billion in Medicaid money out of his state over a decade.

None of this is settled history. If Democrats take either chamber in November, restoring the premium credits and undoing the Medicaid cuts is at the top of the list, and in a Senate this close it can come down to a single seat. Michigan is one of the seats.

The bottom line

Mike Rogers (MI) told a private audience in March that charging people $50 for an annual physical is "probably okay," and floated moving the sickest patients into a separate insurance pool — two ideas that, as Bridge Michigan put it, would undo two promises of the Affordable Care Act. University of Michigan researchers say even a few dollars of cost-sharing makes people skip preventive care, and that the short-term savings evaporate when the undiagnosed illness shows up later. The health care plan Rogers finally released in July does not mention either idea, and his campaign has refused, twice, to say whether he still holds them. Meanwhile he spent his House career voting four times against or to repeal the law that made those screenings free, told a reporter he wants the premium credits phased out, and campaigned on the bill that cut Medicaid — while 130,000 Michiganders lost marketplace coverage in a single year.

Sources

Mike Rogers Wants $50 Copays for Routine Screenings — Jonathan Cohn, The Bulwark, August 30, 2026. Original reporting on the March recording by Simon D. Schuster, Bridge Michigan, April 2, 2026. Michigan enrollment figures from Eli Newman, Bridge Michigan, July 13, 2026, citing federal effectuated-enrollment data. Rogers's July plan as announced by his campaign. Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark (photos: Getty, Shutterstock).

Mike Rogers Told Donors He Saw Osama bin Laden's Body 'With My Own Eyes.' He Was at Home in Washington, and What He Saw Was a Photograph.

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 07:06:29 +0000

Osama bin Laden was killed on May 1, 2011, by American special operators who raided his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small number of people were physically present. A slightly larger group followed it in real time from the White House Situation Room — President Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and a handful of senior officials.

Mike Rogers (MI) was in neither place. He was at his home in Washington, D.C., where — as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee — he got a phone call about the raid from CIA Director Leon Panetta. He told reporters as much the next day, and he tells the same story in a campaign video.

Fifteen years later, he is running for Michigan's open U.S. Senate seat, and he sent supporters a fundraising email that says something different.

What the email said

The email walks through his biography — Army officer, FBI special agent, "working in the shadows, hunting down terrorists, and standing on the frontlines of our national security." Then comes a line the email puts in bold:

"I saw the dead body of Osama bin Laden with my own eyes, knowing that together, we had delivered justice for America."

The email was first reported by Azi Paybarah, a former Washington Post reporter now at Straight Arrow News, who posted a screenshot of it. The Rogers campaign did not respond to requests to explain what he meant.

There is a plain explanation, and Rogers has known it since 2011. He was one of a small number of U.S. officials shown a photograph of bin Laden's body.

He knows the difference, because he argued about it in public

This is not a case of a candidate misremembering a blurry moment from a long time ago. In the days after the raid, Rogers was one of the loudest voices in Congress arguing that the government should not release the images — and the whole reason his opinion carried weight was that he had seen one.

Speaking as Intelligence Committee chairman on May 4, 2011, he told CBS News that releasing the photos would be a mistake:

"To treat Osama bin Laden like he's some trophy of the United States for public gloating I think is wrong."

He added that it would make it harder for "an average soldier, a sergeant in the Army in Ghazni province in Afghanistan" to win cooperation from villagers, and that "there's no gain by doing it. The conspiracy theorists aren't going to believe the photos ... they're going to be doubting Thomases forever."

In a statement at the time he made the same case: the risks of release outweighed the benefits, conspiracy theorists would say the photos were doctored anyway, and publishing them risked inflaming opinion in the Middle East.

Photos. Images. Doctored. That was his own vocabulary, in public, on the record, in the same week. The man writing fundraising emails in 2026 about seeing a body "with my own eyes" is the same man who in 2011 spent that week talking to reporters about a picture.

A pattern, not a slip

Rogers has built this Senate campaign on his national security résumé, and he has stretched it before — repeatedly describing his work funding intelligence agencies as a congressman in terms that made his role sound larger than it was.

He has leaned on it hardest since Abdul El-Sayed, a doctor and former public health official, won the Democratic nomination. On the night El-Sayed won, Rogers said: "I spent years hunting terrorists and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. Never in a million years did I think that I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11."

The second half of that sentence was false, and PolitiFact rated it Pants on Fire. El-Sayed never said it. A New York Times factcheck traced the line to a Twitch streamer who endorsed him — a statement that streamer had retracted and apologized for seven years before the endorsement. El-Sayed, for his part, wrote in 2021 about watching "terrorists with names like mine attack my country in the name of my faith," and called the attacks devastating.

We have documented the same habit on Iran, where Rogers spent two decades insisting Iran was building a nuclear weapon while U.S. intelligence kept concluding it wasn't — and Michigan drivers are paying for the war he wanted.

The through-line is that Rogers keeps making his national security record bigger than the record. Sometimes that means inflating what he did. Sometimes it means inventing what his opponent said. Here it means telling donors he saw the body himself when he was at home in Washington waiting on a phone call.

What the record shows

Mike Rogers (MI) told donors in a fundraising email, in bold type, that he saw Osama bin Laden's dead body with his own eyes. He was not in Abbottabad and not in the Situation Room. He was at home in Washington, and learned about the raid in a phone call from the CIA director. What he actually saw, days later, was a photograph — the same photograph he spent that week publicly arguing the government should not release, in his own words, because conspiracy theorists "aren't going to believe the photos." His campaign would not explain the discrepancy.

Source

Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers says he saw Bin Laden's body with his 'own eyes'. He did not — Robert Mackey, The Guardian, August 29, 2026. Photo: Paul Sancya / AP.

208 House Republicans Just Voted to Lock In the Food-Safety Layoffs. Complaints About Contaminated Meat Had Risen 40%.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:51:48 +0000

Last year, complaints to the federal government about contaminated meat, poultry and egg products rose by nearly 40% — from 1,443 to 2,016 — according to the USDA's own Food Safety and Inspection Service.

That happened because the people who do the inspecting had been leaving in numbers. Since the start of 2025, the FDA has laid off nearly 4,300 employees, and the Food Safety and Inspection Service — the branch that puts inspectors physically inside slaughterhouses and processing plants — has lost roughly 900 positions, about 9% of its workforce in six months.

On June 4, 2026, the House had a chance to decide what to do about that. It voted, 213 to 210, to leave it alone.

What the bill actually does

Be precise here, because Republicans dispute the word "cut," and on one point they have a case.

H.R. 8646 is the agriculture and Food and Drug Administration spending bill for 2027. By the Appropriations Committee's own summary, it:

provides $26.27 billion in total — $380 million, or 1.4%, below the level enacted for 2026;
gives the FDA $7.1 billion; and
claims to increase money for the Food Safety and Inspection Service "to fund frontline meat and poultry inspectors and bolster support for state inspection programs."

So this is not a bill that zeroes out food safety, and anyone telling you it is has skipped the document.

Here is the line that matters instead. It sits in the committee's own list of the bill's accomplishments, under "Safeguards American taxpayer dollars":

"Reducing salaries and expenses where appropriate to account for staffing reductions and shrinking grant programs that housed canceled grants."

Read that in plain English. Thousands of federal food-safety staff were fired. Congress's response was not to fund those jobs back. It was to lower the budget line to match the emptier building — and to call that a saving.

That is what 213 members voted for. The staffing losses stop being an emergency and become the new baseline.

The man who quit over this said so at the time

None of this was a surprise to anyone in the building.

Jim Jones, who ran the FDA's food division, resigned in February 2025. His resignation letter named the number: "The indiscriminate firing of 89 staff in the Human Foods Program is beyond short sighted." He wrote that the people fired "represent the future of the agency," and that staying on would be "fruitless" given the administration's "disdain for the very people necessary to implement" its own agenda.

Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group called his departure "a huge step backward for the FDA and the safety of our food."

The consequences reached specific places. On April 21, 2025, the FDA's Division of Dairy Safety suspended its proficiency testing program for Grade A raw milk and finished dairy products, because its Moffett Center laboratory was "no longer able to provide laboratory support for proficiency testing and data analysis." Grade A milk kept being tested. What stopped was the federal government's annual check that the labs doing the testing are getting it right — the same staffing problem, one more thing the government stopped doing.

The 188 who voted yes

Everyone below has a page on this site and is recorded voting Yea on H.R. 8646. All but one are Republicans — the clerk records Kevin Kiley of California as an independent. Grouped by state:

Alabama (5) — Barry Moore, Dale Strong, Gary Palmer, Mike Rogers, Robert Aderholt
Alaska (1) — Nick Begich
Arizona (6) — Abraham Hamadeh, Andy Biggs, David Schweikert, Eli Crane, Juan Ciscomani, Paul Gosar
Arkansas (4) — Bruce Westerman, French Hill, Rick Crawford, Steve Womack
California (6) — David Valadao, Jay Obernolte, Ken Calvert, Kevin Kiley, Vince Fong, Young Kim
Colorado (4) — Gabe Evans, Jeff Crank, Jeff Hurd, Lauren Boebert
Florida (16) — Aaron Bean, Anna Paulina Luna, Brian Mast, Byron Donalds, Carlos Gimenez, Cory Mills, Gus Bilirakis, Jimmy Patronis, John Rutherford, Kat Cammack, Laurel Lee, Maria Elvira Salazar, Mario Diaz-Balart, Mike Haridopolos, Randy Fine, Scott Franklin
Georgia (7) — Andrew Clyde, Austin Scott, Brian Jack, Clay Fuller, Mike Collins, Rich McCormick, Rick Allen
Idaho (2) — Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher
Illinois (3) — Darin LaHood, Mary Miller, Mike Bost
Indiana (7) — Erin Houchin, Jefferson Shreve, Jim Baird, Mark Messmer, Marlin Stutzman, Rudy Yakym, Victoria Spartz
Iowa (3) — Ashley Hinson, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Zach Nunn
Kansas (3) — Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann
Kentucky (4) — Andy Barr, Brett Guthrie, Hal Rogers, James Comer
Louisiana (4) — Clay Higgins, Julia Letlow, Mike Johnson, Steve Scalise
Maryland (1) — Andy Harris
Michigan (7) — Bill Huizenga, Jack Bergman, John James, John Moolenaar, Lisa McClain, Tim Walberg, Tom Barrett
Minnesota (4) — Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach, Pete Stauber, Tom Emmer
Mississippi (3) — Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly
Missouri (5) — Ann Wagner, Bob Onder, Eric Burlison, Jason Smith, Mark Alford
Montana (1) — Troy Downing
Nebraska (2) — Adrian Smith, Mike Flood
New Jersey (2) — Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew
New York (6) — Andrew Garbarino, Claudia Tenney, Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota, Nick Langworthy, Nicole Malliotakis
North Carolina (10) — Addison McDowell, Brad Knott, Chuck Edwards, David Rouzer, Greg Murphy, Mark Harris, Pat Harrigan, Richard Hudson, Tim Moore, Virginia Foxx
North Dakota (1) — Julie Fedorchak
Ohio (10) — Bob Latta, David Joyce, David Taylor, Jim Jordan, Max Miller, Michael Rulli, Mike Carey, Mike Turner, Troy Balderson, Warren Davidson
Oklahoma (5) — Frank Lucas, Josh Brecheen, Kevin Hern, Stephanie Bice, Tom Cole
Oregon (1) — Cliff Bentz
Pennsylvania (8) — Dan Meuser, Glenn Thompson, Guy Reschenthaler, John Joyce, Lloyd Smucker, Mike Kelly, Ryan Mackenzie, Scott Perry
South Carolina (4) — Joe Wilson, Russell Fry, Sheri Biggs, William Timmons
Tennessee (8) — Andy Ogles, Chuck Fleischmann, David Kustoff, Diana Harshbarger, John Rose, Matt Van Epps, Scott DesJarlais, Tim Burchett
Texas (17) — August Pfluger, Beth Van Duyne, Brandon Gill, Brian Babin, Craig Goldman, Jake Ellzey, John Carter, Keith Self, Lance Gooden, Michael Cloud, Monica De La Cruz, Nathaniel Moran, Pat Fallon, Pete Sessions, Randy Weber, Roger Williams, Ronny Jackson
Utah (3) — Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy
Virginia (5) — Ben Cline, Jen Kiggans, John McGuire, Morgan Griffith, Rob Wittman
Washington (1) — Michael Baumgartner
West Virginia (2) — Carol Miller, Riley Moore
Wisconsin (6) — Bryan Steil, Derrick Van Orden, Glenn Grothman, Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Tiffany, Tony Wied
Wyoming (1) — Harriet Hageman

The four who voted no

Only five House Republicans in the entire chamber voted against this bill. Four of them have pages here, and they deserve to be named for it:

Brian Fitzpatrick (Pennsylvania)
Rob Bresnahan (Pennsylvania)
Tom McClintock (California)
Greg Steube (Florida)

The fifth was Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who has no page on this site. Their reasons were not identical and several are fiscal conservatives who vote against spending bills as a matter of course — but on this roll call, they are the Republicans who did not vote to bank the losses.

Four more Republicans did not vote at all: Dusty Johnson of South Dakota, Tom Kean of New Jersey, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, and Chip Roy of Texas. Not voting is not a no, and none of them are on either list above.

What the record shows

Complaints about contaminated meat, poultry and eggs climbed nearly 40% in one year, to 2,016, after the FDA shed nearly 4,300 employees and the federal meat inspection service about 900. On June 4, 2026, the House passed a spending bill that comes in $380 million under last year and, by the Appropriations Committee's own description, trims salaries and expenses "to account for staffing reductions" rather than restoring them. It passed 213-210. Two hundred and eight Republicans voted for it, 187 of them people we track — 188 counting Kevin Kiley of California, whom the clerk records as an independent. Five Republicans voted no.

How they voted

The official record: Roll Call 205, H.R. 8646, 119th Congress, 2nd Session, June 4, 2026 — On Passage, Passed 213-210. Bill details from the House Appropriations Committee. Staffing figures from UpNorthNews.

Mike Rogers Spent 20 Years Saying Iran Was Building a Nuclear Weapon. U.S. Intelligence Kept Saying It Wasn't.

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 19:34:49 +0000

For twenty years, Mike Rogers (MI) has been telling Americans that Iran was building a nuclear bomb. For most of those twenty years, America's own spy agencies were telling Congress it wasn't.

On August 27, 2026, Jacobin published a review of Rogers's entire public record on Iran, going back to when George W. Bush was still president. It is not a flattering picture. Michigan's Republican candidate for U.S. Senate spent two decades hyping a threat the intelligence community kept knocking down, attacking every attempt at a deal, and pushing for exactly the war we are now in — the one currently showing up in Michigan gas tanks.

He is not shy about it. Since Trump launched the war six months ago, Rogers has called Iran "an imminent threat to our country," said the war was "absolutely right" and "a win-win-win for us," and told the Detroit News that "we are better off today than we were when it started."

Last summer, after Trump's first round of strikes, Rogers told Jewish Insider: "I couldn't have supported [the operation] more. I was for all of this when it wasn't very cool to be for all of this."

That part is true. Here is what the record actually shows.

2006: the report the U.N. called "outrageous and dishonest"

Rogers sat on the House intelligence committee whose staff produced a report in August 2006 declaring that "Iran is seeking nuclear weapons." It said Iran could have a bomb "sometime in the beginning to the middle of the next decade," and that Iran "probably" had a biological weapons program.

The International Atomic Energy Agency — the U.N. inspectors who were actually on the ground in Iran — wrote to the committee to knock it down. The agency objected to the report's claim that Iran "is currently enriching uranium to weapons grade," saying Iran had produced material "only in small quantities that is far below the level that can be used in nuclear arms." And it called the report's suggestion that an inspector had been removed for telling the truth about Iran "an outrageous and dishonest suggestion."

Rogers did not back down much. Asked about the weapons-grade claim, he told CNN the report was "very clear": "It says that we don't believe that they've gotten there. But the point of that whole section is, they are trying to enrich uranium to weapons grade." On the accusation that U.N. inspectors were covering for Tehran, he stood by it flat out.

So the inspectors said the report was wrong. Rogers said the report was fine.

2007: America's own spy agencies said the opposite

Fifteen months after that report, every U.S. intelligence agency put out a National Intelligence Estimate saying the reverse. They concluded with "high confidence" that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003 — years before his committee's report told the country it was racing for a bomb.

That assessment has held up. In early 2011, the Director of National Intelligence told Congress that the intelligence community did not know if Iran eventually would decide to build nuclear weapons, and that it was not clear Tehran would decide to do so. And in March 2025, Trump's own Director of National Intelligence testified that "the IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003."

Rogers said it anyway. By Jacobin's count, he publicly claimed Iran had, was pursuing, or was close to a nuclear weapon dozens of times between 2006 and 2026 — on the intelligence committee, later as its chairman, and then for another decade on television. In 2012, a year after that briefing, he told CNN "we know that [Iran is] aggressively pursuing a nuclear weapon program." In 2013 he told CNN "everybody agrees" Iran was doing it. In 2023 he claimed Iran had "helped plan" the October 7 attack, a claim Israel's own military said it had no evidence for.

And last summer, he told Jewish Insider that on the day Trump attacked, Iran "had all three components" of a nuclear weapon — "they just didn't have them assembled." His own party's DNI had testified to the opposite three months earlier.

He took Netanyahu's side against two American presidents

In 2012, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ran a public pressure campaign to get President Obama to attack Iran, and threatened to go it alone. Obama refused and pushed for talks instead. Rogers spent that year criticizing him for it.

"I believe that if this is going to work we have to have a credible military option," Rogers told CNN in March 2012. "We can't say all options on the table, oh, by the way, Israel, we don't want you to do anything. That's not very credible."

He went further than that. He said on NPR that the United States and Israel have a defense pact under which "we will defend them if attacked under any circumstances." There is no such treaty. Rogers, the sitting chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, was telling the public America was legally bound to fight a war Israel might start.

Three years later, when Netanyahu came to Congress to attack Obama's Iran deal in a speech many in both countries saw as raw foreign interference, Rogers cowrote a Politico op-ed defending it. He accused Obama of trying "to hobble the prime minister," and called Netanyahu's speech "the act of a true and courageous friend."

The terrorist group he helped get off the terror list

There is one more thing in Rogers's Iran file. In 2012, a Guardian investigation into the campaign to delist the Mojahedin-e-Khalq — a group of Iranian exiles pushing for regime change, and at that time a U.S.-designated terrorist organization — found that Rogers "has also received the backing of individuals and groups that support the unbanning of the MEK," and that he "has been among the strongest supporters in Congress of delisting the group, sponsoring resolutions and pressing other members of Congress to support the cause."

The MEK was on that list because it had been responsible for the deaths of Americans. Killing Americans is the exact thing Rogers has spent twenty years saying justifies going to war with Iran.

He fought the deal, then changed his story about it

When Obama reached the interim agreement that became the Iran nuclear deal, Rogers went after it hard. "We've taken away the one thing that brought them to the table," he said on CNN in November 2013. "We have just rewarded very bad and dangerous behavior." He kept it up on Twitter for years after leaving Congress, and he demanded Iran be allowed zero enrichment — a condition Iran hawks have long used to make a deal impossible.

While the deal was in force, Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium shrank to almost nothing. Trump pulled out in 2018, and it grew back. According to Jacobin's review, Rogers claimed on CNN the following summer that he had opposed that unilateral withdrawal. But in a September 2022 op-ed in The Hill, he wrote that the deal was "an agreement that should never have been made in the first place and withdrawing from it made sense, even if the way in which it was handled left much to be desired." His objection, in other words, was the manner — never the result.

The result is the part Michiganders should care about. Pulling out of that deal is what let Iran's uranium stockpile build back up, and that buildup is the thing Rogers now cites to justify the war.

Rogers is not the only Republican whose Iran positions move with whoever is in the White House — Arkansas's senator spent a decade attacking an Iran deal and went quiet the moment Trump signed one. And he is running in a race where an outside group is weighing tens of millions of dollars to put him in the Senate.

What it is costing Michigan right now

This is not a foreign policy debate anymore. It is a bill.

In late March, with the war in its fourth week, Michigan drivers were paying $3.92 a gallon, the highest since August 2023 and up $1.07 in a single month. By late June the state average was about $4.11 a gallon, roughly a third higher than a year earlier — and that same outlet, adding up Pentagon spending estimates, consumer energy costs and Michigan's share of the population, estimated the state's slice of the war's economic hit could top $2 billion. A mid-Michigan farmer said nitrogen fertilizer was "up 40 percent" since the war began.

When an attendee at a March campaign stop raised gas prices with him, Rogers waved it off: "We're gonna be fine, we got plenty of oil." He went on: "You'll get your oil, because we're going to pump our oil right here in America, and we got plenty."

Talking to a local reporter earlier this year, he was a little more honest. The war, he allowed, "brought some costs that are hard to live with, you know, when you're trying to pay your higher electric rate that's gone up the last eight years." Jacobin reports he said it with a chuckle.

Meanwhile Congress still has not voted on any of this. Trump's team argues it does not have to, and House Republicans have been happy to agree. Rogers has said he "doesn't mind" the idea of Congress formally authorizing the war so Trump can keep it going. He is asking Michigan to send him to the chamber that would cast that vote.

What the record shows

For twenty years Mike Rogers (MI) pushed for war with Iran on a claim U.S. intelligence contradicted in 2007 and again in March 2025 — that Iran was building a nuclear weapon. U.N. inspectors called part of his committee's 2006 case "outrageous and dishonest," and he stood by it. He spent years attacking the deal that shrank Iran's uranium stockpile to nothing, and later wrote that withdrawing from it "made sense." The war he wanted started in February. Michigan gas ran about $4.11 a gallon by late June, roughly a third more than a year earlier, one estimate says the state's share of the cost could top $2 billion, and when an attendee raised the prices with Rogers he said, "We're gonna be fine."

Source

Mike Rogers Pushed for War With Iran for Two Decades — Branko Marcetic, Jacobin, August 27, 2026. Photo: Rich Clement / Bloomberg via Getty Images.

All Seven of Michigan's Republicans in Congress Voted to Keep Trump's Tariffs. That's $5,619 Per Michigan Household, More Than Any Other State.

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 17:04:25 +0000

Trump's tariffs have cost American importers an estimated $342 billion since January 2025, and Axios reported this week that the bill is nowhere near evenly spread. It lands on a state according to what that state buys from the rest of the world. By that measure, no state's families are carrying more of it than Michigan's.

Michigan's importers have paid an estimated $23 billion in tariffs since January 2025, the third-largest total in the country behind California and Texas. Spread across the state's households, that comes to $5,619 each — the highest per-household figure of the 52 states and territories the National Taxpayers Union Foundation tracks, using estimates prepared for it by Trade Partnership Worldwide.

In February, Michigan's seven Republicans in Congress got two chances to end those tariffs. They voted together both times, and both times they voted to keep them.

What Michigan is actually paying for

The state's tariff bill is not a story about luxury imports. It is a story about the things Michigan builds cars out of. About 64% of the total fell on raw materials, parts, and equipment that Michigan manufacturers buy.

The four hardest-hit categories, with the average tariff rate charged between July 2025 and June 2026:

Cars and trucks — $10 billion paid, at an average rate of 12.4%. In 2024 the rate was 1.0%.
Auto parts — $5 billion paid, at 9.1%. In 2024 it was 2.3%.
Steel, aluminum and other metals — $1.5 billion paid, at 35.3%. In 2024 it was 1.7%.
Machinery and parts — $681 million paid, at 16.6%. In 2024 it was 1.3%.

Those costs were supposed to buy Michigan something. The promise was that the pain would be short and the factory jobs would follow. Michigan instead lost about 4,000 auto parts manufacturing jobs in the year ending in June 2026, a 3.5% decline, according to federal labor data compiled by Bridge Michigan. Vehicle manufacturing added roughly 500.

The vote to stop the vote

There is a law called the National Emergencies Act, and it contains a safety valve. When a president declares a national emergency, any member of Congress can force a vote on ending it, and the statute puts a clock on that vote so leadership cannot simply bury it.

Trump used emergency powers to impose the tariffs. For nearly a year, House Republicans kept that clock switched off by writing a single sentence into unrelated procedural resolutions — a trick we traced through four separate resolutions.

On February 10, 2026, they tried it one more time. Buried in a routine resolution setting the terms for debate on three ordinary bills was Section 4:

"Each day during the period from February 10, 2026, through July 31, 2026, shall not constitute a calendar day for purposes of section 202 of the National Emergencies Act..."

Days would stop being days through the end of July. Four separate tariff emergencies would be unvotable until then.

It failed, 214 to 217. Every Republican who voted backed it except three: Don Bacon of Nebraska, Kevin Kiley of California, and Thomas Massie of Kentucky. "A rule is meant to bring a bill to the floor, set the parameters for debate," Kiley told Roll Call. "It's not meant to smuggle in unrelated provisions that expand the power of leadership at the expense of our members."

All seven Michigan Republicans — Tom Barrett, Jack Bergman, Bill Huizenga, John James, Lisa McClain, John Moolenaar and Tim Walberg — voted for it.

The vote they couldn't stop

The next day, the House finally voted on the thing itself.

The measure was H.J.Res. 72, sponsored by Rep. Gregory Meeks of New York and introduced on March 6, 2025. It did one thing: end the emergency Trump declared on February 1, 2025, the one that put tariffs on goods coming in from Canada. It had waited eleven months for a vote it was legally entitled to. "They're trying to change the rules again, and again, and again, and again to do what?" Meeks said on the floor the night before. "To avoid voting on ending Trump's tariffs."

It passed, 219 to 211. Six Republicans crossed over.

None of them were from Michigan, the state on the other side of that border. All seven voted no.

The resolution went to the Senate on February 12, was read twice, was referred to the Finance Committee, and has not moved since.

Nine days after the House vote, the Supreme Court ruled that the 1977 emergency law never gave the president the power to impose those tariffs at all. Michigan had already paid.

What each of them said

Tom Barrett defended the tariffs at a telephone town hall on April 7, 2025, calling them "a tool we can use to get there, but of course it can't be done recklessly" and brushing off the market's reaction: "a handful of days is not indicative of a broader market." Asked by a farmer in his district what the trade war would do to crop prices, he promised only that the effect would be "blunted as much as possible."

Jack Bergman represents Sault Ste. Marie, where the Canada trade war cost the area at least $82.9 million in lost local spending in a single year as border crossings fell by nearly 24%. ProPublica found he had been "virtually silent on the new tariffs" while constituents pressed him to speak up.

Bill Huizenga has been on both sides. In 2018 he called metal tariffs on America's trading partners a "misguided proposal" and warned that any short-term gain "may be quickly blunted by hardworking men and women losing their jobs in West Michigan." In March 2025, defending the new tariffs to reporters in Battle Creek, he said: "Is it the right thing to do? Absolutely it is."

John James, now running for governor, went on CBS's Face the Nation on March 2, 2025 and was read a warning from the Republican mayor of Sterling Heights, in his own district, who called the tariffs the "single biggest threat to our local economy." James defended them anyway, answering that "what's devastating and staggering is the fact of the matter that we have been taken advantage of for decades."

Lisa McClain chairs the House Republican Conference and represents a district full of auto workers. In April 2025 she told Breitbart that "it isn't an immediate fix, and there is going to be some discomfort," but that "people are willing to make that tradeoff for long-term more jobs." Complaints, she said, were only "about 15 percent of what I'm hearing." She added: "I thought it would have been worse, to be honest with you."

John Moolenaar chairs the House Select Committee on China and backed Trump's tariffs the day after they were announced, describing American shoppers as the leverage: "Trade deficits reflect that imbalance, but they also reveal something deeper: the strength of the American consumer. It's time we stopped allowing that strength to be used against us."

Tim Walberg backed the 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico even as the Detroit Regional Chamber's MichAuto affiliate called them "punitive" and "counterproductive to commerce," and posted the story about his support on his own congressional website.

The refund is going to somebody else

Because the Supreme Court ruled the emergency tariffs illegal, that money has to be returned. The ruling left the separate duties on cars, auto parts and metals in place — Michigan's three biggest tariff categories — so much of the state's bill is not coming back at all. What is coming back is not going to the households in that $5,619 figure. Tariffs are legally paid by the company that brings the goods across the border, so the company is the one owed the refund. Apple, Ford, Nike, Amazon and General Motors are collecting billions, while the families who paid the higher prices at the register get nothing.

What the record shows

Michigan's importers paid an estimated $23 billion in tariffs, the equivalent of $5,619 per household and the heaviest household burden in the country, with $10 billion of it on cars and trucks and another $5 billion on auto parts. In February, all seven of Michigan's Republicans in Congress voted for a resolution declaring that days would not count as days, so the House could not vote on those tariffs. When the House got its vote anyway, all seven voted against ending them. Nine days later the Supreme Court ruled the emergency tariffs had never been legal — leaving the duties on cars, auto parts and metals standing — and those refunds are going to the companies that import the goods rather than to the households that paid the higher prices.

Source

"Where Trump's tariffs hit hardest," Axios, August 27, 2026. Map: Brad Jennings/Axios.

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

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

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

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

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

"You have so many proteins to choose from"

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

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

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

"The Democrats invented this term 'affordability'"

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

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

"Earn more"

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

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

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

"Gasoline prices are down 40 percent"

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

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

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

"Gas prices are at five-year lows"

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

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

The rest of the list

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

What they have in common

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

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

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

The short version

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jay Obernolte wrote the bill that does the preempting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carlos De La Cruz was outspent by his own backers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What it looks like where you live

None of this stays in Washington.

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

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

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

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

What the money shows

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

Bill Huizenga's Campaign Took $3,400 From the Gravel Company and Its Founders Who Wanted to Mine Land He Half Owns

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:03:38 +0000

Here is a simple question a member of Congress should never have to answer: did the company that wanted to do business with your family's companies also write checks to your campaign?

For Bill Huizenga, the answer — according to a new Metro Times investigation by Steve Neavling — is yes.

What happened, in order

February 2022. Two companies Huizenga co-owns — Huizenga Gravel Co. and Huizenga Development Land LLC — reached an agreement in principle to lease property in Georgetown Township to a construction materials company called Top Grade Aggregates, for a sand and gravel operation.

Bill Huizenga and his brother Bruce put it in an email at the time:

"We anticipate, when finalized, this agreement will be of great benefit to the citizens of Georgetown Township and the greater West Michigan area as we work towards a final reclamation and use of these Bend Area properties."

February 2023. The Georgetown Township Mineral Mining Board unanimously approved Top Grade's mining license. The approved plan contemplated a processing plant on land owned by Huizenga's businesses. The project would pull roughly 4 million cubic yards of sand and gravel over about 12 years, with material from neighboring Ottawa County Road Commission property moved by conveyor or pumping onto the Huizenga land for processing and stockpiling.

A township staff report was blunt about whose driveway this all ran through:

"All trucks will use the Huizenga property access at Fillmore and Cottonwood."

June 30, 2023 — about four months later. Top Grade Aggregates LLC contributed $2,400 to Huizenga for Congress.

February 2024. Top Grade founder Thomas Brink and owner Ross Veltema each contributed $500.

Total: $3,400.

The detail that makes it hard to call a coincidence

Federal Election Commission records reviewed through July 22 show that Huizenga's campaign appeared to be the only federal campaign to receive money from Top Grade, from Brink, or from Veltema.

Not one of several. The only one.

There is no indication in the records that the contributions were illegal, and no evidence they were explicitly tied to the proposed arrangement. Huizenga's campaign says the lease was never executed and Top Grade never operated on the property. All of that is fair, and it's in the Metro Times story.

But that isn't really the standard. The standard is whether a congressman should be taking money from a company that has been trying to do business with companies he personally owns a piece of. He did.

How big a piece

Huizenga held a 50% stake in Huizenga Gravel and a 25% stake in Huizenga Development Land, according to his own financial disclosures.

In 2024 he reported between $100,001 and $1 million in income from his stake in Huizenga Gravel Inc., plus between $15,001 and $50,000 from Huizenga Gravel LLC. His quarter interest in Huizenga Development Land was valued between $100,001 and $250,000.

The same year the township approved the mining license, Huizenga's reported value for his half of Huizenga Gravel LLC moved up a bracket — from between $250,001 and $500,000 in his 2022 disclosure to between $500,001 and $1 million in his 2023 disclosure. He described the business on that form as ownership of "land with gravel resources for mining," from which he received royalties.

Congressional disclosures report values in wide ranges, so nobody outside his accountant can say exactly how much the land gained. That is the point of the ranges.

This is the second one this summer

In July, the same reporter found that Huizenga's campaign paid more than $400,000 to a company owned by his half-brother between 2013 and 2025 — while that half-brother, working as a realtor, helped market and sell luxury condos owned by a company Huizenga co-founded with his wife. Huizenga reported receiving at least $94,000 in management and consulting fees from the condo company between 2018 and 2023.

The pattern is old enough to have a paper trail at two federal bodies:

In 2018, the Michigan Democratic Party and a Muskegon resident filed an FEC complaint alleging Huizenga's campaign improperly used campaign money for personal expenses and failed to adequately disclose reimbursements involving Huizenga, his wife, his half-brother and other family members. The commission deadlocked 2-2 on whether there was reason to believe the law had been broken, so it made no finding either way.
The House Ethics Committee looked into campaign-funded trips to Walt Disney World, Mackinac Island and a Utah ski resort that included campaign staffers and family members. It closed the inquiry on June 5, 2024 without finding that he had clearly converted campaign funds to personal use — but it found his campaign's record-keeping inadequate and said he "should have exercised more care to avoid even the appearance of improper use of campaign funds."

He was advised, in writing, to take more care about the appearance of how his campaign money moves — in a report dated June 5, 2024, by which point all three of these contributions had already been made. His campaign went on paying his half-brother's company through 2025.

Meanwhile, his own balance sheet

Huizenga has been in Congress since 2011. Over that time, his financial disclosures show his assets roughly tripled and his estimated net worth rose by as much as fivefold. As with everything else on those forms, the numbers are ranges, so the precise figure is unknowable.

He is running for reelection in Michigan's 4th District against Democratic state Sen. Sean McCann, in what is expected to be one of the state's more competitive races.

Why West Michigan should care

Every dollar in that $3,400 is legal on its face. That's what makes it worth talking about.

The people of Michigan's 4th District send one person to Washington. When that person also owns half a gravel company, a quarter of a land company, and a piece of a condo business, every deal those businesses touch is a place where his interests and theirs can quietly come apart. The Ethics Committee already told him that appearances matter. His answer has been to keep taking the money and let the ranges on the disclosure forms do the rest.

What the records show

Companies Bill Huizenga co-owns reached an agreement in principle in February 2022 to lease their land to Top Grade Aggregates for a 12-year gravel operation. The township approved the mining license in February 2023. Four months later, Top Grade gave his campaign $2,400; about a year after the approval, its two founders added $500 each — $3,400 in all, from donors whose only federal contributions on record appear to have gone to him. Huizenga owned half of one of the companies involved and a quarter of the other, and the year the license was approved his reported stake moved up a disclosure bracket. Two years ago the House Ethics Committee said he should have taken more care to avoid even the appearance of improper use of campaign funds.

Source

Bill Huizenga took campaign donations after company pursued deal with his businesses — Steve Neavling, Detroit Metro Times, August 2026. Photo via Detroit Metro Times.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The vote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four of them voted for it four separate times

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

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

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

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

Arizona, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin: the promises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Source

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

John James Attacked an Opponent for Getting Rich in Office. His Own Net Worth Grew Up to 1,000% in Congress.

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 10:02:22 +0000

In 2020, when he was running for Senate against Democrat Gary Peters, John James approved a campaign ad that accused Peters of having "got rich in public office" and "doubled his wealth." James appeared at the end of the ad and said he approved the message.

Six years later, the Detroit Metro Times went through James's own financial disclosures. His own wealth has grown by far more than the doubling his ad accused Peters of.

The numbers

James was elected to Congress in 2022. That year, he reported assets worth between $2.5 million and $8.75 million.

In the disclosure he filed on August 13, 2026, he reported assets worth between $11.8 million and $51.3 million.

After subtracting what he owes, his estimated net worth went from roughly $990,000 to $8 million in 2022 to between $10.8 million and $50.8 million in 2025.

Members of Congress don't report exact values. They report broad ranges, which makes precision impossible. But the direction is not in doubt, and neither is the scale:

Using the lowest number in every range, his net worth grew by nearly 1,000%
Using the highest number in every range, it grew by about 536%

Much of that jump traces to his stake in James Group Inc., the Detroit logistics company his father founded. In 2024 he valued that stake at between $1 million and $5 million. In his latest filing it is between $5 million and $25 million — a jump into an entirely higher reporting bracket.

Other holdings moved too. A preferred savings account he listed at between $100,001 and $250,000 in 2024 was reported the next year at between $1 million and $5 million. A USAA checking account went from between $15,001 and $50,000 to between $500,001 and $1 million.

More than half his trades were in industries he was overseeing

James served on the House Energy and Commerce Committee from 2023 through 2026. It is one of the most powerful committees in Congress, with authority over energy, health care, telecommunications, consumer products and manufacturing. His subcommittee assignments covered commerce, manufacturing, energy, health care, data and environmental issues.

An analysis of his disclosures found that 55% of the stock trades he reported since entering Congress involved companies that fall under the jurisdiction of that committee or its subcommittees.

That is the whole problem with members of Congress trading individual stocks. A lawmaker on Energy and Commerce hears from the companies, sees the draft bills, and knows which way a regulator is leaning — before the public does.

This isn't the first time James's trading has drawn attention. His family bought up to $50,000 of SpaceX stock the day the company went public — a purchase the law required him to disclose — while he sat on the committee with jurisdiction over the FCC, which regulates SpaceX's Starlink satellite network. We wrote about that in August. His office said his wife bought the shares for their children.

The filing was late, and then it was late on purpose

In 2024, James reported 145 stock trades after the 45-day deadline federal law requires. His office told the Detroit News at the time that he was unaware of the transactions because they happened through a financial trust that "functions as a blind trust."

This year he took a different route. He requested a 90-day extension, moving his filing deadline from May 15 to August 13.

Michigan's Republican primary for governor was August 4.

So the disclosure showing his sharply higher net worth was not filed until nine days after Republican voters had already chosen him as their nominee. He won that primary and will face Democrat Jocelyn Benson in November.

What else he was doing while his wealth grew

James's time in Congress hasn't only been good to his own balance sheet. It's been good to the companies writing him checks.

Across his campaigns he has taken nearly $50,000 from DTE Energy, CMS Energy — Consumers Energy's parent — and their employees, while both utilities were asking Michigan regulators to raise rates on Michigan families.

And he has been willing to say things that aren't true when it suits him. Standing next to Trump at the GM Proving Grounds in July, James told the crowd Trump had won Michigan "three times." Trump lost Michigan in 2020 by more than 154,000 votes.

What the filings show

John James ran an ad in 2020 attacking his opponent for getting rich in public office. Since he was elected to Congress in 2022, his own reported assets have grown from a range of $2.5–$8.75 million to a range of $11.8–$51.3 million, and 55% of the stock trades he disclosed involved companies overseen by the committee he sat on. He asked for a 90-day extension that kept those numbers hidden until nine days after Michigan Republicans nominated him for governor.

Source

John James' wealth soared in Congress as he traded stocks in industries he helped oversee — Steve Neavling, Detroit Metro Times, August 2026. Photo via Detroit Metro Times.

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

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

Joe Wilson wrote it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ohio said no in 2011. Jim Jordan signed anyway.

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

Jim Jordan is Ohio's signature on this bill.

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

Pennsylvania sent five signatures on a law it never wanted

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

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

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

What it costs a paycheck

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

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

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

This is not a one-off

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

Mike Rogers Says He's 'Proud' to Have AIPAC's Support. His Own Team Asked Them to Take Their Name Off the Ads.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:04:21 +0000

Here is what Mike Rogers (MI) told Axios on the record this week:

"I welcome any and all support from the pro-Israel community and I'm proud to have their involvement."

And here is what his allies had been doing off the record, according to Axios' Alex Isenstadt: asking AIPAC not to run ads on his behalf at all.

Rogers spoke with AIPAC chair Michael Tuchin in Los Angeles. The next day, the group shelved a video ad it had already cut attacking his Democratic opponent, Abdul El-Sayed. AIPAC officials were, per Axios, angry. Direct talks between the two camps have since gone cold, and Republican donors with ties to both sides are trying to broker peace.

He didn't ask them to stop spending. He asked them to stop appearing.

This is the part that matters, and it's easy to miss.

Rogers' team did not tell AIPAC to keep its money. According to Axios, they urged the group "to get involved without putting the group's name front and center." The specific options they floated:

Direct AIPAC's donors to a pro-Rogers super PAC instead, so the checks arrive without the AIPAC label on the ad.
Route it through the joint fundraising group the Rogers campaign set up with the national Republican Party.
Hire AIPAC's political strategists to help guide Rogers' own effort.

Same money. Same strategists. Same message. Different name at the bottom of the screen.

That is not a candidate distancing himself from a donor over principle. That's a candidate who wants the spending and has concluded the disclosure is the liability. AIPAC's own answer was that this wouldn't work anyway — Rogers is strongly pro-Israel, they told his team, so El-Sayed would tie him to the group regardless.

Why now

AIPAC's super PAC, the United Democracy Project, spent more than $30 million trying to stop El-Sayed in Michigan's Democratic primary. He won anyway — and he won partly by running against that spending, using it to paint his opponent as bought. "AIPAC, if you're listening, come back and burn it again," he said before the primary.

We wrote about that $32 million bet when it looked like the group would simply roll its money into the general election on Rogers' behalf. AIPAC's super PAC ended July with nearly $60 million in the bank, and the group rarely spends at that scale in general elections at all.

Michigan has one of the largest Arab American populations in the country. A recent Fox News poll found 55% of Michigan voters oppose continued U.S. aid to Israel.

So Rogers' team ran the numbers and reached the obvious conclusion: in this state, in this race, having AIPAC's name on your ads costs more votes than the ads buy. Their proposed fix was not to turn down the help. It was to make the help harder for voters to see.

What voters are supposed to do with that

Campaign disclosure exists for exactly one reason: so that when an ad runs, you can find out who paid for it and decide how much that changes your reading of it.

Rogers' team looked at a group whose involvement they believed voters would hold against them, and went looking for a way to keep the involvement and lose the visibility. Whatever you think of AIPAC, that instinct should worry you, because it doesn't stop at one donor. Any interest a candidate thinks voters would punish him for taking money from is a candidate for the same treatment.

It also fits a pattern with this candidate. Rogers is the same man who called Trump's 2020 election lies the behavior of "Third World dictatorships" in a 2021 op-ed and now claims a van in Detroit stole his own election, without producing evidence. The public statement and the private position keep pointing in different directions.

Michigan votes November 3.

Source

Scoop: Mike Rogers-AIPAC rupture roils Michigan Senate race — Alex Isenstadt, Axios, August 22, 2026. Photo illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios; photo: Sarah Rice/Getty Images.

Three Out of Four Americans Oppose Data Centers Near Their Homes. These Eight Republicans Spent the Year Helping the Build-Out. Five Have Since Discovered Concerns.

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:59:56 +0000

Data centers are giant warehouses full of computers that run AI. They use enormous amounts of electricity and enormous amounts of water, and somebody has to pay to build the power plants and power lines that feed them.

That somebody is usually you, on your electric bill.

A year ago the country was split on them — 42% of Americans opposed one in their area and 43% supported it. A poll released on August 20 by Embold Research and published by Heatmap Pro found that 75% now oppose one, with 61% strongly opposed.

That is one of the fastest collapses in public support for anything in recent memory. And it has left a lot of Republicans holding a position they took when it was popular and profitable.

Here are eight of them. Every one has spent the past year or two helping the build-out along, taking money from the companies and utilities that profit from it, or both. Five have spent the past few weeks sounding a lot more worried about it. Three are still arguing the industry's side.

Jon Husted took $69,750 from the companies on the other side of the fight

The Ohio senator introduced something called the Ratepayer Protection Act in July and put out a press release about protecting your electric bill.

What wasn't in the press release: his campaign has taken about $69,750 from the very industry that bill is supposed to rein in — $16,000 from the corporate PACs of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle, $28,750 from employees and executives of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Oracle, and $25,000 from the PACs of American Electric Power, Duke Energy and Vistra. AEP's Ohio utility serves the central Ohio corridor where much of the state's data center construction has concentrated.

His own party has noticed. A leaked National Republican Senatorial Committee memo this month called data centers an "anchor" around his campaign, and asked the AI industry to please fix its image.

Mike Rogers (MI) called for a moratorium days after a reporter listed what he owns

Michigan's Republican Senate nominee endorsed Trump's national AI plan in March and told reporters he wanted to make permitting easier for AI companies.

Then The Lever went through his financial disclosure and found he holds $1.7 million to $2.6 million in companies positioned to profit from the AI build-out — including a Blackstone real estate trust that has been rapidly buying into data centers. Blackstone is helping build a $16 billion data center near Ann Arbor.

Days later, he announced he supports a one-year moratorium on new data centers in Michigan. His campaign would not say whether he intends to sell any of it.

Tom Barrett is running on a vote from 2015

Barrett's new ad has him at a bar warning about politicians "cozying up with Big Tech billionaires to force data centers on our communities."

The vote he cites as proof he stood up to his own party is from 2015, on a statewide sales tax break for data center equipment — eleven years before any of this. Since arriving in Congress he voted for the budget bill that handed six AI-linked companies $83 billion in tax breaks, voted for a version containing a ten-year ban on states regulating AI at all, and backed a bill weakening environmental reviews.

Elon Musk's super PAC spent more than $869,000 in his district. Peter Thiel and Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman have both given him the maximum.

Stacy Garrity accused someone else of a "massive flip-flop"

Pennsylvania's Republican candidate for governor says Josh Shapiro "was the biggest cheerleader of data center development in Pennsylvania until he wasn't." She called it "a huge, massive flip-flop, and nobody should be fooled."

Her own record, in order: she called Amazon's $20 billion Pennsylvania investment "great news," told a Pittsburgh radio show "we need to deregulate," complained that "Ohio is kicking our butt. They have over 192" data centers to Pennsylvania's 88 — and now wants a pause she struggles to define.

She isn't alone in her delegation. All ten of Pennsylvania's Republicans in the U.S. House voted for the ten-year ban on states writing their own AI rules.

Marsha Blackburn said data centers were "good and important." Then $100,000 arrived.

On June 13, Tennessee's Republican candidate for governor posted a video: "Let me be direct, data centers are going to be a good and important part of Tennessee's economic growth, but we've got to be thoughtful about their placement."

Weeks later her campaign reported more than $100,000 from employees of AI and data-center companies — including about $53,000 from Anthropic employees in a matter of days and more than $50,000 from Oracle employees, one of them a top executive. Many of the donors don't live in Tennessee. Neither of her two Republican primary opponents got a dollar of the Oracle or Anthropic money.

Her campaign's answer, when asked about the money, was that Blackburn "has led the fight to hold Big Tech accountable."

Tom Tiffany wants to end data center subsidies. The coalition's lobbyist gave him $5,000.

Wisconsin voters do not like data centers — 76% said in July that the costs outweigh the benefits, up from 55% last October.

So Tiffany, running for governor, has spent weeks clipping his opponent's data center comments. Meanwhile his campaign took $5,000 from Robert Marchant, the only registered lobbyist for the Wisconsin Data Center Coalition. Tiffany says he wants to ban data center non-disclosure agreements and end their sales tax break. The coalition his donor lobbies for fought both.

Mike Lawler's district blocked one. Nine days later he went on TV to blame the rules.

On July 8, the planning board in Orangetown — in Lawler's own Hudson Valley district — voted unanimously to require a full environmental impact study of a data center expansion sitting near Lake Tappan, a drinking water reservoir — which halts the project indefinitely. More than 100 residents turned out. At a rally outside the same town hall in May, their chant had been "we can't drink data."

Nine days later, Lawler went on Fox Business to argue that New York's new limits on data center permits hurt innovation and push the industry toward China. He had already voted for a bill that would have barred states from writing AI rules in the first place.

Cindy Hyde-Smith told federal regulators Mississippi is "at the forefront of safeguarding ratepayers"

She said it at a July oversight hearing on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Two months earlier, energy economists had reported the opposite: Mississippi's 2024 law curtailed its Public Service Commission's oversight, hid Entergy's contract with Amazon from the public, and let the utility start recovering data center costs through everyone's rates before the facilities even opened. Residential customers had already paid $38 million toward Amazon's data centers.

The phrase she used for what data centers pay — "their fair share" — is her utility donor's own branding. Entergy launched a "Fair Share Plus" pledge in March 2026.

The pattern

Not one of these eight was warning anybody about data centers a year ago. For five of them — Husted, Rogers, Barrett, Garrity and Tiffany — the concern arrived on the same schedule the polling did.

That timing is the whole story. A politician who opposed something before it was popular has a record. A politician who opposed it three weeks after 75% of the country did has a press release.

The other three did not reposition at all. Blackburn was still calling data centers "good and important" in June. Lawler went on national television to attack New York's new limits on them, nine days after a board in his own district stopped one. And Hyde-Smith told federal regulators her state was at the forefront of protecting ratepayers, two years after that state's own law curtailed the commission whose job that is.

And the alternative to repositioning is worse. When constituents organized against data centers, seven Republicans decided China might be behind it — and four of them asked the FBI and the Justice Department to investigate who was funding the opposition.

The people showing up at township meetings are not confused about who they are. They are the ones who read the electric bill.

In November, they're also the ones who fill out the ballot.

Tom Barrett's New Ad Says He 'Stood Up to My Own Party' Against Data Centers. The Vote Was From 2015, and It Had Nothing to Do With AI.

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:48:12 +0000

There is a new ad running in Michigan's 7th District. A man sits at a bar and talks about how "Michigan water, Michigan land, and Michigan's future belong to Michiganders."

"So while politicians are cozying up with Big Tech billionaires to force data centers on our communities," he says, "I stood up to my own party and voted against giving your tax dollars to data centers."

That is Tom Barrett, the Republican congressman who represents the district. If you didn't know the race, you couldn't tell from the ad which party he's in.

There's a line of small print on screen citing the vote. It's from 2015.

What the 2015 Vote Actually Was

Barrett was a state legislator then, and the bill he voted against was Senate Bill 616 — a sales tax exemption on data center equipment, anywhere in Michigan, running through 2035. The American Prospect describes it as incentives for one internet data center in Grand Rapids, which is the project that drove it. The Senate's own fiscal analysts expected at least 43 Michigan firms to qualify.

It had nothing to do with the AI build-out that is currently upsetting people in Michigan and across the country. In 2015 "AI" was mostly the title of a Steven Spielberg movie.

Eleven years later, Barrett is running that vote as his qualification on the issue dominating his district.

What He's Done Since

Here is Barrett's record on data centers in Congress — the part the ad doesn't mention.

He voted for the tax breaks. He voted for Trump's budget bill, like nearly every Republican did. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates that six companies tied to the AI build-out — Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Nvidia among them — collected $83 billion in tax breaks last year from the corporate tax provisions that bill extended. That's money those companies then had available to build data centers.

He voted for that same bill knowing what else it did to Michigan. Barrett was one of the members who voted for it, and 130,000 fewer Michiganders were enrolled in Obamacare coverage a year later.

He voted to stop states from regulating AI at all. An early version of the budget bill contained a ten-year ban on any state-level AI rules. Barrett voted for that version. A bipartisan group stripped the ban out before final passage. Had it survived, it would likely have wiped out state restrictions on data centers — the exact local control Barrett's ad now says he believes in.

He backed a bill to weaken environmental reviews. Barrett supported the SPEED Act, a permitting bill the House passed mostly along party lines last December. It shrinks federal environmental review, including for data centers.

He voted against limiting Flock cameras. In May, a bipartisan amendment would have barred anyone taking federal highway money from using automated license plate readers — the Flock cameras his Democratic opponent says are being rolled out across the district — for anything except toll collection. It failed 20–44 in the committee Barrett sits on. Barrett voted no.

Who Pays for His Campaigns

The ad warns about "politicians cozying up with Big Tech billionaires."

Elon Musk's super PAC spent more than $869,000 in Michigan's 7th District to get Barrett elected two years ago.
Peter Thiel gave Barrett the legal maximum this cycle.
Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone — which holds $150 billion in data center investments worldwide — gave Barrett the maximum in 2024 and again in 2026.
The corporate PACs of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle have all given to Barrett. Oracle is the company behind the contested data center project in Saline, Michigan.

"Tom Barrett wants to reinvent himself as a data center fighter, but his record says the opposite," said Ravi Mangla of the Working Families Party. "He voted to give data center developers billions in tax breaks and left Michiganders holding the bag."

Barrett's campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

This Is Becoming a Habit

Barrett's ads have a pattern of saying things his own record doesn't support.

His campaign store sold "Made in USA" T-shirts whose tags said Haiti. His campaign ran a full-page ad in a Black-owned newspaper telling readers to vote the day after Election Day. And he described the 2020 election as "an unknowable thing" fifteen months after his own party's investigation found nothing wrong with it.

Now an eleven-year-old vote, cast before anyone was building for AI, is doing the work of a data center platform.

The Bigger Picture

Barrett isn't alone, and that's the point.

The same week this ad went up, Axios reported that Republicans' Senate campaign arm privately warned AI companies that their data center push was costing Republicans votes and could become "a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle." In Ohio, that memo named Senator Jon Husted's data center record as the "anchor" around his campaign. In Michigan's Senate race, Mike Rogers called for a one-year moratorium days after a reporter published what he personally owns.

Barrett's answer is to talk about "nationalization" — the idea that Washington will force data centers on unwilling towns. As the Prospect notes, the only person in Washington trying to do that is Donald Trump, who has moved to exclude data centers from environmental review and to put them on public land. Trump has endorsed Barrett and held a rally in the district a few weeks ago. Data center protesters interrupted it.

His opponent, Will Lawrence, won the Democratic primary by double digits running against data centers, and has spent the campaign at town halls opposing specific projects in the district. A House Majority PAC poll released Thursday put Lawrence ahead 49–47, with Barrett at 35 percent favorable and 47 percent unfavorable.

Barrett is not leading this argument. He's chasing it.

Michiganders in the 7th District are worried about their water, their power bills and who gets to decide what goes up down the road. Barrett voted for the tax breaks, voted to take away their state's ability to write rules, backed weaker environmental reviews, and took the industry's money.

Then he made an ad about 2015.

Source

David Dayen, "MI-07: Tom Barrett Scrambles to Bury His Data Center Past", The American Prospect, August 20, 2026.

Mike Rogers Holds Up to $2.6 Million in Companies That Stand to Gain From the AI Build-Out. Days After That Came Out, He Called for a Moratorium.

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:46:59 +0000

For most of this year, Mike Rogers (MI) was for data centers.

In March, he endorsed Trump's national AI plan, which speeds up federal permitting for data centers. He told Michigan reporters he wanted to make permitting easier for AI companies. In July, he told Detroit's WXYZ that communities willing "to put up with one of these things" should get something out of it.

Then, on Thursday, August 20, he stood at a news conference and was asked about his policy on data centers.

"I think we need to take a pause, probably," he said.

He told the Detroit News he wants a one-year moratorium on new data centers in Michigan. Michigan, he said, "needs stronger guardrails to protect community control, prevent utility price hikes, protect our water and stop pay-to-play schemes."

That is a complete reversal. Politico called it "a massive shift" that "separates him from most of the Republican Party and even many Democrats."

Here is what happened in between.

Days Earlier, a Reporter Went Through His Financial Disclosure

The Lever, a reader-funded outlet that follows money in politics, published an investigation into what Rogers personally owns. What reporter Freddy Brewster found:

Between $1.7 million and $2.6 million in companies that stand to gain from tech-friendly policy and faster permitting for AI construction.
Between $100,001 and $250,000 in the Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust. Data centers are now 29 percent of that trust's holdings, up from 1 percent in 2020.
Blackstone is helping build a 1.6 million square-foot data center near Ann Arbor worth $16 billion.
Stock, held with his wife, in cybersecurity firms Qualys, NowSecure and Constella Intelligence, and in the quantum computing firm D-Wave — all companies building their businesses on AI.
Stock in the venture capital firm Forgepoint Capital, where Rogers is a board adviser and his wife sits on the advisory council. Forgepoint is invested in at least 49 companies that use AI. Rogers is invested in two Forgepoint funds.

Days after that story ran, Rogers wanted a pause.

His campaign would not say whether the new position means he is going to sell any of it.

The Donors, Too

Rogers has raised roughly $148,000 from people invested in AI and data centers.

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss gave $14,000 between them. Seven Blackstone executives gave $34,500. Paul Singer, who runs the private equity firm Elliott Investment Management — an investor in the data center company Equinix — gave $7,000. Executives at the venture firm Paradigm gave $17,615. Forgepoint's cofounder gave $6,950.

This is a familiar shape for Rogers. He has already been on this site for taking $95,000 from phone companies and then writing the bill that would have let them hand your data to the government, for voting against a gas price-gouging bill after nearly $700,000 from oil and gas, and for promising to root out "every waste, every fraud" while taking $234,000 from donors with fraud cases of their own.

The pattern is not that Rogers takes money. Everyone takes money. The pattern is that the policy keeps arriving after it.

Why Michiganders Care About This

Data centers are giant warehouses of computers that run AI. They need enormous amounts of electricity and enormous amounts of water, and somebody pays to build the power plants that feed them.

There are 79 data centers operating in Michigan right now, and 26 more proposed. Polling in May found 55 percent of Michiganders opposed building one within 25 miles of their home, though that opposition softened when the question added electricity-cost limits and other safeguards.

Water is the part that is specific to Michigan. Nearly half the state's residents rely on groundwater, and a lot of them draw it from private wells. A March report from the Alliance for the Great Lakes warned that if water-hungry industries pull out more groundwater than nature puts back, aquifers can be drained — and only 1 percent of the Great Lakes' water is naturally replaced each year.

A separate report in April found that data centers and their suppliers could push more forever chemicals — PFAS — into drinking water. The EPA has linked PFAS to cancer risk and pregnancy complications. Federal scientists found that up to 95 million Americans were already drinking groundwater with PFAS in it. Trump then cut 25 U.S. Geological Survey science centers in 2025 — the agency that did that measuring.

And communities often can't even find out what's coming. Andrea Densham of the Alliance for the Great Lakes told The Lever that developers show up "with an NDA in hand," requiring the county, the city and the water system to sign a silence agreement before work even begins.

The Politics Caught Up First

Rogers didn't discover any of this in August. The voters did, and they got there first.

On August 4, at least 14 Michigan candidates who campaigned against data centers won their primaries — including Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat Rogers faces in November, and William Lawrence, who won the Democratic primary in Michigan's 7th District.

The same week Rogers flipped, his own party's Senate campaign arm sent a memo to the tech industry warning that data centers are turning toxic in the midterms — a memo that named Ohio Senator Jon Husted's data center record as the "anchor" around his campaign.

El-Sayed's response to Rogers' conversion was a raised-eyebrow emoji.

What He Still Hasn't Answered

A moratorium is a good idea. That isn't the problem.

The problem is that Rogers is asking to be trusted to write the rules for an industry he is personally invested in — after spending the year helping it, and after changing his mind within days of that investment becoming public.

Three questions his campaign has not answered:

Will he sell the holdings? He hasn't said. Politico asked. The Lever asked. No response.
What changed his mind? In July he wanted communities to be able to say yes. In August he wants the state to say no for a year. Nothing about the water, the power bills or the NDAs was new in between. The Lever story was.
Does the moratorium apply to the $16 billion Ann Arbor project that Blackstone — whose real estate trust he holds a stake in — is helping build?

He also asked for guardrails to "stop pay-to-play schemes." He is the one holding $1.7 million to $2.6 million in the industry and $148,000 from its investors.

Michigan gets the electric bills, the groundwater risk and the NDAs. Rogers gets the portfolio. In November, Michiganders get one vote about which of those matters more.

Source

Freddy Brewster, "After data center investments revealed, Rogers backs statewide moratorium", The Lever / Michigan Advance, August 20, 2026. Photo by Ben Solis / Michigan Advance.

Timothy Cama, "Republican Mike Rogers backs Michigan data center moratorium", Politico, August 20, 2026.

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

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

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

We now know exactly what that cost.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Jordan — Ohio, −32%

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

Jim Jordan voted yes on the House bill.

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

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

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

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

Stephanie Bice — Oklahoma, −32%

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

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

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

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

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

Juan Ciscomani — Arizona, −30%

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

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

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

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

Sheri Biggs — South Carolina, −29%

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

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

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

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

Victoria Spartz — Indiana, −28%

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lisa McClain — Michigan, −27%

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

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

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

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

Michael Guest — Mississippi, −26%

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

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

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

Jason Smith — Missouri, −25%

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia Foxx — North Carolina, −21%

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roger Marshall — Kansas, −20%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ashley Moody

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

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

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

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

Gus Bilirakis

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

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

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

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

Texas — the thinnest safety net in America, cut anyway

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

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

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

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

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

Monica De La Cruz

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

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

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

Ronny Jackson

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

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

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

He voted yes.

The through-line

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike Rogers Took $95,000 From Phone Companies. Then He Wrote the Bill to Let Them Hand Your Data to the Government.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:25:33 +0000

There is a version of this story where a congressman writes a surveillance bill because he honestly believes it keeps us safe. Then there is the version where you look at who was paying him.

Mike Rogers (MI), the Republican running for Michigan's open U.S. Senate seat, collected nearly $95,000 from the phone and wireless industry while he was in Congress and while he has been running for the Senate, according to federal campaign finance records reviewed by the Michigan Advance. The money came from AT&T, Verizon, and CTIA — the trade group for the wireless companies.

During the same years, Rogers wrote and pushed a bill that would have let those exact companies hand your private information to the federal government without a warrant. After he left Congress, one of them hired him.

The money

The Advance went through two decades of Federal Election Commission filings, covering 2006 through 2025. It found at least 21 separate contributions to Rogers for Congress, Rogers for Senate, and his own leadership PAC, Securing America's Future.

AT&T — $56,000
Verizon — $28,500, across 17 contributions between 2007 and 2014
CTIA, the wireless trade association — $10,000, starting in 2008

That's the industry. Now here's what he did for it.

The bill

As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rogers introduced the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act in November 2011. Everyone called it CISPA.

The bill would have let phone companies and internet providers legally hand over large amounts of private customer data — including information that identifies you personally — to federal agencies like the National Security Agency. No judge had to sign off. And the companies got broad protection from being sued for doing it.

Civil liberties groups hated it. So did consumer groups. So did a number of conservative and libertarian organizations, who argued the bill's language was so vague that the government could vacuum up enormous amounts of personal information without a warrant.

The phone companies loved it. AT&T publicly backed the bill in a November 2011 statement posted by Rogers' committee, saying it looked forward to "continuing to work with Chairman Rogers." By that November, AT&T had already given Rogers $27,000. Verizon, which lobbied for the bill alongside AT&T, had given him $23,000 by the time he reintroduced it in 2013.

CISPA passed the House and died in the Senate. Rogers brought it back in 2013. It cleared the House a second time that April and stalled again. When he reintroduced it, CTIA and US Telecom supplied supportive quotes for his own press releases. CTIA had given him $6,000 by then.

Rogers also cosponsored two resolutions, in 2010 and 2011, to stop the Federal Communications Commission from regulating broadband — the rules that keep internet providers from deciding which websites load fast and which load slow.

What he said while he was doing it

Rogers didn't just wave off the privacy objections. He made an argument that is genuinely hard to read twice.

"You can't have your privacy violated if you don't know your privacy is violated."

That was Rogers in 2013, defending warrantless government surveillance of Americans.

The same year, pushing for CISPA, he told the public the NSA wasn't watching Americans online at all:

"Our NSA is not monitoring the Internet here in the United States. I can guarantee you that."

He could not guarantee that. Two years later, The New York Times and ProPublica reported, using documents from Edward Snowden, that the NSA's ability to monitor internet traffic rested on a decades-long partnership with a single company — AT&T. The agency's files gave the program the codename "Fairview," dated it to 1985, and described AT&T's "extreme willingness to help." AT&T had installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its internet hubs on U.S. soil, far more than Verizon.

The company Rogers was legislating for, and taking money from, was the company doing the thing he guaranteed wasn't happening.

Then he went to work for them

Rogers left Congress in 2015. In 2016 — one year later — AT&T hired him as its chief security adviser, a job the Detroit News confirmed in 2024 while reporting on his industry ties. He advised the company on the same issues that had come before his committee.

That was one of several industry jobs. From 2018 to 2024 he sat on the advisory board of Telefónica, a giant international phone company. One of its subsidiaries operates in Venezuela — and Telefónica's own 2022 transparency report disclosed that it had intercepted the private communications of large numbers of its Venezuelan customers at the request of the authoritarian government of Nicolás Maduro.

Business Insider reported in 2024 that Rogers' post-Congress work in telecom and cybersecurity earned him $2 million in income, and that his assets had grown to $17.5 million.

The revolving door didn't stop the checks, either. When Rogers ran for Senate in 2024 and lost, AT&T's PAC gave him $10,000. In his current race, AT&T's corporate PAC has given him another $5,000.

This is the pattern, not the exception

If this were the only industry that had paid Rogers and then gotten what it wanted, you could call it a coincidence. It isn't.

We've already documented that Rogers voted against a bill to stop gas price gouging after taking nearly $700,000 from oil and gas. We've documented that he promises to root out "every waste, every fraud" while taking $234,000 from donors with fraud cases of their own. His own report card lays out three decades of banking money and a stated desire to sit on the committee that regulates banks.

His campaign's answer to all of this is that the money follows the man, not the other way around. Spokesperson Alyssa Brouillet told the Advance that Rogers "has protected the national security interests of the United States his entire career, and nothing is going to change that."

His opponent's campaign puts the career total at $5.2 million in corporate PAC money.

What it means for Michigan

A U.S. senator votes on who gets to see your text messages, your emails, and your browsing history. They vote on whether the companies that carry those messages can be sued when they hand them over. They vote on whether your internet provider gets to throttle the websites it doesn't like.

Rogers has a record on every one of those questions. He wrote the bill to make the handover legal. He cosponsored the resolutions to strip the FCC of its authority. He told the public the surveillance wasn't happening while the company paying him was helping run it. And when he left office, that company put him on the payroll.

Michigan deserves a senator who works for the people whose data is being handed over — not for the companies handing it over.

Source

Telecom industry gave Mike Rogers nearly $100K while he pushed to deepen government data sharing — Ben Solis, Michigan Advance, August 19, 2026. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is actually being taken away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And TSA screeners got the same treatment

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

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

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

The House had a bill to end it permanently

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

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

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

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

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

The 20 Republicans who voted yes

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

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

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

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

The 195 who voted no

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

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

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

Colorado — Lauren Boebert, Jeff Crank, Jeff Hurd

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

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

Idaho — Russ Fulcher, Mike Simpson

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mary Miller

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

Iowa — Ashley Hinson

Kansas — Ron Estes, Tracey Mann, Derek Schmidt

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

Minnesota — Tom Emmer, Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach

Mississippi — Mike Ezell, Michael Guest, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Mike Flood, Adrian Smith

New York — Nick Langworthy, Claudia Tenney

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Mike Kennedy, Celeste Maloy, Blake Moore

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

The Senate has done nothing for eight months

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

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

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

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

This is not a fringe position they're protecting

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

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

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

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

We deserve better.

How they voted

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two of them were sworn in before Reagan was inaugurated

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

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

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

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

Here is the part that should end the argument.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why they don't leave: eleven of thirteen gavels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ones who won't even stand in a room

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

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

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

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

And then there's Grassley

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

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

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

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

This was supposed to be a job you leave

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

Michigan Lost 130,000 People From Obamacare in One Year. Barrett, Huizenga and James Voted Against Bringing It Back.

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:36:16 +0000

In February 2025, about 487,000 Michiganders had health coverage through the Affordable Care Act marketplace. One year later, that number was 357,000.

That is 130,000 people gone — a 27% drop in twelve months, according to federal data reported by Bridge Michigan. Roughly one in four people who had that coverage no longer does.

Michigan didn't do this to itself. Three of the people who did it represent Michigan in Congress: Tom Barrett, Bill Huizenga and John James.

What actually happened

For nearly five years, from March 2021 on, extra pandemic-era premium tax credits made marketplace insurance affordable. They expired at the end of 2025. Congress could have extended them, and did not. The House did vote on a three-year extension on January 8, 2026, and passed it 230 to 196 — with Barrett, Huizenga and James all voting no. The Senate has never taken it up.

The effect was immediate and entirely predictable. Michigan marketplace plans went up about 20% in 2026. When the price of something jumps 20% overnight and the help paying for it disappears, people drop it.

Dr. Mark Fendrick of the University of Michigan put it as plainly as it can be put:

"If you make people pay more for something, they buy less of it."

Nationally, nearly 3 million Americans lost or dropped marketplace coverage. Michigan's 27% loss puts it near the top of the list.

We've written this story before, in a different state. Ohio lost a bigger share of its marketplace coverage than any state in the country — nearly a third of everyone who had it — for exactly the same reason. This is not a Michigan problem or an Ohio problem. It is a policy, and it was chosen.

The vote

On July 3, 2025, the House passed H.R. 1 — the bill Republicans call the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act" — by 218 to 214.

Look up that roll call and you will find:

Tom Barrett — Aye
Bill Huizenga — Aye
John James — Aye

Two votes the other way and it is a 216-216 tie, which fails. Michigan supplied three of the votes it needed.

That law is the reason the next round of losses is already scheduled. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities tracks it month by month, and the picture is not ambiguous: 4.8 million fewer people had Medicaid in April 2026 than in April 2025.

And that is before the hard part starts.

What's coming in 2027

CBPP's tracker lays out the schedule. From the law Barrett, Huizenga and James voted for:

2027 is when the most significant Medicaid coverage losses begin — that's when more frequent, more burdensome eligibility renewals kick in, along with a work requirement.
October 2026 is when the law further narrows immigration-related eligibility, taking coverage from more people who are here lawfully.
2028 brings another round of Medicaid cuts.

The Congressional Budget Office projects it will take several years for the full effect to land. In other words: what Michigan has lost so far is the beginning, not the end.

What it looks like from a clinic

Michigan Families for Fair Care, which is calling on all three to reverse the cuts, collected an account from a substance-abuse counselor in Huizenga's 4th District named Jeannette:

"My patients depend on Medicaid to afford the treatment they need, and these new rules that will kick people off of Medicaid are just cruel. Patients struggling with addiction used to be able to rely on Medicaid or the Affordable Care Act, but my Congressman Bill Huizenga took both of those options away."

That is the whole mechanism in two sentences. Someone in treatment for addiction had two ways to pay for it. Both were narrowed by the same two votes, cast by the same person.

The thing to hold onto

A congressman can say a lot of things about health care. What is on the record is how they voted, and what happened after.

Barrett, Huizenga and James voted yes on July 3, 2025. Michigan then lost 130,000 people off its marketplace coverage in a year, premiums rose about 20%, and the Medicaid provisions that do the heavier damage don't even take effect until next year.

None of them has moved to undo it.

Source

Michigan Families for Fair Care: "Medicaid and ACA Enrollment Are Dropping After Barrett, Huizenga, and James Backed Health Care Cuts." Enrollment figures from Eli Newman's July 13, 2026 reporting for Bridge Michigan, drawn from CMS data. Photo: AP Photo/Patrick Sison, via Bridge Michigan.

Republicans Are Coming for IVF and Surrogacy. Twenty-Five of the Ones We Track Signed the Bill.

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:31:40 +0000

For years, the political line on in vitro fertilization was simple. Everybody said they were for it. It is one of the most popular things in American medicine — this March, the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology reported that for the first time, more than 100,000 babies were born in a single year with the help of IVF. Even Donald Trump has talked about making it cheaper.

That line is breaking. And you can watch it break in two places at once: in state Republican party platforms, and in a bill sitting in Congress right now with a long list of Republican names on it.

What the state parties wrote down

In June, the Texas Republican Party adopted a 2026 platform that opposes public funding for IVF and calls for regulating the whole assisted-reproduction industry, including mandatory reporting on how embryos are created and stored. One section says the Texas Legislature must "protect fetal life from destructive practices, such as IVF and commercial surrogacy."

Another section goes after surrogacy directly:

"We support a ban on contract surrogacy involving foreign nationals, which may involve a form of trafficking and may lead to claims of citizenship. We also support prohibiting third-party egg and sperm donations and the commercialization of human reproduction in Texas; and support policies that promote the welfare of children, medical transparency, and the protection of biological parents."

The Idaho Republican Party added language to its own 2026 platform opposing "the destruction of human embryos." Republicans in Missouri, North Carolina and Oklahoma adopted similar language in 2024 and 2025. That is five states in two years.

Party platforms are not law. But they tell you where a party is heading. As Sean Tipton of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine put it to Stateline, "Party platforms are mostly about intraparty politics and jockeying for position, but at the same time, you have to pay attention, because that symbolism matters."

The bill below is what happens when the symbolism grows teeth.

The SAFE KIDS Act

On November 4, 2025, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida introduced S. 3101, the SAFE KIDS Act. On January 13, 2026, Rep. Blake Moore of Utah introduced the House version, H.R. 7040.

Here is what it does, in the sponsors' own words: it "invalidates commercial surrogacy agreements with citizens of foreign adversary countries, such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, and creates a misdemeanor for brokers — not surrogates — who knowingly facilitate these agreements."

Read that again. A surrogacy contract — the document that protects the surrogate, the intended parents, and the child — becomes legally void if one of the parties holds the wrong passport. The people who signed it in good faith are left with nothing to enforce.

The bill is pitched almost entirely as a national security measure. John Moolenaar of Michigan, who chairs the House Select Committee on China, said Chinese nationals "are exploiting gaps in US law to buy children from America," and that "this legislation will ensure accountability and protect innocent children from nationals of foreign adversary countries who want to buy American babies."

Blake Moore said the "espionage risks that could emerge from China and Russia bringing children with U.S. passports into their countries should be further cause for alarm."

Rich McCormick of Georgia was blunter about which door this actually opens:

"The SAFE KIDS Act closes a dangerous loophole that allows foreign adversaries to exploit our 14th Amendment through surrogate pregnancies. This bill protects vulnerable women and children while preventing hostile regimes from abusing U.S. birthright citizenship."

That is the tell. The 14th Amendment "loophole" McCormick is describing is birthright citizenship — the rule that people born here are citizens, in place since 1868. The Supreme Court upheld it on June 30, 2026, rejecting Trump's order trying to end it. Republicans have been hunting for a way around that ruling ever since, and subpoenaing maternity clinics while they look. Surrogacy is the newest angle of attack.

Robert Aderholt of Alabama, Jen Kiggans of Virginia, Nathaniel Moran of Texas, Mike Kennedy of Utah, Addison McDowell of North Carolina, John McGuire of Virginia and Jefferson Shreve of Indiana all supplied supporting statements for the same announcement.

Who signed it

These are the cosponsors who have report cards on this site. In the House, alongside Moore and Moolenaar:

Robert Aderholt
Jen Kiggans
Nathaniel Moran
Paul Gosar
Diana Harshbarger
Rich McCormick
Michael Rulli
Addison McDowell
Mike Kennedy
John McGuire
Pete Sessions
Jefferson Shreve
John Rose
Ben Cline
Harriet Hageman
Andy Harris
Chuck Fleischmann
Sheri Biggs

And in the Senate, on Rick Scott's version: Dan Sullivan, Pete Ricketts, Ashley Moody, Marsha Blackburn and Mike Rounds.

Neither bill has passed. The Senate version was referred to the Judiciary Committee the day it was introduced and has not moved since. But 25 sitting members of Congress decided this was worth attaching their name to.

The part they don't put in the press release

Here is the thing about the "we support IVF, we just want guardrails" position: four of the senators on that list already had a chance to vote on protecting IVF, and did not take it.

On September 17, 2024, the Senate voted on whether to take up the Right to IVF Act, which would have written a federal right to fertility treatment into law. Sen. Tammy Duckworth rewrote an earlier version of it after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in February 2024 that discarded embryos were children under state law — a ruling that prompted doctors in that state to halt IVF procedures.

The motion needed 60 votes to advance and failed 51–44. Two Republicans voted to advance it: Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. Sen. John Thune told reporters that week, "Republicans support IVF full stop," and called the vote an attempt "to create a political issue where there isn't one."

The roll call says otherwise. Dan Sullivan voted no. Marsha Blackburn voted no. Pete Ricketts voted no. Mike Rounds did not vote at all.

Rick Scott — who would introduce the surrogacy bill fourteen months later — spent that week floating his own IVF proposal to expand health savings accounts, and noted that his own daughter was undergoing IVF. Duckworth's answer to him at the time reads differently now: "you can't support a fertilized egg being a human being — this personhood stuff which Rick Scott has said he supported — and also say you support IVF. The two are contradictory."

This is the same pattern at the state level. In Nevada, a bill writing a right to IVF into state law passed the state Senate with Republican votes — and Joe Lombardo vetoed it anyway, while saying he supports making IVF more accessible.

Saying you support IVF costs nothing. Voting for it costs something.

Why surrogacy, and why now

The people pushing this are not shy about the reasoning. Emma Waters, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation — the group behind Project 2025 — calls surrogacy "baby selling," and says people from countries hostile to the U.S. can hire a surrogate to obtain citizenship. She has said that by age 35, a surrogate-born child from China could run for president.

Waters also thinks couples turn to IVF too early without exploring the underlying causes of infertility, an idea tied to a conservative philosophy called restorative reproductive medicine that also discourages birth control. In a blog post last month, she said that over the past six months she has received more requests for help drafting surrogacy legislation than on any other topic.

Tipton, of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, thinks the appeal is broader than national security. "For groups like Heritage, (surrogacy) is a nice synergy that allows them to be xenophobic, homophobic and anti-choice all at once," he said.

There is a reason he says homophobic. Many same-sex couples build their families through IVF and surrogacy. There is no other route.

The numbers do not support a crisis. Babies born through surrogacy made up about 14 out of every 100,000 deliveries between 2017 and 2020, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. A study found about 32% of surrogate pregnancies between 2014 and 2020 were for international couples, and about 41% of those were from China — where surrogacy is illegal, which is why people leave.

Meanwhile, as of June, lawmakers in at least 17 states had introduced 36 bills this year to give embryos or fetuses legal personhood, according to a Guttmacher Institute count reported by Stateline. Those are the bills that actually threaten IVF, because a clinic that discards an embryo is suddenly exposed. Opponents beat them back by arguing that they might limit IVF — which remains broadly popular.

What this costs real people

Ashley Kirk-Robertson, an Idaho woman who has carried four surrogate pregnancies, described what these arrangements actually look like. Her first was for a single father from Spain, where surrogacy is illegal. The second was for a husband and wife from Israel. The third was for a same-sex couple from Israel. The fourth was for Brooke Green, a Democratic Idaho state representative who could not carry a second child because she was diagnosed with a hormone-fueled breast cancer weeks before her last embryo was to be implanted.

"They truly are just here because coming here for the surrogacy is cheaper or because in their country it's not allowed," Kirk-Robertson said.

None of Kirk-Robertson's four contracts would be touched by the SAFE KIDS Act. It reaches only prospective parents who are citizens or permanent residents of the four countries the defense code calls foreign entities of concern — North Korea, China, Russia and Iran — and Spain and Israel are not among them. But look at where the bill draws its line. Not at whether anyone was harmed. At a passport.

Twenty-five Republicans on this site's report cards signed their names to that.

Source

Kelcie Moseley-Morris, Stateline: "More GOP party platforms include anti-IVF language. Is surrogacy next?" Cosponsor lists from congress.gov; sponsor statements from Rep. Blake Moore's office.