MAGA Report Cards — Minnesota

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

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

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

Not immigration money. Housing money.

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

Any grant. All of them.

What that money actually pays for

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

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

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

How wide the net is

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

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

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

The Montana communities in the crosshairs

Downing has said what he thinks:

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

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

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

Downing did not respond.

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

Nineteen Republicans on this site signed it

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

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

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

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

The part nobody is saying out loud

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

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

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

What the bill does

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

Nobody is doing the thing the bill bans

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

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

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

This is control, not freedom

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

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

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

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

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

Two Republicans said no

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

The bill now goes to the Senate.

The choice they made

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

Every Republican we track who voted yes

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

Iowa: Ashley Hinson, Zach Nunn

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

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

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the SAVE America Act would actually do to voters

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

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

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

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

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

The emergency the resolution describes

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

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

It cites a federal investigation that charged four people.

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

What was actually in front of them that week

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

Outside the chamber:

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

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

In their own words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 189 who voted yes

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

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho — Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas — Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi — Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey — Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

The number nine is not in the Constitution

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

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

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

What they were actually voting on

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

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

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

The timing

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

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

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

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

Who pushed it

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who voted to freeze the Court

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey: Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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.

Brad Finstad Hasn't Held a Town Hall in His District. Talking to Him at the Mankato Golf Club Started at $250.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:47:54 +0000

Southern Minnesota votes on November 3. Brad Finstad is asking for a third full term representing the 1st District — Worthington to Winona, 21 counties — and he has spent the term declining to stand in a room with the people who live there and take their questions.

He has not stopped meeting people. He has been quite busy. It just costs money.

Two evenings in August

On Tuesday, August 18, 2026, the Finstad Victory Committee held an evening reception for the congressman at the Mankato Golf Club, 100 Augusta Drive, from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. The invitation — one of two published by MeidasTouch — lists what a conversation costs:

Chairman: $10,000
Champion: $5,000
Sponsor: $3,500
Host: $1,000
Supporter: $500
Friend: $250

Under his name, the invitation lists the reason to buy in: "Agriculture, Armed Services, Small Business Committees." Not his views. His committee seats — the places where the decisions get made.

That same Tuesday evening, from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m., his opponent Jake Johnson held a Nicollet County town hall at the Courtland Community Center. The flyer's promise, in block letters: "IN-PERSON. UNFILTERED. OPEN TO EVERYONE." Admission was nothing.

Six days later, on Monday, August 24, Finstad was at the Take 16 Event Center in Luverne for another reception, 4:30 to 6:30 p.m., cash bar and hors d'oeuvres. Suggested minimum contribution: $250. Maximum: $7,000 per person, $10,000 per PAC. Checks to "Finstad for Congress."

MeidasTouch counted at least ten such fundraisers in Minnesota and Washington over six months, against zero town halls in the district. We can't independently verify the full count — but the invitations themselves are unambiguous, and the town hall number is confirmed by his own local press coverage below.

"Come with their pitchfork"

Asked by KAAL why he won't hold a town hall, Finstad said such events let agitators "come with their pitchfork and scream and have a hissy fit in front of the cameras to get their viral time that they desperately want."

The Post Bulletin asked him about that line on May 27, 2026. He did not walk it back.

"I don't regret saying it at all."

He said the people asking for a town hall don't want a conversation. They want to "interrupt and disrupt." He offered a story as proof: a woman approached him at a parade and asked him to hold a town hall.

"And I said that's great, but what do you want to talk about?"

When she repeated the request, he said he told her, "But I'm here with you right now. What's the conversation you'd like to have," and, in his telling, "she didn't have anything."

That is the case for the defense. A constituent asked her congressman for the one format where she could ask a question in front of her neighbors, and he treated the request itself as evidence she had nothing to say. Nobody at the Mankato Golf Club had to pass that test. They had to pay $250.

What he does instead

Finstad's substitute for a town hall is the tele-town hall — a conference call. In 2025 he held four of them, on February 27, March 26, April 30 and June 25, according to KTTC's count.

Two details about those calls come from his own press office:

As many as 5,000 randomly selected residents are dialed in for each one.
Dial-ins are not allowed. You cannot call in to join. His office says this keeps non-constituents out.

So the participants are chosen by his operation, and nobody who wasn't chosen can get on. Finstad's defense of that arrangement:

"We have reached thousands of people in the tele-town halls and there has been multiple opportunities for people to ask questions. We've answered all the questions all around the things we've talked about today. We're not screening out the tough questions; we are talking about the issues that people that hop onto those calls want to talk about. And so it's been productive."

KTTC pointed out that other Republicans do it the old way — Iowa's Ashley Hinson took an hour of questions from a crowd of about 150 in Mason City in late April 2025, cheers and jeers both. Asked whether colleagues doing that made his position harder to sell, Finstad said:

"No, I'm just focused on the way that I know best to do it in the environment that we're in. And I know that there is way more productive conversations that we can have if we sit around a table and treat each other like human beings, in the most southern Minnesota way possible."

Sitting around a table and treating each other like human beings is, in fact, what was on offer at the Mankato Golf Club. The table cost between $250 and $10,000.

Asked in August 2025 whether he would hold any in-person town halls before the 2026 election, he gave no direct answer. A year later, he still hasn't held one.

He is not too busy

The Post Bulletin followed him through a full district day in Rochester on May 27, 2026. It was packed: a groundbreaking at Rochester International Airport with Senators Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, a working lunch with Minnesota Farm Bureau leaders, a roundabout dedication, a newspaper interview, and a meeting with a high school senior he had nominated to the Air Force Academy.

Back-to-back-to-back. None of it a town hall.

The schedule is the point. This is not a member who can't get to the district or can't find an hour. It is a member whose calendar has room for everything except the hour where anyone can stand up.

His opponent is doing the thing he won't

On June 11, 2026, Johnson announced a county-by-county town hall tour of all 21 counties in the district, running from June 20 through the end of August — open to the public, questions taken from the audience, not pre-screened.

Johnson's framing: voters "want an opportunity to speak with their representative," and "It's something that they just do not feel like they're getting with Congressman Finstad." He added: "We shouldn't just meet with the people who we're comfortable with, who kind of say the things that we want them to say."

The last stop on that tour, in Dodge County, is the day after this post. Finstad's count of open, in-person town halls this term remains zero.

The pattern is the party's, not just his

Finstad's position tracks a national instruction. After Republican members were shouted down at events in early 2025, national Republican Party leaders urged GOP lawmakers to skip in-person town halls altogether. Finstad is one of many who took the advice — Roger Marshall, who once bragged about holding 105 town halls, went more than 500 days without an open one, and Jeff Hurd left about 400 constituents waiting in a Grand Junction church, then called it "political theater".

The cost is not abstract. A town hall is where a farmer gets to ask, on the record and in front of the local paper, why the tariffs their congressman called a "short term" problem from April 2025 to February 2026 are still here. A phone call with 5,000 people chosen by the congressman's office is not that, and a $250 reception at a golf club is not that either.

What the record shows

Brad Finstad has not held an open, in-person town hall in Minnesota's 1st District, and has not committed to one before the November 3 election. On the evening of August 18 he attended a reception in his honor at the Mankato Golf Club where the suggested contributions ran from $250 to $10,000 and the draw advertised on the invitation was his committee assignments; his opponent held a free town hall open to anyone that same evening in Courtland. Six days later Finstad was at another $250-minimum reception in Luverne. Asked why he won't take unscreened questions, he said the people requesting a town hall want to "have a hissy fit," and told a reporter in May 2026 that he does not regret saying it.

Source

Fundraiser invitations published by Troy Matthews, Brad Finstad Holds 10+ Fundraisers But Zero Town Halls in Six Months, MeidasTouch, August 28, 2026. Finstad's quotes and district schedule from Brian Todd, No town hall, but U.S. Rep. Brad Finstad says he's been productive in office, Post Bulletin, June 2, 2026 (photo: Maya Giron / Post Bulletin), and Brock Bergey, DIGGING DEEPER: Rep. Finstad defends position on town halls, KTTC, August 13, 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brad Finstad chairs the subcommittee that writes SNAP policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't believe in welfare."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eight weeks. That is the gap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Cole called it "an extraordinary piece of legislation"

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

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

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

Extraordinary is one word for it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Sources

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

The Order Protecting the Boundary Waters Expires 90 Days After Walz Leaves Office. Lisa Demuth Wants the Copper Mine.

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 07:06:31 +0000

On Tuesday, August 18, Governor Tim Walz signed an executive order aimed at blocking a copper-nickel mine upstream from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

There's a catch written into it. The order expires 90 days after Walz leaves office.

Which means the person who really decides whether the Boundary Waters gets a sulfide-ore mine in its watershed is whoever wins the governor's race this November.

One of the two major-party nominees is Lisa Demuth. The Star Tribune summed up her position in six words: "Pro-mining, all mining, including Twin Metals."

What's actually at stake

The Boundary Waters is a million acres of lakes and forest in northern Minnesota. People take their kids there. It is one of the most visited wilderness areas in the country, and the tourism and recreation economy built around it depends on one thing: the water staying clean.

Twin Metals wants to put a copper-nickel mine outside the wilderness but upstream from it. That word does all the work. Water runs downhill. Anything that leaks out of that site runs into the Boundary Waters.

This is sulfide-ore mining, which Minnesota has never done. It's a type with a long, documented record of leaving polluted water behind. Conservation groups warn a failure would flow downstream and permanently contaminate the wilderness.

And the company that would cash in is not a Minnesota company. Twin Metals is a subsidiary of Antofagasta, a Chilean mining conglomerate.

How the protection got knocked down in the first place

In 2023, the federal government pulled about 225,504 acres of Superior National Forest — the land that drains straight into the Boundary Waters — off the table for mining leases for 20 years.

Minnesota Congressman Pete Stauber wrote a resolution to erase that. It passed the Senate 50-49 in April, Trump signed it on April 27, and the 20-year protection was gone. Every Senate Democrat, including Amy Klobuchar, voted against lifting it.

That vote is what pushed conservation groups to ask Walz for a state-level order. Which is what he signed Tuesday. Which is what expires 90 days into the next governor's term.

So the whole thing now rests on one election.

What Demuth says

Demuth's public statement about the order didn't discuss the specifics of Twin Metals' proposal. It went after the politics:

"Tim Walz, Amy Klobuchar and Democrats in the legislature continue their hostility toward Minnesota mining, taking job growth opportunities off the table before they can even go through the regulatory review process."

She has said before that she supports the Twin Metals project specifically.

In her own words to reporters this week, on why the review should go ahead:

"It provides jobs. It provides minerals and I think we can look better at Minnesota and how we can help with those critical minerals rather than just shutting down the process."

And then the claim worth writing down:

"I believe that we can do the mining safely in Minnesota, safer than any other place in the country if not the world for those critical minerals that we absolutely need and that review process should be allowed to go forward."

Safer than any other place in the country. If not the world.

That is a big promise about a kind of mining Minnesota has never done once, on a site where the water runs into a national wilderness. It is offered as a belief — "I believe that we can" — not as evidence.

The jobs argument cuts both ways

Demuth frames this as jobs versus environmentalists. That framing skips something.

The Boundary Waters already supports jobs. Outfitters, guides, lodges, resorts, restaurants, gear shops — a whole regional economy that exists because people come from all over the country to paddle clean water. Those jobs are here now, and they are the ones that disappear if the water goes bad.

The trade isn't jobs versus no jobs. It's a Chilean conglomerate's mine versus the tourism economy Minnesotans already built, with the wilderness itself as the collateral.

Demuth's statement said mining can be approved while protecting "our beloved outdoors." She did not say how, and she did not address what Twin Metals specifically would put in the watershed.

The pattern

This is a candidate who has been comfortable claiming more than the record supports before.

She took credit for a viral daycare video — and the YouTuber who made it said he had no idea who she was. She had herself elected Speaker of the Minnesota House, and ten days later the state Supreme Court ruled it never legally happened. And a billionaire who funds abortion bans is bankrolling her run for governor.

Now she is telling Minnesotans that a copper-nickel mine upstream from the Boundary Waters can be done more safely than anywhere on earth.

Voters get to decide whether they believe that, because the order protecting the place runs out 90 days after the next governor is sworn in. There is no do-over on a poisoned watershed.

Sources

Dave Orrick, "Klobuchar vs. Demuth: Where they stand on mining near the Boundary Waters", The Minnesota Star Tribune, August 18, 2026.

"Republican Demuth Opposes Governor's Executive Order Protecting BWCAW from Mining", Learfield / willmarradio.com, August 19, 2026.

The Republicans With the Worst Records on Workers and Unions

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:01:46 +0000

On Monday, five of the biggest unions in Wisconsin — teachers, state workers, service workers, Teamsters — asked the state Supreme Court to reinstate a ruling that Act 10 is unconstitutional.

Act 10 is the 2011 Wisconsin law that stripped collective bargaining rights from most public employees. Fifteen years later, it is still in court.

That's a useful reminder of something worth saying plainly: taking away a worker's right to bargain is not a one-news-cycle event. It's a thing that shapes paychecks for a generation, and the people who did it usually get promoted.

Here is a look at Republicans in Congress with the worst records on workers — including the man who ran Act 10 through the Wisconsin Senate.

Scott Fitzgerald wrote the playbook

Scott Fitzgerald was Wisconsin's Senate Majority Leader when Act 10 passed. His brother Jeff was Assembly Speaker. Between them, the Fitzgerald brothers controlled both chambers of the legislature that sent the bill to Scott Walker's desk.

It is still the most consequential thing he has ever done.

And the reason Act 10 is still in court traces to which workers the law let off the hook. It exempted certain public safety employees — including the State Patrol. Three days before the bill was introduced, the Walker administration had named Stephen Fitzgerald — Scott's father — superintendent of that same State Patrol.

The Wisconsin State Journal's editorial board called the appointment out at the time under the headline "Fitzgerald pick to head State Patrol smacks of favoritism." We laid out the full timeline here.

The dissenting appeals judge in this case made the point sharper: the unions that kept their bargaining rights under Act 10 had backed Walker's election months earlier. Your rights depended on which side you'd been on.

Glenn Grothman called the overnight protesters "slobs"

When tens of thousands of Wisconsinites filled the Capitol to protest Act 10, then-state senator Glenn Grothman called the ones staying overnight "a bunch of slobs taking up the building" — "college students who are having a fun party."

That was not a one-off mood. It's a worldview, and he's kept at it in Congress.

He asked Trump to cut 100,000 to 200,000 federal jobs, explaining that "a lot of these people are not working very hard at all". And he wrote a bill making it easier to pay workers with disabilities a median of $3.46 an hour — stripping out 2014 protections that keep teenagers with disabilities from being funneled straight into subminimum-wage jobs.

Pete Stauber wrote a union bill, then voted twice to kill it

This one is in a category of its own, because Pete Stauber didn't just vote wrong. He wrote the bill.

In September 2025 he co-authored the Faster Labor Contracts Act with a New Jersey Democrat. It addresses a real problem: workers vote to unionize, and the employer simply runs out the clock instead of bargaining. Stauber's own release said it takes an average of 458 days to reach a first contract.

He sold it on his biography: "As a former police office who organized my union, I've seen firsthand how unfair and frustrating this process can be for some." The Teamsters' general president praised him. Nearly 20 national unions endorsed it.

Then, on June 9, 2026, the bill needed procedural votes to actually reach the floor.

He voted no. Twice. On his own bill.

There is a way to tell whether a politician wants a bill to pass, and it isn't the press release at the Teamsters hall.

Byron Donalds: no water, no shade, no break

OSHA proposed the first federal rule ever written to protect workers from extreme heat. When the temperature passes 80 degrees, employers would have to provide rest breaks, shade, and clean drinking water.

That's the whole rule. Water, shade, and a break.

Byron Donalds — running to be Florida's next governor, in a state where people roof houses and pick crops in July — is one of 60 Republicans co-sponsoring a bill to block it, and to bar OSHA from ever issuing anything "substantially similar."

Rich McCormick wants you fired for using the Fifth Amendment

Rich McCormick revived a bill that would bar people from federal employment if they decline to answer certain questions from members of Congress, and let lawmakers refer them to the Justice Department for prosecution.

His pitch: "If you don't want to answer questions about what you did wrong, we should be able to fire you."

The Fifth Amendment is not a loophole. The Supreme Court settled in 1968 that a public employee cannot be fired simply for invoking it. McCormick's bill would put roughly two million federal workers to a choice between their constitutional rights and their jobs.

Robert Aderholt deleted the job training

Robert Aderholt chairs the House subcommittee that writes the spending bill for Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education — the panel deciding what goes to worker training and to the agencies that enforce wage laws.

In the bill his subcommittee advanced in June 2026, the job training programs aren't trimmed. They're zeroed out. He then announced $22 million for his own district.

He described the bill as one that "restores accountability."

Tom Tiffany takes the anti-union lobby's money

Tom Tiffany's donor list includes Associated Builders and Contractors, the anti-union construction lobby — an organization whose central purpose is keeping job sites non-union.

He also promoted DOGE while it brought office closures and funding cuts to a state where 18,000 people work for the federal government.

This isn't seven bad apples

The tell isn't any one of these records. It's what happened when the whole conference had to vote.

Two executive orders, plus an earlier move against TSA screeners, stripped collective bargaining from 84.4% of the unionized federal workforce. A bipartisan bill to restore it passed the House 231-195 — not one Democrat voted against it, and 195 Republicans did. The Senate has sat on it for eight months.

Meanwhile the administration has been subpoenaing the financial records of labor unions and putting a teachers' local on a criminal conspiracy chart shown to a grand jury.

Fifteen years after Act 10, Wisconsin's public workers are still in court trying to get back what was taken. That is how long this fight lasts once you lose it — which is exactly why the people who take it away count on you forgetting who they were.

They're on the ballot in November.

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.

The Third-Ranking Republican in Congress Went on TV and Called Minnesota's Lieutenant Governor "a More Masculine Version of Tim Walz"

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 08:03:48 +0000

Peggy Flanagan is the lieutenant governor of Minnesota. She just won her party's nomination for the United States Senate, beating Rep. Angie Craig in the primary. She is a citizen of the White Earth Nation, the first woman of color elected to statewide office in Minnesota, and when she was elected in 2018 she was the highest-ranking Native American woman in elected executive office in the country.

On Wednesday, August 12, 2026, Fox Business anchor Cheryl Casone asked Tom Emmer — the House Majority Whip, the third-ranking Republican in Congress — for his read on her.

Here is what he led with, after a warm-up about downtown Minneapolis:

"Cheryl, look. First looking at Peggy Flanagan, she's just a more masculine version of Tim Walz, but it's the same person."

"First looking at." Not her record as lieutenant governor. Not a vote. How she looks.

This is a habit, not a slip

Emmer is not a backbencher who wandered onto television. He is the man who counts votes for the Republican conference, and he has now made a specific kind of remark twice in seven weeks.

On June 24, at a Faith and Freedom Coalition town hall on Capitol Hill, he said Somali Minnesotans who don't assimilate should "go the hell back to where they came from" — and added that he was "done being careful, even the least bit careful." Minnesota is home to roughly 107,000 Somali residents, the largest such community in the country.

He was telling the truth about that last part. Seven weeks later he is on Fox Business describing a Native American woman's appearance as her defining political trait.

The number he stated as fact

The rest of the answer is worth reading closely, because Emmer moved from the insult straight into a figure he presented as established:

"She is literally in the fraud issue up to her eyes. $9 billion in fraud under her watch, Tim Walz' watch, Keith Ellison, Ilhan Omar... Not one government official has been charged or held accountable for almost $9 billion dollars in taxpayer money that was built out of our state government in the hands of Somali fraudsters."

Minnesota does have a serious fraud problem, and nobody sensible disputes that. But the $9 billion number is not a finding. It is a projection an assistant U.S. attorney offered in December for what prosecutors expect they may eventually find across 14 "high-risk" state programs.

The largest charged case in the state — Feeding Our Future, which the Justice Department calls the largest COVID-19 fraud scheme in the nation — involves roughly $250 million. That is a real scandal and a real number. It is also a different program: the $9 billion is a Medicaid estimate, and Minnesota's own Medicaid director said in December that "we don't have evidence in hand to suggest that we have $9 billion in fraud in these benefits over the last seven years."

Gov. Tim Walz has called the $9 billion figure sensationalized. Whether you believe him or the prosecutor's projection, the honest way to say it is "prosecutors believe it could reach." Emmer said it had happened, and attached the words "Somali fraudsters" to it.

That is the same move he made in December 2025, when he told the same network that 80% of crimes committed in the Twin Cities are committed by Somalis — a figure Minnesota's own crime data contradicts, and one he then inflated to 90% two weeks later.

What he's actually running on

Strip out the appearance comment and the inflated figure, and Emmer's pitch is straightforward. He said it himself at the end:

"Vote for Democrats you will get more of the same, vote for Republicans you're going to get a change."

Nothing in the answer was about what Republicans would do next. Not the price of groceries, not health premiums, not the hospitals in his own 6th District. What was in it: Flanagan's looks, the fraud number, thanks to Trump for "chasing down the fraud, waste and abuse," and a count of Amy Klobuchar's press releases. The part about Flanagan was about who she is — a woman he described first by her looks and then by association with a community he has already told to leave.

Emmer is the third-ranking member of the House majority. When he is asked what Republicans offer Minnesota, this is the answer he gives.

The thing about "she's just a more masculine version"

There is no policy content in that sentence and no way to fact-check it, which is the point of saying it.

It's the oldest available attack on a woman running for office: not that she's wrong, but that she is somehow not properly a woman. Emmer aimed it at the first woman of color Minnesota ever elected statewide, on national television, and prefaced it himself with the words "First looking at."

Flanagan will face Republican nominee Michelle Tafoya, a former sportscaster, in November. Minnesotans will spend the next three months hearing about this race. Emmer just showed them what shape the Republican half of it is going to take.

Source

Tom Emmer Says Peggy Flanagan Is 'a More Masculine Tim Walz' — Kathianne Boniello, Mediaite, August 13, 2026. Photo: Fox Business via Mediaite.

Max Miller's PAC Gave $70,000 to 16 Republicans in Tight Races. Exactly One Gave It Back.

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:13:33 +0000

There is a simple test in politics for whether a scandal is real to a party or just inconvenient. It's the money.

Max Miller runs a leadership PAC called Dependable Conservative Leadership. According to FEC records reviewed by POLITICO, that PAC has given more than $70,000 to 16 Republican incumbents in the toughest races on the 2026 map — mostly in chunks of $1,000, $2,500 and $5,000, with maxed-out $10,000 donations to some of them.

Miller's ex-wife, Emily Moreno, has accused him of assaulting her and their young child. She is also the daughter of Ohio Republican Senator Bernie Moreno. Miller denies the accusations. He refused to leave the race before Ohio's deadline to replace him on the ballot, which means his party is stuck with him.

This week POLITICO went to all 16 recipients and asked a single question: are you giving the money back?

One said yes.

The tally

Brad Finstad (Minnesota) — returned the $5,000. That's it. That's the entire list of Republicans who gave it back.
Mike Lawler (New York) — took $10,000 and is keeping it. His spokesman's justification was that Lawler's Democratic opponent attended a fundraiser hosted by former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who resigned in 2008 in a prostitution scandal.
Derrick Van Orden (Wisconsin) — took $2,500. Asked about it Tuesday night, he refused to discuss it, describing the accusations against Miller as "allegations" he had heard about "the day before yesterday."
The other 13 said nothing at all. Their offices and campaigns did not return POLITICO's requests for comment.

Those 13: Jon Husted of Ohio, Rob Bresnahan, Ryan Mackenzie and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, Nick Begich of Alaska, Tom Barrett of Michigan, Juan Ciscomani of Arizona, Gabe Evans of Colorado, Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey, Jen Kiggans of Virginia, and David Valadao of California.

Husted is the one to look at

Jon Husted publicly said Max Miller should not run for reelection.

Husted also took a maxed-out $10,000 from Miller's PAC and, when asked this week whether he'd return it, said nothing.

That is the whole story in one man. He'll say the words. He won't write the check.

Husted is running against former Senator Sherrod Brown in what is expected to be one of the closest Senate races in the country. Ten thousand dollars is not what decides that race. Which is exactly why keeping it is a choice about something other than money.

What Van Orden said

Van Orden's answer deserves its own look, because he gave one.

He called the accusations "allegations" he'd heard about "the day before yesterday."

The allegations against Max Miller have been public and heavily reported for months. We wrote about the domestic violence lawsuits and about the House Ethics Committee opening a probe. Ohio's two Republican senators had already called on him to quit. Republicans have been openly worried about the seat since at least early August.

"The day before yesterday" is not a timeline. It's a way of not answering.

The pattern, not the exception

None of this is new behavior around Max Miller.

Popular Information found — and we checked the FEC filings ourselves — that dozens of major corporations are funding Miller's own campaign this cycle, several of them with checks that arrived after the allegations were published. Stanley Black & Decker gave $10,000. Elevance gave $7,000. Kroger, an Ohio company, gave $3,500.

Meanwhile Trump's political team urged Ohio Republicans to hold off on publicly pressuring Miller to drop out, so the party wouldn't look divided.

So: corporations keep paying him, the White House told his own state party to keep quiet, and 15 of the 16 colleagues who took his money won't say whether they'll give it back.

The one consistent principle is that nobody wants to give up anything.

Why it matters where you live

If you vote in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Alaska, Michigan, Arizona, Colorado, New Jersey, Virginia, California, Wisconsin or New York — or in Ohio's Senate race — there is a good chance one of the people on that list is on your ballot.

They were each asked a yes-or-no question about money from a man accused of assaulting his wife and small child. Fifteen of them declined to say yes.

Brad Finstad managed it. It took a $5,000 check and about one sentence.

Source

Eli Okun and Mia McCarthy, "Republicans stay mum on whether they'll return campaign cash from embattled Max Miller", POLITICO, August 12, 2026.

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

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

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

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

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

What the gloves are

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

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

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

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

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

The warnings come from the company that sells them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congress wrote guardrails. They were about equipment.

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

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

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

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

Two votes made this possible

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

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

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

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

The 201 with report cards on this site

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

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

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

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

Source

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

Brad Finstad Asked the State to Investigate a Rochester Curriculum. The District Says It Never Adopted It — and the State Doesn't Pick Curriculum Anyway.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:24:18 +0000

In late June 2026, Brad Finstad sent a letter to Minnesota's education commissioner asking him to look into "the influence of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Learning for Justice program and related social justice frameworks being integrated into the Rochester Public School District."

It made the local news, which is what letters like this are for.

Then people started checking it, and three separate problems turned up. The school district says it never adopted the program. The official he wrote to has no authority over what any Minnesota district teaches. And the evidence in the letter came down to a footnote in a four-year-old document that the school board never voted on.

Nobody from Finstad's office had called the district to ask.

The district's answer

Rochester Public Schools put out a written response, reported in full by KIMT. The first thing it says is that nobody asked them anything:

"Neither Representative Finstad nor any member of his staff contacted Rochester Public Schools (RPS) before sending the letter to ask whether Learning for Justice curriculum, materials, or frameworks are currently being used in RPS or have been used in recent years. If they had reached out to inquire, Finstad's staff would have been informed that Rochester Public Schools has not adopted, approved, or implemented Learning for Justice as curriculum, required instructional materials, or a formal instructional framework."

The second thing it says is that he wrote to the wrong office:

"In Minnesota, local school districts are responsible for selecting curriculum and instructional materials that align with state academic standards. The Minnesota Commissioner of Education does not select or approve the curriculum used by local school districts. For that reason, Rochester Public Schools would have been the appropriate entity to contact for accurate information about what is being taught in RPS classrooms."

That is not a spin point. It's how Minnesota law works. Curriculum is a local decision. Finstad asked a state commissioner to account for something the state commissioner does not decide.

Superintendent Kent Pekel made the same point more bluntly to the Post Bulletin: if Finstad wanted to know how Learning for Justice is or isn't used in Rochester classrooms, he could have simply called, rather than writing to a commissioner to "ask about an issue over which he has no authority or influence."

Pekel added one more line: "He has not visited our schools once."

The evidence was a footnote

So what was the letter actually built on?

According to Finstad's office, Rochester school board documents show that social studies curriculum in the district "has been informed by Learning for Justice."

Pekel says that reference was "essentially a footnote" in a supporting document for an information-only agenda item at the February 8, 2022 school board meeting. Learning for Justice was listed alongside three other items under the heading "Informing our Practice" — material about how to teach, not what to teach.

"There was no vote taken and no decision on the agenda that night," Pekel said.

Meanwhile, the district had just approved new social studies curriculum at its most recent board meeting. Pekel said those new materials did not include anything created by Learning for Justice, and that he had confirmed the materials are not formally part of the current Rochester curriculum.

Finstad's office pushed back on one piece of this. Spokeswoman Jenny Luepke said Learning for Justice materials are written by the SPLC, and pointed to a March board document showing the district aligns its counselors with the American School Counselor Association model, which she said has integrated SPLC standards. Pekel's position is that the Learning for Justice materials — formerly branded Teaching Tolerance — are promoted by the SPLC rather than written by it.

That's a real disagreement about sourcing. It is not evidence that a Rochester classroom is teaching anything. And a phone call to the superintendent would have surfaced all of it before the letter went out instead of after.

There is one loose thread, and it's fair to name it. A conservative think tank, the Center of the American Experiment, later published an account from an unnamed former district staffer who says she was handed Teaching Tolerance handouts at a January 2024 staff training. The group's own editor's note concedes the date "has not been independently verified through a district record or session agenda," and the material described is adult professional development, not student curriculum. Even taken at face value, it is not what Finstad's letter alleged.

What the letter said about kids

The letter didn't stay on process. Finstad wrote that Learning for Justice content often pushes "leftwing activism, gender ideology and queer theory, white privilege and transgenderism."

He also told the commissioner that "public school should be politically neutral, but instead the Southern Poverty Law Center's Learning for Justice program is able to integrate far-left content and materials into our K-12 schools."

Read that sentence next to the district's answer. The program he says "is able to integrate" content into Rochester schools is a program Rochester schools say they never adopted.

Finstad's letter also cited the SPLC's legal trouble. That part is accurate as far as it goes: a federal grand jury in Alabama indicted the SPLC on April 21, 2026 on charges of wire fraud, false statements to a bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. An indictment is an accusation, not a verdict — the organization has pleaded not guilty. And whatever happens in that Alabama courtroom, it says nothing about what is being taught in a Rochester social studies class.

This is the second letter this summer

Finstad has a method now, and it doesn't take long to see it.

Six weeks after the Rochester letter, he wrote to Minnesota's secretary of state raising the "potential" of noncitizens registering and voting. We checked that one: a ten-year study Minnesota's own secretary of state cites had turned up three cases out of 13.3 million votes cast, and not one of them involved a person in the country illegally.

Both letters follow the same pattern. Pick a national conservative talking point. Address it to a Minnesota official who can't do much about it. Announce it. Let local TV carry the headline. Nobody has to prove anything, because a letter isn't a finding — it's a question, and a question can't be wrong.

His opponent said as much. DFL nominee Jake Johnson told KIMT:

"This is what people hate about politics. Congressman Finstad is abusing taxpayer resources by directing his congressional office to find and launch baseless attacks to support his reelection campaign."

Finstad is not the only Republican who has decided that the real problem in a classroom is the teacher. North Carolina's Virginia Foxx answered a fourth grader's persuasive essay by telling him to ask his teacher to explain propaganda, and that his teachers were "too interested in indoctrinating you."

What southern Minnesota is actually dealing with

Finstad represents one of the most agricultural districts in the country, and his constituents are in a genuine crisis. In July 2025 alone, 306 Minnesota farmers filed for the state's Farmer-Lender Mediation program — four times as many as the same month a year earlier. He spent ten months calling the tariff damage "short term" while it kept getting worse.

He does not hold in-person town halls. When constituents in New Ulm and Rochester turned up at his offices in early 2025 asking for one, the Mankato Free Press could not find any record of Finstad ever having held one. Asked why he won't, he said such events let agitators "come with their pitchfork and scream and have a hissy fit in front of the cameras" — and in June 2026 he added, "I don't regret saying it at all."

So he won't stand in a school gym in his own district and take questions from the people who live there. But he will write to a state commissioner in St. Paul demanding an accounting of what a Rochester teacher is putting in front of a ninth grader — without calling the school, without visiting the school, and without checking whether the thing he's asking about is in the building at all.

The superintendent's offer is still open. Pekel said Finstad is welcome anytime to come see what Rochester is teaching and how, at a school "where our community's young people are doing amazing things."

Finstad has not taken it.

Source

Addie McCabe, "Finstad asks MDE for clarity on 'far-left' education materials; Rochester schools push back," KTTC, June 24, 2026. Additional reporting from Brian Todd at the Post Bulletin and KIMT. Photo: Post Bulletin / Forum Communications.

Tom Emmer Told Somali Minnesotans to "Go the Hell Back." Six Months Earlier He Told Fox Business a Number That Wasn't True.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:22:39 +0000

On June 24, 2026, at a Faith and Freedom Coalition town hall on Capitol Hill, the third-ranking Republican in the U.S. House was asked about immigrants in his home state. Here is what he said:

"I don't really care where you come from. But if you come to this great country, you have to understand you're coming here to be an American," Emmer told the crowd. "We celebrate everyone's culture. We're happy with that. As long as you are an American. Celebrate your culture, I don't care. Italian, Polish, Somali. But they don't assimilate. And if they don't assimilate, then they should go the hell back to where they came from."

Tom Emmer is the House Majority Whip. He has represented Minnesota's 6th District since 2015. Minnesota is home to roughly 107,000 Somali residents — the largest Somali community in the United States.

He wasn't caught on a hot mic. He wasn't misquoted. And he told the room he had thought about the risk and decided he didn't care:

"I would argue that I never did care, but I'm done being careful, even the least bit careful."

That was about being called racist, or Islamophobic. He said the quiet part out loud: he knows what the words sound like, and he has decided to keep saying them.

"Go back where they came from" — to a community that is 95% American citizens

Start with the plain fact that makes the sentence collapse. 95% of Somalis living in Minnesota are U.S. citizens, according to FactCheck.org's review of the data. For the overwhelming majority of the people Emmer was talking about, "where they came from" is Minnesota.

Rep. Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia and represents Minneapolis, answered him directly: "I assimilated all the way to Congress and this idiot still tells me to go back where I came from."

Rep. Angie Craig called the remarks racist. Gov. Tim Walz condemned them. The Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations called on Congress to formally rebuke him. Doug Chapin, the Democrat running against Emmer, said Emmer seemed more worried about being called racist than about being racist. A spokesperson for Emmer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The number underneath it is false

The June remark didn't come out of nowhere. It rests on a claim Emmer had been making for months — that Somali Minnesotans are responsible for most of the crime in the state's biggest metro area. And that claim is not true.

On Fox Business on December 3, 2025, Emmer said this:

"It's not that all Somalis are committing crimes, but 80% of the crimes being committed in the Twin Cities Minnesota are being committed by Somalis."

The Minnesota Reformer checked it against the state's own numbers. Two public dashboards cover exactly this question:

Minnesota's state crime dashboard, filtered to the seven-county metro: 37% of people arrested since 2021 were Black.
The Hennepin County Attorney's Office dashboard: 57% of Hennepin County cases since 2018 involved a perpetrator who was Black or African-American.

Here is why those numbers demolish the claim rather than support it. Police and prosecutors record race, not nationality. Somali Minnesotans are a portion of Minnesota's Black population — not all of it. So the widest possible ceiling for Emmer's figure is 37% of metro arrests, and the real number for Somalis specifically is some fraction of that.

Emmer said 80%. The outer limit is 37%, and Somalis are only part of it.

This is a habit, not a slip. Eight months after the 80% claim, Emmer went back on Fox Business and told viewers eggs cost 78 cents and milk was under $2 — when the federal government's own price data had eggs at $2.14 a dozen and milk at $4.32 a gallon. The pattern is identical: a confident round number, delivered on cable, that the public record contradicts.

Asked to defend his own constituents, he attacked them instead

Two weeks after the Fox Business appearance, Emmer got a chance to answer for it.

On December 2, 2025, President Trump used a Cabinet meeting to attack Somali immigrants. FactCheck.org recorded the remarks: "I hear they ripped off, Somalians ripped off that state for billions of dollars, billions. Every year, billions of dollars. And they contribute nothing. The welfare is like 88% ... I don't want them in our country." In the same stretch of remarks he described taking Somalis into the country as taking in "garbage."

On December 16, reporter Pablo Manríquez of Migrant Insider caught Emmer in a hallway and asked the obvious question, reported by The New Republic: did he agree with the President that the roughly 5,000 Somali residents of St. Cloud — people in Emmer's own district, whom Emmer is paid to represent — are garbage?

Emmer didn't defend them. He said Trump "raise[d] an issue that is something that we've been trying to raise for almost three years." Pressed further, he offered a new figure: "Ninety percent of the ... crimes that have been charged are from the Somali community."

So in the space of two weeks the number moved from 80% to 90%, and neither version matches any public data. A member of Congress was handed a direct opportunity to say that his constituents are not garbage, and instead he inflated the smear.

Yes, there is real fraud. No, it isn't what he said.

This deserves to be said plainly, because the fraud is real and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.

Minnesota was defrauded. That same FactCheck.org review found the Feeding Our Future case involved claims of roughly $240 million, with the Star Tribune reporting on December 7, 2025 that the alleged fraud uncovered to date across all the Minnesota cases was closer to $152 million — a figure it said "is expected to grow" — and that of 86 people charged across three separate schemes, 78 were of Somali descent. Those are prosecutions, with names and case numbers.

But look at what Emmer did with them. A set of charged fraud cases is not "80% of the crimes being committed in the Twin Cities." Fraud is one category of crime; the dashboards above cover all of it. Emmer took a real prosecution involving a real subset of people and stretched it into a statement about every assault, burglary and robbery in a metro of three million. That is not calling out fraud. That is using fraud as a license to talk about a whole nationality.

And the "billions of dollars, every year" figure Trump used, which Emmer went out of his way not to dispute? The fact-checkers asked the White House for evidence and got a statement that supplied none — and when they asked the U.S. Attorney's Office how its own billion-dollar estimate had been calculated, they got no response at all.

Minnesota Republicans have been running this play all year

Emmer isn't operating alone, and the harm isn't hypothetical.

Later that month, the fraud narrative got a new engine: a viral YouTube video of Somali-run daycares in Minneapolis, posted on December 26, 2025 — a video that Minnesota's Republican House Speaker took credit for helping steer, and that state inspectors then contradicted: investigators visited nine of the ten centers and found children at nearly every one, with no fraud violations. After the video spread, Somali-run daycares reported strangers showing up demanding to see children, threatening phone calls, and a break-in.

In March 2026, Minnesota Rep. Pete Stauber became the only House member willing to put his name on a bill named after a nationality — the "Stop Fraud by SOMALIA Act," which five Senate Republicans had introduced in January and which Stauber carried into the House word for word, where it still sits with no cosponsors. It writes a terrorist group into immigration law, barring from the country any child care provider debarred for fraud who is found to have funded "any terrorist organization, including Al-Shabaab."

And back in January 2026, Emmer had signed on to the Sharia-Free America Caucus, saying in its founders' announcement that Sharia "is radical, oppressive, and must never be allowed to gain a foothold in America" — the congressional wing of a panic whose Arkansas centerpiece, when we traced it, turned out to be five houses, two of them lived in by Christians.

What the job actually is

Tom Emmer is not a backbencher shouting into a microphone. He is the House Majority Whip — the man who counts and delivers Republican votes, which makes him one of the most powerful people in Washington. When he puts a number on national television, it travels. When he declines to say his own constituents aren't garbage, that travels too.

He is also supposed to represent the Somali Minnesotans of St. Cloud, whether they voted for him or not. That is the entire job description. Instead he stood in front of a friendly audience on Capitol Hill, said people who don't meet his standard of assimilation should "go the hell back," and volunteered that he is finished being careful about it.

Minnesotans deserve a Whip who checks his numbers before he repeats them, and who defends the people he represents when the President calls them garbage. On both counts, Emmer chose the other thing — and then told us he'd chosen it on purpose.

Source

CBS Minnesota, Rep. Tom Emmer says Somalis who "don't assimilate" should "go the hell back to where they came from" (June 25, 2026). Photo via Getty Images.

Michelle Fischbach Managed the Rule That Declared Days Would No Longer Count — So the House Couldn't Vote on Trump's Tariffs

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:52:51 +0000

There is a law called the National Emergencies Act. It has a safety valve in it. When a president declares a national emergency, any member of Congress can force a vote to end that emergency — and the clock is written into the statute, so leadership can't just sit on it.

On February 1, 2025, Trump used emergency powers to impose tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China. That started the clock.

The House turned the clock off. Not by voting on the tariffs and losing. By declaring that days had stopped being days.

The vehicle was H. Res. 211, the rule for a government funding bill. Buried at item 19 of that rule is this:

"Provides that each day for the remainder of the first session of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day for purposes of section 202 of the National Emergencies Act with respect to a joint resolution terminating a national emergency declared by the President on February 1, 2025."

The House Rules Committee reported that rule by a record vote of 9-3 on March 10, 2025. The committee's own record lists the floor manager for it on one line:

MANAGERS: Fischbach/McGovern

That is Michelle Fischbach, who represents Minnesota's 7th District — more than 30,000 farms, and roughly $9 billion in agricultural products a year, nearly half the state's total.

What a "manager" does

The Rules Committee is the small panel that decides what the full House gets to vote on, what amendments are allowed, and what unrelated provisions ride along inside a procedural resolution nobody reads. Most members of Congress never get near it.

The manager is the member who carries the rule to the floor, defends it in debate, and answers for what's in it. On March 11, 2025, that rule passed the House 216-214. Fischbach voted aye.

Two votes. If two Republicans had gone the other way, the tariff clock would still have been running.

Fischbach's counterpart across the aisle was Jim McGovern, the Rules ranking member, who said Republicans were "sneaking" the provision into the rule because they wanted "no floor vote, no Republicans on record and no way to stop these devastating price hikes." Rep. Gregory Meeks put it more plainly: "House Republicans are declaring that the days are no longer days and that time has literally stopped."

Then they did it again, and again. H. Res. 313 did the same for the emergency Trump declared on April 2, 2025, freezing that clock from April 9 through September 30. H. Res. 707 pushed the February 1 freeze out to March 31, 2026 and added a third emergency, declared July 30, 2025. H. Res. 722, adopted the next day, reset all three to January 31, 2026. As the National Taxpayers Union pointed out, none of these were "presented for individual consideration but instead rolled into rules for other 'must-pass' bills."

Almost a year later, the vote finally happened

The clock ran out on the blockade eventually. On February 11, 2026, the House at last voted on a resolution to end the national emergency Trump declared on February 1, 2025 — the one that put tariffs on Canada, Minnesota's largest export market, which buys roughly $7 billion in Minnesota goods a year.

It passed, 219 to 211. Six Republicans crossed over to vote yes, among them Colorado's Jeff Hurd.

Fischbach voted no.

So the record reads like this. When the House could have voted, she managed the rule that stopped it. When the House finally did vote, she was against it.

Her district paid for the delay

That year of no votes was not a quiet year in western Minnesota.

By that October, the U.S. had gone a full month without selling China a single soybean — the first time in nearly a decade. The federal government moved toward another farm bailout, public money to patch a hole federal policy made. Farmers who wanted their congresswoman to fight the tariffs got something else: in June 2025 Fischbach joined 55 colleagues in a letter commending the Trump administration on trade and expressing "strong support" for its negotiations.

This month, at Minnesota Farmfest, she defended the tariffs from the stage and got booed from the front row. She also sits on the Ways and Means trade subcommittee — the specific committee, in the specific chamber, that the Constitution gives power over tariffs.

She has the trade seat. She has the Rules seat. She used the second one to make sure the first one never had to matter.

This is bigger than tariffs

Set the trade policy aside for a second. What happened here is that the House of Representatives, to avoid taking a recorded position, wrote into its own procedural rules that time was not passing.

The National Emergencies Act clock exists precisely because Congress knew a future Congress might be too cowardly to vote. So it made the vote automatic. H. Res. 211 was the workaround: keep the emergency powers, skip the accountability.

It's the same committee, and the same instinct, that blocked the Epstein files twice in 2025 — first killing Ro Khanna's amendment 5-7 in July, then killing the standalone Epstein Files Transparency Act 8-4 in September. Fischbach voted no both times. A discharge petition eventually went over the committee's head and forced a floor vote, where the bill passed 427 to 1.

Control the floor so the vote never happens, because the vote would be embarrassing. That's the play.

The difference with the tariff rule is that the price shows up in a grain elevator.

Source

House Committee on Rules, H.R. 1968 — Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2025 (rule text, committee vote, and managers), and Roll Call, "House majority rules: When a 'calendar day' isn't what it seems," March 18, 2025. Photo: Michelle Fischbach at a Western Caucus field hearing, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Michelle Fischbach Won't Hold an In-Person Town Hall or Answer a Reporter. She Spent $51,000 of Your Money in Three Months Mailing You Instead.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:49:16 +0000

Michelle Fischbach has represented Minnesota's 7th District since 2021. Four years in, as of April 2025, she had not held a single in-person town hall in a district that runs from the Canadian border almost to Iowa.

She does communicate with her constituents, though. She just does it one way, on her terms, and sends you the bill.

MinnPost went through the records the Clerk of the House keeps on "franking" — the taxpayer-funded privilege that lets members of Congress send mail, texts, emails, robocalls, radio ads and digital ads to constituents. What it found: Fischbach sent more of them than any other member of Minnesota's congressional delegation.

She produced 55 franked communications last year. In the first quarter of 2026 alone she sent 50 more, at a cost of about $51,000 in public money.

For comparison, in that same first quarter Rep. Betty McCollum sent four. Rep. Pete Stauber sent seven. Rep. Brad Finstad sent nine.

What your $51,000 bought

Not answers to your questions. Here's what MinnPost found in her franked output:

A radio ad promoting legislation she introduced on fraud. Taxpayers paid for a commercial about a bill with her name on it.
Text messages to constituents about her support for the SAVE America Act, the bill stalled in the Senate that would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo ID to cast a ballot.
Surveys. One asked constituents whether they "support revoking welfare benefits to immigrants who send taxpayer-funded benefits dollars to foreign countries?" Another, sent on Mother's Day, asked, "Do you support increasing access and support services to expectant mothers and their families?"

Read that first survey question again. It isn't a question. It's a campaign message with a checkbox on the end, and it went out on the public's dime.

Franking rules are supposed to draw a line between informing constituents and campaigning. As MinnPost put it, these taxpayer-funded messages sometimes "blur the line between being totally informative and touting a lawmaker's accomplishments in a way that boosts their chances of reelection." The money comes out of each member's roughly $1.9 million office budget — the same account that pays the caseworkers who help a constituent untangle a Social Security problem.

And the research says the blurring isn't accidental. A study in Legislative Studies Quarterly, cited in the same piece, found that members who won their last election by small margins send significantly more franked communications than members in safe seats.

The other direction is closed

Here is the part that makes the $51,000 sting.

As of April 2025, Fischbach had not conducted a single in-person town hall in her district. Her office's answer was a telephone town hall — a call she controls. The League of Women Voters, still asking her for an in-person event in November 2025, said those calls "often occur with little or no advance notice and typically come from an unrecognized number."

When constituents organized their own meetings, sign rallies and postcard campaigns to get her attention, Fischbach went on the radio and called those activities "garbage", suggesting they were fueled by outside activists.

It got bad enough that in April 2025, Rep. Angie Craig — who represents a completely different part of Minnesota — drove to Willmar and held a town hall for Fischbach's constituents. More than 100 people came. Craig told them: "Michelle Fischbach won't show up and bring your concerns back to Washington."

In August 2025, after a private event in Willmar for her campaign volunteers, Fischbach declined to answer questions from the press or from the dozen-plus people standing outside with signs.

So the ledger for Minnesota's 7th District looks like this. Messages from Fischbach to her constituents, paid for by those constituents: 105 in fifteen months. In-person town halls where those constituents could stand up and ask: zero.

This is a pattern, not a quirk

We've now written this story about three different Republicans in six weeks, which is how you know it's a strategy rather than an accident.

Georgia's Mike Collins spent more than $400,000 in taxpayer office money on TV ads that look nearly identical to his campaign ads, right down to the same clip of Trump praising him. Utah's Blake Moore's office, facing the federal rule that bars mass communications in the 60 days before an election, sent taxpayer-funded mailers touting his record in batches of 499 — one under the 500-piece threshold that defines a "mass" mailing.

Pennsylvania's Brian Fitzpatrick went further and said the quiet part on national television, calling the in-person town halls his party's campaign arm was steering members away from "a circus, a three-ring circus".

The through-line is control. A town hall is a room where a stranger can stand up and ask about the Medicaid vote. A franked text is a message you can't reply to.

What she'd have to answer for

There's a reason the room is scarier than the mailer.

Fischbach didn't just vote for Trump's budget bill — her office said she "played a pivotal role in the development and passage" of it from her seats on Ways and Means and Rules. An estimated 14,092 people in her district are projected to lose Medicaid coverage because of it, and 17,992 in all once the lapsing Affordable Care Act tax credits are counted alongside it. Another 30,242 households in the 7th District rely on SNAP to buy groceries.

On tariffs, she defended them from a Farmfest stage this month and got booed from the front row — in a district that grows about $9 billion in agricultural products a year.

None of that showed up in a survey question.

Fifty-one thousand dollars of public money bought western Minnesota a radio ad about a Fischbach bill, a push about the SAVE America Act, and two loaded questionnaires. What it did not buy was one evening, in one room, with a microphone that works both ways.

Source

How the Minnesota delegation uses the congressional frank — MinnPost D.C. Memo, July 2026.

Pete Stauber Bragged About His Union Bill at the Teamsters Hall. Then He Voted Twice to Kill It.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:54:24 +0000

There is a way to tell whether a politician actually wants a bill to pass. It isn't the press release. It's the boring procedural vote nobody covers — the one that decides whether the bill gets a vote at all.

On June 9, 2026, Pete Stauber faced that vote twice on his own bill. He voted no both times.

The bill was his

In September 2025, Stauber co-authored the Faster Labor Contracts Act with Rep. Donald Norcross, a New Jersey Democrat. It's a real bill about a real problem: workers vote to form a union, and the employer simply runs out the clock instead of bargaining. Under the bill, an employer has to start negotiating within 10 days, a federal mediator steps in after 90 days, and after another 30 days the dispute goes to binding arbitration.

Stauber's own news release said it takes an average of 458 days to reach a first contract. He leaned hard on his biography:

"As a former police office who organized my union, I've seen firsthand how unfair and frustrating this process can be for some. That's why I am proud to partner with Representative Norcross to hold employers accountable and ensure workers have a real voice at the negotiating table, because when our workers succeed, our entire nation succeeds."

That's from the Mesabi Tribune's write-up of the September 2025 introduction, which also carried praise for him from Teamsters general president Sean O'Brien and from Local 346 in Duluth. Nearly 20 national unions endorsed the bill.

Good bill. Good instinct. Then it needed him.

The night at the union hall

On the evening of Wednesday, January 28, 2026, Stauber went to the Teamsters Local 346 hall in Duluth's Lincoln Park neighborhood to talk to members about the bill.

Constituents heard he'd be there. They filled the sidewalks on both sides of the building in subzero cold, holding signs, hoping for a word about ICE operations in Minnesota and about copper-nickel mining.

They didn't get one. Stauber left through the back.

The Duluth News Tribune editorial board wrote it up two days later, and it is worth reading in full. Two things happened that night:

The press was shut out. Only WDIO-TV was let in. Reporters and photojournalists from other outlets — including card-carrying members of the Minnesota Newspaper and Communications Guild — were stopped at the door. A TV journalist from Northern News Now was physically pushed out by a man in a Teamsters jacket. (Local 346's secretary-treasurer, Zak Radzak, apologized: "We do not condone the physical contact of anyone.")
Stauber snuck out the back rather than take questions from the people standing outside.

The editorial board's verdict on the congressman was blunt: he "has long been avoiding gatherings open to the public," and his tele-town halls — "with attendees handpicked and the questions of the softball variety" — are not a substitute. "Controlled conference calls aren't accountability."

One constituent outside the hall told the paper: "You don't get much opportunity because he has not made himself available to any of us for a very long time."

Stauber's office didn't respond to the News Tribune's request for comment about the meeting.

So: a room full of union members got the pitch. The neighbors outside in the cold got a back door.

The two votes that decided it

The bill never got scheduled for a floor vote, so Norcross had to force it there with a discharge petition — a rare maneuver where a majority of the House signs a paper to yank a bill out of leadership's hands. The 218th signature went on it on May 20, 2026.

The Teamsters thanked the seven Republicans who signed it by name: Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota, Brian Fitzpatrick, Don Bacon, Max Miller, Riley Moore, and Rob Bresnahan.

The bill's Republican co-author was not on that list.

That set up two procedural votes on June 9, and both of them were the real vote. Here is the official record from the House Clerk:

Roll call	Question	Result	Stauber
2026-212	On Motion to Discharge, H.Res. 1140	Passed, 220–199	Nay
2026-215	On Agreeing to the Resolution, H.Res. 1140	Passed, 221–201	Nay
2026-216	On Passage, H.R. 5408	Passed, 230–193	Yea

On the motion to discharge, exactly 9 Republicans voted yes. On the rule, 11 did. Stauber — the bill's Republican co-author — was in neither group.

Then, once the bill was safely on the floor and 210 Democrats had guaranteed it would pass, he voted yes. Twenty Republicans did.

Read the sequence again. He voted twice to keep his own bill from getting a vote. Had his position won, the Faster Labor Contracts Act would have died in Speaker Johnson's desk drawer without ever reaching the floor. Only after that failed did he vote for it.

Then he took the credit

The next day, Stauber's office put out a press release headlined "Stauber Legislation to Speed Up First Contracts for New Unions Passes House."

Timothy W. Andrew, a Duluth attorney who has represented labor unions since 1992 and is a state bar–certified labor and employment law specialist, called it out in the News Tribune in June:

"He was happy to be a cosponsor of the bill when it made him look independent and pro-worker. … That is the definition of having it both ways. Union members know the difference between solidarity and political convenience."

Andrew's point about the press release: "What he disingenuously failed to mention was that when the bill needed help getting to the floor, he voted against it."

His advice to voters in the 8th District: "judge Stauber not by the headline he posted afterward, but by the vote he cast when the bill's future was on the line."

We have watched another Republican work this exact play — Maria Elvira Salazar handing out oversized novelty checks for money that came from bills she voted against, then telling a camera she couldn't remember the votes. The mechanics are identical. Vote where the party wants you, then send the press release where the voters are.

What "friend of labor" is supposed to mean

Stauber's district is union country — the Iron Range, the Duluth port, the building trades. He built his political identity on being the Republican who organized his police department's union. He sells that story constantly.

The rest of his record on working people is easier to read than the June 9 sequence:

He voted against the bipartisan infrastructure bill, saying he would "not be complicit in paving a destructive and irreversible path towards socialism" — then, weeks later, announced nearly $9.4 million in FAA grants to 29 airports in his district without mentioning that the money came from the bill he'd voted against.
When Trump doubled steel tariffs to 50%, Stauber thanked him for protecting "our way of life on the Iron Range." In February 2026 he voted against ending Trump's tariff emergency on Canada — Minnesota's largest export market, which bought nearly $7.1 billion in Minnesota goods in 2023. That resolution passed anyway, 219–211, with six Republicans crossing over. He wasn't one.
In February 2026, union workers stood outside his Hermantown office asking him to address what ICE raids were doing to the region.

The Faster Labor Contracts Act is the clearest case because he co-wrote it. He knew what it did, he knew who it helped, and he told a hall full of Teamsters he was for it. When the House asked him whether it should get a vote, he said no. Twice.

We deserve better.

Sources

Duluth News Tribune, Local View: Stauber's faster-contracts flip-flop was pure hypocrisy, by Timothy W. Andrew (June 27, 2026)
Duluth News Tribune Editorial Board, Our View: Snubs by Stauber, Teamsters unacceptable (Jan. 30, 2026)
Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives — roll call votes 212, 215 and 216 (June 9, 2026)

Photo: Constituents rally outside the Teamsters Local 346 hall in Duluth while Rep. Pete Stauber met with members inside, Jan. 28, 2026. Dan Williamson / Duluth Media Group.

Pete Stauber Is the Only House Member Who Would Put His Name on the 'Stop Fraud by SOMALIA Act.' It Writes Al-Shabaab Into Immigration Law.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:50:42 +0000

On March 12, 2026, Pete Stauber introduced a bill in the U.S. House called the Stop Fraud by SOMALIA Act.

He did not invent the name. Five Senate Republicans got there first: S. 3644, introduced on January 14, 2026 by John Cornyn, with John Kennedy, Rick Scott, Tommy Tuberville and Marsha Blackburn. Stauber's House bill is that bill — the two texts are identical, section by section, down to the punctuation. What he did was read it, decide it was worth his name, and be the only member of the House to say so.

The acronym is a stretch, and everybody could see it. In the official text, SOMALIA stands for "Strengthening Oversight and More Accountability for Lying and Illegal Activity." Nobody was fooled. Stauber's own press statement said the quiet part plainly:

"Taxpayers in Minnesota and across the country deserve to know their hard-earned dollars are supporting legitimate services and not lining the pockets of Somali fraudsters."

That's the congressman for Minnesota's 8th District, quoted by KAXE, describing a whole nationality as the problem his bill exists to solve.

Minnesota's largest Muslim civil rights group called it what it is. "You cannot name a federal bill after a nationality or ethnic group and claim it is about accountability," said Suleiman Adan, deputy executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations Minnesota. "Fraud is a crime committed by individuals, not by entire communities."

The group's executive director, Jaylani Hussein, put the test in one sentence: "No member of Congress would introduce legislation titled the 'Stop Fraud by Norwegians Act' or the 'Stop Fraud by Germans Act.'"

Read the actual bill

This is where it stops being about a name.

H.R. 7923 is nominally a child care bill. Section 2 amends the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act to permanently bar providers found to have committed fraud. Fine — nobody defends stealing from a program for poor working parents.

Then keep reading.

Section 4 amends the terrorism section of immigration law. It writes into federal statute that a debarred child care provider who is found to have sent money to "any terrorist organization, including Al-Shabaab" is inadmissible. The same section adds a blanket bar for anyone "in any way associated with" the Palestine Liberation Organization or al-Shabaab.
Section 5 makes a debarred provider deportable, ineligible for asylum, ineligible to adjust status, and legally incapable of showing "good moral character."
Section 6 is the one to sit with. If an immigration officer or judge merely "suspects" an arriving person may be inadmissible under the new fraud provision, the officer "shall order the alien removed, subject to review under paragraph (2)" — and must "refrain from conducting any further inquiry or hearing" unless a senior official says otherwise. That review is a desk review by the Homeland Security secretary, the attorney general or a designee, who "may order the alien removed without further inquiry or hearing." The person gets to submit a written statement.

Suspicion. Not a conviction, not a hearing — suspicion, a form, and a political appointee reading it.

A day care billing dispute is now a terrorism screening and an expedited removal. That is not an oversight bill. That is a bill built to tell one community that its members are presumed criminals, presumed foreigners, and presumed one step from a terrorist group.

Stauber introduced it alone. Five months later it still has zero cosponsors and has never moved past a committee referral. Not one other House Republican has signed on. It was never going to become law. It was written to be said — and he is the only person in the House who has agreed to say it.

The scandal it's built on never checked out

Here's the part Stauber has never gone back and corrected.

The whole thing started the day after Christmas 2025, when a conservative YouTuber named Nick Shirley posted a 43-minute video in which he knocked on the doors of ten Somali-run day cares in Minneapolis, and declared — when nobody answered, or when staff wouldn't let a group of strangers in — that there were no children inside. He claimed $111 million in fraud.

Then people actually went and looked.

On January 2, 2026, Minnesota's Department of Children, Youth and Families said inspectors had visited nine of the ten sites and found them "operating as expected". Children were present at eight of the nine. The ninth simply hadn't opened for the day yet.
The Minnesota Star Tribune visited all ten and found children inside four of them — the four that invited reporters in. Its review of state enforcement records and court filings found that none of the people publicly identified as owners or operators of the ten businesses "have ever been charged with fraud or any other felonies."
Three months later, on March 16 — four days after Stauber introduced his bill — MPR News summed up the state of play in one line: "No evidence of fraud has yet been confirmed at any of those sites."

We've written before about how this video was assembled and who fed it — the Minnesota House Republican caucus claimed a hand in it, then backed away when the YouTuber publicly called that a lie.

Real fraud in Minnesota's social service programs is real. More than 50 people have been convicted in the Feeding Our Future scheme. Nobody is arguing otherwise. But Stauber didn't put his name on a bill built around the convictions. He put it on one built around a video that fell apart.

He gave a State of the Union seat to the man who said "EVERY Somali in MN is engaged in fraud"

Seventeen days before he introduced the bill, Stauber announced his two guests for Trump's State of the Union: Nick Shirley, and the man who appears in the video as "David."

"David" is David Hoch, a Minnesota lobbyist and former right-wing candidate for state attorney general. The Intercept identified him on January 3 and pulled his now-deleted Instagram posts. Two of them:

"EVERY Somali in MN is engaged in fraud. ALL of them."

"Even the Blacks have had enough of the demon Muslims."

That was public, in a national outlet, seven weeks before Stauber handed him a ticket to the House chamber. Stauber's statement announcing the guests:

"By revealing stunning levels of obvious fraud to the American people, Nick and David did more work and showed more transparency than the Minnesota Department of Human Services."

He called them "citizen-driven oversight."

What it cost people who live here

None of this stayed on the internet.

A lawyer for one of the day cares told the Star Tribune his Somali clients had received hundreds of death threats. "Everybody is very scared right now of being targeted," attorney Jason Steck said. "Nobody wants to stick their head up. Nobody wants to get shot."

One director played reporters the voicemails his center was getting at 5 a.m. and at midnight — "We're coming," "ICE, ICE baby." A part-owner, Umi Hassan, said she'd lived in Minnesota since right after 9/11 and had never felt this marginalized. Crying, she asked the reporters: "What else can I do to be an American?"

Meanwhile the Trump administration froze federal child care money to Minnesota — the money that helps poor parents pay for care while they work — and around 3,000 federal immigration officers surged into the Twin Cities in Operation Metro Surge. Two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were shot and killed by federal officers in January.

Stauber's answer to all of it was a bill with a nationality in the title.

This is a pattern, not a slip

Stauber's response to the ICE killing in Minneapolis wasn't to ask questions about the shooting. It was to blame local politicians for it: "When Twin Cities politicians spew hateful rhetoric about our law enforcement for months, it gives their constituencies permission to violently attack my brothers and sisters in uniform. The events of today are the result. Minnesotans deserve leadership that respects the rule of law and encourages deescalation and cooperation."

Every other Minnesotan quoted in that story asked a question. Klobuchar wanted "full transparency and an investigation." Tina Smith said the department's account "clearly doesn't match up with the videos we're all seeing." Betty McCollum demanded "a full and independent investigation into ICE's actions." Stauber wanted de-escalation from the politicians.

In February 2026, union workers stood outside his Hermantown office asking him to address what ICE operations were doing to the region.

He has not held an open, in-person town hall where any of them could ask him about it. When the mayor of Cloquet invited him to hold one, his office offered a virtual meeting with no date attached.

The ten day cares in that video are in Minneapolis. Stauber doesn't represent Minneapolis — his district runs from Duluth to the Iron Range to the Canadian border. He went looking for this fight. He put his name — alone, in his chamber — on a bill named after the people on the other side of it. And when the underlying story collapsed, he didn't withdraw the bill, revise the title, or say a word.

We deserve better.

Sources

MPR News, Muslim civil rights group: Congressman's fraud bill 'discriminatory and deeply irresponsible' (March 16, 2026)
KAXE, Stauber introduces Stop Fraud by SOMALIA Act (March 13, 2026)
The Minnesota Star Tribune, We went to the day cares Nick Shirley did. Here's what we found. (Dec. 31, 2025)

Photo: Rep. Pete Stauber speaks on the House floor, January 2026 / U.S. House Clerk, via KAXE.

$70 Billion for ICE Passed the House by Two Votes. Not One Republican Voted No.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:57:39 +0000

Most big bills pass with room to spare. This one didn't.

On June 9, 2026, the House passed S. 2 — the "Secure America Act" — by 214 votes to 212. The next day it became Public Law 119-98.

Two votes. That's the whole margin. And when a bill passes by two, there is no such thing as a symbolic yes. Every single Republican who pressed the green button that day cast a deciding vote. If any one of them had voted no instead, the bill would have tied 213 to 213 and failed on the floor.

Not one of them did. Zero Republicans voted against it. All 211 Democrats present voted no, along with the House's one independent. Three Republicans didn't vote at all.

We've already written about the Senate half of this bill, which passed 52 to 47 at 4:42 in the morning on June 5. This is the other half — the one that actually made it law, by the narrowest margin either chamber managed.

What the money is for

S. 2 puts $70 billion into the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and it keeps that money available through fiscal year 2029.

The official summary of the law spells out what ICE's share pays for: hiring, paying and training personnel; transportation; facilities and fleet; 287(g) agreements, which deputize state and local police to do federal immigration enforcement; the agency's legal office; and, in the summary's own words, "operations by ICE to arrest certain unlawful aliens."

CBP's share buys agents and hardware — surveillance towers along the southern and northern borders, air and marine platforms, biometric entry-and-exit systems, and inspection equipment the summary describes as using "artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other innovative technologies."

This is not a border-security budget in the ordinary sense. It is the interior enforcement machine: the arrests, the local police partnerships, the surveillance, all funded four years out in a single lump.

The only limits Congress wrote were about equipment

Here is the detail that tells you what this Congress cared about.

S. 2 does contain restrictions. Read the summary and you'll find them. Funds can't be used to hire or train processing coordinators after October 31, 2028. And no money may go to surveillance towers "that have not been tested and accepted by CBP to deliver autonomous capabilities."

Those two, plus a handful of clauses steering Title I money to work other than immigration enforcement, are the whole of it. The guardrails Congress bothered to write into a $70 billion law are about procurement — what gear CBP is allowed to buy, and when it may stop hiring a particular job title.

Nothing about what agents may do. No body-camera requirement. No rule against agents concealing their identities. No limit on funding family separation. No mandated reporting on who is being detained, or where, or for how long. Congress found the time to specify that a surveillance tower must pass acceptance testing, and did not find the time to specify that the people operating it must be identifiable.

That omission is a choice, and it was made by the 214 members below the line.

Why the margin matters more than the bill

We write up a lot of party-line votes. Usually the honest framing is that any one member's vote didn't change the outcome — 220 Republicans vote yes, and the bill passes whether or not your representative shows up.

This vote was not that. At 214–212, the outcome turned on every last one of them.

That means the usual answer — I was one vote out of hundreds, leadership had the votes anyway — is factually unavailable here. Any one of these members could have walked to the well and changed the result. It would have taken one person out of 214 deciding that a $70 billion enforcement fund with no conduct rules attached was worth a second look.

Two. Out of 214. And the number who did it was zero.

That's worth remembering the next time one of them tells a town hall they have concerns about how ICE is operating. They had a moment where their individual vote was the whole ballgame, and they used it to hand the agency four years of money with no strings on its conduct.

The 187 with report cards

Two hundred fourteen Republicans voted yes. These are the ones who have a report card on this site and were still in their races when this published, by state:

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

How they voted

None of this is our characterization. It's the official record, and it will be there permanently: the House Clerk's roll call for vote 214 on S. 2, June 9, 2026 — every name, every vote — and the bill itself on congress.gov, including the summary of what the $70 billion buys.

If your representative is on that list, this bill needed their vote to pass.

Brad Finstad Wrote to Minnesota's Election Chief About Noncitizens Voting. A 10-Year Study Found Three Cases Out of 13.3 Million Votes.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 08:26:05 +0000

On Friday, Brad Finstad sent a letter to Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon about the "potential of people who are not legally eligible to vote registering and casting ballots in Minnesota elections, including people illegally in the United States."

According to KAAL, Finstad singled out Minnesota's Driver's License for All law, which lets all Minnesota residents get a standard Class D license or ID card without proving their immigration status. He asked Simon for more information about what his office is doing to keep Minnesota's elections secure.

Minnesota already has an answer. It's been public for a while, and it comes with numbers.

The number

In October 2025, Simon addressed exactly this claim. He pointed to a University of St. Thomas study covering a decade of Minnesota elections.

Out of 13.3 million votes cast over ten years, the study turned up three examples of noncitizens attempting to vote in Minnesota.

And Simon added one more detail:

"And by the way, none of the three were here in this country illegally."

None of them. Not one of the three cases involved a person in the country illegally — which is the specific thing Finstad's letter raises.

Simon's summary of the problem:

"This is just not something that happens more than very, very occasionally and for good reason."

The "for good reason" part

The reason is that noncitizen voting is already a serious federal crime, and Minnesota already checks.

Simon has pointed out that a noncitizen voting is a deportable felony. A person without permanent legal status who casts a ballot risks being removed from the country — to cast one vote, out of millions, in an election that one vote will not decide.

Minnesota also runs post-election reviews that identify noncitizens on the rolls, and refers those cases to county attorneys. That is how anyone knows the number is three. The system Finstad is writing letters about is the same system that produced the data showing there is no problem.

And having a driver's license does not make someone a registered voter. That's the gap Finstad's letter treats as a pipeline, and it's the gap Simon's numbers say isn't being used.

Finstad is not first, and this is not new

The Republican effort to tie Minnesota's driver's license law to voter fraud has been running for a while. The House Administration Committee sent Simon an oversight letter on January 22, 2026 on election integrity, and Simon testified before a House committee in April 2026.

So Simon has already been asked, in writing and under oath, by a committee of Congress. Finstad's letter in August asks him again.

That's the tell. When a question has been asked and answered with data, and it keeps getting asked anyway, the asking is the point.

What "election integrity" letters actually do

Letters like this don't change election law. They do three things.

They generate a headline. Finstad's office put out a press release about the letter. Local TV picked it up. The story that lands in a voter's head is "congressman raises concerns about noncitizens voting" — not "study finds three cases in ten years."

They build the case for restrictions. The through-line from "we're concerned noncitizens might be voting" to "everyone must produce a passport or birth certificate to register" is short and well-worn. That's the SAVE Act, and we've written about how the talking points travel and what it would actually do to voters — including married women whose current legal name doesn't match their birth certificate.

They put a target on an immigrant community. Driver's License for All exists so that people who are going to drive to work anyway do it with a license, insurance, and a road test. Tying it to voter fraud isn't an argument about ballots. It's an argument about who belongs.

The problems Minnesota's 1st District actually has

Finstad represents southern Minnesota — farm country. His constituents have been living through a genuine crisis, and it isn't at the polls.

We've written before about Finstad and the tariffs that hit his own farmers. The farm bill just failed in the Senate Agriculture Committee, leaving growers without a reauthorized farm bill since 2018.

Those are real, expensive, unresolved problems in his district right now.

The letter he sent on Friday was about three people over ten years, none of whom were in the country illegally.

Source

"Rep. Brad Finstad sends letter expressing concern over Minnesota election security," KAAL/ABC 6 News. Simon's remarks: "Sec State Simon: driver's license doesn't mean non-citizens vote," WCCO Radio, October 2025. Photo: KAAL.

Michelle Fischbach Sits on the Trade Subcommittee. At Farmfest, She Defended Tariffs the Supreme Court Already Threw Out.

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

On Tuesday, August 4, 2026, Michelle Fischbach stood on a stage at Minnesota Farmfest in Morgan and defended President Trump's tariffs to a room full of farmers.

A member of the front-row audience started booing.

She kept going. There have been "20 agreements" on trade under this administration, she told them, and "usually ag is a winner" in them.

Why that landed badly in a room full of farmers

Six months ago, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump's tariffs were illegal — that the 1977 emergency law he used to tax nearly everything coming into the country never gave a president that power.

The government now owes $166 billion in refunds. As we wrote last week, that money is going to Apple, Ford, Nike, Amazon and General Motors — the importers who legally paid the tariffs. Not to the farmers who lost export markets. Not to anyone who paid more at the register.

Fischbach's opponent, DFL-endorsed candidate Erik Osberg, put the question to her directly:

"If these tariffs have been so helpful, why did the Supreme Court have to create a $160 billion refund that is going to the importers? We need Congress to act as the Constitution said in Article 1, Section 8."

That's the part that should stick.

Article I, Section 8 is her job description

The Constitution gives Congress — not the president — the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations and to lay duties. Tariffs are a congressional power. The Supreme Court just said so in the most expensive way possible.

Fischbach sits on the House Ways and Means trade subcommittee. That is the specific committee, in the specific chamber, that holds that specific power.

She has spent that seat defending an executive tariff program the courts struck down, rather than exercising the authority the Constitution assigns to her. When farmers asked what Congress would do, her answer was to describe what the administration had already done.

The farm payments question

The forum opened with the moderator asking about the recurring need for ad hoc farm payments — the emergency checks Washington keeps writing to keep farms afloat.

Fischbach said Congress needs to "provide more stability and more clarity," and that farmers want strong markets, not payments.

Osberg agreed on the diagnosis and disagreed on the cause: bridge payments are "throwing billions of dollars at a problem" that needs a long-term fix, he said, adding, "It'd be nice and stable if Congress would stand up against the unconstitutional tariffs and take that back."

That's the loop farmers are stuck in. Tariffs close export markets. Closed markets crater prices. Washington writes emergency checks to cover the hole it made. Fischbach wants credit for wanting stability while defending the thing destabilizing it.

USMCA and the "very well" answer

On the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement — which the Trump administration has decided not to extend — Fischbach pointed to her access to the chief U.S. agricultural negotiator and said talks with Mexico were going "very well."

"We have the base of it, and we are taking a look at what's going on in the USMCA, what we can improve on, and there's obviously things we can improve on."

Osberg's answer was the one the room could measure against their own experience:

"One of the improvements we could make is looking at ourselves in the mirror and saying, 'Are we a reliable trade partner right now?'"

He then quoted a young farmer on a committee he convenes: "I wouldn't run my farm the way we're running this country right now."

"She is out here"

The forum also covered USDA's plan to move Washington-based staff into regional hubs. Osberg described the effect on the ground — local food producers who have waited three years just for permission to accept food stamps — and called it "chaos and uncertainty and dysfunction."

Fischbach's rebuttal was that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins had been at Farmfest a few hours earlier.

"(Rollins) is out here. She is listening to people. She is talking to the people that are actually farming, the people with boots on the ground."

A cabinet secretary attending a farm show is not a response to a producer who's been waiting three years for a permit. It's evidence that someone showed up.

What Minnesota farmers are actually carrying

Tariffs hiked Midwest household costs and slashed jobs, according to a report published in July. The Minnesota Senate has compiled its own record of how the tariffs hit Minnesota businesses.

Fischbach closed the forum on her record: estate tax relief, crop insurance improvements, year-round E15.

Osberg closed with a question.

"Are farmers better off today than they were two years ago?"

The booing from the front row was one person's answer. The $166 billion in refunds going to Apple and Amazon instead of Minnesota grain farmers is a bigger one.

Source

West Central Tribune, "Fischbach, Osberg clash over tariffs, USDA shakeup in Farmfest candidate forum," by Noah Fish, August 5, 2026. The booing was also covered by Courier Minnesota.

Mike Lindell's Plan: Cut Minnesota's Budget in Half, and Fill the Hole With His Own Charity

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 11:00:00 +0000

On Thursday, August 6, 2026, Mike Lindell released a 72-page plan for what he'd do as governor of Minnesota.

The headline is eliminating the state income tax. The arithmetic underneath it is cutting the state general fund budget in half.

Minnesota's primary is August 11. Voting has already begun.

What gets cut

In some places the plan is very specific:

Education: $4.9 billion, roughly 19% of what Minnesota spends on schools.
Healthcare: $11 billion.
Public assistance programs: $3.6 billion.

That's $19.5 billion out of schools, hospitals and help for people who can't make rent.

Minnesota is a state that has, historically, taxed more and gotten more for it — better schools, better healthcare, better roads, parks, social services. The plan's argument is that the extra spending hasn't produced better results, and it cites Mississippi's recent early-literacy gains at far lower spending as proof.

Set aside whether that comparison holds. Ask instead what happens to a Minnesota school district that loses a fifth of its money, in a state where the federal government is already pulling out. Under Trump's budget bill, Minnesota is set to lose $15.4 billion in federal Medicaid funding over the next decade, and an estimated 152,000 to 253,000 Minnesotans will lose health coverage.

Lindell's $11 billion healthcare cut would land on top of that.

Where the money comes back from

Here's the part that deserves the closest reading.

Lindell doesn't claim the state can simply do without the $19.5 billion. He proposes replacing $16.5 billion of it with something the plan calls the "Lindell Direct Assistance Program" — his own charitable model. The claim is that "services can be delivered with private sector sponsorship for 40% less than government assistance."

Read that again. A candidate for governor is proposing to take $16.5 billion of Minnesota's public services — the hospital funding, the school funding, the assistance programs — and hand them to a privately sponsored charity operation named after himself.

There is no statute for this. No agency. No accounting. It is a line in a campaign document.

The rest of the gap gets filled with "dynamic scoring" — the standard tax-cutter's assumption that cutting taxes generates so much growth it pays for itself. The plan books $3.9 billion in revenue on that basis.

So: $19.5 billion in real, specified cuts, offset by a charity that doesn't exist and a growth projection that assumes the cuts work.

Whether he can run a charity is a fair question

This is where Lindell's own record stops being background and becomes the point.

A Star Tribune investigation published in July found that creditors are chasing MyPillow in court for more than $25 million in unpaid bills — including a $15.4 million default judgment to a footwear supplier and an $8.8 million default judgment to FedEx, which accused Lindell of misrepresenting the company's ability to pay. Most of the judgments were defaults, meaning MyPillow didn't show up to defend itself. MyPillow told a court that if a levy on its Amazon account wasn't lifted, the company "could go out of business."

Lindell has since stepped down as CEO of MyPillow to focus on the governor's race.

And last week, an administrative law judge found probable cause that Lindell broke Minnesota campaign finance law — by having his campaign buy 2,500 pillows from his own company and throw them off a parade float.

That is the operator being proposed as the backstop for $16.5 billion of Minnesota's schools, hospitals and safety net.

Who actually pays

Eliminating an income tax doesn't make government cheaper. It moves who pays.

Minnesota's income tax is progressive — higher earners pay a higher rate. Delete it and the revenue has to come from somewhere else, or the services go away. In Lindell's plan, the services go away.

The people who lose the most are the ones who use public services most: families whose kids are in public school, people on Medical Assistance and MinnesotaCare, the 452,600 Minnesotans who receive SNAP, the 1 in 6 Minnesota kids who faces hunger.

The people who gain the most are the ones with the biggest incomes.

Lindell's plan would make Minnesota the 10th state with no income tax, joining South Dakota, Texas, Wyoming, Florida and the rest. Those states are not, generally, known for their schools or their hospitals.

Minnesota is. That's the trade on the ballot Tuesday.

Source

Minnesota Reformer, "Lindell releases plan to eliminate income tax with massive cuts to education, healthcare spending," by J. Patrick Coolican, August 6, 2026. Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer.

Mike Lindell Got Two Minutes in Front of Minnesota Farmers. He Used Them on Satan and 2020.

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 12:52:00 +0000

Farmfest is Minnesota's summertime farm industry convention, held in Redwood County, and it's where the state's farm economy goes to be heard.

On Wednesday, August 5, four candidates for governor sat on stage there: U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, House Speaker Lisa Demuth, businessman Kendall Qualls, and Mike Lindell. It was the first and last time Klobuchar shared a stage with all three Republicans. Republicans pick their nominee this coming Tuesday, August 11 — so this was the last chance any of them would get to make a closing argument to a room full of farmers before the votes are counted.

Each candidate got two minutes.

Klobuchar used hers on a rural plan — markets, hospitals, housing, workforce. Demuth used hers on her record as speaker of a tied Minnesota House. Qualls used his on how many candidate forums he'd won.

Lindell used his on a satanic statue and the 2020 election.

What he actually said

You can watch it on the full forum video. After a minute of biography — walking beans on his uncle's farm, church on Sundays, addiction, MyPillow — he pivoted:

"This is a spiritual battle of evil and good of biblical proportions. We have a governor that put a satanic statue in the … capitol. Put the satanic statue in there. All the evil and the horrific things that we've seen happen as we watch our state just crumble."

Then he turned to Klobuchar, sitting three seats away:

"Amy on this stage and we agreed, we agreed in 2020, and we came into a historical agreement on the election fraud. She went after the machines. She named them in the movie Kill Chain. She named them and she went after this fraud. But then she stopped after the 2020 election. What did Mike Lindell do since then? I spent $80 million trying to secure our elections in this country."

And he closed with this:

"What did Amy do since then? Amy went to Washington, brings back $20 billion to our state, only to have it shipped off to Somalia. That's not a good steward of our money."

That was the whole thing. Two minutes, in front of farmers, five days before a primary. Not one word about tariffs, soybeans, input costs, land prices, or rural hospitals.

The satanic statue wasn't the governor's

Start with the easy one, because it's the kind of claim that sounds damning until you look it up.

In December 2024, a Minnesota satanist group put up a holiday display in the State Capitol — a phoenix with a pentagram — alongside the building's Christmas tree, nativity scene, and Hanukkah menorah. The permit came from the Minnesota Department of Administration, which handles all Capitol displays. A spokeswoman for that agency said a permit "does not imply an endorsement by the state."

Gov. Tim Walz had nothing to do with it. His office said so directly at the time:

"The governor does not agree with the display and did not approve it. But the First Amendment means that he does not police speech in the State Capitol. That's true whether it's a religious display, a political protest, or a Minnesotan advocating for a policy."

The group behind it says it doesn't worship Satan or believe he exists.

So the "governor put a satanic statue in the capitol" line has one accurate word in it: capitol. A candidate for governor either doesn't know how permits at his own future Capitol work, or knows and said it anyway.

The Kill Chain claim is false — and the irony is enormous

This is the part worth slowing down on, because Lindell told a room full of people that a sitting U.S. senator once agreed with him that the 2020 election was stolen. She didn't. And the movie he cited proves it.

"Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections" is an HBO documentary. It premiered on March 26, 2020 — seven months before the 2020 election. HBO's own announcement describes it as arriving "in advance of the 2020 Presidential election" and taking "a deep dive into the weaknesses of today's election technology."

It is a film about preventing an attack that hadn't happened, not about proving one that did. Its argument is that America should use paper ballots and audits so results can be checked. HBO's announcement lists Klobuchar as one of four senators interviewed — alongside Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, plus Mark Warner and Ron Wyden. Sitting for a pre-election documentary about voting-machine security, next to a Republican, is not "a historical agreement on the election fraud." There was no agreement, historical or otherwise.

Now the irony. The film Lindell invoked as his own evidence follows one central figure: Finnish hacker and security researcher Harri Hursti, who travels the country demonstrating how voting equipment can be broken into.

In August 2021, CNN brought Harri Hursti to Lindell's Cyber Symposium in Sioux Falls specifically to examine the data Lindell said would prove the election was hacked. Hursti looked at it and told the Washington Post the whole event was "a big fat nothing and a distraction." We wrote about that symposium three days ago — the promised proof never arrived, and the $5 million challenge Lindell built the event around ended with a federal judge ordering him to pay a Trump supporter who won it.

Lindell stood on a stage at Farmfest and named a documentary as his corroboration. The star of that documentary examined Lindell's evidence in person and called it nothing.

The $80 million he says he spent — while telling judges he's broke

"I spent $80 million trying to secure our elections in this country."

Set aside that the number keeps growing — he told CNBC in 2021 it was $25 million. Take him at his word today and just ask what an $80 million election crusade bought, and who paid for it.

What it bought: a Denver jury finding that he defamed a former Dominion executive, and $2.3 million in damages. A federal judge in Minnesota ruling that he defamed Smartmatic with false claims about voting machines. A separate federal judge ordering him to pay $5 million to the software expert who debunked his data. Zero overturned results, in any state, ever.

Who paid for it: the people MyPillow owes. Creditors are chasing the company for more than $25 million in unpaid bills, including an $8.8 million judgment to FedEx. Lindell has spent years fighting the IRS over a $6 million tax debt that put a lien on his Texas house and garnished half his paycheck. "I have no assets," he said under oath in 2024. "There's nothing left." In 2025 he told a federal judge, "I'm in ruins."

Jim Furlong, his longtime friend and MyPillow's former president, tried to warn him at a 2016 board meeting. "I thought it was a terrible mistake," Furlong said in a 2024 deposition, of Lindell taking the company political. Lindell's answer, per Furlong: "Mike said he was going to do it, and if we didn't like it, that was just too bad."

The day before Farmfest, Lindell stepped down as MyPillow's CEO and dropped to a minority ownership stake. His replacement is Jim Furlong.

And one more thing about the man who says he spent $80 million on election integrity: until the third week of July — about two weeks before this forum — he wasn't registered to vote in Minnesota at all.

"$20 billion … shipped off to Somalia"

This is the line he chose to end on, and it's the one he backed with the least.

He didn't say what $20 billion. He didn't name a program, a bill, an appropriation, an audit, or a case. He didn't explain what Klobuchar had to do with it or who did the shipping. He said it, the crowd reacted, and the moderator called time.

Minnesota's fraud scandal is real, and it is genuinely enraging. Feeding Our Future was a scheme that stole from a federally funded child nutrition program by opening more than 250 fake meal sites and billing for meals never served. On May 22, 2026, the Justice Department announced that its ringleader, Aimee Bock, had been sentenced to 500 months in prison — over 41 years. The judge told her, "This was a fraud vortex and you were at the epicenter of it."

DOJ puts that scheme at $250 million. That is a quarter of a billion dollars of children's food money, and every Minnesotan has the right to be furious about it. It is also not $20 billion, it wasn't money Klobuchar "brought back," and Lindell offered nothing to bridge the gap between the number prosecutors use and the one he shouted at a farm show.

Earlier in the same forum, asked what he'd do about fraud, Lindell had called it "the biggest blessing our state's ever had, because it's opened our eyes to get rid of the current government we have."

That's a strange thing to call stolen food money.

What he skipped

Here's what the farmers in that room are actually living through, and what Lindell didn't spend a second of his two minutes on.

Trump's tariffs raised input costs and cost Minnesota its biggest customer — China booked no orders at all for the state's soybean harvest, sending growers to Washington to beg for a bailout. Soybeans are Minnesota's single biggest agricultural export. The war in Iran drove up fertilizer and fuel costs. Trump's approval among rural Americans fell from 60% to 50% between the start of his second term and June, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.

Klobuchar used part of her closing to name it directly: not one of the three Republicans on that stage had objected to the tariffs, or to the war in Iran, or to the megabill that cut Medicaid for rural hospitals. "We do not need a governor who is a rubber stamp of Donald Trump," she said.

None of them stood up to argue otherwise. Lindell went next, and talked about Satan.

Meanwhile the bill he's never criticized is still landing. Congressional Republicans let the Affordable Care Act tax credits expire, which raises premiums for a projected 89,000 Minnesotans — a lot of whom are farmers and ranchers buying insurance on the individual market, exactly the people sitting in that building.

The Rose Garden story, for the record

One small thing, since he brought it up himself. Lindell told the crowd he was at the Rose Garden "right before the pandemic," where he said a nation had turned its back on God.

He was at the Rose Garden on March 30, 2020. It was a White House coronavirus task force briefing, more than two weeks into the national emergency, and Lindell was there because MyPillow had retooled to make masks. He used his turn at the podium to tell Americans to read the Bible. Trump, standing behind him, said afterward: "I did not know he was going to do that."

That's the pattern, and it hasn't changed in six years. Give Mike Lindell a microphone at an event about something urgent and specific, and he'll use it for something else.

Minnesota Republicans vote Tuesday.

Source

Aaron Rupar posted the clip of Lindell's closing statement on Bluesky. Quotations here are transcribed from the full forum broadcast, linked above. Additional reporting from the Minnesota Reformer, also linked above. Photo of Lindell signing his book at Farmfest by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer.

Tom Emmer Says Eggs Cost 78 Cents and Milk Is Under $2. The Government's Own Numbers Say Otherwise.

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 09:20:00 +0000

On August 4, Maria Bartiromo asked the third-ranking Republican in the House a simple question. A new CNN poll had Democrats up eight points on the generic ballot. Why is America frustrated with the Republican Party?

Tom Emmer told her the frustration isn't real.

"I think it's perception, Maria. The perception and the reality of our economy. The two need to meet. Right now there are great things happening in our economy. Nobody wants to talk about 78 cent eggs, nobody wants to talk about milk that's under $2. No, no. They want to focus on gas prices. Americans are smarter than the elites in Washington."

He's right that Americans are smarter than that. They buy groceries.

What eggs and milk actually cost

The federal government tracks the average retail price of both of these items every single month. It is not a secret. It is published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Eggs, Grade A large, per dozen: $2.14 in June 2026
Milk, fresh whole, per gallon: $4.32 in June 2026

Emmer said 78 cents. Eggs cost nearly three times that.

Emmer said milk was "under $2." It costs $4.32 — more than double what he told a national television audience.

And milk isn't even falling. It has gone up over the course of this year, from $4.10 a gallon in January to $4.32 in June.

Where the 78 cents came from

The number wasn't invented out of thin air. It appears to come from a wholesale price movement — what distributors pay, not what you pay at the register, as Crooks and Liars noted in flagging the claim.

That distinction matters enormously, and Emmer erased it. Nobody in Minnesota buys eggs at wholesale. The Majority Whip took a number from a market most Americans will never touch and presented it as the price on the shelf.

Then he used it to tell people their own grocery bill is a "perception" problem.

He's not a bystander to grocery prices

The most frustrating part of Emmer's answer is the pose — as if he's an analyst commenting on an economy that happens to him.

Tom Emmer is the House Majority Whip. Rounding up Republican votes for Trump's agenda is literally his job. When prices go up because of policies Congress passed, he is one of the people who passed them.

On tariffs — the policy that raises the price of imported goods for the people buying them — Emmer has been a cheerleader, not a critic. He told a telephone town hall that "these tariffs are going to protect American manufacturing," and he publicly applauded Trump's Section 232 tariffs, calling him "a master negotiator, especially when it comes to tariffs."

He also whipped through the budget bill he called "historic America First policy wins for the American people." Here's what those wins look like back home in Minnesota's 6th District:

An estimated 14,903 people in his district are projected to lose health coverage — 11,803 losing Medicaid and 3,100 losing marketplace coverage.
19,033 households in the district rely on SNAP to buy food — including 11,613 households with children and 5,117 with someone 60 or older.

Those 19,033 households are the ones who feel the difference between $2.14 eggs and 78-cent eggs most sharply. They are also the ones whose food assistance he voted to cut.

"They want to focus on gas prices"

Notice the rest of the answer. Emmer complained that people "want to focus on gas prices" — as though picking which grocery bill to worry about is a media trick rather than a household budget.

This is a familiar move. When David Valadao was asked about food assistance cuts in a district where more than a quarter of households are on SNAP, he said the drop in enrollment didn't worry him. The pattern is the same: cast the vote, then tell the people it lands on that their concern is overblown.

It is also familiar from Emmer himself. He is happy to talk loudly about his committee's investigations when the subject suits him, and goes quiet when it doesn't.

The bottom line

A member of Congress can be wrong about a number. It happens.

But Emmer wasn't off by a rounding error. Eggs cost nearly three times what he said, and milk more than twice — and he said it on national television while arguing that voters' own experience of their grocery bill is a misperception that needs to be corrected.

The prices are published every month, for free, by the government he works for. He could have looked.

Minnesotans in the 6th District don't have to. They already know what a gallon of milk costs.

Source

Emmer Claims Eggs Cost 78 Cents, Milk Is Under $2 — Joe.My.God., August 4, 2026, with the full Fox Business transcript. Image via Crooks and Liars.

Five Houses in Little Rock. Two of Them Occupied by Christians. That's the Sharia Takeover.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 19:12:00 +0000

On July 17, 2026, the governor of Arkansas posted this to her official accounts:

"In our state, you cannot replace Arkansas law with Sharia law. We will not allow it. Period."

Her attorney general quote-tweeted her an hour later to agree that Arkansas is governed by law, "not religious legal codes."

Here is what they were protecting Arkansas from.

Five houses off John Barrow Road

New Africa is a small subdivision in Little Rock's John Barrow neighborhood, built by a local mosque, the Islamic Center for Human Excellence. The Arkansas Times went out and looked at it this month.

It's five houses. Two of them are lived in by Christians. The imam lives in another. The only sign it exists is a sign that says "New Africa Community." It has been there for nearly two decades.

Buyers sign a Bill of Assurance — the same kind of covenant a homeowners association makes you sign, with rules about upkeep and conduct. That document says the development exists "for the purpose of creating a wholly owned residential Al-Islamic community conforming to the social guidelines given in the Quran." That's the sentence that launched a thousand posts.

Tauheed Salaam, part of the development team, explained what it actually means: no stealing, no crime, take care of your family, keep the property up. Nobody is made to wear a hijab or convert. The rules cover the community's public spaces, not what you do inside your own home — you can have a drink in your own house.

And he reached for an analogy that ought to stop this whole story cold. They hope people take examples from the Quran, he said, the same way a Christian might hope people follow the Ten Commandments.

Hold onto that one.

How five houses became a statewide emergency

The Arkansas Times traced the panic back to its source, and it isn't a court case or a police report. It's a content pipeline.

On March 31, the RAIR Foundation — an outlet the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as an anti-Muslim hate group — published a piece claiming Little Rock had been "conquered" by Islam, with a section on New Africa.
On April 4, pro-Trump influencer Terrence K. Williams pushed the story to his 4.5 million Facebook followers. It drew more than 18,300 likes, 7,800 comments and 6,300 shares.
That same day, Arkansas state Rep. Alyssa Brown posted about "a story out of Little Rock about an Islamic Shariah organization" that "is going viral" and "deserves more attention."
Brown then co-sponsored House Resolution 1016, the "Arkansas Property Rights Protection From Sharia Law Act," with primary sponsor Rep. Marcus Richmond. In a later post, Brown cited "a viral post about the Islamic Center compound here in Arkansas."

A hate group's blog post became a bill in the Arkansas Legislature in four days.

It died. On April 15, the House Rules Committee rejected it — and the man who took it apart was a fellow Republican. Rep. Jeremiah Moore pointed out the bill wouldn't even reach a white supremacist compound in northeast Arkansas:

"If we're trying to worry about disclosures for Sharia Law, I would also like to cover the white supremacists up near Ravenden. I'm pretty sure they're trying to do the exact thing that you're describing here…"

That was in a session so short that lawmakers had to vote just to consider non-budget bills. On the same day, another Republican was begging the committee to let him raise the homestead property tax credit because "gasoline is high, groceries are high." The imaginary threat got a named bill with three sponsors. The compound Moore was talking about got nothing.

Then the governor picked it up anyway

Three months after her own party's committee killed the bill, Sarah Sanders posted her warning to Arkansas.

Nobody could say why. Commenters under her own Facebook post asked where it came from — "Where did this come from lmao," one wrote; another called it "a dog whistle inviting hate crimes and deportations." A spokesperson for Sanders didn't respond when the Arkansas Times asked what inspired it.

Attorney General Tim Griffin amplified her post about an hour later with his own, on X and on Facebook. His office said it had "received repeated inquiries about the status of Sharia law in Arkansas." When the Times filed a public records request to see those inquiries, the AG's office refused to release them, claiming an exemption for the attorney general's working papers.

So the official story is: we responded to concerned citizens, and no, you can't see them.

There is no takeover. There never was.

Let's be clear about the thing itself. "Sharia" is a religious framework — prayer, fasting, charity, how you treat your family, how you do business honestly. It does not override American law, any more than kosher rules or Catholic canon law do. American courts answer to the Constitution.

This panic is also not new, and it has never once found anything. A 2013 Brennan Center report counted lawmakers in 32 states introducing "foreign law" bans, and found the practical result wasn't safety — it was confusion over marriages, divorces and prenuptial agreements with religious or foreign origins, and over how international businesses do deals here.

Texas has been running the play the longest. In 2015, a mosque in Irving offered its members voluntary mediation. Then-mayor Beth Van Duyne accused the mosque's leaders of creating separate laws for Muslims and "bypassing American courts," and led Irving officials in endorsing a state bill to forbid judges from using foreign laws. Mosque leaders said she was stirring up anti-Muslim feeling. Eleven years later, nobody has produced the takeover.

Texas passed a "Sharia ban" that never mentions Sharia

Greg Abbott has told Texans he banned Sharia law. He didn't.

The law he signed is House Bill 4211, signed June 20, 2025. Its official title is "Relating to certain residential property interests controlled by certain entities." It governs how business entities own and sell homes in a development. Read the text yourself: the words "Sharia," "Islam," and "Muslim" do not appear in it a single time.

That didn't stop Abbott from posting that he had banned "Sharia law" and "Sharia compounds," and telling Texans to report anyone attempting "Sharia compliance" to law enforcement. CAIR-Texas called it "reckless, discriminatory, and divorced from reality" — and pointed out that the developers of EPIC City, the Muslim community near Dallas the law was aimed at, had said they supported the bill, because they were already following the rules.

They were telling the truth. The Justice Department closed its investigation into EPIC City without bringing any charges.

None of that slowed anything down. In the March 2026 Republican primary, the state party put "Texas should prohibit Sharia law" on the ballot as Proposition 10 — one of ten advisory questions used to set party priorities. It passed with 94.81%, and Abbott promised more:

"Even though I've signed a law that bans Sharia law in the state of Texas, this is going to be something that we take going into the next session and make more crystal clear and more expansive."

He is promising to expand a ban on something that isn't happening, under a law that doesn't say what he says it says.

Congress had already built a caucus

Washington did not need Little Rock. The organization was there first: on December 18, 2025 — three months before the RAIR post — Keith Self of Texas and Chip Roy launched the "Sharia Free America Caucus." Within a month it had 26 members from 17 states. By March it had 50.

The roster reads like a directory of this site: Majority Whip Tom Emmer, plus Reps. Brandon Gill, Michael Cloud, Mary Miller, Andy Biggs, Eli Crane, Byron Donalds, Scott Perry, Randy Fine, Andy Ogles, Eric Burlison, Josh Brecheen, Sheri Biggs, Ralph Norman, Barry Moore, Tracey Mann, Russ Fulcher, Mike Kelly, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Clyde, Mark Harris, Nick Begich, Cory Mills and Mike Haridopolos.

Read their own words in Self's press release and watch how fast "we're protecting the Constitution" turns into something else. Cloud called it "an assault on our Constitution, our freedoms, and the Christian foundations of our nation." Gill complained about "the rise of mass Islamic immigration in north Texas." Ogles skipped the legal argument entirely:

"Islam is a religion of violence, abuse of women, and ruthless political conquest."

That is not a statement about a legal code. It's a statement about a faith and the people who practice it. Ogles kept going: in March 2026 he posted that "Muslims don't belong in American society. Pluralism is a lie." The same week, Randy Fine wrote that "we need more Islamophobia, not less," and Tommy Tuberville posted a photo of the September 11 attacks beside a photo of New York's Muslim mayor, captioned "The enemy is inside the gates."

In February 2026, CAIR designated the caucus an anti-Muslim hate group — the first time in the group's 32-year history it has designated a congressional caucus. The reason was the legislation. One bill members back, the Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act, would let the government revoke visas and deport any foreign national judged to be "an adherent of Sharia law." There is no test for "adherent." It's an official deciding whether your prayers count against you.

This isn't only an objection from the left. At the House Judiciary subcommittee hearing Republicans themselves called in February, George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin testified against the bill, arguing it violates the First Amendment's protections for free speech and free exercise of religion, sweeps in enormous numbers of people who pose no threat, and would actually harm national security by handing extremists a recruiting pitch.

The Senate has a bill by the same name, and it belongs to Alabama's Tommy Tuberville, who introduced S. 3009, the "Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act," on October 15, 2025 — along with S. 3008, the "No Shari'a Act," the same day.

A different Senate bill goes after Sharia in American businesses. On February 12, 2026, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas introduced S. 3887, the "Defeat Sharia Law in America Act," with Tuberville as his only co-sponsor. It would amend the Civil Rights Act so that a business covered by its public-accommodations section that provides goods or services "by implementing Sharia law" counts as discriminating on the ground of religion. Cornyn described a religion practiced by nearly two billion people as "an existential threat to our way of life." CAIR's Alabama chapter called the bill an "unconstitutional attack on religious freedom," pointing out that Sharia guides daily religious practice much the way Jewish Halacha does.

Follow the money, and the calendar

If this were a legal emergency, you'd see it in the courts. Instead you see it in ad buys.

Republicans spent more than $10 million on TV ads mentioning "Sharia" or "Islam" negatively, according to figures the ad-tracking firm AdImpact gave NPR — most of it in Texas, right before its primaries. That's roughly ten times what was spent in each of the last four election cycles.

Sabina Mohyuddin, who runs the American Muslim Advisory Council in Tennessee, put it plainly: "It is an election year and these politicians believe if they spew this hateful rhetoric, they are going to get more votes."

House Speaker Mike Johnson defended the rhetoric, saying "there's a lot of energy in the country and a lot of popular sentiment that the demand to impose Sharia law in America is a serious problem." NPR added the part he left out: Sharia is a religious framework, and it does not have standing over the U.S. Constitution.

A few Republicans wouldn't play along. Rep. Nicole Malliotakis said "freedom of religion is a pillar of our nation and broad brush statements like this are offensive and completely inappropriate." Most of the conference said nothing — a long way from 2019, when Republican leaders condemned Rep. Steve King over his comments on white nationalism and stripped him of his committee assignments.

The freedom argument falls apart on contact

Now go back to Salaam's line: they hope people learn from the Quran the way a Christian might hope people follow the Ten Commandments.

Because three days before Sanders warned Arkansas about religious law, she stood with the First Liberty Institute to announce that Arkansas ranks #1 in the nation for religious liberty. "Every American should be free to live according to their faith and conscience," she said. And one of the laws she credited for the ranking was Act 573 — the law putting the Ten Commandments in every Arkansas classroom.

So: a religious code in every public school is religious liberty. A religious code in a five-house subdivision is an invasion.

That's not the only place the principle collapses.

Texas requires the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom. Abbott signed that bill, and in April 2026 the Fifth Circuit upheld the law. A religious text, in every room, by order of the state.
A federal judge threw Arkansas's version out. In March 2026, Judge Timothy Brooks wrote that "nothing could possibly justify hanging the Ten Commandments — with or without historical context — in a calculus, chemistry, French, or woodworking class." Sanders called the Ten Commandments "the basis of all Western law and morality" and vowed to appeal. The lawyer running that appeal is Tim Griffin — the same attorney general who told Arkansas that the state is governed by law, "not religious legal codes."
Arkansas librarians can now face jail. On July 30, 2026, a federal appeals court let Act 372 take effect. Handing a minor an item deemed "harmful" is a Class A misdemeanor carrying up to a year in prison; a separate provision makes some cases a felony carrying up to six. Griffin praised the ruling.
Texas is near the top of the country in pulling books from schools. PEN America counted 1,781 book bans in Texas in the 2024–25 school year alone.
Texas bans abortion at about six weeks, with no exception for rape or incest. Abbott signed it, then told Texans not to worry because the state would "eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas."

The government tells you what religious text hangs in your kid's classroom, what books the librarian can hand your teenager, and what you can do about your own pregnancy — and that's liberty. But a Muslim family following religious guidance in their private life is a threat to the Republic.

That's not a principle. That's a target.

Who actually pays

The imam at the Islamic Center for Human Excellence said they haven't had any incidents from all this. They increased their security anyway. That's what it costs to be five houses on the wrong end of a viral post.

It costs more elsewhere. "We know this kind of rhetoric leads to more bullying in school, discrimination in the workplace, hate crimes and vandalism against mosques," Mohyuddin said. By her estimate, Ogles alone has tens of thousands of Muslim constituents in his own district.

And it isn't over. The Arkansas Legislature convenes a regular session in January 2027, and the Arkansas Times notes the Sharia bill could come back. Abbott has promised a "more expansive" version in Texas. The caucus keeps growing.

Every hour spent on an invented takeover is an hour not spent on what was actually squeezing families in that Arkansas hearing room — the price of gas, the price of groceries, the cost of seeing a doctor. Ask your representative what they did about your health insurance premium this year. Then count how many times they said the word "Sharia."

One of those numbers is going to be much bigger than the other.

Sources

Despite debunkings, misinformation about Little Rock's 'New Africa' persists — Arkansas Times, August 4, 2026
Arkansas homestead tax credit proposal advances, Sharia Law resolution fails in committee — Arkansas Advocate, April 15, 2026
House GOP leadership silent as more members post anti-Muslim statements — NPR, March 14, 2026
CAIR Designates House's 'Sharia-Free Caucus' an Anti-Muslim Hate Group — CAIR, February 18, 2026
CAIR-Texas Calls Gov. Abbott's Claim to Sign a 'Sharia Law' Ban 'Divorced from Reality' — CAIR-Texas, September 12, 2025
Sanders' July 17 post and Griffin's reply on X

Photo: Rep. Andy Ogles addresses the New York Young Republican Club, Dec. 13, 2025. Adam Gray/Getty Images.

ICE Is Reading Your Posts. Congress Paid for It.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A round-the-clock dragnet

Here is what the Journal found.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reddit said no. The government kept going.

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

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

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

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

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

No charges have been filed in any of them.

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

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

What actually counts as "doxxing"

The administration has been rewriting a word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The number they won't show you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congress wrote the check

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

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

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

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

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

The Senate: 52 to 47

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

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

The House: 214 to 212

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source

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

Lisa Demuth Had Herself Elected Speaker. Two Weeks Later the Supreme Court Said It Never Happened.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 12:12:00 +0000

On January 14, 2025, Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon walked into the House chamber to open the legislative session, as state law requires. He read the roll. Only Republicans answered. He announced that the House did not have the 68 members it needed to do business, adjourned the chamber, and left.

The 67 Republicans stayed in their seats. They decided among themselves that 67 was enough. Then they voted to make their leader, Lisa Demuth of Cold Spring, Speaker of the House — a move Democrats immediately called an "unlawful sham with no legal authority."

Ten days later, the Minnesota Supreme Court agreed with the Democrats. Everything Demuth's House had done for two weeks — electing her Speaker, naming officers, handing out committee gavels — was wiped out, because the chamber had never legally been in session at all.

She is now running for governor.

She had a deal. She threw it away when she thought she didn't need it.

Start with what makes this worse: Minnesota voters didn't give either party a majority in November 2024. They elected 67 Republicans and 67 Democrats. A tie.

Demuth and DFL leader Melissa Hortman did what leaders are supposed to do with a tie. They sat down and negotiated a power-sharing agreement — shared committee chairs, shared control, neither side steamrolling the other.

Then, in late December, a judge ruled that a newly elected Democrat in a heavily Democratic district hadn't actually been living there. He resigned. Until a special election could fill the seat, Republicans had a temporary 67-66 edge.

Demuth's caucus used that temporary edge to tear up the deal.

Republicans "scrapped" the power-sharing agreement the moment the seat opened up, the Minnesota Reformer reported, and announced they would organize the entire chamber themselves. Nothing about the election had changed. Voters hadn't given Republicans a majority. A residency lawsuit had, temporarily, in a seat everyone expected Democrats to win right back.

That's the whole story in one sentence: she followed the rules when the rules gave her a tie, and abandoned them the second an accident of litigation gave her an advantage.

The threat underneath it: throwing out an election she lost

The reason Democrats walked out instead of just showing up and losing votes wasn't committee chairs. It was a seat.

Rep. Brad Tabke, a Shakopee Democrat, won reelection by 14 votes in a race where local election officials admitted 20 ballots had been accidentally destroyed without being counted. Republicans wanted a do-over election in a swing district they could win — which would have handed them a real 68-seat majority.

A judge looked at it and ruled that Tabke had won anyway, and that the missing ballots would not have changed the outcome. Republicans lost in court.

Demuth would not commit to seating him regardless. She had said her caucus wouldn't seat Tabke without a do-over. Hortman put a written provision on the table that would have blocked Republicans from unseating him. Republicans rejected it. A source close to House GOP leadership told the Reformer the problem with the offer was that Democrats "sought to unilaterally disarm us on Tabke."

Sit with that phrase. Being asked to promise you won't overturn a certified election result was described as disarmament.

The Minnesota Constitution lets each chamber judge who gets seated. That power exists to handle genuine fraud, not to let a party with a six-week accidental majority delete a lawful winner. Demuth kept the option open anyway, right up until she had to trade it away.

"A majority of the total number of seats"

On January 24, 2025, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled against her. The Minnesota House's own nonpartisan Session Daily reported the holding plainly: 68 members constitute a quorum.

The court's order was short and blunt:

"We further hold that under Article IV, Section 13, of the Minnesota Constitution, which requires that '[a] majority of each house constitutes a quorum to transact business,' a quorum requires a majority of the total number of seats of each house. Vacancies do not reduce the number required for a majority of each house to constitute a quorum."

Republicans had argued that 67 was a majority of the 133 members currently seated. The court said no — a vacancy doesn't shrink the House. The chamber had 134 seats, so it needed 68. Demuth's two weeks of proceedings had produced nothing official.

Hortman's response is the line that names it:

"Republicans tried to seize power that the voters did not give them."

And Demuth's response? Not a word acknowledging that the state's highest court had just voided everything she'd done. Instead she put out a statement attacking Democrats for "disrespecting not just their own constituents, but the entire state of Minnesota by refusing to do their jobs."

She lost a constitutional case about her own legitimacy and framed it as a scheduling complaint about the other side.

What she said while she was doing it

The gap between Demuth's words and Demuth's conduct is not a matter of interpretation. It's on the record from the same afternoon.

In her acceptance speech — the one for the speakership a court would later erase — she promised to "work tirelessly" to build a "culture of respect and civility" in the House. She told the half-empty chamber that lawmakers owe the people they represent "the respect of agreeing that sometimes we do disagree." She said: "So let's focus on what unites us."

She said all of that minutes after 67 members overruled the presiding officer, ignored an adjournment, and installed her in an office they had no legal power to fill.

Three weeks of nothing, to end up where she started

The standoff dragged on until February 5, 2025, when Republicans finally agreed to seat Tabke and Democrats came back to work. Demuth got the speakership for the full term.

Here is the part worth remembering. The Reformer's summary of the final deal was that "on its face, the final deal looks similar to an offer Democrats extended three weeks ago" — Tabke seated, a Demuth speakership, committee gavels until the special election, a Republican majority on the fraud oversight committee.

Three weeks of paralysis. A trip to the state Supreme Court. A legislature frozen at the start of a budget year in which it had to write a two-year, $60-billion-plus budget for schools, roads, health care, and social services — or shut the state government down at the end of June.

And she landed on terms she'd been offered before any of it started.

That's not hardball that worked. That's three weeks of Minnesotans' time burned so one politician could try to keep a majority the voters never handed her.

This is the pattern, not the exception

Demuth's defenders will say this was a one-time fight over an unusual situation. Her record as Speaker says otherwise. When she has the gavel, the rules bend toward whatever she wants:

After the Annunciation school shooting in Minneapolis, a bill banning semiautomatic rifles and high-capacity magazines passed the Minnesota Senate. DFL lawmakers held a days-long sit-in and hundreds packed the Capitol demanding a floor vote. DFL lawmakers said Speaker Demuth was holding the vote up. Minnesotans never got to see their representatives go on the record.
She is asking voters to make her governor while seeking Donald Trump's endorsement and praising his tariffs as "hard but effective" — as Minnesota farmers lost their export markets.

A governor has real power over what happens when the rules get inconvenient: vetoes, appointments, emergency authority, the National Guard. The question every Minnesotan should ask is simple. In January 2025, handed a temporary and accidental advantage, what did Lisa Demuth do with it?

She took everything she could reach, until a court made her give it back.

We deserve better.

Source

AP, Democrats boycott first day of Minnesota House session but GOP votes to appoint speaker anyway by Steve Karnowski (Jan. 14, 2025)
Minnesota Reformer, Minnesota Supreme Court sides with House DFL, invalidating House GOP's work for last two weeks (Jan. 24, 2025)

Photo: Minnesota House Republican leader Lisa Demuth speaks to reporters at the State Capitol, Jan. 13, 2025 / AP Photo/Steve Karnowski.

Lisa Demuth Took Credit for the Viral Daycare Video. The YouTuber Said He Had No Idea Who She Was.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 11:54:43 +0000

The day after Christmas 2025, a right-wing YouTuber named Nick Shirley posted a video of himself knocking on the doors of Somali-run daycare centers in Minneapolis. He said the centers were empty. He said they were stealing your tax dollars. The video exploded.

Three days later, Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth — who is running for governor — got on a virtual press conference and claimed a piece of it for herself.

"Our caucus has been working to expose fraud for years, including working with Nick Shirley and agency whistleblowers to get the information out to the public and to hold the Walz administration accountable."

That's what she told reporters, according to The Hill. Fox 9 reported the same quote.

There was one problem. Nick Shirley says it never happened.

"I have no idea who this lady is"

On January 1, 2026, Shirley posted a flat, public denial:

"This is completely false. I have no idea who this lady is, she is lying to make herself look good for her campaign. Shame on her!"

It got 1.4 million views.

Nine hours later, Demuth posted again — and her story had changed. Now Shirley "deserves all the credit." Now it was only that "some of the information used in Nick's video was compiled by our staff," which she described as "public information we have shared and will continue to share with anyone."

That is not what "working with Nick Shirley" means. She said she was a partner in the video. When the guy who made it called her a liar in public, she quietly downgraded herself to a filing cabinet.

This is the part that matters, and it's simple: the Speaker of the Minnesota House stood in front of reporters and took credit for something the other person says never took place. She only corrected the record after she got caught, and she never explained the gap.

What state inspectors actually found

The reason Demuth wanted credit is that the video was, briefly, a sensation. The reason she should have wanted distance is that it didn't hold up.

After the video went out, investigators from Minnesota's Office of Inspector General went to nine of the ten centers Shirley filmed. The 19th reported what they found: normal operations and children at all but one — and that one simply hadn't opened for the day yet. They skipped the tenth center in the video because it had been closed for years and hadn't received a dollar in that time.

Some of those centers did have licensing violations on file, for things like cleanliness and staff supervision. None of the violations were for fraud.

The rest of the video fell apart the same way. A disinformation researcher walked through it piece by piece: one center was closed when Shirley showed up, two others weren't operating at all, and one had security footage of children being dropped off on the very day Shirley stood outside telling viewers the place was empty. One daycare told reporters it wouldn't let him in because he arrived with a handful of masked men and staff thought they were ICE agents.

Most daycares lock their doors and cover their windows. That's a safety rule, not a confession.

Real fraud in Minnesota's child care program is a real thing — the state found several million dollars' worth in a 2019 investigation and has been tightening oversight ever since. But that's the story Demuth's caucus could have told with actual records. Instead they helped feed a camera crew.

Who Republicans actually handed the information to

Demuth's revised version — "some of the information used in Nick's video was compiled by our staff" — deserves a closer look at where that information went.

The main source in Shirley's video is a man identified only as "David." He is David Hoch, a Minnesota lobbyist and former right-wing candidate for state attorney general. The Intercept identified him and dug up what he had been posting on now-deleted social media accounts:

"EVERY Somali in MN is engaged in fraud. ALL of them."

And, in November: "Even the Blacks have had enough of the demon Muslims."

Hoch didn't dig up the state funding data on those specific centers himself. The 19th reported that he got it from Republican staffers in Minnesota.

So the chain runs: House Republican staff → a lobbyist who says every Somali in the state is a criminal → a YouTube video → the White House. Demuth's own floor leader, Harry Niska, confirmed the first link out loud. "Much of the information that one of the gentlemen in that video was providing was due to information he got from the House Republican staff," he told reporters. "We have been ready and willing to provide information to anyone who wants to pursue this."

Anyone. Including that guy.

Minnesota has the largest Somali population in the country. After the video, Somali-run daycares reported people showing up in person demanding to see children, and threatening phone calls. At least one center was broken into.

What came next

Vice President JD Vance reposted the video and said Shirley had done more useful journalism than the 2024 Pulitzer winners. The Trump administration then froze federal child care money to Minnesota and four other Democratic-run states, plus $7.3 billion in cash assistance for low-income families, until a federal judge ordered it released. Minnesota was told to hand over Social Security numbers for all 23,000 children in the program.

Then the agents came. Thousands of federal officers surged into and around Minneapolis. On January 7, one of them shot and killed Renee Good, a U.S. citizen, in her car. By January 24, agents had killed Alex Pretti, another U.S. citizen.

And the fraud cases Republicans said this was all about? Minnesota House DFL leader Zack Stephenson told NPR that some of the federal prosecutors working them — including the lead prosecutor — resigned in the wake of the ICE surge. "This has crippled our fraud response, and Minnesotans should be outraged by that, and it was all done in the name of supposedly addressing fraud."

Minnesota Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy put the blame where the invitation came from: "I also think the pretext was caused by the action of the Republicans to invite Nick Shirley, a YouTuber, into town."

She still says it was worth it

Six weeks after Renee Good was killed, Demuth told NPR that fraud and immigration are simply not connected, and that she has no regrets:

"So if it took a YouTuber, an independent YouTuber, to get the word out and get Minnesotans to know what was actually going on, and then the national attention — that is good for Minnesota, because it was our tax dollars that were stolen."

Except state inspectors found children at the centers. The violations weren't fraud violations. And two Minnesotans are dead.

This is the same pattern that runs through Demuth's record. When an ICE officer killed Renee Good, she went on Newsmax and said we "have to respect the work that law enforcement is doing, whether it is city, state, or federal agents." When Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act against Minnesota, she would not say whether she supported it, offering only "we need peace in Minnesota here."

Her campaign platform promises an inspector general to "root out fraud in all parts of government" — in St. Paul. Not a word about the federal cuts and federal agents landing on Minnesotans.

Demuth wanted the credit when the video was going viral. She dropped the claim within 24 hours of being called out. She has never dropped the story it was used to tell.

We deserve better.

Sources

The Hill, Top Minnesota Republican: GOP caucus steered YouTuber Nick Shirley to day care sites (Dec. 31, 2025)
NPR, Minnesota Republicans defend their focus on fraud despite the ICE surge that followed (Feb. 17, 2026)
The 19th, Fact check: Here's what's happening with child care fraud in Minnesota (Jan. 9, 2026)
The Intercept, Unnamed Source in Viral Minnesota Somali Fraud Video Is Right-Wing Lobbyist Who Called Muslims "Demons" (Jan. 3, 2026)

Photo: Nick Shirley outside Quality Learning Center in Minneapolis / FOX 9.

Five Years Ago This Week, Mike Lindell Promised Proof the Election Was Stolen. Experts Called It 'A Big Fat Nothing.'

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 09:52:00 +0000

Five years ago this week, Mike Lindell rented a hall in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and told America he was about to end the argument.

The event was called the Cyber Symposium. It ran August 10 through 12, 2021. Lindell had spent weeks promising that he would put the raw data on a screen, hand it to cybersecurity experts, and prove once and for all that the 2020 election had been hacked and handed to Joe Biden.

He didn't just promise evidence. He promised a specific outcome. He said the proof would be so strong that the Supreme Court would rule for him unanimously, that Biden and Kamala Harris would resign, and that Donald Trump would be put back in the White House on August 13 — the day after the symposium ended.

Then he stood up in front of the room for three days and delivered nothing.

It matters now because Lindell is running for governor of Minnesota, and the thing he failed to prove in Sioux Falls is the number one plank of his campaign.

The promise

Before the event, Lindell said he would produce "100 percent, non-subjective evidence" that Trump had won.

He also offered $5 million to any cybersecurity professional who could look at his data — his so-called "packet captures" from the 2020 election — and show that it wasn't what he said it was. He called it the "Prove Mike Wrong" challenge. It was meant as a flex. If you're that sure, you can afford to bet on it.

Real experts showed up. So did Steve Bannon, QAnon figure Ron Watkins, and the son of Brazil's then-president Jair Bolsonaro. Ordinary supporters flew in from across the country to watch history happen.

The delivery

Lindell opened by announcing that the symposium itself was under attack.

"The whole technology was attacked," he told the room, according to Gizmodo's account of the first day. "This is the cover-up. This is the absolute cover-up of the worst in history."

That was the pattern for three days: a technical problem, an accusation, a promise that the real material was coming tomorrow. Instead of data, attendees got slides. Votebeat's reporter described the finale as dramatic images of computer code and file structures that looked like "a slide of wingding characters" — and then Lindell simply declined to hand over the underlying data.

The security professionals in the room said so out loud, in real time.

Robert Graham, a well-known security researcher, was live-tweeting from the floor. On day two he wrote:

"All day Mike Lindell has been on stage saying the cyber experts are happily working on packet captures. We are not. We haven't been given the packet captures we were promised. I mentioned this because some of his PR guys came by looking to take video of cyber experts working on packet captures. They seem confused by the fact that there's no cyber experts who have seen the promised packet captures."

CNN's Donie O'Sullivan brought election security expert Harri Hursti to the event specifically to analyze whatever evidence turned up. Hursti told the Washington Post that the whole thing was "a big fat nothing and a distraction," and that Lindell's team "have fed us with garbage just to control the narrative."

By the end, Hursti summed it up like this: "We expected a huge pile of data which we wouldn't be able to understand and how it can be evidence. We didn't expect there's no pile of anything."

Even the fans noticed. "I think the guy makes a wonderful pillow," one attendee told CNN. "But I wish some of this information had been organized a little better."

His own hired experts said the data was junk

This is the part Lindell can't blame on the media.

Lindell paid for a "red team" of cyber experts to vet his evidence. One of them, Josh Merritt, told the Washington Times during the symposium that the packet captures were unrecoverable in the data, and that what Lindell had could not prove a cyber attack by China. His description of the material Lindell handed them:

"We were handed a turd. And I had to take that turd and turn it into a diamond. And that's what I think we did."

So the people paid to make Lindell's case said the evidence was garbage. The independent experts said the evidence was garbage. And Lindell's answer, when CNN pressed him at the end, was to say he was saving it: "I have that proof with my people that we're bringing to the Supreme Court. I don't need the media driving the narrative before my case to the Supreme Court."

August 13 came. Biden did not resign. Trump was not reinstated. The Supreme Court did not rule 9-0 for Mike Lindell. None of it happened, because none of it was ever going to happen.

The $5 million bet he lost

Remember that "Prove Mike Wrong" challenge? Someone took it.

Robert Zeidman is a software developer — and a Trump supporter — who flew to Sioux Falls genuinely hoping to watch an election get overturned. He testified later that he entered the contest because he wanted to see "history in the making." He assumed he'd lose, figuring Lindell would never dangle $5 million over data his own experts hadn't checked.

Zeidman was given 11 files to review over two days at the conference. He looked at them and found they weren't 2020 election data at all.

Lindell's own contest panel refused to declare him the winner. So it went to arbitration, and in 2023 the arbitrators ruled for Zeidman. In February 2024, a federal judge in Minneapolis confirmed the award and gave Lindell 30 days to pay the full $5 million.

Lindell's response to NBC News: "I don't have any money. I have a pickup truck and a house that I live in. That's it."

The centerpiece stunt of the Cyber Symposium ended with a court ordering Lindell to pay $5 million to a Trump supporter who proved the data was fake.

Real people paid for the show

The symposium wasn't just an expensive embarrassment. It landed in the middle of a genuinely dangerous moment for the people who run American elections.

That same week, the Department of Homeland Security put out a public safety warning about "an increasing but modest level of activity online by individuals calling for violence in response to unsubstantiated claims of fraud related to the 2020 election and the alleged 'reinstatement' of former President Trump." State election officials heading to their national conference that week were nervous enough that one texted a reporter: "So like, I don't plan on dying for voting machines anytime soon."

And Mesa County, Colorado, Clerk Tina Peters was in Sioux Falls as a featured speaker at Lindell's event at the exact moment confidential passwords from her county's voting machines showed up on a far-right website. Colorado's Secretary of State decertified the county's election equipment and said Peters "allowed a security breach and, by all evidence at this point, assisted it."

That's the cost of this stuff. Not just wasted money — election workers quitting, equipment thrown out, clerks getting threats.

He is running Minnesota's campaign on the exact claim he could not prove

Here is why a 2021 conference still matters in 2026.

Lindell is running for governor of Minnesota. His campaign platform lists seven things he wants to do — property taxes, schools, fees, public safety. And then it names the one thing he says makes all the rest possible:

"The key to enabling me to fix all of the above? Securing our elections from fraud by ridding us of the machines which have been used to steal elections."

Read that again. He wants to be governor so he can rip out Minnesota's voting machines, on the grounds that they "have been used to steal elections" — the identical claim he flew hundreds of people to South Dakota to prove, and could not.

He has had five years and unlimited motivation. In that time, a Denver jury found he defamed a former Dominion executive and awarded that man $2.3 million. A federal judge in Minnesota ruled that he defamed Smartmatic with false claims about its voting machines. Another federal judge ordered him to pay Zeidman $5 million. He still has not produced the proof.

And when the Star Tribune checked last month, the man who made "election integrity" his life's work wasn't registered to vote in Minnesota.

Minnesota isn't a hall in Sioux Falls. If Lindell doesn't deliver as governor, nobody gets to fly home disappointed. Minnesotans deserve better.

Sources

Joseph Marks, The Cybersecurity 202: My Pillow cyber symposium is yet another font of election fraud lies, The Washington Post, Aug. 11, 2021. Related: Ed Mazza, Mike Lindell Loses It On CNN Reporter As His Cyber Symposium Disintegrates, HuffPost, Aug. 13, 2021, and Lucas Ropek, MyPillow CEO's Cyber Symposium Is Already a Deranged Circus, Gizmodo, Aug. 11, 2021. Photo: Jim Watson / AFP (Getty Images).