MAGA Report Cards — Mississippi

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

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

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

The argument they signed is the part worth reading twice.

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

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

What the brief actually argues

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

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

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

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

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

Who signed it

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

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

Some of these names carry their own history

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the argument matters beyond this case

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

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

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

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

What the filing shows

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

Nobody is doing the thing the bill bans

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

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

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

This is control, not freedom

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

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

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

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

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

Two Republicans said no

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

The bill now goes to the Senate.

The choice they made

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

Every Republican we track who voted yes

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

Iowa: Ashley Hinson, Zach Nunn

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

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

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the SAVE America Act would actually do to voters

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

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

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

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

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

The emergency the resolution describes

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

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

It cites a federal investigation that charged four people.

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

What was actually in front of them that week

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

Outside the chamber:

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

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

In their own words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 189 who voted yes

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

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho — Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas — Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi — Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey — Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

The number nine is not in the Constitution

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

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

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

What they were actually voting on

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

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

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

The timing

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

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

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

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

Who pushed it

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who voted to freeze the Court

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey: Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

Then a second missile killed them.

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

Congress never voted to authorize any of it.

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

We do not know who most of these people were

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

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

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

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

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

What the Senate actually voted on

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

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

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

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

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

It failed, 48 to 51.

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

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

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

Two of them switching sides would have carried it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The legal case for all this is classified

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The House looked into it for ten days

The Senate is not the only chamber that folded.

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Source

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

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.

Cindy Hyde-Smith Hasn't Debated an Opponent Since 2018. Her Campaign's Answer to 'Where's Cindy' Was a Line About George Soros's Apartment.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:31:24 +0000

Mississippi votes on November 3. Absentee voting opens September 19. And Cindy Hyde-Smith, running for a second full term in the U.S. Senate, has not agreed to a single debate or a single public town hall.

On Thursday, August 27, 2026, her Democratic opponent Scott Colom held a press conference in downtown Jackson to launch a "Where's Cindy" tour — five town halls in five Mississippi cities between August 31 and September 4, open to voters and their questions.

His ask of the incumbent was modest to the point of being embarrassing:

"She needs to do one town hall. She can pick the reddest county in the state."

One. Anywhere she likes. In front of the friendliest crowd in Mississippi.

The answer was not an answer

Hyde-Smith's campaign manager, Jake Monssen, responded to the "Where's Cindy" question by listing her funding announcements — Delta State's aviation program, a rural hospital collaboration in Franklin County, other towns around the state.

Then he added this:

"I can tell you where she isn't. Sen. Hyde-Smith isn't with Scott Colom in George Soros' apartment in NYC, promoting gender transition surgeries for children and other extreme policies of the radical left."

Read what actually happened there. A sitting United States senator was asked, through her campaign, whether she would stand in a room in Mississippi and take questions from Mississippians. Her campaign's official reply was a sentence about a billionaire's apartment and surgery on children.

It is not a scheduling answer. It is not a "we're considering it." It is a change of subject dressed up as an insult — and nothing else in the statement came any closer to a yes or a no.

Soros has donated to Colom's campaign; he donates to Democratic candidates regularly. Colom's response has been that hundreds of Mississippians have donated to him too. Neither fact has anything to do with whether Hyde-Smith will take questions anywhere in Mississippi.

She has done this before

This is not a first-time dodge. It is her pattern, and the record is short enough to state completely:

2018 — Hyde-Smith debated Mike Espy during the special election runoff.
2020 — running for her first full six-year term against the same opponent, she did not debate him at all.
2026 — no debate agreed to, no town hall agreed to, with the election nine weeks out.

One debate, eight years ago, in the one race where she was an appointed senator who had never been on a ballot for the seat and could not avoid it.

Ty Pinkins, an independent also on the November ballot, has challenged both party nominees to debate. Colom said he would take any debate "any time our junior senator shows up."

What she is avoiding being asked about

The "busy announcing funding" defense is worth taking seriously for a second, because it tells you what a town hall would be about.

Colom used the same press conference to hit Hyde-Smith for not standing up to President Trump on tariffs, on agriculture policy, and on the war with Iran — three things driving up what Mississippians pay.

"Listen, she totally gave away our voice on tariffs. If you look at the Constitution, it's clear that the Congress, including our senator, is supposed to be Mississippi's voice when it comes to tariffs."

Those are the questions a farmer in the Delta gets to ask at a town hall and does not get to ask at a ribbon-cutting. Announcing a grant is a press release with a podium in front of it. Nobody in the room gets to ask why beef and diesel cost what they cost, or why, in Colom's words, their senator gave away Mississippi's voice on tariffs.

There is also the matter of the man asking for the debate. Hyde-Smith already blocked Scott Colom once — she killed his federal judgeship by refusing to return a blue slip, a procedure a Mississippi segregationist invented to keep civil rights judges off the bench, after Roger Wicker and two Republican governors had backed him. She never had to explain that decision to a room of voters either.

A Republican habit, not a Mississippi one

Hyde-Smith is one of many. In Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn skipped a public forum, wouldn't say whether she'd debate, and claimed she had done "lots of forums" until a TV station checked with her opponents and found it wasn't true. In Minnesota, Brad Finstad says the people asking him for a town hall just want to "have a hissy fit", and answers constituents only on phone calls his own office fills.

The common thread is that none of them lose anything by refusing. There is no rule requiring a debate. The only cost is whatever voters decide to charge them for it.

What the record shows

Cindy Hyde-Smith has agreed to no debate and no town hall in a race that ends November 3, with absentee voting starting September 19. She has debated an opponent exactly once, in 2018, and skipped debating the same opponent in 2020. Asked this week to hold one town hall in the reddest county she could pick, her campaign manager's public response was that she is not in George Soros's New York apartment promoting surgery for children.

Source

Taylor Vance, Colom calls on Hyde-Smith to participate in debate and town hall before election, Mississippi Today, August 28, 2026. Photo: Jacquelyn Martin / AP.

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

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

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

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

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

"You have so many proteins to choose from"

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

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

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

"The Democrats invented this term 'affordability'"

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

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

"Earn more"

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

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

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

"Gasoline prices are down 40 percent"

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

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

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

"Gas prices are at five-year lows"

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

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

The rest of the list

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

What they have in common

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

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

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

The short version

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

He told them it had nothing to do with vaccines.

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

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

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

What Kennedy did not tell the senators

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

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

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

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

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

The fourteen votes

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

Fourteen of those yes votes came from Republicans we track:

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

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

What Susan Collins was promised

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

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

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

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

What happened to the promises

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

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

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

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

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

The MMR vaccine is now the target

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who would have to investigate

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

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

Joe Wilson wrote it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ohio said no in 2011. Jim Jordan signed anyway.

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

Jim Jordan is Ohio's signature on this bill.

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

Pennsylvania sent five signatures on a law it never wanted

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

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

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

What it costs a paycheck

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

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

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

This is not a one-off

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

That somebody is usually you, on your electric bill.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Barrett is running on a vote from 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We now know exactly what that cost.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Jordan — Ohio, −32%

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

Jim Jordan voted yes on the House bill.

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

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

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

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

Stephanie Bice — Oklahoma, −32%

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

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

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

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

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

Juan Ciscomani — Arizona, −30%

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

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

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

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

Sheri Biggs — South Carolina, −29%

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

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

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

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

Victoria Spartz — Indiana, −28%

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lisa McClain — Michigan, −27%

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

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

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

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

Michael Guest — Mississippi, −26%

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

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

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

Jason Smith — Missouri, −25%

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia Foxx — North Carolina, −21%

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roger Marshall — Kansas, −20%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ashley Moody

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

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

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

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

Gus Bilirakis

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

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

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

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

Texas — the thinnest safety net in America, cut anyway

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

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

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

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

Every Texas Republican in the House voted for H.R. 6703. Two of them stand out.

Monica De La Cruz

Monica De La Cruz represents TX-15 in South Texas, and she sits on the Ways and Means Committee — the same committee Jason Smith chairs, the one with jurisdiction over the tax credits that expired.

Her own district is among the hardest hit in the country. An estimated 65,193 people in TX-15 are projected to lose health coverage, per the same Joint Economic Committee minority analysis — and note the split: 61,700 of them losing ACA marketplace coverage, against 3,493 losing Medicaid.

This is not a Medicaid story in her district. It is almost entirely a marketplace story — which is to say, it is almost entirely about the credits her own committee could have extended.

Ronny Jackson

Ronny Jackson is a doctor. He served as White House physician to three presidents before taking TX-13 in 2021.

He is the third clinician on this list, after a nurse practitioner in South Carolina and an OB-GYN in Kansas. All three voted the same way.

There is no version of a medical career that leaves you unaware of what happens when a patient's coverage lapses. You see it directly: the delayed scan, the rationed insulin, the condition that was manageable in March and is not in September. Jackson spent decades close enough to that to know.

He voted yes.

The through-line

Look at the vote counts again. The Senate blocked the extension by nine votes short of cloture. The House passed its substitute 216–211. Neither outcome was inevitable; a handful of members in either chamber could have changed it.

Then look at who these fourteen people are. This is not a list of backbenchers who got steamrolled:

Jason Smith chairs Ways and Means, the committee that writes tax law — and these were tax credits. Monica De La Cruz sits on it too.
Virginia Foxx chairs Rules, the committee that decides what reaches the floor at all.
Lisa McClain is Conference Chair, fourth in House Republican leadership.
Jim Jordan chairs Judiciary and founded the Freedom Caucus.
Gus Bilirakis sits on the Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee.
Roger Marshall is a physician on the Senate health committee, and Ronny Jackson was White House physician to three presidents.
Sheri Biggs is a nurse practitioner.

Four of them held the gavels or the leadership posts that control what the House votes on. Two sit on the committee that writes tax law, and two more on the health panels themselves. Three of them treat patients for a living. If any group in Congress had both the power and the knowledge to force a different result, it was these fourteen — and their own states include the two that lost the biggest share of their coverage in America, and the one that lost the most people outright.

And notice what the House actually passed. Not a repeal. A bill named "Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act," which loosens rules on association health plans and does nothing about the credits whose expiration was about to raise what enrollees pay by 58%. It exists so that members can say they voted to lower premiums.

Every member above can now go home and say exactly that. The 2.6 million people who lost coverage this year are the reason it isn't true.

We've documented what this looks like on the ground in Alabama, Wisconsin, Arkansas and Ohio, and the full national tally of both votes is here.

The credits are gone. The people are uninsured. The votes are on the record with names attached — and in 2026, so are the members who cast them.

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.

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.

Trent Kelly's Constituents Have Been Asking for a Town Hall Since 2017. By 2025 There Was a Protest Outside His Office Every Friday, and Someone in It Was Still Asking.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:21:55 +0000

On a Friday afternoon in March 2025, more than 30 people stood outside Trent Kelly's district office on Seventh Street North in Columbus, Mississippi, holding signs at passing traffic.

One of the signs read: "Honk if you support Ukraine." Another said "Cutting Medicaid is murder."

They had been showing up every week. The organizer, Annis Cox of Columbus, told the Commercial Dispatch the group had more than doubled in size since the previous week. Here's how she described why:

"(What unites us) right at this second is probably all the time we've spent irritated in our hearts and our minds about stuff that was going on and not having a place (for them), besides ourselves and our families, our echo chambers – but a lot of times you're singing to the choir. Now … the people driving by, they can see us and they can say, 'Yeah.'"

One of the regulars, Fred Kinder, had been there since the protests started on February 28. What frustrated him, he said, was never hearing where his own congressman stood until a roll call came out.

"It's about time that somebody took a stand. … I think Trent (Kelly) should hold a town hall meeting."

He was not the first person in Columbus to ask.

They started by asking nicely. In 2017.

This is not new. It has been going on since Kelly's first full term.

In January 2017, more than 20 members of a community group called Columbus Action Together walked into Kelly's Columbus office at noon on a Friday. They were worried about the push to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They were not there to shout. They were there, the Dispatch reported, "to make an appointment to have a town hall-style meeting with Kelly."

Twenty-one of them left their names and phone numbers on a sign-in sheet.

"This was just to make an appointment to have a face-to-face meeting, and it makes an impression to have a strong group show up … rather than just individuals," one member, Bridget Smith Pieschel, told the Dispatch.

Another organizer, Melissa Cooper, said what she wanted to ask was simple: what will replace the Affordable Care Act, if anything?

The group specifically said they didn't expect Kelly to be there — Congress was in session. They just wanted a date on a calendar.

Paul Howell, the district director in Kelly's Tupelo office, called Smith Pieschel that afternoon after the group left and stayed on the phone about 45 minutes. According to her account, he could not promise when the group would be able to meet with Kelly.

Kelly himself was at a Republican conference in Philadelphia and could not talk to the Dispatch by press time. He answered by email, through his communications director:

"Constituents have been complaining about the Affordable Care Act since it became law. That's why we in Congress are making it a top priority to solve the problems in healthcare."

That was the answer to "what will replace it."

One of the women asking had a specific reason

The Dispatch talked to Rachel Gamache, 58, of Columbus. She had lost her pharmacist job the year before and moved to town. Her husband was on Social Security and Medicare. She had signed up for coverage through the Affordable Care Act — about $80 a month — while she waited for a job to open in her field.

"It's been really helpful. We live comfortably with the amount of money we have."

She wanted to know what would happen to that. The statement from Philadelphia was the answer she got.

Then his party made the dodge official

In March 2025 — the same month those Friday protests were growing outside his Columbus office — Republican leadership formalized the avoidance.

At a closed-door meeting on March 4, 2025, National Republican Congressional Committee chairman Richard Hudson told House Republicans to stop holding in-person town halls. His suggested replacements: tele-town halls and Facebook Live. The reasoning, as NOTUS reported it, was to avoid the spectacle of booing and jeering after videos of angry constituents confronting Republican members went viral.

We wrote about that directive — and about what Hudson did on his own tele-town hall, where he told constituents the Medicaid cuts were "just rumors."

So the pattern in Columbus wasn't an accident or a scheduling problem. Not answering was the strategy. And Kelly's district is one of dozens where you can watch it work: constituents ask, nobody answers, and eventually the only place left to say something is a sidewalk.

What they wanted to ask him about turned out to matter

The 2017 group wanted to know what would replace the Affordable Care Act. The 2025 group was carrying a sign that said "Cutting Medicaid is murder."

In July 2025, Kelly voted for Trump's budget bill. Roughly 714,600 Mississippians — about 24% of the state — were on Medicaid in 2024. Analysts project the law will add about 115,000 Mississippians to the uninsured by 2034 — 28,000 of them in Kelly's own district.

Nobody in Columbus got to ask him about it first.

He isn't the only one, and that's the point

Across the country, Republicans have spent this cycle running the same play. Bob Latta's constituents held two town halls for him in 2025 and talked to an empty chair. A 90-year-old has stood outside French Hill's office every Thursday for a year. John Carter's last in-person town hall was in 2013.

Mississippi's 1st District belongs on that list. In 2017 the answer to a room full of raised hands was a statement emailed from a conference in Philadelphia. By 2025 the asking had moved to the sidewalk.

The job description

A staffer can return a call. A press office can issue a statement. The one part of this job nobody can do for you is stand in a room full of the people who hired you and take a question you didn't pick.

Trent Kelly has been in this seat since 2015. His constituents have been asking for that room since 2017.

In March 2025, Cox said she intended to keep the protests going — noon to one, every Friday, on the sidewalk outside his door.

Source

Abigail Sipe Rochester, "Weekly protests outside Rep Trent Kelly's office grow in size and message," The Commercial Dispatch, March 15, 2025.

Trent Kelly Spent 15 Years Prosecuting Crime in North Mississippi. Twice in Congress He Voted Against the Violence Against Women Act.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:19:00 +0000

Before he went to Washington, Trent Kelly prosecuted crime in north Mississippi. By his own official biography, he served as Tupelo City Prosecutor and as forfeiture attorney for the North Mississippi Narcotics Unit, and then, right up until he was elected to Congress, as district attorney for the 1st Circuit Judicial District — Lee, Pontotoc, Alcorn, Monroe, Itawamba, Prentiss and Tishomingo counties — "managing all felony cases."

If you run felony cases in Mississippi, you handle domestic violence. And the federal money that helps you handle it — the training, the victim advocates, the rural enforcement grants — comes from one law.

The Violence Against Women Act.

Kelly has voted against reauthorizing it twice.

The votes

April 4, 2019. The House took up the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act. It passed 263 to 158. Thirty-three Republicans voted yes. Kelly voted no.

March 17, 2021. The House took it up again. It passed 244 to 172. Twenty-nine Republicans voted yes. Kelly voted no again.

These aren't obscure procedural votes buried in a spending package. Both were straight up-or-down votes on final passage of a bill named the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act.

What VAWA actually pays for

VAWA is not a slogan. It's a grant program, and the biggest piece of it is aimed squarely at people who do the job Kelly used to do.

The Congressional Research Service's breakdown of the 2021 bill lists the programs it reauthorized. The largest is the STOP program — Services, Training, Officers, and Prosecutors — funded at $215 million in fiscal 2021. Other line items that year:

$47 million for civil legal assistance for victims
$45 million for rural domestic violence enforcement
$41 million for sexual assault services

Rural domestic violence enforcement. That is a line item written for districts like Mississippi's 1st.

What it looks like in Mississippi

The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence publishes a fact sheet for Mississippi. The numbers:

39.7% of Mississippi women and 31.7% of Mississippi men experience intimate partner physical violence, intimate partner sexual violence, and/or intimate partner stalking in their lifetimes.
On a single day in 2019, Mississippi domestic violence programs served 354 adults and children — and 57 requests for help went unmet for lack of resources.
Mississippi does not release intimate partner homicide data to the public.
As of December 31, 2019, Mississippi had submitted no domestic violence misdemeanor or protective order records to the federal background check index.

That last one deserves a second read. Those are the records a federal background check searches to catch a domestic abuser. Mississippi had submitted none of them.

The reason 172 Republicans voted no

The contested part of the 2021 bill wasn't the shelters or the legal aid. It was the guns.

Federal law already barred people convicted of domestic violence from owning firearms — if they had been married to, lived with, or had a child with the victim. If the abuser was a boyfriend or an ex-boyfriend, the ban didn't apply. That gap has a name: the boyfriend loophole.

The 2021 bill closed it. Per the CRS summary, it extended the firearm prohibition to dating partners and former dating partners, added people convicted of misdemeanor stalking, and covered protective orders issued under state, tribal, and territorial law.

The National Rifle Association came out against the bill's gun provisions. Jason Ouimet, executive director of the NRA's lobbying arm, told Newsweek:

"The NRA did not oppose VAWA for its first 25 years. And today, we only oppose the gun control provisions contained within."

He accused Nancy Pelosi and anti-gun lawmakers of putting those provisions into the bill in 2019 "to pit pro-gun lawmakers against it so that they can falsely and maliciously claim these lawmakers don't care about women."

One hundred seventy-two House Republicans then voted no. Kelly was one of them.

The NCADV fact sheet has the number that makes this concrete: an abuser's access to a firearm increases the risk of intimate partner femicide at least five-fold. When a gun has been used in the most severe abuse incident, the risk goes up 41-fold.

He didn't have to vote this way

Twenty-nine House Republicans voted yes in 2021. Thirty-three voted yes in 2019. This was not a case where a Republican had no room to move.

A paper in his district noticed. Ahead of the 2022 primary, Commercial Dispatch columnist Slim Smith went through Kelly's record and added this vote to the list: "For good measure, Kelly also voted against restoring the Violence Against Women Act, which had lapsed in 2018." Smith's framing was that there are moments when party loyalty and constituents' welfare point in opposite directions, and this was one:

"I have no issue with either Guest or Kelly voting with their party on most legislation. But there are instances where both have made party loyalty a higher priority than the welfare of the people they were elected to represent."

The part that's hard to explain

Plenty of members of Congress vote with the gun lobby every time. That's a position, and voters can judge it.

But a former district attorney knows something a lobbyist doesn't. He knows what a domestic violence file looks like. He knows which victims come back and which ones don't. He knows what happens in the weeks after a woman leaves — which is when the danger spikes, and which is exactly the window the boyfriend loophole leaves open.

He voted no anyway. Twice.

We've written before about how his votes land on Mississippi families — he also voted against capping insulin at $35 a month in a state where 348,000 adults have diabetes — and about what Mississippi's whole Republican delegation is costing the state.

Fifteen years as a prosecutor. Two votes against the law that funds prosecutors who handle these cases.

Source

Slim Smith, "Slimantics: Guest, Kelly have consistently voted against constituents' best interests," The Commercial Dispatch.

348,000 Mississippians Have Diabetes. Trent Kelly Voted Against Capping Insulin at $35.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:14:40 +0000

There are bills where you can argue about the details. And then there are bills where the whole thing fits in one sentence: nobody should have to pay more than $35 a month for insulin.

On March 31, 2022, that bill came to the floor of the U.S. House. It was called the Affordable Insulin Now Act. It passed — but almost entirely on Democratic votes. Of the 205 Republicans who voted, only 12 voted yes.

Trent Kelly voted no.

He represents Mississippi's 1st District. Mississippi has one of the worst diabetes problems in the country. And he voted against a $35 cap on the drug that keeps people with diabetes alive.

What the vote actually was

The bill was simple. It capped what a patient pays out of pocket for a month's supply of insulin at $35, for people on Medicare and for people with private health insurance.

That's the heart of it. It didn't nationalize anything. It didn't set the price drug companies charge. It capped what you hand over at the pharmacy counter.

The roll call is public, and you don't have to take anyone's word for it. On the Clerk of the House's site the tally reads 220 Democrats and 12 Republicans in favor, 193 Republicans against. Kelly is in the "Nay" column.

Why this one lands harder in Mississippi

The American Diabetes Association publishes a fact sheet for every state. Here is Mississippi's, as of June 2026:

About 348,000 Mississippi adults — 13.2% of the adult population — have diagnosed diabetes.
About 20,000 more Mississippi adults are diagnosed every single year.
Diagnosed diabetes costs Mississippi an estimated $5.1 billion a year — $3.4 billion in direct medical costs and $1.7 billion in lost productivity.

America's Health Rankings, which tracks adult diabetes using the CDC's national health survey, ranks Mississippi 45th on the share of adults who have been told they have it — 15.2%. Only four states rank worse: Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky and West Virginia. Tennessee has no data at all.

Now stack that against the other thing Mississippi is known for. Writing ahead of the 2022 primary, the Commercial Dispatch pointed out that Mississippi has the highest poverty rate in the nation and that one in five Mississippians had no health insurance at all. When insulin is expensive here, people don't grumble about it. They ration it.

That is not a figure of speech. The ADA's own fact sheet lists what diabetes does when it isn't controlled: heart disease, stroke, amputation, end-stage kidney disease, blindness — and death.

And the price didn't climb because more people needed the drug. The Dispatch, writing the day after the vote, cited a Health Care Cost Institute study showing that per-person insulin spending had doubled over five years while average daily insulin use rose just 3%. People weren't using more. They were being charged more.

The paper in his district called it "unconscionable"

The Commercial Dispatch in Columbus — which covers a chunk of Kelly's district — did not let this vote slide. Columnist Slim Smith wrote it up twice.

The first time, right after the vote:

"House Resolution 6833, which would cap the price on insulin at $35 for a month's supply, narrowly passed a House vote Thursday, thanks not at all to our Republican representatives — Trent Kelly, Michael Guest and Steven Palazzo, each of whom voted against the bill and against the compelling interests of Mississippians."

And he predicted exactly how the congressman would handle it afterward:

"It's unlikely that Kelly, Guest or Palazzo will mention this vote in their weekly newsletters. For obvious reasons, they would prefer Mississippians not to know about it."

Months later, ahead of the primary, Smith came back to it and used a blunter word:

"It is unconscionable for Kelly and Guest to have voted against this measure."

This is not a national group parachuting into Mississippi to score political points. This is the paper in Columbus, writing about the congressman who represents Columbus.

Mississippi's own Republican senator disagreed with him

Here's the part that makes "I had to vote no on principle" hard to sell.

The insulin bill went nowhere in the Senate. Democrats then tried to put the $35 insulin cap into a larger bill later that year. The Senate parliamentarian ruled that the cap could stay for people on Medicare but not for people with private insurance, and Democrats moved to overrule her. That motion needed 60 votes. It got 57, on August 7, 2022, so the private-insurance cap came out.

Seven Republicans voted to keep it. One of them was Mississippi's own Republican senator, Cindy Hyde-Smith.

So the argument that a Republican simply could not support a $35 insulin cap doesn't survive contact with Mississippi's own delegation. A Republican senator from this state looked at the same policy and voted yes. Kelly, representing a district in one of the four states with the lowest median household income in the country, voted no.

Who he was listening to

Kelly's money picture is not the profile of a man who has to worry much about what people in Tupelo think of a copay. 95% of what he raises comes from PACs and large donors; about 3% comes from small grassroots donors.

Smith made the same point at the time, and he wasn't subtle about it:

"You can rest assured that the votes by Kelly, Guest and Palazzo have not escaped the attention of the insurance lobby."

The bigger pattern

The insulin vote isn't a one-off. It fits a record.

On July 3, 2025, Kelly voted for Trump's budget bill, the law that cut Medicaid — the program about 714,600 Mississippians, roughly 24% of the state, were on in 2024. Analysts estimate the law will cost about 115,000 Mississippi residents their health coverage. His colleague Michael Guest spent an August recess promoting a $206 million rural hospital fund after voting for that same law. We've laid out what the whole delegation's record adds up to in what Mississippi's Republicans in Congress are costing you.

The insulin vote is just the cleanest example, because there's nothing to hide behind. No thousand-page bill. No complicated formula. One number, one drug, one vote.

The question for north Mississippi

If you have diabetes in the 1st District — or your mother does, or your kid does — you already know what a vial costs.

Your congressman had a chance to cap it at $35 a month. Twelve Republicans in the House took it.

Trent Kelly wasn't one of them.

Source

Slim Smith, "Slimantics: Kelly, Guest and Palazzo vote against Mississippians on insulin bill," The Commercial Dispatch.

Michael Guest Spent His August Recess Promoting $206 Million for Mississippi's Rural Hospitals. He Voted for the Law That Takes Billions Out of Mississippi Medicaid.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:48:26 +0000

On August 7, 2026, during the House's August recess, Michael Guest was back home in Mississippi meeting with health care providers. The subject was money for rural hospitals.

He told WDAM that Mississippi is getting $206 million this year from a $50 billion federal rural hospital stabilization program, and that he wants to make sure local and rural hospitals know how to apply and that the program works the way it's supposed to.

That's a fine thing for a congressman to do. It's also worth knowing where that $50 billion came from, and what came with it.

The fund is a piece of the bill that cut the hospitals

The Rural Health Transformation Program was created by Trump's budget bill — the same law Guest voted for on July 3, 2025, and the same law he and Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green put out a press release celebrating the day it passed.

It appropriates $10 billion a year for five years, 2026 through 2030.

Here is what the rest of that law does, according to KFF's analysis of it:

$911 billion cut from federal Medicaid spending over ten years.
$137 billion of that comes out of rural areas specifically.
The $50 billion fund offsets about 37% of the rural cuts — a little over a third — and about 5% of the total.

So the program Guest is promoting replaces roughly one dollar in three of what the same bill takes out of rural health care. And it runs for five years, while the cuts run for ten.

And the money doesn't have to go to rural hospitals

This is the part that doesn't make the press release.

Half the $50 billion is split equally among every state with an approved application — the same amount to each, regardless of how many rural hospitals it has or how many people live in them. The other half goes out on an approach CMS determines, within broad requirements.

And KFF found that the law doesn't actually require the money to reach rural areas. States have to spend it on at least three of ten permitted purposes, and as KFF put it, "most of the permitted uses in the list above do not specify that the funds would need to go to rural areas" — meaning dollars can flow to urban and suburban regions with federal sign-off.

That is the program Guest is asking Mississippi's rural hospitals to apply to.

What Mississippi actually lost

Almost a quarter of this state — 714,600 people, 24.2% of the population — was on Medicaid in 2024. Mississippi is one of the four states with the lowest median household income in the country.

The budget bill Guest voted for is projected to cost Mississippi $2 to $4 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade, and the Center for American Progress puts 115,000 more Mississippians without insurance by 2034 — a figure that counts both the law's own cuts and the enhanced ACA tax credits Congress let expire alongside it.

Against that: $206 million in year one.

People told him what would happen. Some of them were standing outside his office.

Nobody had to wait five years to find out. On July 3, 2025, the day of the vote, protesters gathered outside Guest's office in Brandon asking him to vote no. He voted yes that afternoon.

Mississippi's Bennie Thompson, the only member of the delegation to vote against it, said this about his own district:

"It's a bill that takes food out of children's mouths, strips health care from our seniors, and makes college unaffordable for working families, so the wealthy can get another tax break. In Mississippi's Second Congressional District, this means shuttered hospitals, empty grocery carts, rising bills, and dreams deferred."

Ten days after Trump signed it, faith leaders rallied outside Cindy Hyde-Smith's and Roger Wicker's Jackson offices, asking Mississippi's senators to take back the support they had already given. By then Guest had voted yes and the bill was law.

This is a pattern, not a Mississippi thing

We keep writing this same post about different Republicans, because they keep running the same play: vote for the cut, then campaign on the fund that partially offsets it.

Shelley Moore Capito cast one of the 50 Senate votes for the bill and then signed on to legislation to prevent rural hospital closures. Cindy Hyde-Smith — Guest's own senator — told Mississippi "Medicaid is not going anywhere," voted to cut it, and started cosponsoring rural hospital rescue bills.

The vote is the thing that changes people's lives. The follow-up is the thing that changes the headline.

What to ask him

If Guest comes to your town this August to talk about the $206 million, the questions write themselves:

The fund covers about a third of what the same bill takes out of rural health care nationally. What happens to the other two-thirds?
The fund runs five years. The cuts run ten. What's the plan for years six through ten?
The law doesn't require this money to go to rural hospitals. Will you push for Mississippi's share to be spent on them?
115,000 more Mississippians are projected to be uninsured by 2034. Which part of the $206 million covers them?

He's been in Congress since 2019, and in the same WDAM interview he talked about the spending bills as his own committee's work — "we've been able to pass all 12 of the appropriations bills out of committee. A big accomplishment." He knew what was in the budget bill. He put out a statement celebrating it.

Handing out a fraction of what you took isn't relief. It's change from your own wallet.

Source

Rep. Guest visits Mississippi district, discusses Washington priorities — WDAM, August 7, 2026. Photo: WDAM.

Michael Guest Voted to Throw Out Two States' Electoral Votes. A Month Later He Admitted Nobody Ever Showed Him Evidence.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:43:59 +0000

Before he came to Congress, Michael Guest spent, by his own campaign's account, "11 years as District Attorney for Madison and Rankin Counties." That's a career built on one skill: deciding whether the evidence in front of you is enough to take away someone's rights.

In December 2020 and January 2021, he made a different call.

What he actually did

December 10, 2020. Guest was one of 126 House Republicans who signed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Texas's lawsuit asking the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out the presidential results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The Court refused to hear it.

January 6, 2021. After a mob stormed the Capitol and the House came back into session that night, the chamber voted on whether to reject Arizona's electoral votes. Guest voted yes. The objection failed.

January 7, 2021. The same vote on Pennsylvania. Guest voted yes again. That objection failed too.

January 13, 2021. The House impeached Donald Trump for inciting the insurrection. Guest voted no.

Then he sat down with a Jackson TV station

On February 4, 2021, Guest gave an interview to WLBT in Jackson. Asked about his votes, he said this:

"I thought that there were voter irregularities, that there was probably voter fraud... But we were never presented evidence to show that the voter irregularity, the voter fraud was substantial enough that the elections should be overturned."

That is a career prosecutor saying, on the record, that nobody ever met the burden of proof.

He voted to overturn them anyway. He explained that his votes weren't really about fraud at all:

"I did not vote to challenge those states based on election fraud or election irregularity. I believe that the will of the legislature was violated by the court system and, in Pennsylvania, by the Secretary of State."

So the theory is: state courts and a state's chief election officer interpreted their own state's election rules in a way Guest disagreed with, and that was reason enough for a congressman from Mississippi to vote to discard the ballots of millions of people in Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Notice what that argument does. It doesn't need evidence — that's the point of it. Fraud claims can be checked and thrown out in court, and they were, over and over. "The will of the legislature was violated" can't be checked. It's a position, not a finding. It lets you cast the same vote the fraud crowd cast while telling your hometown station you're the reasonable one.

The word he used about the man who sent them

In the same interview, Guest said he agreed with a statement Kevin McCarthy had made, and added:

"I think there's a lot of blame to go around. I think the President could have chosen his words better there at the rally..."

Could have chosen his words better. That's how he described the speech that preceded a mob breaking into the building where he works. Guest was in the House chamber when Capitol Police locked it down. He was escorted to the Rayburn building and sheltered there for hours.

He voted for the investigation. Then he voted against it.

Here's the part that's genuinely his own, and it doesn't fit the usual script.

On May 19, 2021, the House voted on H.R. 3233, to create an independent commission to investigate the January 6 attack. It came out of bipartisan negotiations between Mississippi's own Bennie Thompson, then chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, and that committee's top Republican, John Katko of New York. House Republican leadership recommended a no vote. Guest voted yes anyway — one of only 35 Republicans who did.

He gave Mississippi Today a statement explaining why:

"We need answers to questions surrounding the events of Jan. 6."

The bill passed the House 252–175 and died in the Senate.

Six weeks later, on June 30, 2021, the House voted on H. Res. 503 to create a select committee to do the same job — the only route left after the bipartisan commission was blocked. Guest voted no.

You can construct an argument for that. The select committee was structured differently and Republicans complained about it. But strip the procedure away and look at the outcome: the man who said "we need answers" voted for the investigation that couldn't happen, and against the one that could.

Why this still matters in 2026

Guest now chairs the House Ethics Committee — the panel that judges whether other members of Congress meet the standards of the institution. He also broke the STOCK Act himself and paid a $200 fee for it.

And he has never walked any of it back. The watchdog group Republican Accountability grades congressional Republicans on their record toward democratic institutions. It gives Guest an F.

The record is short and it is not in dispute, because most of it is his own voice:

He signed a brief asking the Supreme Court to void four states' results.
He voted twice to reject other states' electors.
He said a month later that nobody ever showed him evidence that would justify overturning an election.
He voted against impeaching the man he said "could have chosen his words better."
He voted for a January 6 commission that couldn't pass, and against the committee that could.

He ran a district attorney's office for eleven years. He knows exactly what it means to act without evidence.

Source

In Conversation: Michael Guest talks Trump, impeachment and Marjorie Taylor Greene — WLBT, February 4, 2021. Photo: WLBT.

The Congressman Who Runs the House Ethics Committee Broke the Insider Trading Disclosure Law Himself. It Cost Him $200.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:41:13 +0000

On July 22, 2026, the House passed a bill called the Stop Insider Trading Act. It passed 232 to 198 — every Republican who voted, all 218 of them, saying yes, joined by 13 Democrats and one independent. Michael Guest was one of the 218.

Guest chairs the House Ethics Committee. That is the panel that polices what members of Congress do with their money — including enforcing the law that already exists on this exact subject, the STOCK Act.

Five years ago, he broke it.

What happened

On January 22, 2021, a family trust bought between $1,001 and $15,000 of Exxon stock and sold between $1,001 and $15,000 of BP stock. Guest's wife and sons are beneficiaries of that trust.

The STOCK Act says a member of Congress has to report a trade like that within 45 days. Guest's report reached the House Clerk on November 3, 2021 — nine months and twelve days after the trade, and roughly eight months past the deadline. He paid the penalty.

The penalty is $200.

Here is his explanation, in full, from the disclosure report itself:

"On October 22nd, 2021, I became aware of a stock transaction made by a family trust. This transaction occurred on January 22, 2021. I do not have a decision-making role in the trust; but my wife and sons are beneficiaries, so I am bound to report certain details. On October 25th, 2021, I contacted the Committee on Ethics to note this oversight and ensure correct reporting. I reported the transaction to the Clerk of the House on November 3, 2021, and paid the statutory remedy of a $200 late fee."

Read that carefully, because it's the whole story: he says the first he knew of it was October 22, nine months after the trade, and that he took it to his own committee three days later. That may well be true. It is also exactly the answer that every member of Congress gives, and it is precisely the reason the law exists — so that the public, not the member, gets to decide whether a trade looks like a coincidence.

He was on the Ethics Committee at the time

This is the part that matters.

When this happened, Guest wasn't a backbencher who'd never heard of the STOCK Act. He was the second most senior Republican on the House Committee on Ethics — the committee responsible for enforcing that exact law on everyone else.

He went on to become its ranking Republican, and then, in the Congress that began in January 2023, its chairman. He still is.

So the man who now decides whether other members get investigated for their financial disclosures is a man whose own financial disclosure came in eight months late.

What his committee does to other people

In July 2025, the Ethics Committee Guest chairs released its findings on Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania. The committee investigated whether Kelly's wife had bought stock in Cleveland-Cliffs based on what he knew about a federal decision affecting the company's plant in his district.

The committee did not find evidence Kelly knowingly caused the trade. It found something else: that he violated the House Code of Official Conduct by failing to acknowledge the seriousness of the alleged misconduct, and that it hadn't received full cooperation from his wife. It determined that the Kellys "should divest of any stock in the company before Representative Kelly takes any further official actions directly related to that company," and voted unanimously to issue the report as a reproval of his conduct.

That is what accountability looks like when the committee decides to apply it: an investigation, a public report, a finding, a reproval.

What it looked like when the chairman's own family trust traded oil stocks and nobody told anyone for nine months was a $200 check.

$200 is not a penalty. It's a fee.

We went through every Republican on this site and found 45 who broke the STOCK Act — some by years, on trades worth millions. The number that keeps showing up in all of those stories is the same one in Guest's: two hundred dollars, and it's often waived.

And $200 means something different to different people. In April 2026, NOTUS went through the delegation's personal financial disclosures and found Guest's median net worth is $9.7 million — held mostly in municipal bonds for Mississippi localities and institutions, plus individual stock in Meta and Exxon Mobil. Mississippi's median household income is $56,447.

NOTUS made the same connection this post does, in one sentence: "Guest — a member of Congress since 2019 — is chairman of the House Ethics Committee, which in part enforces the House's code of conduct and laws including the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act."

A $200 fee is not a deterrent to a man whose net worth NOTUS puts at $9.7 million. It's the cost of not bothering.

And the disclosure is the entire point of the law. It doesn't stop members from trading. It doesn't limit what they can own. It says: tell us, within 45 days, so we can hold what you bought against how you voted while it still matters.

Guest's trades were in Exxon and BP. He has an abysmal 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025, and a lifetime score of 4%. Those two facts are not proof of anything on their own — and that's precisely why the timing rule exists. Filed on time, we could have looked at the trade and his energy votes side by side in early 2021. Filed eight months late, we couldn't.

The gavel

Michael Guest has represented Mississippi's 3rd District since 2019. He is a former district attorney. He wrote the resolution that expelled George Santos from the House. In April 2026 he announced his committee was opening an investigation into Rep. Eric Swalwell over sexual misconduct allegations, and said on SuperTalk Mississippi's "MidDays with Gerard Gibert," "It's possible this week that we will be voting to expel members of Congress."

He clearly believes in the machinery. He runs it.

The question a Mississippi voter is entitled to ask is a simple one: when the machinery pointed at him, what did it cost?

Two hundred dollars.

Sources

Alex J. Rouhandeh, "GOP Rep. Michael Guest Violates Stock Trading Rules, Submitting Disclosures 8 Months Late", Newsweek, November 5, 2021; Periodic Transaction Report, Filing ID #20019676, Clerk of the House, filed November 3, 2021. Photo: U.S. House official portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

$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.

Mike Ezell Runs Congress's Coast Guard Oversight. His Biggest Corporate Donor Sells the Coast Guard Ships.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:15:49 +0000

There is a job in the U.S. House whose entire purpose is to look hard at how the Coast Guard spends money. It's the chairmanship of the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee.

Mike Ezell has it. His official biography says so, and so does the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which introduces him as "Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee Chairman Mike Ezell (R-MS)."

Now look at who pays for his campaigns.

The company

Edison Chouest Offshore is a Louisiana marine company. It builds and operates ships, and it sells them to the U.S. government. It also owns a shipyard called Gulf Ship in Gulfport, Mississippi — which is in Ezell's district.

According to FEC records compiled by Who Bought My Rep, people who list Edison Chouest Offshore as their employer have given Ezell's campaigns $39,800. On top of that:

$12,600 from Gary Chouest, listed as an executive at Edison Chouest Group — he is the company's president and CEO
$13,400 from Carolyn Chouest

Set aside the generic buckets — "retired," "self-employed," "homemaker" — and no single employer shows up on Mike Ezell's donor list more than Edison Chouest Offshore does.

The chairman of Coast Guard oversight is funded, more than by anyone else, by a company that sells to the Coast Guard.

What that money has bought before

This isn't a hypothetical conflict. There is a documented case study, and it's a big one.

In January 2025, ProPublica's McKenzie Funk published an investigation into the icebreaker Aiviq — a ship Edison Chouest built for Shell's Arctic drilling program and then spent nearly a decade trying to sell to the U.S. government.

ProPublica found that since 2012, Edison Chouest has contributed more than $7 million to state and national parties, PACs, super PACs, and members of the key House and Senate committees — with more than 95% of it going to Republicans.

And it worked. ProPublica's finding on how the purchase was engineered:

"The way Congress wrote the specifications for a 'United States built' icebreaker, however, ensured there was only one the Coast Guard could choose: the Aiviq."

The Coast Guard didn't want it. The Maritime Executive reported that the service "initially resisted, citing concerns over Aiviq's commercial design," and that back in 2016, "two congressmen with ties to Chouest — Representatives Duncan Hunter and Don Young, a longtime friend of the family company — advocated for the Coast Guard to buy a used commercial icebreaker that matched Aiviq's characteristics."

The Coast Guard bought it anyway, in December 2024, from the Chouest subsidiary Offshore Service Vessels LLC, for $125 million.

What taxpayers got for $125 million

The Aiviq's résumé, before the sale:

In December 2012, in 20-to-30-foot seas in the Gulf of Alaska, it lost power in all of its engines because seawater got into the fuel. The vessel it was towing ran aground and was eventually scrapped.
Then it sat, "little-used for many years."

ProPublica catalogued the design problems the Coast Guard was buying: a low, wet deck that waves can swamp; a helipad near the bow that's poorly suited to rescue work; a direct-drive propulsion system more likely to jam in ice than the diesel-electric systems the Coast Guard actually uses; waste and discharge systems that don't meet polar code standards; and an inability to break ice much thicker than about four and a half feet.

The government renamed it the USCGC Storis and sent it north.

How the family does business

The Chouest family's approach to Congress is not subtle, and it has been examined by the House ethics process before.

In January 2011, at a Texas fundraiser, Gary Chouest handed Rep. Don Young an envelope. Inside were twelve checks for $5,000 each — $60,000 — written by twelve different family companies, all registered at the same address in Galliano, Louisiana. The legal limit on what one person could give was $5,000.

By the time Young died, Edison Chouest had given him close to $300,000 — more than the Veco executives at the center of Alaska's political corruption scandal ever did.

Young is the man who spent years pushing the Coast Guard to take the Aiviq.

Gary Chouest, who handed over that envelope, is the same Gary Chouest who has given Mike Ezell $12,600.

What Ezell does with the gavel

An oversight chairman's job is to be the hard question in the room. Here is what Ezell's chairmanship sounds like instead.

In March 2025, when the Coast Guard handed Bollinger Mississippi Shipyards a $951 million contract modification for the Polar Security Cutter program, Ezell put out a statement calling it "a major win for America's maritime strength and Arctic presence" and thanking Trump for his leadership.

Six weeks later, in May 2025, Bollinger and Edison Chouest announced a partnership called the United Shipbuilding Alliance, formed specifically to chase the Coast Guard's next big icebreaker contract — the Arctic Security Cutter. Gary Chouest was quoted in the announcement as ECO's president and CEO.

In July 2026, the Coast Guard finalized roughly $3.3 billion in Arctic Security Cutter contracts. Bollinger got about $2.2 billion of it for four ships. (The Coast Guard's award names Bollinger; how the alliance divides the work isn't public.)

Ezell also chaired a February 2025 hearing where he called the Jones Act "quite literally the bedrock and foundation of the nation's shipbuilding industrial base." The Jones Act reserves shipping between U.S. ports for U.S.-built, U.S.-crewed vessels. Edison Chouest builds and crews U.S. vessels.

What's missing from the record is the other half of the job — the chairman asking, in public, whether the government is being taken for a ride.

Why this should bother you

Nobody in South Mississippi is against shipbuilding jobs. Gulf Ship employs people in Ezell's district, and that's real.

But shipyard jobs are not what's at issue. What's at issue is whether the one member of Congress specifically assigned to scrutinize Coast Guard purchases can do that when the company on the other side of those purchases is his biggest corporate backer, and when its CEO writes him personal checks.

We've seen this exact shape before: Diana Harshbarger vice-chairs the health subcommittee that oversees the FDA, is funded by compounding-pharmacy lobbies, asked the FDA to loosen the rules on peptides — and then her son landed a seat on the FDA panel that voted to allow them. Different industry, identical machinery: put your money on the person holding the gavel, and the gavel stops swinging at you.

The Coast Guard said the Aiviq was the wrong ship. Congress bought it anyway, for $125 million, after $7 million in donations. That is the record of the company that funds the man now running Coast Guard oversight in the House.

And what his office offers constituents is a telephone town hall you register for in advance — not a room in South Mississippi where somebody could stand up and ask him about any of this.

Sources

This Icebreaker Has Design Problems and a History of Failure. It's America's Latest Military Vessel. — McKenzie Funk, ProPublica, January 23, 2025. Photo: Edmund D. Fountain, special to ProPublica.
Icebreaker owner gave Don Young an envelope with $60,000 in checks in 2011 — Dermot Cole, Reporting From Alaska, January 24, 2025.

"Shut Up. Knock It Off.": Mike Ezell Slapped a Phone Out of a Palestinian American Woman's Hand — Then Called Her "China-Backed"

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:11:03 +0000

On May 7, 2024, a woman walked down a hallway in a House office building and asked a congressman a question. He knocked her phone out of her hand.

The congressman was Mike Ezell, a Republican who represents Mississippi's 4th District and who describes himself as "a career law enforcement officer for more than forty years."

The whole thing was recorded, because the phone he hit was the one doing the recording.

What happened in the hallway

The Associated Press, whose account ran in the Mississippi Free Press, described it this way: Ezell was walking down a hallway before a House committee meeting — his own spokesperson said it was the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee — when two activists from the antiwar group CodePink approached him with questions about the war in Gaza. One asked whether Israel should accept a peace proposal.

"You want this genocide to continue?" one woman asked.

The second woman was Sumer Mobarak, who is Palestinian American. On the video, she asks him:

"You want the killing of my people, my Palestinian people?"

Ezell's answer, per the AP:

"Shut up. Knock it off."

And then, the AP wrote, the video "shows him extending a hand and knocking down the cellphone that was being used for recording."

Mobarak said she filed a police report alleging assault. U.S. Capitol Police told the AP they were looking into the incident and would not comment further. We found no public report of what, if anything, came of that review.

He is supposed to be the expert on this

Every part of Ezell's political brand runs through law enforcement. His official biography lists it: a graduate of the Mississippi Law Enforcement Training Academy and the FBI National Academy, four decades on the job, most recently as sheriff of Jackson County.

In January 2026, after an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old American citizen and mother of three, Ezell issued a statement lecturing the country on exactly this subject:

"The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, religion, the press, peaceful assembly, and the right to petition the government. It does not protect violent behavior, obstruction of law enforcement, or attempts to harm officers because someone disagrees with their mission."

So he has a firm and well-articulated view about physical contact during a political disagreement — when someone else is accused of it.

A woman asked him a question in a public hallway. She was not blocking him. She was holding a phone. A man with forty years of training in when force is and isn't appropriate reached out and struck the object in her hands.

Then he made it about China

Here is where it stops being a bad moment and starts being a choice.

Ezell could have said he was startled, or that he shouldn't have done it, or nothing at all. Instead, as the AP reported, he put out a statement about the Palestinian activist:

"These China-backed protesters want to harass and intimidate Members of Congress into ending our support for Israel and our opposition to Hamas terrorists."

"I will not be harassed or intimidated by the Chinese Communist Party, Hamas, or their supporters, and I will continue standing with our Israeli allies against terrorism."

Read that again. A Palestinian American woman asked him about the killing of Palestinians. His answer was to publicly tie her to the Chinese Communist Party and to Hamas — a designated terrorist organization — in the same breath.

He offered no evidence for either claim. The AP noted only that CodePink says on its website that "China is not our enemy," which is a political opinion, not a payroll.

This is the oldest trick there is: you can't answer the question, so you make the questioner foreign. It's what politicians reach for when a constituent-shaped person shows up with a camera and a grievance they'd rather not discuss on the record.

Who he actually answers to on this

Ezell was not being asked about an abstraction. He votes on U.S. military aid, and he was asked what he thought about how it's being used.

There is a reason he had an answer ready about "our Israeli allies" and no answer at all about the Palestinians she was asking about. According to TrackAIPAC's tally of FEC filings, Ezell has taken $51,922 from pro-Israel PACs. FEC records compiled by Who Bought My Rep show AIPAC's own political action committee among his largest PAC donors, at $20,004.

That is not unusual, and that's the point — we've written about how a handful of billionaires funding AIPAC came to own Republican foreign policy votes, and about the House Foreign Affairs chairman who said there are "very few innocent Palestinian civilians" and then voted to delete the humanitarian exemption for food and medicine. Ezell is a smaller figure in that story. He is not a smaller example of it.

What it says about how he handles being questioned

The through-line here isn't Gaza. It's what Mike Ezell does when someone he doesn't want to talk to asks him something in public.

What his office has offered constituents instead is a telephone town hall you sign up for in advance — a call you dial into, not a room you can walk into. In his home district, the question turns up in a local politics group on Facebook: "Does anybody know if and when Mike Ezell will be holding a town hall?" The last in-person town halls on his public record were in September 2023, when he made two stops in a single week — one at the Lucedale Public Library, the other hosted by Americans for Prosperity.

In a hallway in Washington, somebody tried anyway.

He told her to shut up, hit her phone, and then told the press she was China-backed.

Source

Activists: Ezell Swatted Phone From Palestinian Woman's Hand — Emily Wagster Pettus, The Associated Press, via Mississippi Free Press, May 8, 2024.

ICE Took Two of His High Schoolers at a Bus Stop. Mike Ezell Was 'Closely Monitoring.'

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:07:59 +0000

On the morning of April 21, 2026, Israel Makoka, 18, and his little brother Max, 15, were standing outside their house in Diamondhead, Mississippi, waiting for the bus to Hancock High School.

Their host father, Cliff Baptiste, noticed an unfamiliar car sitting nearby. Then the school bus pulled up — and so did ten unmarked cars. ICE agents surrounded the boys and zip-tied them both.

Israel was a month away from graduating. He had a college basketball scholarship commitment. Max played beside him on the Hancock High varsity team. They had come to the United States legally from the Republic of the Congo on F-1 student visas, in 2023 and 2024.

They spent just over a week in immigration detention in two different states before Mississippi's two U.S. senators got them out.

Their own congressman — the man who represents Diamondhead, and who was a cop for four decades before he got to Washington — put out a statement saying his office was watching.

What Mike Ezell said

Mike Ezell represents Mississippi's 4th District, which includes Hancock County. His own official biography describes "a career law enforcement officer for more than forty years, most recently serving as Sheriff of Jackson County." His whole political identity is built on being the guy who knows how law enforcement works.

Here is what he had to say while two of his constituents' kids sat in ICE custody. As WLOX reported, Ezell said his

"office is closely monitoring the situation and remains in contact with the appropriate agencies to better understand the circumstances."

That's it. Monitoring. Contacting. Trying to better understand the circumstances — as if the circumstances were unclear. Ten unmarked cars had surrounded two teenagers at a school bus stop in his district. There was nothing to understand.

What actually got them out

Senators Cindy Hyde-Smith and Roger Wicker did the work. The Mississippi Free Press, which broke the story, put it plainly: it was their intervention "which led to the sudden release" of Israel from the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, Louisiana, and Max from a group home in Houston, Texas.

Host mother Gail Baptiste said Hyde-Smith's office connected the family with pro bono lawyers and stayed on it from the start.

"They have been great. They've been involved from the beginning. They got the ball rolling."

Ezell, per the same reporting, was among the Mississippi politicians who "responded to the story of the Makoka brothers ... privately and on social media." Responding on social media is not the same thing as picking up the phone.

What the boys went through while he monitored

Israel later described the week to the Mississippi Free Press. He was chained at the ankles, wrists and belly for close to seven hours during transport. "I thought I was having a mental breakdown," he said. He spent 48 hours in a processing cell with 25 other people and one exposed toilet, with no way to shower.

An agent handed him paperwork to sign away his case. His account of the pitch:

"You sign that paper, you're gonna get deported, and you will get some money."

He refused and demanded a hearing.

Max, who is 15, was shipped to a shelter for unaccompanied children — despite having legal guardians in Mississippi. Their immigration lawyer, Amy Maldonado, pointed out how backwards that is: "The legal definition of an unaccompanied alien child is one without a parent or legal guardian in the U.S."

The paperwork trap

The reason ICE gave was a school transfer.

The brothers had moved from Piney Woods Country Life School, a private school in Rankin County, to Hancock High, a public school about three hours south. That transfer knocked them out of visa status. DHS told the Mississippi Free Press they "violated their student visas by failing to attend classes at Piney Woods School" and were therefore "subject to removal."

Nobody told the family. Nobody told the boys. Maldonado's summary:

"But they were underage, they were not advised that they were gonna be violating status. This is completely inadvertent."

Israel was under 18 for nearly the entire period he was out of status. He turned 18 a few weeks before ICE showed up.

This is what immigration enforcement has actually become: not "the worst of the worst," but two high school basketball players who got caught in a paperwork problem nobody warned them about. It fits a pattern we've written about before: ProPublica found the Trump administration is detaining and removing unaccompanied minors at about three times the rate of his last term, and that the vast majority of those removed last year had no criminal history at all.

He isn't quiet when ICE is the one under fire

Ezell's "monitoring" posture is not how he talks about ICE in general. It's how he talks about ICE when ICE is the problem.

Three months before the Makoka arrests, an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old American citizen and a mother of three, in her car. State and local officials strongly disputed the administration's claim that the agent was defending himself.

Ezell had plenty to say about that one. On January 8, 2026 — the day after she was killed — he put out a full statement blaming the dead woman:

"The incident in Minneapolis was entirely preventable. Unfortunately, the reckless and unlawful actions of Renee Good left U.S. ICE agents with no choice but to defend themselves and the officers supporting them."

He went on for five more paragraphs. He lectured Americans about the First Amendment. He closed with: "It's time we stop blaming law enforcement for doing their duty. They are not thugs or nazi's."

So we know he can write a statement. We know he can pick a side fast, with confidence, without waiting to "better understand the circumstances." He did it the day after a killing in a city half a country away, on behalf of the agency.

When the agency zip-tied two kids at a bus stop in his own district, the confidence evaporated.

Diamondhead noticed

The community did not need a press release to know what to do. More than 3,100 people — mostly Mississippi Gulf Coast residents — signed a petition demanding the brothers' release. Students held a ceremony for Israel on the day he was supposed to receive his cap and gown. Hancock High's head basketball coach, Conner Entrekin, said the brothers had "done nothing but make this community, this school, and this team much, much better since they've arrived."

Teenagers in Hancock County did more for the Makoka brothers than the congressman they'll be old enough to vote against.

And the case isn't over. Release from detention doesn't restore the boys' status or stop the deportation case. Maldonado is filing to reinstate their student status at a different school, because they can't go back to Hancock.

The job he isn't doing

Casework like this — a constituent tangled in a federal agency — is one of the few things a member of Congress can actually do on his own, without a floor vote or a committee gavel. Two senators picked up the phone and it worked in just over a week.

Ezell has not held an in-person town hall since two stops in a single week in September 2023 — one at the Lucedale Public Library in George County, the other hosted by Americans for Prosperity. His most recent town hall of any kind was a telephone town hall in July 2025. So there is no room in Mississippi's 4th District where a parent can stand up and ask him why he monitored while somebody else made the calls.

He built a career on the badge. When federal agents came for two kids in his district, he sided with the badge by saying almost nothing at all.

Source

Makoka Brothers Free With Help From Senators After ICE Arrests — Nick Judin, Mississippi Free Press, April 30, 2026. Photo courtesy Baptiste Family / Mississippi Free Press.

A State Had to Sue the Federal Government to Investigate Child Sex Crimes. Three Days Later, 50 Republicans Promoted the Man It Sued.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 08:23:04 +0000

On Wednesday, August 5, 2026, the state of New Mexico did something states almost never have to do.

It sued the United States Department of Justice.

Not over a regulation. Not over funding. New Mexico sued because it says the federal government is blocking a live criminal investigation into the sexual abuse of women and girls at Jeffrey Epstein's ranch — crimes that happened inside New Mexico's own borders, to New Mexico's own people.

The lawsuit names acting Attorney General Todd Blanche personally.

Three days later, at 4:17 in the morning, fifty Republican senators voted to give Blanche the job permanently.

What New Mexico is asking for

The state's complaint, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., asks a judge to order the Justice Department to hand over unredacted Epstein investigative files.

New Mexico argues the refusal breaks federal law and stomps on the state's basic authority to investigate and prosecute crimes committed on its own soil. That's not a small claim. It's the argument that a state gets to police its own territory.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, a Democrat, put it plainly:

"We asked the Department of Justice to cooperate by providing access to records that may be critical to identifying victims, witnesses, and additional criminal conduct at Zorro Ranch. Their delay is actively hurting our criminal investigation and delaying justice Epstein survivors deserve."

On a call with reporters, Torrez said his office has made ten separate requests for information. Every one has been ignored or denied.

"We have heard repeatedly they will cooperate and what our team has experienced is anything but cooperation."

And:

"Todd Blanche today with a stroke of a pen could grant us the access that he claimed. Instead they have decided to stonewall, to obstruct and to frankly conceal for whatever reason."

This isn't the first time the feds told New Mexico to sit down

Here's the part that should make you angry.

Back in 2019, federal prosecutors asked New Mexico to pause its own investigation. They promised to share what they found when they were done.

They never did.

Former New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas — the man who agreed to that deal — wrote to Torrez in a July 20 letter saying the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York simply failed to honor it.

So the timeline is: the federal government told a state to stand down on a child sex abuse investigation, promised to share the evidence, kept the evidence, and is now refusing to hand it over seven years later.

New Mexico reopened the case in February 2026. Since then, the state — not the FBI, not the Justice Department — conducted the first law enforcement search of Zorro Ranch that has ever been done.

Epstein bought that property in 1993. He died in 2019. Nobody searched it while he was alive.

What they're looking for

A separate bipartisan panel — New Mexico's Truth Commission, a four-person legislative subcommittee with two Democrats and two Republicans on it — released its first report the same day the lawsuit was filed.

The findings so far, reported by FOX 4 and confirmed by the Christian Science Monitor:

Evidence that Epstein abused about five women and girls at Zorro Ranch between 1996 and 2012.
Roughly 30 other people who may have been victims, witnesses, or facilitators — or some combination.
Federal redactions in the released files are actively blocking the commission from verifying what it has.

The commission has issued 20 subpoenas and gotten back more than 100,000 records. Seven of those subpoenas were flat-out ignored — including by the Federal Aviation Administration and by the same U.S. Attorney's Office in New York that told New Mexico to stand down in the first place.

Rep. Andrea Romero, who chairs the commission, described what that silence has cost:

"In the seven years since Jeffrey Epstein died, in the two decades since his crimes first drew attention of law enforcement, no government, federal, state, or local, has ever compiled an account of what he did in New Mexico."

Twenty years. Nobody wrote it down.

The Justice Department's excuse, and what survivors said about it

The Justice Department's answer is that court orders bar it from disclosing "victim-identifying information carte blanche," and that New Mexico hasn't given a lawful reason for such sweeping disclosures. It says protecting victim privacy is a top priority.

Torrez's response was that his office has "provided them with ample legal justifications," and that the department is hiding "behind the Epstein survivors."

The survivors themselves answered that one. In a joint statement to NBC News, some of the women Epstein abused said:

"The DOJ's argument that it won't hand over files in order to protect survivors' identities is laughable, when the DOJ has already revealed their names and personal information. By holding onto these files, Todd Blanche's DOJ is simply continuing to protect abusers."

That is not a partisan talking point. That is the people the policy claims to protect saying the policy is a lie.

It lands harder because the Justice Department's actual record on redactions is a mess. When it began releasing Epstein records in December under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, what came out was largely material that was already public or blacked out so heavily it meant nothing — while accusers' personal details slipped through.

Now: the part that's on Republican senators

New Mexico filed this lawsuit on Wednesday, August 5. It was national news that day and the next.

The Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as attorney general on Saturday, August 8, by a vote of 50 to 49.

Every yes vote was a Republican. The margin was one.

Fourteen of those yes votes came from senators we track: Marsha Blackburn, Shelley Moore Capito, Tom Cotton, Darline Graham, Bill Hagerty, Jon Husted, Cindy Hyde-Smith, Roger Marshall, Ashley Moody, Pete Ricketts, Jim Risch, Mike Rounds, Dan Sullivan, and Tommy Tuberville.

They had the information. A state attorney general had just gone to federal court and accused this man, by name, of obstructing a criminal sex trafficking investigation. Lisa Murkowski, one of only two Republicans who voted no, said the Justice Department's "handling of files" connected to Epstein was part of her reason.

Fifty of her colleagues shrugged and confirmed him before sunrise, then left town for a month of vacation.

They already voted to keep these files sealed once

This is the pattern, and it is on the record.

On September 10, 2025, the Senate voted on an amendment whose stated purpose was, in the Senate's own words, "To direct the Attorney General to make publicly available documents related to Jeffrey Epstein."

Republican leadership moved to table it — the procedural way of killing something without having to vote on it directly. The motion to table passed 51 to 49. Two votes the other way and the files would be public today. Rand Paul and Josh Hawley were the only Republicans who broke ranks.

We pulled the roll call. Every single senator on this list who was in the Senate that day voted to table:

Blackburn. Capito. Cotton. Hagerty. Husted. Hyde-Smith. Marshall. Moody. Ricketts. Risch. Rounds. Sullivan. Tuberville.

Thirteen for thirteen.

The same thirteen then voted to make Todd Blanche deputy attorney general in March 2025, and voted for him again in August 2026 after a state sued him for withholding the very documents they'd voted to keep sealed.

That's three chances. Three times the same answer.

Dan Sullivan's case is the sharpest: he voted to keep the files sealed and then took campaign checks from two men who appear in them. Over in the House, Ashley Hinson refused to sign the petition to force the files open while billionaires named in those files wrote her nearly $90,000 in checks. And Majority Whip Tom Emmer, who never misses a chance to promote his committee's investigations, has stayed conspicuously quiet about the Epstein one — the one his own son runs.

Who this actually hurts

While all of this plays out in Washington, the ranch itself has moved on.

Epstein's estate sold Zorro Ranch in 2023 to the family of Don Huffines, a Texas Republican recently appointed his state's comptroller. Huffines has said the property is being renamed San Rafael Ranch, after a saint associated with healing, and that his family plans to run a Christian retreat there.

A healing retreat, on the property where nobody has finished asking who was hurt.

Meanwhile a New Mexico survivor named Rachel Benavidez sat in a hearing room in Santa Fe last Wednesday and asked, again, for the evidence to be released.

"I use this survivor platform to stand on the right side of every survivor's journey toward truth and justice. I am holding onto faith that real accountability will be achieved."

She is holding onto faith. Her state had to sue the federal government to get a look at the files. And the senators who could have made this a condition of confirming an attorney general — who had the leverage, in a vote decided by one — used it for nothing.

Fourteen of them are on this site. You can look up every one.

We deserve better.

Source

Daniel Miller, "New Mexico sues federal government for release of Epstein files" (FOX 4 Dallas-Fort Worth, August 6, 2026). Additional reporting from NBC News and the Associated Press and Source New Mexico. The Truth Commission's interim report is public. Photo: NBC News.

At 4:17 in the Morning, 50 Republican Senators Handed the Justice Department to Trump's Personal Lawyer

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 22:20:53 +0000

At 4:17 a.m. on Saturday, August 8, 2026, the United States Senate made Todd Blanche the attorney general of the United States.

The vote was 50 to 49. Every one of the 50 yes votes was a Republican. Every Democrat voted no. Two Republicans — Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — voted no with them. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky did not vote.

One vote. That's the whole margin.

Todd Blanche is Donald Trump's personal criminal defense lawyer. Not "was, a long time ago." He was hired in 2023 to defend Trump against criminal charges, he was a lead attorney on Trump's defense team at the hush-money trial in New York, and he defended Trump in the two federal cases brought by the Justice Department he now runs.

Fifty Republican senators looked at that and said: perfect, give him the whole building.

What they actually voted for

This wasn't a close call that turned on some technical dispute. The objections were enormous, they were public for weeks, and several Republicans raised them out loud before folding.

A $1.8 billion fund for Trump's supporters. Trump sued the IRS. Then he settled that lawsuit with his own administration. The settlement created a $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" to pay people who say the criminal justice system mistreated them — and Trump was explicit that he meant the people who attacked the Capitol on January 6. He called them "great American Patriots."

Tax audit immunity for the Trump family. The same settlement shielded Trump, two of his sons, and the Trump Organization from IRS audits and enforcement on past returns. A federal judge who handled the IRS case described Trump's lawsuit as an improper exercise in self-dealing. The union representing IRS workers went to court two days before the vote to try to block the immunity deal.

Prosecuting the president's enemies. Under Blanche, the Justice Department charged former FBI Director James Comey with threatening the president — over a photo of seashells arranged to read "86 47" that Comey posted online. It charged the Southern Poverty Law Center. It opened an investigation into the lawsuits E. Jean Carroll brought and won against Trump for sexual abuse and defamation. Comey's lawyers are asking a judge to throw his case out, accusing the department of misleading judges and withholding key facts.

Blanche's answer to all of this was two letters, written on August 2. One said the order creating the fund "is rescinded and shall have no force or effect." The other narrowed the tax immunity deal.

That was enough for fifty senators.

The letters aren't worth much

Here is the part nobody should skip past.

ABC News reported that the agreement Cornyn and Tillis accepted contains no language preventing the fund from being brought back under a different name or a different method. The Judiciary Committee advanced Blanche anyway on August 4, on a 12–10 vote along party lines.

Brandon DeBot of the Tax Law Center at NYU Law told NPR what the letters were worth:

"These assurances are not worth the paper they're written on. They don't pull back on the attempts to give the president and his affiliates unauthorized immunity from tax audits. And they don't do anything new to stop the president from trying to bring back the fund."

And the president himself spent the week before the vote saying he wanted the fund back. Trump told reporters the fund would have been "very fair," that it could have given "some solace" to Jan. 6 defendants, and: "I view that fund as a positive, and a lot of Republicans do too."

So the deal was: Trump says out loud he still wants it, his own lawyer signs a piece of paper saying it's cancelled, and the Senate calls that a win and goes home for a month.

Thirteen of them had already done this once

This is the fact that should follow every one of these senators around.

On March 5, 2025, the Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as deputy attorney general — the number-two job — by 52 to 46. Everything anyone objected to on Saturday morning happened after that vote, on the job that vote handed him.

Every single Republican we track who was in the Senate in March 2025 voted yes then, too. Blackburn, Capito, Cotton, Hagerty, Husted, Hyde-Smith, Marshall, Moody, Ricketts, Risch, Rounds, Sullivan, Tuberville — all yes, both times.

They didn't get fooled. They got exactly what they voted for, twice.

Susan Collins voted yes in March 2025 as well, and then announced a no vote on August 4 — hours after the two Republicans with real leverage had already given theirs away.

What Blanche did to the Justice Department

Before the vote, more than 1,200 former Justice Department employees — people who served across 14 administrations, including dozens of former U.S. attorneys — signed a letter to the Judiciary Committee urging senators to reject him.

Their director, Stacey Young, put it this way:

"Since his confirmation as Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche has shown time and again that his guiding star is fealty to the President, not the Constitution."

The letter's numbers are the part that should worry anyone who has ever called the FBI or reported a fraud. Under Blanche's watch, over 16,000 employees left the department, including more than a quarter of its attorneys. Agents, analysts, immigration judges and career prosecutors were fired for declining to bring vindictive prosecutions, for refusing to lie in court, or for working assigned cases the president didn't like. Others were pulled off their real work to patrol streets in Washington, D.C.

The letter says the consequences reach far past the Justice Department's own hallways:

"They've meant that much of the department's vital work isn't being done, or isn't being done as well – leaving communities less safe, Americans' rights less protected, and our national security more vulnerable."

That is 1,200 people who spent their careers inside the Justice Department, serving under presidents of both parties, telling the Senate this man should not get the job. Fifty senators voted yes anyway.

The Epstein survivors told them, too

Murkowski, one of the two Republican no votes, said part of her reason was the Justice Department's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. She wasn't alone — Sen. Thom Tillis had pushed Blanche to meet with Epstein survivors, and Blanche finally did in July.

It did not go well. Afterward, survivor Annie Farmer said in a July 16 statement that she found Blanche "abrasive, condescending, and intentionally noncommittal to survivors," and survivors urged senators to block him.

Blanche was the public face of the Epstein files at the Justice Department. He is the official who personally sat down with Ghislaine Maxwell in a Florida courthouse for two days of interviews on July 24 and 25, 2025, after granting her limited immunity so she could talk without fear of being prosecuted over what she said. She told him she never saw Trump act inappropriately. Shortly afterward she was moved from a low-security prison in Florida to a minimum-security camp in Texas. Neither her lawyer nor the Bureau of Prisons has explained why.

Fourteen senators on this site voted to promote him. One of them, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, voted to keep the Epstein files sealed and then took checks from two men named in them.

The fourteen we track

Ashley Moody of Florida spent six years as her state's attorney general before Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed her to the Senate. She knows better than almost anyone in that chamber what it means for a chief law enforcement officer to be independent of the politician above him. She sits on the Judiciary Committee. She voted yes.

Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee also sits on Judiciary, and is running for governor while she does it.

Darline Graham of South Carolina has been a senator since July 14. Nobody elected her — Gov. Henry McMaster appointed her to the seat left vacant by the death of her brother, Lindsey Graham, on Trump's public recommendation. She has never held elected office in her life. She now sits on the Judiciary Committee, and the first bill she put her name on was one that would make it harder for millions of citizens to register to vote. Now she's voted to confirm the president's defense lawyer as attorney general.

Jon Husted of Ohio spent the same week writing a brand-new photo ID bill that the Senate voted on nineteen minutes after it confirmed Blanche. His state lost more Obamacare coverage than any other in the country this year.

Tommy Tuberville of Alabama is running for governor while still holding his Senate seat.

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

The three who talked tough and voted yes anyway

The best part — if you like this sort of thing — is who made the noise.

Cornyn and Tillis spent two weeks holding the nomination hostage. Cornyn accused the Justice Department of having "stonewalled" him and said flatly, "They've simply refused to cooperate." Tillis said the fund was "an insult to the police officers and the people that defended us on January the 6th." Then he said, "It's done. It's been rescinded, and I am satisfied." Both of them voted yes.

Bill Cassidy of Louisiana was the decisive vote. He listed the problems himself — the $1.8 billion fund, the tax immunity deal, the prosecutions of Trump's political opponents — and then said: "This is not a referendum on President Trump. It is a decision regarding Mr. Blanche in very specific circumstances."

Here's what those three men have in common. All of them are on their way out. Cornyn lost his May primary to Ken Paxton after Trump endorsed against him. Tillis isn't running again. Cassidy lost his primary this year to a Trump-backed challenger.

The only Republicans who used any leverage at all were the three with nothing left to lose. And they gave it away for two letters.

That tells you what the other 47 yes votes were really about.

What they did with the night

The Senate pulled an all-nighter to get this done. In the same session it confirmed Blanche, passed a stopgap funding bill, and held a pre-dawn vote on a photo ID requirement for voting. Then everyone went home for a month of recess.

They did not lower anyone's grocery bill. They did not lower anyone's rent, or premiums, or electric bill.

They stayed up until 4:17 in the morning to hand the Justice Department to the president's defense attorney, and then they left town.

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, told them what the moment was before they voted:

"If there is ever a moment in history when we need an Attorney General above reproach, who is clearly dedicated to ending corruption, even at the highest level of our government, it's right now."

Fifty of them heard that and voted for the president's defense attorney anyway.

We deserve better.

Source

Alanna Durkin Richer and Lisa Mascaro, "Todd Blanche narrowly confirmed as Trump's attorney general in overnight vote" (Associated Press via PBS News, August 8, 2026). Additional reporting from the Associated Press, NPR, and The Hill. Roll call from Senate vote #230. Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters.

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

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

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

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

Then the senators went home for a month.

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

The bill was three days old

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the same fight, wearing a different hat

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

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

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

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

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

The fifteen we track

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What they didn't do before they left

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

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

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

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

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

Source

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

Cindy Hyde-Smith Told Federal Regulators Mississippi Is 'at the Forefront of Safeguarding Ratepayers.' Mississippi Hid the Contract.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:25:02 +0000

On July 23, 2026, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held an oversight hearing on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission — the agency that referees the nation's power grid. Cindy Hyde-Smith sits on that committee, and when her turn came she told the commissioners this:

"Mississippi, my home state, continues to be at the forefront of safeguarding ratepayers by ensuring companies, like data centers, pay their fair share for large loads."

That sentence deserves a hard look, because two months earlier a group of energy economists published a report on exactly that question in Mississippi. Their answer was close to the opposite.

What Mississippi actually did

Amazon is building four data centers in Mississippi — in Ridgeland, Canton, Clinton and Vicksburg — as part of a $25 billion investment the company says will create 2,000 jobs. Enormous facilities like these need enormous amounts of electricity, and somebody has to build the poles, wires and generation to deliver it.

The question in every state with a data center boom is simple: does the tech company pay for that, or do the people already on the grid?

Mississippi answered it in 2024 with Senate Bill 2001. According to the May 2026 report by Synapse Energy Economics, prepared for Earthjustice and Environmental Advocates Mississippi, that law:

"curtailed the standard oversight role of the Public Service Commission (PSC) over energy infrastructure, making it easier and faster to expand the electrical grid for data centers."

The report is blunt about who absorbed the risk: "By limiting the role of the PSC, Mississippi legislators transferred significant risk to residential consumers, who as a class of ratepayers, have now lost a key transparency and fairness check on Entergy Mississippi."

The law also hid Entergy's agreement with Amazon from the public, and let the utility start recovering data-center costs through everyone's rates before the facilities are even running. Ben Havumaki, one of the report's authors, put it plainly: the law "creates an unusually frictionless path for the utility to make investments on behalf of data centers."

Normally, he explained, a utility spends its own money first and then has to convince regulators the spending was prudent — "in public with transparency and reasonable vetting from other parties. In this case, a lot of that is just shrouded in regulatory cover and secrecy."

That is the state Hyde-Smith described to federal regulators as "at the forefront of safeguarding ratepayers."

What it has cost Mississippi households so far

The Synapse report put numbers to it. Entergy Mississippi's residential customers:

have already paid approximately $38 million as of March 2026 for investments related to serving these data centers, and
will contribute $74 million by the end of 2026.

Mississippi Today, reporting on the same analysis, put the household effect at about $10.60 more per month on residential bills. Against the average monthly bill the report used — $157 — that's roughly a 7% increase.

In Mississippi, $10.60 a month is not a rounding error. It's about $127 a year, taken from households that did not get a vote on it, to help build data centers for Amazon.

The report is careful, and so are we: these are estimates, and the authors say so, because the contract is secret. That secrecy is the point. Nobody outside Entergy and Amazon can check the math — which is what SB 2001 arranged.

Whose words she was using

Entergy disputes all of it. The company says its customers "are not subsidizing data centers — they're benefitting from them," and that data centers "are paying their fair share, plus additional benefits for customers." In March 2026 it launched a public pledge branding this promise: "Fair Share Plus." It projects that by 2030 customers' bills will be 16% — about $30 a month — lower than they'd be without Amazon.

Entergy has released limited data supporting those projections, citing trade secrets in its agreement with Amazon.

Now read the senator's sentence again: Mississippi is safeguarding ratepayers by "ensuring companies, like data centers, pay their fair share for large loads."

She didn't test the utility's claim in front of federal regulators. She repeated its slogan.

There's a reason to notice whose language she reached for. Entergy is one of her donors — her campaign has taken $37,250 from the utility, and she sits on both the Energy and Natural Resources Committee that oversees FERC and the Appropriations Committee.

To be fair to her, she did ask the commissioners a real question that day — what mechanisms FERC is putting in place to make large-load customers pay upfront so rates don't rise. That's the right question. But she asked it while telling the room that her own state had already solved the problem, when her state had in fact removed the referee and sealed the contract.

We have seen this exact script

This is becoming the standard move for Republicans in data-center states: warm words about protecting the electric bill, delivered by someone the power industry is paying.

In Ohio, Jon Husted says he'll protect your electric bill while the companies raising it fund his campaign — $69,750 from the tech and utility companies at the center of Ohio's data center fight. The pattern travels.

What makes Mississippi's version sting is the underlying condition of the state. Mississippi already ranks 48th out of 50 on the measures we track. Its households have the least slack in the country to absorb an extra $10.60 a month, and the least ability to hire lawyers to pry open a sealed utility contract.

Their senator went to Washington and told the referees everything was fine.

If Mississippi really is "at the forefront of safeguarding ratepayers," there's an easy way to prove it: unseal the contract and let the Public Service Commission do the job the Legislature took away from it. Until then, the only people who know whether Amazon is paying its fair share are Amazon and Entergy — and one of them writes checks to Cindy Hyde-Smith.

Source

Data centers likely increasing Mississippi power rates — Alex Rozier, Mississippi Today, May 28, 2026. Photo: site of Amazon's data center under construction in Canton, October 2025, Mississippi Today.

Cindy Hyde-Smith Told Mississippi 'Medicaid Is Not Going Anywhere.' Then She Voted to Cut It — and Started Writing Bills to Save the Hospitals.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:25:01 +0000

On August 3, 2026, Cindy Hyde-Smith put out a press release announcing she had cosponsored a new bipartisan bill to help rural hospitals stay open. It's called REH 2.0, and here's how she described it:

"We're trying every option we can to give rural hospitals a better chance to stay open."

Every option. Hold on to that phrase, because there was one option she had a year earlier, and she voted the other way.

April 2025: "Why is everyone's head exploding?"

In April 2025, Mississippians were hearing that Washington was about to cut Medicaid, and some of them went looking for their senator. Three of them found her at a Ridgeland Chamber of Commerce event.

According to people who watched the exchange, Hyde-Smith did not enjoy the conversation. She told them:

"Medicaid is not going anywhere. Nothing is going to happen to Medicaid. Why is everyone's head exploding? I can't understand why everyone's head is exploding."

Then a staffer moved her along.

This was not a small question in Mississippi. About 714,600 Mississippians — 24.3% of the entire state — were on Medicaid in 2024. Nearly one in four people. When a Mississippi senator says nothing is going to happen to Medicaid, that is a promise to a quarter of the state.

July 2025: she voted to cut it

Two months later, the Senate passed Trump's budget bill — Medicaid cuts, food aid cuts, and tax breaks — on a 50-50 tie broken by Vice President JD Vance. Hyde-Smith voted for it.

Because that vote was 50-50, there is no hiding in the crowd. Any single senator switching would have killed it. She was one of the votes that made it law.

What it does to her state:

Mississippi is projected to lose an estimated $2–$4 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade.
An estimated 115,000 Mississippians are projected to lose health coverage.

And the people who tried to tell her so in advance couldn't get to her. Constituent groups made three separate trips to her Jackson office in the months before the vote. Each time they were either locked out or given a few minutes with a staffer.

February 2026: the bill comes due for the hospitals

Rural hospitals run on thin margins. Medicaid reimbursements account for nearly 10% of net revenue at the typical rural hospital — about $3.9 million a year — while the national median operating margin for rural hospitals is 2.0%. When that money shrinks, the hospital is what closes.

In February 2026, the health care advisory firm Chartis published its annual Rural Health State of the State analysis. The findings:

417 rural hospitals nationwide are now vulnerable to closure.
Twenty-four of them are in Mississippi.
41.2% of all rural hospitals are operating in the red. In states like Mississippi that never expanded Medicaid, it's 52.2% — more than half.
Chartis estimates rural hospitals face nearly $140 billion in expected losses from Medicaid-related cuts.

Mississippi is already the extreme case. The state has the highest percentage of rural providers in the country that have stopped offering general surgery — 44%. When the surgery stops, the hospital is usually not far behind, and the next ambulance ride gets an hour longer.

March, May, August: the rescue bills

Now look at what Hyde-Smith has been doing since the cuts passed.

March 2026 — she backed a bill to improve rural emergency care services at health centers and clinics.
May 21, 2026 — the Senate passed her and Chuck Grassley's Rural Community Hospital Demonstration Reauthorization Act, extending a Medicare payment-model program for five more years. "This is an important bill to sustain a program that has a proven track record of helping steady the finances of rural hospitals so they can keep their doors open," she said.
August 3, 2026 — REH 2.0, widening eligibility for the Rural Emergency Hospital program so more hospitals can qualify, including some that already closed.

Six Mississippi hospitals are enrolled in that demonstration program: Greenwood Leflore Hospital, Magee General, Wayne General, Anderson Regional Medical Center in Meridian, Highland Community Hospital in Picayune, and Marion General in Columbia.

Nobody should sneer at those bills. Reauthorizing a payment demonstration is real, and the hospitals in it are real. But look at the scale honestly. On one side, a vote that pulls billions of federal dollars out of Mississippi health care over a decade and pushes 115,000 people off coverage. On the other, tweaks to the eligibility rules of existing programs — worth having, nowhere near the size of the hole.

You cannot vote to drain the pool and then present yourself as the lifeguard.

The pattern

This is the shape of the whole thing. Vote for the cut in Washington, where the party is watching. Announce the patch back home, where the voters are.

She is not alone in it. Derrick Van Orden voted to cut Medicaid by $900 billion and then asked for credit for winning Wisconsin an exemption. Gabe Evans insisted the budget bill didn't cut Medicaid at all and called the warnings "fear mongering" — and a year later nurses named 12 Colorado hospitals at risk. Same script, three states.

What makes Mississippi's version worse is the arithmetic underneath it. This is the state that ranks 48th out of 50 on the measures we track, with a quarter of its people on Medicaid and more than half its rural hospitals losing money. It had the least room of any state to absorb a hit like this, and its senator cast a deciding vote for it two months after telling constituents to their faces that nothing was going to happen.

The next time a hospital in Mississippi closes its doors, the press release announcing a bill to help rural hospitals will already be written.

Source

Hyde-Smith cosponsors new bipartisan legislation to strengthen rural hospitals — Picayune Item, August 3, 2026. Photo: official U.S. Senate portrait.

Cindy Hyde-Smith Used a Jim Crow-Era Tool to Block a Judge. Now He's on Her Ballot.

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:25:00 +0000

In November 2026, Mississippians will pick a United States senator. One of the two names on that ballot is a man the other one personally kept off the federal bench.

That is not a figure of speech. In April 2023, Cindy Hyde-Smith blocked Scott Colom's nomination to be a federal judge in the Northern District of Mississippi. She didn't lose a vote. She didn't lose a debate. There was never a vote or a debate, because she made sure there couldn't be one — by declining to hand in a piece of paper.

Three years later, Colom won the Democratic primary in a landslide — the Associated Press called it with him at 73% — and became the man standing between her and another term.

What a "blue slip" is, and who invented the version she used

When a president nominates someone to a federal district court, the Senate Judiciary Committee sends a blue-colored slip of paper to each senator from that nominee's home state. Return it, and the process moves forward. Don't return it, and — under the way the committee has run for most of the last 70 years — the nomination simply stops. No hearing. No committee vote. No floor vote. Nothing.

That absolute veto is not in the Constitution. It's not in Senate rules. One man made it up, and Mississippians have heard of him.

Starting in 1956, Senator James Eastland of Mississippi became the first Judiciary chairman to let a single home-state senator kill a nominee outright, and he did it for a reason. Eastland used the blue slip to keep judges sympathetic to school desegregation off Southern courts, in the years right after Brown v. Board of Education.

You don't have to take a liberal group's word for that. Here is Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, writing in 2017 while he chaired the same committee:

"For the vast majority of the blue slip's history, a negative or unreturned blue slip did not stop the Senate Judiciary Committee from holding a hearing and vote on a nominee. In fact, of my 18 predecessors as chairman of the committee, only two allowed home-state senators unilateral veto power through the blue slip. The first to do so, Sen. James Eastland (D-Miss.), reportedly adopted this policy to thwart school integration after the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education."

Scholars who studied the practice landed in the same neighborhood. A paper by professors from Georgia, Michigan State and Wisconsin wrote that why Eastland changed the policy "is unclear, though racial politics likely had something to do with it, as Eastland could use committee rules to block pro-civil rights nominees from reaching the bench."

That is the tool Hyde-Smith reached for. And the man she used it on is the first African American elected district attorney for the 16th District in north Mississippi.

The two reasons she gave

On Tuesday, April 4, 2023, Hyde-Smith gave a statement to the Magnolia Tribune explaining herself — a statement her own Senate website still carries:

"I will not return the blue slip on the nomination of Scott Colom to serve as a U.S. District Court judge for the Northern District of Mississippi. I visited with the District Attorney recently, and I recognize that he is smart and well liked in his district. However, there are a number of concerns I have regarding his record. As someone with a strong interest in protecting the rights of girls and women, I am concerned about Scott Colom's opposition to legislation to protect female athletes. The significant support his campaign received from George Soros also weighs heavily against his nomination in my view. I simply cannot support his nomination to serve on the federal bench in Mississippi for a lifetime."

Two reasons. Look at both.

Reason one: school sports. Colom has never publicly said anything about transgender athletes in women's sports. Mississippi Today checked, and reported plainly that while he "has voiced general support for trans rights, he has never publicly commented on the issue of trans women competing in women sports." What he actually did was sign a 2021 letter opposing efforts "to criminalize transgender people and gender-affirming healthcare" — a letter about putting people in jail and taking away medical care, not about who runs track. She took a position he never took and disqualified him for it.

Reason two: George Soros. A political action committee funded partly by Soros spent money on Colom's first race for district attorney — in 2015. Colom has said he didn't know the PAC had taken Soros money until he read it in the news. And he took no Soros money at all in his 2019 race.

So a prosecutor got vetoed for a stance he never took and a donation he didn't solicit eight years earlier.

The people who wanted him confirmed

This wasn't a party-line fight, which is the part that should stick with Mississippi voters.

Roger Wicker — Mississippi's senior Republican senator — returned his blue slip. He backed the nomination.
Haley Barbour and Phil Bryant, both former Republican governors of Mississippi, supported Colom.
Dick Durbin, then the Judiciary chairman, called Colom "highly qualified," and his office said Durbin was "extremely disappointed" by what Hyde-Smith did.

Wicker told reporters that "quite a lot of mainstream Mississippi Republicans" saw Colom as a strong law-and-order prosecutor. Mississippi's Republican establishment, in other words, was fine with him. One senator wasn't, and one senator was all it took.

The anger over it reached the Mississippi Capitol. In February 2024, when state lawmakers brought up a resolution honoring Hyde-Smith as the first woman Mississippi ever elected to Washington, 11 of the 16 state Senate Democrats simply didn't vote, and a 12th voted present. They said the resolution itself was fine — they were making a point about the judgeship.

"No Democrat opposes the worth of the resolution honoring her," said Senate Minority Leader Derrick Simmons. "But we do feel that it is important that the federal posts in Mississippi that deal with law and order be filled."

Why this is worth your time in an election year

It would be easy to file this under Washington procedure. Don't. This is the clearest look you will get at how Cindy Hyde-Smith uses power when nobody can stop her.

A federal judgeship in north Mississippi is not an abstraction. That court handles civil rights cases, voting cases, criminal cases, business disputes — the machinery of law and order for a big piece of the state. Two Republican governors, the state's senior Republican senator, and the Judiciary chairman all said the nominee was qualified. She overrode every one of them, alone, with a procedure a Mississippi segregationist built for exactly this purpose, and she justified it with two claims that fall apart the moment you check them.

It fits a pattern. When the Senate tried to pass a bill protecting IVF nationwide in 2024 after Alabama clinics started shutting down, Hyde-Smith stood up and killed it with a single objection — again acting alone, again on a bill that needed everyone's consent to move. Given the chance to be the one person who stops something, she takes it.

Mississippi is 48th out of 50 on the measures we track. It is a state that needs its federal posts filled and its problems worked on. What it got, in this instance, was a senator who spent her power on a veto — and who now has to explain it to voters with the vetoed man's name printed right underneath hers.

Source

Lawmakers honor Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, but Dems say it's time for her to allow vote on federal judge — Bobby Harrison, Mississippi Today, February 1, 2024. Photo: Mississippi Today.