MAGA Report Cards — Missouri

Bob Onder Asked for a Map That Handed Him All of St. Charles County. Now That Missourians Get to Vote on It, He's Suing to Stop Them.

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:19:10 +0000

More than 300,000 Missourians signed a petition to put their state's new congressional map to a public vote. On Thursday, September 3, 2026, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled unanimously that they are entitled to that vote — and that because the referendum qualified, the 2025 map never legally took effect. November's election has to be run under the old lines.

The next day, Bob Onder sued in federal court to take that away.

Onder, state Senator Rick Brattin and two Missouri voters filed suit on Friday, September 4 against Secretary of State Denny Hoskins in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, ABC 17 News reported. They want November's election held under the 2025 map instead. Their lawyer, Marc Ellinger, argues that letting Missourians vote on their own congressional districts violates the U.S. Constitution's elections clause and the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection.

The state's attorney general, Catherine Hanaway, filed a separate emergency appeal at the U.S. Supreme Court asking Justice Brett Kavanaugh to put the state court ruling on hold.

He is the man who asked for this map

This is not a bystander objecting to chaos. Onder had been pushing for a seven-Republican-seat map since 2022, when he was a state senator, and was one of four Missouri Republicans in the U.S. House who backed the 2025 redraw.

In August 2025 he told St. Louis Public Radio that the legislature should redraw the lines mid-decade:

"We are a Republican state. Republicans have supermajorities in the Missouri House and the Missouri Senate. Republicans hold all of our statewide elected offices, including, of course, governor. And I believe that we should pass a congressional map that reflects the values of the state of Missouri."

Asked whether the plan might backfire, he said the arithmetic was simple: "we have seats that have wide enough margins that I think it's pretty straightforward math to draw seven very safe Republican seats."

He got what he asked for. The 2025 map moved all of St. Charles County into his 3rd District — a long-running goal for Republicans there. We wrote about the redraw and the four Missouri Republicans who backed it in August.

Now the state's highest court has said Missourians get to vote on the same map, and Onder is in federal court arguing they should not.

The argument he is making

The case rests on the idea that Onder and Brattin are the ones being harmed. Brattin, who is running in the 5th District currently held by Democrat Emanuel Cleaver, put it this way:

"When you put in all this blood, sweat, tears, the time, all of this campaigning, yeah, it's really disenfranchising when you've done all that, and those people have believed in you and trusted you and cast their vote for you, to then say they're going to go to the ballot box and be voting in a completely different district."

Read that again with the actual sequence in mind. Republicans redrew the districts in 2025 to move voters between them. Citizens gathered 300,000 signatures to object. A unanimous court said the objection was valid and the old lines still stand. And the word for the inconvenience of campaigning in the wrong district, according to the candidate who lobbied for the redraw, is "disenfranchising."

Onder's brief makes the same move on behalf of two voters, Pat Thomas and Debra Havens, who say they are harmed because they must now "educate themselves about new candidates and issues."

Whose delay caused the mess

Missouri's own Supreme Court has already assigned responsibility for the confusion, and it did not point at the people who signed the petition.

People Not Politicians turned in more than 300,000 signatures in December 2025. Hoskins had the authority to rule the petition unconstitutional the moment it landed, and he had already made exactly that argument in federal court that same month. Instead he sent hundreds of thousands of signatures out for verification — asking local election officials to check every single one rather than use the random sample state law allows, which pushed the deadline from February to the end of July.

Then, at about 4 p.m. on August 4, 2026, roughly an hour before his legal deadline and while voters were casting primary ballots, Hoskins declared the referendum unconstitutional.

Judge Ginger Gooch, writing for the court, said in a footnote that his complaints about cost and confusion were "particularly misplaced given the secretary's delay created the confusion, expense, and practical difficulties of which he complains" — a sequence the Missouri Independent's Jason Hancock laid out in a commentary piece. All but two of the judges on that court were appointed by Republican governors, and the ruling was unanimous.

The pattern in one state

Missourians voted to expand Medicaid in 2020. They put abortion rights in the state constitution in 2024. They approved a minimum wage increase and paid sick leave the same year, and the legislature repealed the sick leave.

On August 4, 2026, they rejected Amendment 4 — which would have let a single congressional district veto future citizen initiatives — by 80 percent to 20.

The referendum on the gerrymander is the next thing they are supposed to get to vote on. Onder is asking a federal court to make sure it does not count this year.

What the record shows

Bob Onder publicly lobbied Missouri's legislature to redraw its congressional map mid-decade, said the goal was seven safe Republican seats, and ended up with all of St. Charles County in his own district. When 300,000 Missourians forced a referendum on that map and a unanimous state Supreme Court ruled they were entitled to it, Onder went to federal court on September 4, 2026 to have November's election run under the map anyway. The harm he alleges is that he campaigned in the wrong districts.

Source

Congressional candidates Onder, Brattin seek to overturn Missouri Supreme Court map decision by Alison Patton, ABC 17 News, September 5, 2026.

Eric Burlison Said Town Halls Are Where 'Only Political Nutjobs Show Up.' His Opponent Just Offered Him Any Weeknight in October.

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:17:20 +0000

The House's last scheduled voting day before the election is October 1. After that, members go home, keep drawing their salary, and campaign.

On Sunday, September 6, 2026, the Springfield News-Leader ran a letter from Missi Hesketh, the Democratic candidate in Missouri's 7th Congressional District, making Eric Burlison an offer for those weeks. She wrote that she would make herself available "any Sunday-Thursday evening in October to have an organized and civil public forum" alongside him.

She also made a claim about why she had to say it in a newspaper instead of by phone:

"Congressman Eric Burlison and his staff dodge every single person who calls or emails his office or campaign attempting to set up a public forum."

That is her characterization, and she is running against him. But it is not a hard claim to check, because Burlison has been unusually open about how he feels on this subject.

He said it out loud

In March 2025, Burlison told St. Louis Public Radio's Jason Rosenbaum that "the town halls create a dynamic where only political nutjobs show up."

He said it after his fellow Missouri Republican Mark Alford was confronted by angry constituents at a town hall in late February 2025 over federal layoffs, tariffs and the war in Ukraine. Burlison allowed that some people had legitimate concerns, but said an in-person town hall creates "a dynamic that you're inviting all of the most extreme people to come to," the Springfield Daily Citizen reported.

Around the same time, Representative Richard Hudson of North Carolina, who chairs the House Republicans' campaign committee, was telling members to hold their town halls virtually instead of in person.

Burlison already did. He still does — his office reported holding one in January 2026.

What happened when constituents asked in person

On Thursday, March 13, 2025, constituents of the 7th District gathered outside Burlison's Springfield office on East Ridgeview Street to protest his refusal to hold town halls. One of them, John Jennings, said he would collect questions from the crowd and hand-deliver them to the office in the hope that Burlison would respond.

Burlison's spokesperson told KY3 that in-person town halls "have become a target for organized opposition groups."

That is the whole argument, stated plainly: the people who want to ask him questions in a room are the wrong kind of people.

The difference between a phone call and a room

A telephone town hall is not a town hall with worse audio. It is a different event with different rules.

The office decides who gets on the line and which questions get read. Nobody in the audience can see how many people are waiting, or hear a question that the screener skipped, or follow up when the answer misses. There is no video, no local reporter in the back of the room, and no way for a constituent to know whether the person next to them was asking the same thing.

That is why a public forum in October is a real request and a tele-town hall is not an answer to it.

What he would have to answer for

Burlison represents southwest Missouri. A public forum in October would fall inside the final five weeks before an election in which his constituents get to weigh in on what he has done with the seat.

There is material. In March 2024 he was one of nine members of the House who would not vote to condemn Russia for kidnapping Ukrainian children; the resolution passed 390 to 9. He wrote to the Joplin City Council backing a data center that hundreds of his own constituents had turned out to oppose, and in July 2026 told a Jasper County candidate forum that "what the business is doing doesn't matter." Hesketh's letter also points at Missouri Republicans' support for Amendments 4 and 5, the ballot measures that would have made it harder for citizens to use the initiative petition process and swapped the state income tax for higher sales taxes. Missouri voters buried both on August 4, 2026, by 80 and 83 percent.

Those are the sort of questions a room asks and a screener does not have to pass along.

What the record shows

Eric Burlison has said publicly that in-person town halls attract "only political nutjobs," his office has said they are "a target for organized opposition groups," and he holds his town halls by telephone instead. Constituents protested outside his Springfield office over it in March 2025 and got that answer. On September 6, 2026, his opponent offered to appear with him on any weeknight in October, when the House is out of session after its first day and he will be home in the district anyway.

Source

"Will Eric Burlison campaign in public?", a letter from Missi Hesketh in the Springfield News-Leader, September 6, 2026.

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

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.

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

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.

8 Million Americans Have Lost Their Health Coverage. Here Are More of the Republicans Who Did It.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:03:19 +0000

The advocacy group Protect Our Care released state-by-state fact sheets this week putting a number on what the past year of Republican health policy has actually done.

Roughly $900 billion in cuts to Medicaid, plus the decision to let the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expire at the end of 2025, has meant "stripping insurance coverage from around 8 million Americans total."

Eight million is a hard number to feel. So here is what it looks like at the level of the people who voted for it — seven Republicans, none of whom we featured the last time we did this.

They fall into four groups, and the groups are the story.

They wrote the rules: Aaron Bean and Ashley Hinson

The Medicaid work requirement — 80 hours a month or you lose coverage — didn't appear out of nowhere in the budget bill.

Aaron Bean filed it first, in December 2024, and again in February 2025, months before it became law. His version was broader than the one that ultimately passed.

Ashley Hinson defended the policy at the Plymouth County Fair with the line that always gets applause: "If you're going to take a taxpayer benefit, you should be working." She also suggested people here illegally are getting benefits — which federal law already bars.

Here is the number that makes both of these arguments collapse: 92% of the adults under 65 on Medicaid, setting aside those already on federal disability benefits, are working, caregiving, sick, disabled, or in school.

Work requirements don't move people into jobs they already have. They add paperwork, and people lose coverage when the paperwork fails. That is not a side effect. It's the mechanism.

He promised in writing: Jeff Hurd

In April 2025, Jeff Hurd signed a letter vowing he could not and would not support any bill that cut Medicaid coverage for vulnerable people.

Five weeks later he voted for it. Then he voted for it again.

More than 32,000 people in his district are projected to lose coverage.

A politician who never made the promise can at least claim you knew what you were getting. Hurd put it in writing, in a letter designed to reassure exactly the people who are now losing their insurance.

He told them they shouldn't have it: Russell Fry

At an April 2025 telephone town hall, Russell Fry called Medicaid vital, then said a lot of people on it "quite frankly shouldn't be."

Then he voted for the bill. 37,124 people in his district are projected to lose coverage — 33,500 off Affordable Care Act plans, 3,624 off Medicaid.

South Carolina's 7th District is projected to lose more health coverage than any other district in the state. Average marketplace premiums in the state are up 235% since 2025, by Protect Our Care's count.

Fry is not confused about what the bill does. He told his own constituents, on a call they had phoned in to, that too many of them were on it.

They voted for the damage, then backed bills to fix it: Mark Alford and Shelley Moore Capito

This is the pattern that shows up most, and it is the most cynical one.

Mark Alford voted in July 2025 for the budget law. In his own district, 27,243 people are projected to lose coverage — 14,043 off Medicaid, 13,200 off Affordable Care Act plans. Nearly eight months later, in February 2026, he introduced a bill to keep rural hospitals open. "It's very important that we keep our rural hospitals open for business," he told Missourinet a couple of weeks later.

That rescue bill has three cosponsors and has never moved.

Shelley Moore Capito cast one of the 50 votes for the budget bill — a 50–50 vote, meaning she personally could have stopped it. The head of the West Virginia Hospital Association says the state's hospitals will lose more than $1 billion a year once the law is fully in effect, and seven West Virginia rural hospitals are named most at risk of closing.

On July 29, 2026, she cosponsored legislation to prevent rural hospital closures.

Both of them are running the same play: cast the vote that does the damage, wait for the local coverage about hospitals closing, then sponsor the fix and issue the press release. The vote was binding. The rescue bill is optional, and it isn't moving.

He let the subsidies lapse: Jon Husted

Ohio just lost a bigger share of its Affordable Care Act enrollment than any state in America — nearly a third of its enrollees gone.

Jon Husted and Ohio's other senator let the enhanced health subsidies expire and voted for the budget bill.

The subsidy expiration is the quiet half of the 8 million. Medicaid cuts get argued about. Letting a tax credit lapse requires no vote at all in the public's mind — you just don't renew it, premiums jump, and people quietly stop paying for a plan they can no longer afford. Nobody has to stand up and say "I'm taking your insurance."

The pattern

Read those seven together and the defense falls apart.

They knew what the work requirements would do, because two of them wrote them. They were warned what the vote would do to districts like their own before they cast it — Hurd signed a letter saying so, five weeks out. And several of them knew immediately afterward, because they started filing rural hospital rescue bills that go nowhere.

Not one of these is a story about a member who was misled. It's a story about members who did the arithmetic, voted anyway, and then went looking for something to put in the newsletter.

Eight million people. Both bills to fix it are still sitting in committee.

One in Every 14 Union Members in America Just Lost Their Contract by Executive Order. 195 House Republicans Voted to Keep It That Way.

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 08:25:23 +0000

More than a million federal workers lost the right to negotiate their own contracts in the space of five months, and it happened by memo.

In March 2025, President Trump signed an executive order using a rarely-used national security exception in a 1978 law to strip federal workers of collective bargaining — the right to negotiate as a group over pay, schedules, staffing and safety. On August 28, 2025 he signed a second order widening it further.

Together the two orders ended collective bargaining for more than a million federal workers. Counted alongside an earlier decision to end bargaining at the Transportation Security Administration, the Center for American Progress puts the total at 84.4 percent of the unionized federal workforce, or one out of every 14 workers in the entire country covered by a union contract. Federal News Network put the reach of the two orders alone at "an estimated two-thirds of the federal workforce".

Congress had a clean chance to reverse it. A bipartisan bill to give those workers their contracts back passed the House on December 11, 2025.

195 Republicans voted no. The Senate has not touched it since.

What is actually being taken away

"Collective bargaining" is a bloodless phrase for a very specific thing.

It is the reason a nurse at a VA hospital can say "this unit is short-staffed and it isn't safe" without her manager being the only person who decides what happens to her next. It is the reason a shift assignment or a schedule change is something you negotiate rather than something you're handed. It is a written agreement, and a process for enforcing it, that exists whether or not the person above you is having a good day.

Cancel the contract and every one of those questions goes back to being settled by management alone — no agreement to point to, no process to invoke.

That is what more than a million workers lost, and what the House voted in December to give back.

The VA has now tried to cancel the same contract three times in one year

On Friday, August 7, 2026, a federal judge in Rhode Island had to tell the Department of Veterans Affairs the same thing she had already told it twice before: you cannot cancel your workers' union contract.

The contract covers about 320,000 VA employees — the nurses, claims processors, housekeepers and schedulers who take care of veterans. U.S. District Court Judge Melissa DuBose said the VA's plan to end it was "in direct contravention" of her orders. The department had informed the union on July 24 that it intended to terminate the agreement on August 8.

Think about what that means. A federal agency has been ordered by a court, three separate times, to stop doing something — and it keeps trying anyway. The only thing standing between 320,000 workers and the loss of their contract is one judge's patience.

And TSA screeners got the same treatment

This was never limited to the VA. On December 12, 2025, TSA announced it would tear up the contract covering 47,000 airport screeners — the people who run security at every airport in the country. A federal judge had blocked exactly that back in June, finding the effort was aimed at "punishing" the union. Government Executive called the announcement an apparent violation of a court order that had been in place since June.

The pattern is the same everywhere: cancel the contract, lose in court, wait, try again.

That pattern is itself the strategy. Every round costs the union money and staff time it would otherwise spend representing its members, and the agency only has to win once.

The House had a bill to end it permanently

It was called the Protect America's Workforce Act, H.R. 2550. It did one simple thing: give federal workers their union back. It wiped out the executive order and barred agencies from tearing up contracts that existed before it.

It was not a party-line bill. It was led by Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick, a Pennsylvania Republican, and Jared Golden, a Maine Democrat — Golden introduced it and Fitzpatrick was its first Republican cosponsor, on the day it was filed.

Republican leadership never scheduled a vote on it. So rank-and-file members went around them, using something called a discharge petition — a rule that forces a bill onto the floor if a majority of the House, 218 members, signs their name to it in public. The petition hit 218 in November 2025.

On December 11, 2025, the bill passed 231 to 195.

Every Democrat who was present voted for it. Twenty Republicans joined them. 195 Republicans voted against it — including Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, who voted down a bill their own conference member co-led.

The 20 Republicans who voted yes

They deserve to be named, because they prove the rest had a choice:

Don Bacon (NE), Mike Bost (IL), Rob Bresnahan (PA), Gabe Evans (CO), Brian Fitzpatrick (PA), Andrew Garbarino (NY), David Joyce (OH), Tom Kean Jr. (NJ), Nick LaLota (NY), Mike Lawler (NY), Ryan Mackenzie (PA), Nicole Malliotakis (NY), Mariannette Miller-Meeks (IA), Zach Nunn (IA), Chris Smith (NJ), Pete Stauber (MN), Mike Turner (OH), David Valadao (CA), Jeff Van Drew (NJ) and Derrick Van Orden (WI).

Twenty Republicans looked at this bill and decided their constituents mattered more than the White House. That is the whole point. Nobody who voted no can say the party made them do it.

Being on the right side of one vote does not settle the account, either — and if you're going to judge these members, judge them on the procedural votes too, not the press releases. Pete Stauber voted for this bill, then six months later voted twice against his own union bill on the procedural votes that decided whether it would reach the floor, then put out a press release taking credit when it passed anyway.

The 195 who voted no

169 of them have a report card on this site. Here they are, by state:

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

California — Ken Calvert, Vince Fong, Kevin Kiley, Young Kim, Tom McClintock, Jay Obernolte

Colorado — Lauren Boebert, Jeff Crank, Jeff Hurd

Florida — Aaron Bean, Gus Bilirakis, Kat Cammack, Randy Fine, Scott Franklin, Mike Haridopolos, Laurel Lee, Anna Paulina Luna, Brian Mast, Cory Mills, Jimmy Patronis, Greg Steube

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

Idaho — Russ Fulcher, Mike Simpson

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mary Miller

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

Iowa — Ashley Hinson

Kansas — Ron Estes, Tracey Mann, Derek Schmidt

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

Minnesota — Tom Emmer, Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach

Mississippi — Mike Ezell, Michael Guest, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Mike Flood, Adrian Smith

New York — Nick Langworthy, Claudia Tenney

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

Pennsylvania — John Joyce, Mike Kelly, Dan Meuser, Scott Perry, Guy Reschenthaler, Lloyd Smucker, Glenn Thompson

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

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

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

Utah — Mike Kennedy, Celeste Maloy, Blake Moore

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

The Senate has done nothing for eight months

The bill passed the House on December 11. It has sat in the Senate ever since. No hearing, no vote, no floor time.

That is not an accident of the calendar. Senate Republicans had already put themselves on the record on the same question. On April 4, 2025 — eight days after the executive order was signed — they voted down a budget amendment whose stated purpose was "prohibiting attacks on Federal employees by protecting legally binding collective bargaining agreements and the right to organize." It was rejected 48 to 51.

Fifty-one Republicans voted no. Two voted yes: Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski.

So both chambers have now been asked, and both times the answer from most Republicans was the same. Which is why a district judge in Rhode Island is still doing this job one emergency order at a time.

This is not a fringe position they're protecting

Unions are not unpopular. Gallup's August 2026 poll put approval at 71 percent, tying its recent high, extending a six-year stretch in which it has stayed between 67 and 71 percent. A year earlier, when Gallup broke that approval out by party, it was "90% of Democrats, 69% of independents and 41% of Republicans".

Forty-one percent of Republicans. There are union households in every one of the districts on that list above, and a lot of them sent these members to Washington.

And these are not abstract workers. They are VA nurses and TSA screeners. Some of the same members who voted to take away their union have spent the last year arguing there are too many of them anyway — Glenn Grothman went on public radio during the 2025 shutdown and asked the president to cut up to 200,000 federal jobs on the grounds that "a lot of these people are not working very hard at all."

A union contract is how a nurse at a VA hospital says "this unit is short-staffed and it isn't safe" without losing her job for saying it. That is the thing 195 House Republicans voted to keep out of her hands, and the thing 51 Senate Republicans voted down before them.

We deserve better.

How they voted

House Roll Call 332, December 11, 2025 — H.R. 2550, the Protect America's Workforce Act. Passed 231–195.
Senate Roll Call 175, April 4, 2025 — budget-resolution amendment on protecting federal collective bargaining agreements and the right to organize. Rejected 48–51.

Source

Judge orders VA again to maintain collective bargaining with AFGE — Federal News Network, August 10, 2026. Photo: Getty Images.

Republicans Once Voted for a 12-Year Limit on Congress. Forty-Six on This Site Are Already Past It — by 909 Years.

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 19:09:29 +0000

On Sunday, August 16, 2026, Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear went on CBS's Face the Nation and told Ed O'Keefe what he thinks it would take to fix the federal government. Here is what he said:

"Constitutional amendment. It is time. It should outlaw partisan redistricting and enshrine part of the Voting Rights Act right there in the constitution. It should create term limits for Congress and the Supreme Court."

He is not a lonely voice, and this is not a Democratic idea. Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, has pushed a 12-year cap on congressional service for years. But when the House has actually voted on it — in 1995, and again in 1997 — it was the Republican Party's own proposal, and the number both times was 12 years.

Ordinary Americans are not close to divided on this. When Pew Research Center asked in 2023, 87% favored limiting how long members of Congress can serve — 56% strongly. Only 12% were opposed. Republicans and Republican leaners said yes at 90%. Democrats and Democratic leaners, 86%.

There is almost nothing in American politics that 87% of people agree on.

So let's use their own number. Twelve years. Here is who is already past it.

The 12-year line, and the 46 people over it

In 1995, term limits were a plank in the Contract with America — the Citizen Legislature Act, which promised "a first-ever vote on term limits to replace career politicians with citizen legislators." The amendment Republican leaders then brought to the floor, H.J. Res. 73, capped service at 12 years: six terms in the House, two in the Senate. That is the standard Republicans wrote for themselves.

These are the Republicans with a report card on this site who have already served 12 years or more in Congress, without a break. Years and ages are as of today, August 17, 2026.

Name	Years	Age	Seat	In office since
Chris Smith	45	73	New Jersey-4	January 1981
Hal Rogers	45	88	Kentucky-5	January 1981
Ken Calvert	33	73	California-41	January 1993
Frank Lucas	32	66	Oklahoma-3	May 1994
Robert Aderholt	29	61	Alabama-4	January 1997
Susan Collins	29	73	Maine, U.S. Senate	January 1997
Mike Simpson	27	75	Idaho-2	January 1999
Shelley Moore Capito	25	72	West Virginia, U.S. Senate	January 2001
Joe Wilson	24	79	South Carolina-2	December 2001
John Carter	23	84	Texas-31	January 2003
Mario Diaz-Balart	23	64	Florida-26	January 2003
Marsha Blackburn	23	74	Tennessee, U.S. Senate	January 2003
Mike Rogers	23	68	Alabama-3	January 2003
Mike Turner	23	66	Ohio-10	January 2003
Tom Cole	23	77	Oklahoma-4	January 2003
Virginia Foxx	21	83	North Carolina-5	January 2005
Adrian Smith	19	55	Nebraska-3	January 2007
Gus Bilirakis	19	63	Florida-12	January 2007
Jim Jordan	19	62	Ohio-4	January 2007
Bob Latta	18	70	Ohio-5	December 2007
Rob Wittman	18	67	Virginia-1	December 2007
Steve Scalise	18	60	Louisiana-1	May 2008
Brett Guthrie	17	62	Kentucky-2	January 2009
Glenn Thompson	17	67	Pennsylvania-15	January 2009
Jim Risch	17	83	Idaho, U.S. Senate	January 2009
Tom McClintock	17	70	California-5	January 2009
Andy Harris	15	69	Maryland-1	January 2011
Austin Scott	15	56	Georgia-8	January 2011
Bill Huizenga	15	57	Michigan-4	January 2011
Chuck Fleischmann	15	63	Tennessee-3	January 2011
Mike Kelly	15	78	Pennsylvania-16	January 2011
Morgan Griffith	15	68	Virginia-9	January 2011
Paul Gosar	15	67	Arizona-9	January 2011
Rick Crawford	15	60	Arkansas-1	January 2011
Scott DesJarlais	15	62	Tennessee-4	January 2011
Steve Womack	15	69	Arkansas-3	January 2011
Tim Walberg	15	75	Michigan-5	January 2011
Andy Barr	13	53	Kentucky-6	January 2013
Ann Wagner	13	63	Missouri-2	January 2013
David Joyce	13	69	Ohio-14	January 2013
Randy Weber	13	73	Texas-14	January 2013
Richard Hudson	13	54	North Carolina-9	January 2013
Roger Williams	13	76	Texas-25	January 2013
Scott Perry	13	64	Pennsylvania-10	January 2013
Tom Cotton	13	49	Arkansas, U.S. Senate	January 2013
Jason Smith	13	46	Missouri-8	June 2013

Forty-six people. Twenty-four states. 909 years.

Nine of them have served double the limit their own party proposed. Two of them — Hal Rogers and Chris Smith — are approaching four times it. Eighteen of the 46 are 70 or older. Four are past 80.

Two of them were sworn in before Reagan was inaugurated

Hal Rogers and Chris Smith both took office on January 5, 1981 — fifteen days before Ronald Reagan's inauguration. They have both been in the House ever since. Forty-five years.

Rogers has been there so long there is a title for it. The House's own historians keep the list: he has been Dean of the House — the longest-serving member of the entire chamber — since 2022, through three Speakers.

He is 88 years old. In November 2025 he filed for re-election again, and in May 2026 he beat four primary challengers for the nomination. If he wins in November, he starts his 24th term at 89.

Four of them were there for the vote. Two voted for the limit.

Here is the part that should end the argument.

On March 29, 1995, the House voted on that amendment. Four of the forty-six were already in Congress that day. Here is the roll call:

Ken Calvert — Aye. He had served two years. He has served 31 more since.
Frank Lucas — Aye. He had been there ten months. He has served 31 more since.
Hal Rogers — No.
Chris Smith — No.

The amendment got 227 votes to 204. A constitutional amendment needs two-thirds, so it failed.

Read that again. Calvert and Lucas voted for a rule that would have ended their own House careers after twelve years. Both are now past thirty. Rogers and Smith voted to keep the door open — and then stayed another 31 years apiece.

Nobody in that group ever needed a law to leave. They could have just left.

Five of them are cosponsoring a three-term cap right now

This is not history everyone has quietly moved on from. It is happening in this Congress.

On January 6, 2025, Rep. Ralph Norman introduced House Joint Resolution 12, a constitutional amendment with a much harsher line than 1995's: "No person who has served 3 terms as a Representative shall be eligible for election to the House of Representatives." Three terms. Six years.

Five people on the list above signed their names to it. Every one of them is already past three terms:

Cosponsor	Terms served	Signed on
Scott Perry	7	January 6, 2025
Richard Hudson	7	January 13, 2025
Gus Bilirakis	10	March 10, 2025
Frank Lucas	17	April 8, 2025
Ann Wagner	7	August 8, 2025

Frank Lucas is cosponsoring a cap of three terms in his seventeenth.

None of them is required to quit for signing it — these amendments are written to apply going forward, and the pledge groups never ask anyone to pack up. But that is exactly the point. Putting your name on a resolution that will die in committee costs nothing. Leaving costs something. Guess which one keeps happening.

We have watched this move up close before. Alabama's Gary Palmer promised voters he'd serve five terms, then ran for a seventh and said he'd prayed about it. Pennsylvania's Guy Reschenthaler quietly stopped signing the term-limits amendment he'd backed three times — and signed again only eleven days after a billboard about it went up in his district.

Why they don't leave: eleven of thirteen gavels

None of this is an accident. Congress hands out power by seniority, and the gavels are where the money gets decided.

Look at the House Appropriations Committee, which writes the federal spending bills. It has one full-committee chair and twelve subcommittee chairs. Per the committee's own subcommittee rosters, eleven of those thirteen gavels belong to people on the list above:

Tom Cole — chairman of the full committee
Hal Rogers — Commerce, Justice, Science
Ken Calvert — Defense
Mike Simpson — Interior and Environment
Robert Aderholt — Labor, Health and Human Services, Education
John Carter — Military Construction and Veterans Affairs
Mario Diaz-Balart — National Security and State
Andy Harris — Agriculture and the FDA
Chuck Fleischmann — Energy and Water
David Joyce — Financial Services
Steve Womack — Transportation and Housing

Over in the Senate, Susan Collins chairs the Appropriations Committee too. Steve Scalise is the House Majority Leader. Jim Jordan chairs the Judiciary Committee. Virginia Foxx — 21 years in, and 83 — was handed the Rules Committee by Speaker Mike Johnson, the panel that decides which bills reach the floor and whether anyone gets to amend them.

We have already shown what those gavels buy. Rogers chaired the subcommittee controlling the entire Homeland Security budget — and a New York Times investigation found he steered a national ID-card program into a town of 8,000 in his own district while taking eleven trips, six of them to Hawaii, from a group in line to profit from a no-bid contract he arranged. Calvert campaigns on bringing home more federal money than any member in California history; the LA Times found $16 million of it landing within a few miles of rental properties he owns, including a building he had never disclosed.

Even Khanna, who wants the 12-year cap, admits out loud why this is hard. Describing the pushback he gets, he put the objection this way: "Well, look, we finally got seniority in a system where you have to wait 10 years before the voice really matters."

That is the whole trap in one sentence. The system is built so a new member has no power — and that is then used as the argument for why the old ones can never go.

The ones who won't even stand in a room

Long tenure would be easier to defend if it came with more accountability. It comes with less.

John Carter has held Texas's 31st District since 2003. His last documented in-person town hall was in 2013. When about 150 constituents held one for him in Belton in March 2025, they brought a life-size cardboard cutout to stand in for him, and his office dismissed them as "the far-left Indivisible group."

Mike Turner has held Ohio's 10th since 2003. When his opponent publicly asked him to debate and the Dayton Daily News put the question to him directly — would he debate, or hold a town hall? — he answered a different question entirely, responding with a press release about her health care plan. Not a yes. Not a no. Not one word about either.

That is what a safe seat buys you after two decades: you stop having to explain yourself.

And then there's Grassley

Iowa's Chuck Grassley doesn't have a report card here, because we track people on the 2026 ballot and he isn't on it. But he is the clearest picture of where this road ends.

Grassley has been in Congress since January 1975 — six years in the House, then the Senate ever since. That is 51 years, more than four times the limit his party once voted on. He is 92. His current term runs to January 2029, when he'll be 95.

He has already filed a statement of candidacy with the FEC for 2028. Asked in August 2025 whether he'd actually run for a ninth term, he wouldn't rule it out — his answer was "ask me the question in a couple of years."

A ninth Senate term would run to January 2035. Grassley was born on September 17, 1933. He would be 101 years old on the last day of it.

This was supposed to be a job you leave

Nobody on that list is there because of a conspiracy. They are there because they keep winning, in districts drawn to make sure they keep winning, with money that flows to incumbents because incumbents hold the gavels.

But "it's legal" and "they got elected" are answers to a question nobody asked. The question is whether a dozen years is enough — and Republicans themselves already answered it, on the record, in 1995. Twelve years. Six terms. Then go home and live under the laws you wrote.

Forty-six of them are past that line. Nine are past double it. Two are near four times it. Not one has treated their own party's number as binding on themselves.

Serving in Congress was supposed to be something you do for a while, as your part of the deal, and then hand off. A civic duty with an end date. Not a career, not a pension plan, and not a chair you sit in until you are 101.

Eighty-seven percent of Americans already agree. So does a Democratic governor in Kentucky, a Democratic congressman from Silicon Valley, and — in writing, twice, thirty years apart — the Republican Party itself.

They don't need a constitutional amendment to do the right thing. They could just go home.

Sources

Transcript: Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan," Aug. 16, 2026 — CBS News
How Americans View Proposals to Change the Political System — Pew Research Center, 2023
Roll Call 277, H.J. Res. 73, 104th Congress — Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives
H.J. Res. 12, 119th Congress — text and cosponsor list, Congress.gov

Years of service, term counts and ages are calculated from the public congress-legislators dataset, compiled from the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress and the official House and Senate rosters. "Years" counts continuous service, so a member who left and later returned is credited only from their return.

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

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

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

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

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

What the judge did

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

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

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

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

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

What the letter asks for

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

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

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

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

The man who led it sells the products

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

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

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

Who signed

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

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

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

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

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

What registration was actually doing

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

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

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

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

Source

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

Ann Wagner Is Worth an Estimated $26 Million. She Writes the Rules for the Industry Her Money Is In.

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:01:24 +0000

Ann Wagner walked into Congress a wealthy woman. Thirteen years later, she is a lot wealthier.

St. Louis Magazine reported on August 12, 2026 that Wagner's net worth has gone from just north of an estimated $6 million when she was sworn in to around $26 million today, according to Quiver Quantitative, which tracks the finances of members of Congress. That's an increase of about $22 million while holding public office.

Wagner's spokesman says that's just hard work paying off — that she and her husband Ray "worked hard in their respective fields, saved their money, and have been successful," and that "the Wagners will never apologize for working hard and saving for their future." Ray Wagner spent 27 years as an executive at Enterprise Mobility before retiring in 2022.

Fine. Nobody is required to apologize for being rich.

The problem isn't the money. It's the job she holds while she has it.

The subcommittee she chairs

Wagner is the chair of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets. That panel oversees the Securities and Exchange Commission — the agency whose entire job is policing the financial markets, punishing fraud, and setting the disclosure rules that investment firms have to follow.

So the person writing the rules for the investment industry is also a person with an estimated $26 million to her name, some of it in private equity funds.

Wagner's defense is that she stays away from individual stocks. When the House voted this past summer on banning stock trading by members, she said publicly:

"I have neither owned nor traded individual stocks since long before I was elected to Congress, and neither has my husband."

Her spokesman told St. Louis Magazine the point of that is to avoid even the appearance of a conflict, and argued it makes insider knowledge useless to her: "Besides the fact that insider trading remains illegal, it just isn't possible to use insider knowledge that would affect a portfolio of exchange traded funds, mutual funds, and municipal bonds."

Except that isn't the whole portfolio. The same reporting notes Wagner has invested in private equity funds — funds that buy stakes in private companies, outside the public markets entirely.

Her Democratic opponent, veteran Fred Wellman, calls the individual-stocks line a matter of semantics: "If you know anything about the financial markets, you know there's a whole lot of investment vehicles that aren't individual stocks, and she has been very, very good at managing those investment vehicles with great success."

He also says almost half her fundraising comes from corporate PACs tied to financial services, and that she's "not watching out for the working Americans anymore." That's a candidate's claim about his opponent — so look at the actual donor list instead.

Who funds her

Wagner's top contributors read like a roster of the industry her subcommittee regulates:

KKR & Co. — $46,500. KKR is one of the largest private equity firms on earth. Wagner invests in private equity. People at KKR invest in Wagner.
Jones Financial Companies — $48,750. The parent company of Edward Jones, the brokerage headquartered in her own St. Louis area — regulated by the SEC her subcommittee oversees.
Robinhood Markets — $34,000. The retail trading app, another SEC-registered firm.
American Israel Public Affairs Committee — $129,173, the largest single name on the list. TrackAIPAC, reading the same FEC filings, puts the total Wagner has taken from pro-Israel PACs at $315,619.

Corporations cannot legally write checks to a federal candidate, so most of that is money from the people who run these firms, their employees and their families rather than from the firms themselves. That is how the industry gives. None of it is illegal, and all of it is the point: the financial industry does not spend that kind of money on a subcommittee chair by accident.

What she does with the gavel

This isn't a hypothetical conflict. Look at what Wagner has actually written into law.

In June 2026, she introduced a bill to abolish the accounting watchdog created after Enron and cut the SEC's ability to fine corporate lawbreakers. The Senate parliamentarian had already thrown the same idea out of Trump's budget bill a year earlier. Wagner brought it back as a standalone — along with a change that would let a company that broke the rules hundreds of times be fined as though it broke them once.

That is the chair of the SEC oversight subcommittee moving to shrink the SEC's teeth.

Ask who benefits from a weaker market cop. Then look back at the donor list.

The comparison she's making

Wagner's campaign would rather you look at her opponent's finances than her own. Wellman has filed for bankruptcy twice — in Tennessee in 2003, which he attributes to his wife losing her job after 9/11, and in Virginia in July 2020, when his firm Scout Comms collapsed during the pandemic. That firm's work was helping companies and nonprofits better serve veterans returning from service. The 2020 filing showed more than $715,000 in liabilities and $116,000 in outstanding taxes.

Wagner is running that history hard in the general election; her spokesman calls Wellman a "tax cheat."

Set aside who you'd rather have dinner with. One of these two people has spent thirteen years in Congress, has held the gavel over the Securities and Exchange Commission since 2023, has grown an estimated $22 million richer in that time, invests in private equity, takes money from people at private equity giants, and has used that gavel to try to shrink the agency's power to punish financial wrongdoing.

The other one went broke running a small business that worked with veterans.

Missouri's 2nd District gets to decide in November which of those two stories says more about how someone would treat other people's money.

Source

Ryan Krull, "Wagner's wealth has tripled during her time in office—even as her Democratic rival has struggled", St. Louis Magazine, August 12, 2026.

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

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

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

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

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

What the gloves are

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

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

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

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

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

The warnings come from the company that sells them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congress wrote guardrails. They were about equipment.

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

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

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

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

Two votes made this possible

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

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

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

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

The 201 with report cards on this site

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

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

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

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

Source

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

Mark Alford Voted for the Bill That Cuts Medicaid by $900 Billion. Eight Months Later He Introduced One to Keep Rural Hospitals Open.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:06:20 +0000

In March 2026, Mark Alford went on Missourinet to talk about a hospital in Bates County, Missouri — a rural county in his district.

"They have just a few days' cash on hand, and they have other issues that we're trying to work through."

He had a bill for it, he said. And he explained why it mattered:

"It's very important that we keep our rural hospitals open for business."

He is right that it's important. He is the reason it's harder.

What he voted for first

On July 3, 2025, the House passed H.R. 1 — the budget bill Republicans called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The Clerk of the House records the vote. Alford voted Aye.

That law cuts Medicaid spending by more than $900 billion over ten years, according to KFF Health News.

In Alford's own district, the Joint Economic Committee puts the combined Medicaid and Affordable Care Act coverage losses at 27,243 people in MO-4 — 14,043 losing Medicaid, which is the law he voted for, and 13,200 losing Affordable Care Act coverage.

Here's the part that connects the two halves of this story. When somebody loses Medicaid, they don't stop getting sick. They show up at the emergency room without insurance, and the hospital eats the cost. That is precisely how a small rural hospital ends up with a few days' cash on hand.

Alford voted for the thing that empties the hospital's bank account. Then he went looking for a way to keep it open.

The rescue bill

On February 26, 2026 — nearly eight months after that vote — Alford introduced H.R. 7727, the Sustaining Rural Healthcare Act.

The idea is narrow and, on its own terms, reasonable. Right now a hospital can't be designated a "critical access hospital" — which unlocks better Medicare reimbursement — if it sits within 35 miles of the next nearest hospital. Alford's bill would let the government make exceptions.

"Right now, the law is that you cannot be deemed a critical access hospital if you're within 35 miles from the next nearest hospital," he told Missourinet. "It will do it based on the hardship and not just the mileage, but the travel and the hardship of getting to this hospital."

Missouri has 58 designated rural hospitals, by Alford's own count in that interview. Ten full-service rural hospitals in the state have closed in the last twelve years, according to the Cecil G. Sheps Center at the University of North Carolina.

So how is the bill doing?

It has three cosponsors — Glenn Thompson of Pennsylvania, Jill Tokuda of Hawaii, and Henry Cuellar of Texas. It was referred to the Ways and Means Committee on the day it was introduced, and Congress.gov shows no action since. No hearing. No markup. Nothing, for five and a half months, under a Republican House.

A $900 billion cut passed in a day. The patch has been sitting in a drawer since February.

"But the law had a rural fund"

It did. H.R. 1 created a $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program, spread over five years, and Republicans pointed to it constantly while the bill was moving.

Do the arithmetic: $50 billion over five years against more than $900 billion in Medicaid cuts over ten. It is not a replacement. It's a fraction.

And the money doesn't necessarily reach hospitals. In Michigan, the state hospital association expects less than 10% of the state's $173 million first-year rural health allocation to actually go to rural hospitals — against $6 billion in Medicaid losses over the decade.

Nationally, more than 40% of rural hospitals are already operating in the red.

This is a pattern, not an accident

Alford is not the only Republican doing this. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia cast one of the 50 votes that passed the same bill in the Senate, then signed on to rural-hospital rescue legislation a year later, saying that "far too many hospitals are facing challenges that threaten their ability to maintain operations."

Alford is also one of the 197 Republicans who voted to let Affordable Care Act premiums spike — the other half of the 27,243 people in MO-4 losing coverage.

The rural hospital bill is real legislation, and it might help a hospital or two if it ever passed. But it is not a defense. A member of Congress who cared about that Bates County hospital's cash position had a much more direct way to protect it, and it was available to him on July 3, 2025.

He'll be in the room

Alford is one of the few Republicans who still holds real town halls — 15 stops in four days last August, including one where more than 100 people packed a Lions Club hall in Harrisburg and pressed him for more than two hours, Medicaid cuts high on the list.

He won his August 4 primary and faces Democrat Jordan Herrera in November. So there will be more rooms, and the question is short:

You voted for the $900 billion cut. Why should anyone believe the three-cosponsor bill is the real you?

Sources

"Missouri's Mark Alford Pushes Fix To Give Rural Hospitals 'Financial Lifeline'" — Missourinet, March 10, 2026.

Sarah Jane Tribble and Tony Leys, "Earlier Lifeline for Rural Hospitals Faces Test Under 'Big Beautiful' Law" — KFF Health News, August 3, 2026.

Roll Call 190, July 3, 2025 — U.S. House Clerk. H.R. 7727 — Congress.gov. Photo: U.S. House of Representatives.

Kansas City Voted 12–1 to Keep a 7,500-Bed ICE Detention Center Out. The Next Morning, Mark Alford Wrote ICE Offering His Own District Instead.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:03:41 +0000

On January 15, 2026, Homeland Security and ICE officials toured a warehouse at 14901 Botts Road in south Kansas City. It's called I-49 Industrial Center 7. It is 920,400 square feet, and the plan under discussion was to put roughly 7,500 beds in it.

Hours later, the Kansas City Council voted 12 to 1 to block it. As KCUR reported, the ordinance freezes city approvals — permits, zoning, project plans — for any non-municipal detention facility until January 15, 2031.

Mayor Quinton Lucas put it plainly: "Warehousing 10,000 people in an industrial factory is not the move of enlightened or humane societies."

The next morning, Mark Alford sat down and wrote a letter to ICE.

What the letter says

Alford's January 16 letter to ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons is not subtle, and he published it himself.

He opens by thanking ICE for "restoring order and integrity to our nation's immigration system." Then he gets to Kansas City:

"Kansas City officials have responded by imposing a sweeping moratorium on approvals for non-municipal detention facilities, explicitly aimed at preventing the establishment of an ICE facility within the city. This action reflects a broader pattern of local resistance to lawful federal enforcement activities and creates unnecessary legal, logistical, and political obstacles to the execution of ICE's mission."

A 12–1 vote by an elected city council is, in Alford's telling, an "obstacle." Then comes the pitch:

"If Kansas City doesn't want an ICE facility, Cass County has several site options near I-49 which would be ideal fits for ICE's needs. As a member of the Appropriations Committee, we look forward to helping make this happen in the 4th Congressional District."

Read that clause again. Alford sits on the House Appropriations Committee — the committee that writes the checks for the Department of Homeland Security. He put that fact in a letter to the agency, next to a request, in writing.

He closes by arguing ICE shouldn't have to deal with places that say no at all:

"The federal government should not be forced to negotiate with jurisdictions that openly seek to block or delay the execution of federal law."

That is a sitting member of Congress telling a federal agency it should route around local democratic decisions — and volunteering his own constituents' county as the place to route to.

Where he wants to put it

This isn't abstract. Alford named actual ground.

KSHB reported that one option is a 70-acre county-owned parcel near the Cass County Justice Center in Harrisonville. He also floated land near the Harrisonville airport, which he said could help transport detainees out of the area. Separately, KSHB reported that the county is willing to work with ICE and a developer on a vacant county-owned parcel in Belton — land where a planned annex for the Cass County Sheriff's Office had been scrapped. Asked about the Justice Center land, the sheriff's office sent a press release that did not state a position on it.

Harrisonville has a population under 10,000. Belton is a Kansas City suburb. These are small places, and the thing being proposed for them is one of the largest immigration detention operations in the Midwest.

He didn't ask anybody first

Reaction in Cass County, per KSHB's reporting, was mixed at best — and most of the residents willing to be interviewed opposed it. The city of Harrisonville, where two of the parcels sit, told KSHB it had not been notified about the idea by Alford or by county officials at all.

Cass County Presiding Commissioner Bob Huston backed the plan — he told KSHB the county "would just be another great opportunity ... to bring something like this here." He also said he had learned of it the night before the letter went out: "I didn't know anything about this until I got a call last night (Thursday) asking us to come up and speak with Mr. Alford." Even he put the timeline this way: "I think we're a long way from discussion or if they even have a discussion with us."

Jaenna Jackson, of Archie, said what a lot of people said: "I don't like the violent way they're treating these people."

Troy Fellers of Pleasant Hill summed up the split: "We need it, but a lot of people don't want it that close."

Alford's own framing was that he was doing everyone a favor — "This gives DHS an option, a supportive option of a community, a city, a county." The city holding the ground he named had not heard from him.

The rest of the region said no too

Kansas City wasn't an outlier. On March 2, 2026, the Jackson County Legislature passed its own five-year moratorium, 6 to 1, on zoning and permitting approvals for detention facilities in unincorporated parts of the county. Like Kansas City's, it runs through at least 2031, and it allows only municipal facilities such as a city jail.

Two of the largest local governments in the metro looked at the same proposal and said no. Alford's response was that saying no is illegitimate.

What he's inviting in

Alford voted for the money that pays for all of this. On June 9, 2026, he was one of the 214 House Republicans whose votes passed S. 2 by a two-vote margin — $70 billion for DHS, CBP, and ICE through 2029, covering personnel, transportation, "facility and fleet maintenance and sustainment," and, in the law's own summary language, "operations by ICE to arrest certain unlawful aliens."

He also voted for the surveillance side of it. ICE has been paying contractors to monitor Americans' social media around the clock and issuing subpoenas to unmask critics — an operation Congress funded.

So Alford voted for the $70 billion, and then wrote to the agency spending it, offering his own district as the site, and citing his seat on the committee that controls its budget.

This is the second time he's done the Appropriations thing in writing

Three weeks after the ICE letter, Alford went on cable news and announced that House Republicans were investigating the Super Bowl halftime show — while admitting he doesn't speak the language it was performed in — and said he'd be "talking with Brendan Carr from the FCC about this." He sits on the Appropriations subcommittee that funds the FCC, too.

It's the same move both times. Alford controls agency budgets, and he tells the agencies so.

What Cass County should ask him

Alford holds real town halls — he did 15 stops in four days last August, which is more than most of his colleagues can say. He won his primary on August 4 and faces Democrat Jordan Herrera in November.

So there will be rooms. And the questions write themselves:

Which residents of Cass County did you consult before offering their county to ICE?
What did you mean by "as a member of the Appropriations Committee, we look forward to helping make this happen"?
If Kansas City's 12–1 vote was "obstruction," what would a legitimate local no look like?

A congressman's job is to carry his district's wishes to Washington. Alford carried Washington's wishes back to his district, and called the people who objected obstructionists. We deserve better.

Sources

Celisa Calacal, "Hours after ICE toured a Kansas City warehouse, council blocks federal detention center permits" — KCUR, January 15, 2026.

Ryan Gamboa, "Cass County residents respond to talk about possible ICE detention center in Harrisonville" — KSHB 41 Kansas City. Photo: KSHB 41.

"Alford Urges ICE to Consider Cass County Sites for Proposed Detention and Processing Facility" — Office of Rep. Mark Alford, January 16, 2026.

$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.

Bob Onder Wants the Kennedy Center Renamed After Trump. His Case Cited The Apprentice, Home Alone 2, and Hosting SNL Twice.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:10:03 +0000

On July 23, 2025, Bob Onder introduced a bill to take John F. Kennedy's name off the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and replace it with Donald J. Trump's.

He called it the Make Entertainment Great Again Act. The MEGA Act.

This is not a joke someone made about him. It is the actual short title of an actual bill, filed by an actual member of Congress, and the case he made for it is in his own press release.

The argument, in his words

Onder's press office laid out the qualifications. We are quoting the heart of it because a summary would look like we were making it up:

"For more than 40 years, President Trump has been a patron of the arts and a staple of the pop-culture landscape. From books and television shows to board games, movies, and more; when it comes to the arts, President Trump's golden touch has captivated and entertained audiences for decades.

"He captured American and British audiences alike for more than a decade with his hit show, The Apprentice, which ran for 15 seasons, as well as its popular spinoff, The Celebrity Apprentice. As well as regularly appearing in other movies and television shows that would go on to be cultural icons such as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. He is also the only President to have hosted Saturday Night Live. A program he's hosted not once, but twice!"

Board games. A cameo in Home Alone 2. Two SNL hosting gigs.

Onder added his own quote: "You would be hard pressed to find a more significant cultural icon in the past 40 years than President Trump," and "I cannot think of a more ubiquitous symbol of American exceptionalism in the arts, entertainment, and popular culture at large than President Trump."

The building he wants renamed is the national memorial to a president who was assassinated in office. Two months after Kennedy was killed, Congress passed a joint resolution renaming the National Cultural Center in his honor — Public Law 88-260, signed January 23, 1964. Congress wrote into that resolution's preamble that the center "shall be the sole national monument to his memory within the city of Washington and its environs."

Past its short title, Onder's bill is two sentences long. The first says the center "shall after the date of enactment of this Act be known and designated as the 'Donald J. Trump Center for the Performing Arts.'" The second says every reference to the Kennedy Center "in any law, regulation, map, document, paper, or other record of the United States" now means the Trump Center. That's the whole bill: rename the building, then scrub the old name out of the federal record.

Where the bill went

Nowhere.

The MEGA Act was referred on July 24, 2025 to the House Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings, and Emergency Management. It has not moved since. As of today it has zero cosponsors — not one other member of the House has put their name on it.

Onder sits on that subcommittee himself.

So a member of Congress wrote a bill, sent it to his own subcommittee, and it has sat there for more than a year with no support from anyone. That's not legislating. That's a press release with a bill number attached.

The part that costs money

Buried in the same press release is a sentence worth reading twice:

"Rep. Onder voted for historic investments totaling $256.7 million to the John F. Kennedy Center, which were included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. This includes $249.5 million that will go directly to providing funding for capital repairs and restoration along with significant investments in the operation, maintenance, and security of the Center."

That is Onder taking credit for putting a quarter of a billion dollars into a performing arts center in Washington, D.C. — in the same law that cut health coverage and food assistance for his constituents in Missouri.

The Joint Economic Committee's House Minority estimates that 20,218 people in Missouri's 3rd District are projected to lose health coverage by 2034 — 9,518 of them losing Medicaid under the law Onder voted for, and 10,700 losing Affordable Care Act coverage as the enhanced premium tax credits lapse. Meanwhile 19,263 households in the district count on SNAP to put food on the table, including 8,428 households with children and 7,820 with someone 60 or older.

Same bill. Nearly ten thousand people in his district lose Medicaid; the Kennedy Center gets $256.7 million; and Onder's follow-up idea is to put the president's name on the building.

Why this keeps happening

Onder isn't alone, and that's the point. Naming things after Trump has become a genre of legislation.

Seventeen Republicans have signed onto bills to rename Dulles International Airport after Trump — three of them added their names during the longest government shutdown in American history, while the air traffic controllers at that very airport were working for $0 paychecks. In Florida, Anna Paulina Luna filed a bill to carve Trump's face into Mount Rushmore eight days into his second term; eighteen months later it has zero cosponsors, zero action, and geologists say it was never physically possible.

These bills are not meant to pass. They're auditions. They cost a filing and a press release, they generate a friendly headline in conservative media, and they signal loyalty to one man.

What they cost the district is the thing that's harder to see: the hours, the staff time, and the legislative slot that went to renaming a concert hall instead of to the 20,218 people projected to lose their insurance.

Onder is a physician. He spent about a decade in the Missouri legislature before this. He sits on the Judiciary, Education and Workforce, and Transportation and Infrastructure committees. He has the tools to do something about the coverage losses in his own district.

He used them to write the MEGA Act.

Source

"Congressman Onder Introduces the Make Entertainment Great Again (MEGA) Act", Office of Rep. Bob Onder, July 23, 2025. Bill status and cosponsor count from congress.gov. Photo: official congressional portrait.

Bob Onder Is a Licensed Pilot. He Wrote the Provision That Would Stop Tax Collectors From Finding Private Planes.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:08:48 +0000

A single-engine Piper sits on the ramp at the Jefferson City airport, a few minutes from the Missouri Capitol. On paper it belongs to a limited liability company in Montana — a state with no general sales tax and no property tax on aircraft. It is one of at least 16 planes parked at Missouri airfields but registered to Montana shell companies.

Missouri's county assessors are supposed to find planes like that and tax them, the same way they tax your car. They are having a harder and harder time doing it.

Bob Onder wrote a provision that would make it harder still.

The Missouri Independent's Jason Hancock reported in July 2026 that Onder — a first-term Republican from St. Charles County, a physician, and a licensed pilot — authored language that would bar state and local governments from using aircraft-location data to identify planes "for the purpose of obtaining revenue" from their owners.

Asked by the Independent whether he owns or leases a private aircraft, Onder did not respond.

What the data is, and why it matters

Since 2020 the FAA has required most aircraft to broadcast a signal called ADS-B — Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast. It continuously transmits a plane's identification, altitude, speed and heading. It exists so planes don't hit each other.

Tax collectors found a second use for it. Match the broadcast ID against the national aircraft registry and you can attach a name and an address to the plane sitting on the ramp. A small industry now packages that data and sells it to revenue agencies.

It works. In Los Angeles County, assessor Jeff Prang told Politico his office used the data to identify 1,000 aircraft since the start of 2026 that it hadn't been taxing — a combined assessed value of $3.5 billion, or roughly $35 million a year at California's rate. Prang's summary, quoted by the Independent: "Private aircraft owners go to great lengths to hide their aircraft from us." Without the data, assessors are back to driving to airfields and counting planes by hand — and owners who know the schedule "might fly their planes out of state."

Onder's provision would turn that off.

The vehicle: a bill written after 67 people died

Onder introduced his language as a standalone bill in June 2025, the PAPA Act — Pilot and Aircraft Privacy Act. It went to the Aviation Subcommittee and sat there.

Then it became Section 105 of the ALERT Act, the House's response to the January 2025 midair collision between an Army Black Hawk and an American Airlines jet near Reagan National Airport. Sixty-seven people were killed. The National Transportation Safety Board produced 50 safety recommendations, and the House built a bill around them.

Onder's tax provision rode along inside it. The House passed the package in April, 396–10.

The Senate's competing bill, the ROTOR Act, contains nothing comparable. So the question of whether county assessors can keep using flight data to find taxable airplanes is now one of the items to be settled when the two chambers reconcile — attached to a safety bill almost nobody would vote against.

"A clear, nationwide standard"

Onder frames it as privacy. He says third parties have "taken advantage of this data to impose and collect exorbitant third-party landing fees and frivolous lawsuits" against general aviation, and describes himself as "a pilot with years of experience" using the system.

But the language is wider than landing fees, and its supporters said so themselves. House Republicans wrote in their own report on the bill that the provision would "establish a clear, nationwide standard, preempting any future state, local, or tribal law."

Tax officials tried to fix it before the vote:

The California Assessors' Association, a nonpartisan body of county officials, wrote to Onder and other committee members in March pointing out that the bill never defines the "fees" it restricts, that it could be read to reach property taxes, and asking that the language be narrowed to airport charges.
Alabama's revenue commissioner estimated the provision could cost his state, its counties and its municipalities more than $18 million a year.
Rep. Shomari Figures, an Alabama Democrat, offered an amendment in committee to preserve state and local governments' ability to keep using the data for tax collection. It was not adopted.

And the objections weren't only from tax collectors. At a June 23 Senate aviation subcommittee hearing, Todd Hauptli, president of the American Association of Airport Executives, testified that Onder's proposal "would preclude airports from their ability to use ADS-B for fee collection purposes." Airports use those fees to pay for safety projects. Pilots who switch off their transponders to dodge the fees — as some have threatened to — make flying less safe.

Sen. Jerry Moran, the Kansas Republican chairing that hearing, put the point plainly: the fees are "already required to be paid." Nobody is arguing the money isn't owed. The fight is over whether anyone can find out who owes it.

The money

The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association is the nation's largest pilots' lobby. A PAC connected to it gave Onder $5,000 in late September — after he introduced the bill.

AOPA also backed the separate 2024 federal law that lets private aircraft owners keep their names and addresses out of the public registry. That law is why Missouri's State Tax Commission stopped giving county assessors a county-sorted list of aircraft this year: the Department of Revenue no longer supplies the underlying data.

Two laws, two years, one result. The 2024 law hides who owns the plane. Onder's provision hides where it flies. Together they close both doors.

Chrissy Gillis, the Putnam County assessor and president of the Missouri State Assessors Association, told the Independent what that already feels like on the ground:

"With the new regulations and the ability to hide their information, it has made this process very difficult to appropriately determine what aircraft is registered within counties for assessment purposes."

The State Tax Commission's own chief counsel conceded that if an owner leaves a plane off a personal property declaration and has had identifying information redacted from federal records, "the assessor may not be able to identify certain aircraft as property which is assessable in that county."

Who actually pays

Aircraft in Missouri are taxed at the county level as personal property. The bill is collected for schools, libraries and local government.

Missourians pay personal property tax on their cars every single year, and the county knows exactly where they live — the plates are on the car in the driveway. For a $3.1 million turboprop flying out of Spirit of St. Louis Airport, the same obligation can turn on paperwork filed 1,200 miles away, and on whether anyone can establish where the aircraft actually sits. That second part is what Onder's provision takes away.

How much money is at stake if Onder's provision becomes law? Nobody in Missouri state government can say. Asked how much the state collected last year in sales and use taxes on aircraft purchases, a Department of Revenue spokesman told the Independent: "The department does not specifically track this information."

So the honest summary is: a congressman who flies wrote a rule that helps people who fly, inside a bill about a crash that killed 67 people, and neither he nor the state can tell his constituents what it costs them.

Not the first time we've seen this

The private-aviation angle keeps recurring. In Pennsylvania, Rob Bresnahan sells himself as a blue-collar everyman while spending more than $23,000 on a single private jet flight and quietly flying his own helicopter. The difference here is that Onder didn't just take the flight. He wrote the law.

Source

"Missouri Republicans push change that would make it harder to collect taxes on private planes" by Jason Hancock, Missouri Independent, July 10, 2026. Bill text from congress.gov. Photo: Rudi Keller / Missouri Independent.

Bob Onder Asked a Hate Group's Audience to Pray for Protection From the "Demonic Evil That Is the Transgender Cult"

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:06:59 +0000

In late February 2026, Bob Onder went on a podcast run by the Family Research Council to promote a bill he had just introduced. The host, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, asked how listeners should pray for him.

Onder's answer, as LGBTQ Nation reported:

"This is as much a spiritual battle as it is a political battle. I and my family have come under spiritual attack so, yes, please have your, your, your viewers, uh, pray to, uh, to guide me and guide my family to- that the hand of God would protect us from the demonic evil that is the transgender cult."

That is a sitting member of Congress describing a group of his own constituents as a demonic evil and a cult, and asking for divine protection from them.

The Family Research Council is designated an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Onder is a physician. He represents roughly 770,000 Missourians — the state's 6,160,281 people divided among eight House districts — some of whom are transgender, and some of whom are the parents of transgender kids.

The bill he was promoting

Onder introduced the Chloe Cole Act of 2026 on February 23, 2026, with Rep. Mike Kennedy of Utah. It has 88 cosponsors. On July 15, 2026, the House Judiciary Committee ordered it reported, as amended, 15 to 8.

It is not a ban. Missouri already banned this care for minors in 2023 — Senate Bill 49, which the Missouri Supreme Court upheld in January 2026. Onder's bill does something different: it creates a federal lawsuit designed to make providing that care financially unsurvivable anywhere in the country.

Read what's actually in the bill text — the substitute the committee adopted, by voice vote, keeps all of it:

It is retroactive. A claim can be brought "regardless of whether the alleged covered intervention occurred before, on, or after the date of enactment of this Act." Care that was legal, consented to, and consistent with the standard of care when it was given becomes actionable years later.
It is strict liability. For care given after enactment, a provider whose participation is "proven by clear and convincing evidence shall be strictly liable for damages." Not negligent — liable, full stop.
The doctor has to prove the exceptions. If a physician says the treatment fell under one of the bill's medical carve-outs, the burden is on the physician to prove it "by clear and convincing evidence."
You cannot sign it away. "No liability for a health care professional under these provisions may be waived." No consent form protects anyone.
Ties go against the doctor. "Any ambiguities shall be resolved against any party found to have engaged in participation in a covered intervention on a child."
The medical standard of care gets "limited deference." For care given before enactment, the bill instructs courts to discount the prevailing standard of care to the extent it "contradict[s] the intent of this Act" and the doctor "knew or should have known that such standards of care were in serious, scientific, and medical dispute at the time of the covered intervention."
The window is up to 25 years. A suit can be filed within 25 years of the patient's 18th birthday — so a doctor can be sued when the former patient is 43 — or within four years of any detransition expense, whichever is later.
Punitive damages are on the table, plus emotional distress, pain and suffering.

And "participate" is drawn wide. It reaches anyone who prescribes, administers, performs, authorizes, directs, or "knowingly plan[s] or coordinat[es]" the care with intent to facilitate it — the supervising physician and the institutional representative are named in the text.

The bill also writes a definition of sex into federal law: "a person's immutable biological classification, determined at the moment of conception."

What a law like that actually does

You don't need a ban if no doctor will take the risk. A hospital lawyer looking at strict liability, a 25-year window, retroactive exposure, unwaivable liability, and a rule that ambiguity goes against the doctor will reach one conclusion: don't offer this care to anyone under 18, anywhere, for any reason.

That is the mechanism. It's the same one used against abortion providers — don't outlaw the procedure, just make the liability so lopsided that nobody will perform it.

The bill's carve-outs are narrow and the burden of proving them sits on the doctor. A physician treating a child with a disorder of sexual development, or treating a complication from earlier care, has an affirmative defense — one they must establish by clear and convincing evidence, after they've already been sued.

This isn't new for him

Onder's record on LGBTQ Missourians goes back a decade.

In 2016, as a state senator, he introduced Senate Joint Resolution 39, a proposed amendment to the Missouri Constitution shielding businesses that refuse to serve same-sex weddings. Democrats filibustered it for more than 39 hours — Onder himself called it the longest filibuster in state history — before Republican leaders cut off debate and pushed it through the Senate. Seven weeks later a Missouri House committee deadlocked 6–6 and it died. Onder's response was that House members had "caved to pressure from special interests."

Ten years apart, the same instinct: find a legal mechanism that lets other people do the excluding, and call it protection.

The company he keeps

The venue matters here as much as the words.

Onder didn't say "demonic evil" in a floor speech or to a local reporter. He said it to Tony Perkins' audience, on a program run by an organization the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as an anti-LGBTQ hate group — and he said it while asking that audience to pray for him and his family's protection from the people his bill targets.

It's rhetoric with a body count risk, and it comes from someone who took an oath as a doctor before he took one as a congressman.

This is a pattern across the party, not one man's outburst. In Idaho, Gov. Brad Little signed a law that can send someone to prison for using the wrong bathroom — misdemeanor for a first offense, felony for a second within five years. In Colorado, Lauren Boebert spent a week trying to ban transgender troops and then missed the actual defense bill vote. The bills differ. The framing — that trans people are a threat to be legislated away — does not.

What Missourians get out of it

Onder is in his first term. He won his August primary and is set for a November rematch with Democrat Bethany Mann, this time in a district Missouri Republicans redrew mid-decade.

While he was writing this bill, an estimated 20,218 people in Missouri's 3rd District were on track to lose health coverage by 2034, according to the Joint Economic Committee's House Minority — 9,518 of them losing Medicaid under the law he voted for, and 10,700 losing Affordable Care Act coverage as the enhanced premium tax credits lapse. Another 19,263 households in the district rely on SNAP to eat, including 8,428 with children.

Those are his constituents too. None of them got a prayer request on national radio.

Source

"GOP Congressman calls trans people a 'demonic evil' & asks supporters to pray for his protection", LGBTQ Nation, February 2026. Bill text and committee action from congress.gov. Photo: Nathan Papes / Springfield News-Leader / USA TODAY NETWORK.

Ann Wagner's New Bill Would Abolish the Accounting Watchdog Created After Enron — and Cut the SEC's Fines

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 09:22:27 +0000

On June 18, 2026, Ann Wagner introduced H.R. 9329, the SEC Reform and Restructuring Act — a nine-title package rolling several members' bills into one. Her press release frames it as help for local business:

"I am committed to supporting local small businesses and the families that run them. The Biden Administration's SEC imposed a top-down regulatory process that made it much more challenging for employers to raise money and for families to invest."

Two of the nine titles have nothing to do with small businesses raising money. They are about what happens to big companies that break the law.

Title V abolishes the auditor watchdog

Title V is called "Streamlining Public Company Accounting Oversight." Here's the operative language:

"The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board shall terminate on the date that is 2 years after the date of the enactment of this Act."

It also repeals Sections 104, 105, and 107 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act — the sections covering inspections of audit firms, investigations and disciplinary proceedings, and SEC oversight of the Board — and folds what's left into an office inside the SEC's Chief Accountant.

The PCAOB is a nonprofit corporation established by Congress "to oversee the audits of public companies in order to protect investors." It has four jobs: register the accounting firms that audit public companies, set auditing standards, inspect those firms' audits, and investigate and discipline them when they break the rules.

The SEC's own investor glossary describes it as "a private-sector, nonprofit corporation created by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 to oversee accounting professionals who provide independent audit reports for publicly traded companies." Sarbanes-Oxley is the accounting-reform law Congress passed in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom collapses — audits nobody had independently checked.

This is the second attempt in thirteen months

Wagner isn't proposing something new. She's re-running a play that already failed.

The same policy was written into Trump's budget bill in 2025. Wagner voted for that bill on May 22, 2025, when it passed the House 215–214 with the PCAOB provision inside it.

Then it hit the Senate. On June 19, 2025, the Senate parliamentarian ruled the PCAOB provision could not ride through on a simple-majority budget bill because, as the Journal of Accountancy reported, it "proposes a policy change rather than a budget change." It was stripped out.

PCAOB Chair Erica Williams's reaction, quoted by CFO Brew, was that the ruling was "good news for millions of Americans whose retirement savings and investments would be put at risk by eliminating the PCAOB."

A year later it is back, as Title V of Wagner's package — outside the budget process, from the chair of the subcommittee with jurisdiction over it. The title is Bill Huizenga's bill; he is one of the package's original cosponsors.

Title VIII cuts corporate fines by redefining a word

This one is Pete Sessions' bill, carried inside Wagner's package. The press release names it and says nothing about what it does. It may matter more than anything else in the package.

Federal securities law fines companies per violation. Title VIII changes what counts as one. The same language is inserted in nine places across all four of the principal securities statutes — the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the Investment Company Act of 1940 and the Investment Advisers Act of 1940:

"separate acts of noncompliance are a single violation when the acts are the result of— (A) a common or a substantially overlapping originating cause; (B) the same misstatement or omission; or (C) a continuing failure to comply."

Read that third clause again. A continuing failure to comply is one violation. A company that breaks a rule every day for three years, from one bad decision, gets counted once.

That is not a technical clarification. It's a cap on what the SEC can collect, written into statute, and it runs through the civil-penalty provisions of every statute the agency enforces — plus the Exchange Act's criminal-penalty section.

Who pays her

Wagner chairs the Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets — the panel with jurisdiction over the SEC, over the PCAOB, and over securities enforcement.

The industries in that jurisdiction are among her largest funders. From her donor records:

Jones Financial Companies, the parent of Edward Jones — $48,750
KKR & Co., the private equity giant — $46,500
Robinhood Markets, the trading app — $34,000

Corporations cannot legally give to a federal candidate, so those totals are money from the firms' PACs, owners, employees and their families. She writes the rules for the SEC. The people at the companies the SEC polices write her checks. And her bill would shrink both the watchdog and the penalties.

What "small business" has to do with it

Nothing in Title V or Title VIII touches a small business. The PCAOB inspects the audits of public companies — firms listed on stock exchanges. The penalty provision governs SEC enforcement against securities-law violators, which is not where a family-run shop in Ballwin lives.

The press release does name both. It lists seven component bills, one line each, no description: the "Streamlining Public Company Accounting Oversight Act — Sponsored by Rep. Bill Huizenga" and the "Securities Enforcement Clarity Act — Sponsored by Rep. Pete Sessions" are the fifth and sixth of those seven entries. What either one actually does appears nowhere in the release. It is in a section-by-section PDF linked at the bottom, which describes Title V as terminating the PCAOB and Title VIII as treating "multiple acts of securities noncompliance as a single violation."

So the only prose in the announcement is Wagner's own statement, and every word of it is about small business, employers raising money and families investing. The two provisions with real money attached are a name on a list and a line in an attachment.

The pattern

This is the third time we've looked at a Wagner bill and found the headline and the text pointing in different directions. Her signature anti-trafficking law, FOSTA, was used in exactly one federal prosecution and, according to the GAO, was one of two April 2018 events that pushed the market overseas, where investigators found it harder to reach. Her Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, named for protections that have existed in federal law since 2002, adds five years in prison for doctors and a duty for their colleagues to report them.

Now a "small business" bill that abolishes the Enron watchdog.

Source

H.R. 9329 — SEC Reform and Restructuring Act, 119th Congress, introduced by Rep. Ann Wagner, June 18, 2026. Photo: official congressional portrait.

Ann Wagner's Bill Would Put Doctors in Prison for Five Years — and Force Colleagues to Turn Them In

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 09:20:08 +0000

H.R. 21 is Ann Wagner's bill, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. She filed it on January 3, 2025 — the opening day of the 119th Congress, on the lowest bill number House leadership had not reserved for itself — with 163 cosponsors. Three weeks later, on January 23, the House passed it 217–204: every voting Republican in favor, all but one Democrat against. It went to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where it has sat ever since.

Getting a bill from introduction to the House floor in twenty days takes leadership behind it. This one had it.

She has filed some version of it for years. "I have championed this issue for decades and I have been blessed and honored to lead this legislation since 2019," she said when an earlier version passed in 2023. After the 2025 vote she called it "my vital legislation."

It's worth reading what it actually says.

What's already illegal

The bill's own findings section states the law as it already exists:

"If an abortion results in the live birth of an infant, the infant is a legal person for all purposes under the laws of the United States, and entitled to all the protections of such laws."

That's not new. It's the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002, codified at 1 U.S.C. § 8, which Wagner's bill cites by name. FactCheck.org laid this out in 2019: federal law already defines a "person" as "every infant member of the species homo sapiens who is born alive at any stage of development," and every state's homicide laws already apply. As one legal expert put it there: "States can and do punish people for killing children who are born alive."

So the protection Wagner says she is creating has existed for more than two decades. What her bill adds is the enforcement machinery.

What the bill actually adds

Read the text the House passed. Three things:

1. A mandatory hospital transfer, whatever the family wants. A practitioner must exercise the same care as for any child born at the same gestational age, and then "ensure that the child born alive is immediately transported and admitted to a hospital." Not "if medically indicated." Not "unless the parents choose comfort care." Immediately, in every case.

2. Mandatory reporting — by everyone in the room. Any practitioner "or any employee of a hospital, a physician's office, or an abortion clinic" who knows of a failure to comply "shall immediately report the failure to an appropriate State or Federal law enforcement agency." A nurse who watched a family hold a dying infant instead of sending it to a NICU is required by federal law to call the police on the doctor.

3. Five years in prison. "Whoever violates subsection (a) shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than 5 years, or both." A separate provision punishes intentional killing as murder — which, again, was already the case.

There's also a private right of action letting the woman sue for damages "equal to 3 times the cost of the abortion," plus punitive damages and attorney's fees.

What doctors say this does to families

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the professional body for the physicians this bill would prosecute, has condemned it in unusually direct language. Here is ACOG President Dr. Iffath Abbasi Hoskins, after the House passed the 2023 version of Wagner's bill:

"The offensively named 'born-alive' legislation is another cruel and misguided attempt to interfere with evidence-based medical decision making between patients and their physicians. This bill is not based in science or medicine. It is meant to incite emotions, rather than reflect the reality of evidence-based clinical care."

And on the specific harm:

"This reckless bill would impede families from making significant quality-of-life decisions, such as being able to provide comfort or spiritual care in tragic and painful situations. Abortions later in pregnancy are the result of complex decisions, and patients make these health care decisions thoughtfully, carefully, and painstakingly."

"Instead, this bill takes decision making out of the hands of families in crisis and limits the freedom of our patients to make the decisions that are right for them."

Think about the situation the mandatory-transfer clause actually governs. An infant delivered at the edge of viability, with a condition incompatible with life, whose parents have decided — with their doctor — to hold their baby rather than subject it to intubation and transport in its final minutes. Wagner's bill makes that a federal crime punishable by up to five years, and makes every nurse in the room a witness legally obligated to report it.

How often this actually happens

Rarely, and almost never in the way the bill's title implies.

FactCheck.org compiled the available data: the CDC documented 143 deaths involving induced terminations across the twelve years from 2003 to 2014. State reports tell the same story — Florida logged 6 such cases out of 70,083 abortions in 2018; Minnesota, 3 out of 10,177 in 2017. In the CDC data FactCheck cited, from 2015, 65% of abortions occurred within the first eight weeks of pregnancy.

The rare cases that do occur are the ones ACOG describes: "Abortions later in pregnancy are the result of complex decisions, and patients make these health care decisions thoughtfully, carefully, and painstakingly." Those are exactly the families the bill takes the decision away from.

Where this sits in her record

Wagner earned a 0% score for 2025 from Reproductive Freedom For All. H.R. 21 isn't an outlier in her record; it's the flagship of it.

It also fits a pattern we've now documented twice in her legislating: a bill with a title nobody can vote against, aimed at conduct that's already illegal, that produces criminal exposure for the wrong people. Her signature anti-trafficking law, FOSTA, was used in exactly one federal prosecution and, according to the GAO, was one of two April 2018 events that pushed the market overseas, where investigators found it harder to reach.

Legislating that is "meant to incite emotions, rather than reflect the reality," in ACOG's phrase, is a description of a governing style, not a single bill.

She won't discuss it at home

In April 2025, more than 1,000 people turned out for a town hall-style event in Chesterfield, inside her own district. Wagner didn't attend and dismissed it as "just another political stunt from the Democrats." In October 2025, constituents stood outside her Manchester office asking her simply to communicate. "She is our direct line to Washington and she is refusing to be accountable," said Ammie Minton of Sunset Hills.

Wagner is on the November ballot against Democrat Fred Wellman. She has refiled this bill in every Congress since 2019. There is no reason to think the next one will be different.

Source

H.R. 21 — Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, 119th Congress, sponsored by Rep. Ann Wagner, passed the House 217–204 on January 23, 2025. Photo: official congressional portrait.

Ann Wagner's Signature Law Was Supposed to Stop Sex Trafficking. Prosecutors Used It Once.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 09:14:55 +0000

On May 27, 2026, Ann Wagner introduced the Sex Trafficking Demand Reduction Act, a bipartisan bill directing the State Department to grade foreign countries on whether they're working to reduce demand for commercial sex.

"This is a global issue, and it requires a global response," she said.

Fighting sex trafficking is the thing Wagner is best known for in Congress. So before Congress hands her another law on the subject, it's worth looking at what happened to the last one — the one that carries her name and became the centerpiece of her career.

What FOSTA was

Wagner sponsored H.R. 1865, the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act — FOSTA. It picked up 174 cosponsors and became Public Law 115-164 on April 11, 2018.

The idea was straightforward and popular: strip websites of their legal shield when they knowingly facilitate prostitution or sex trafficking, so that prosecutors and victims could go after the platforms directly. It created a new federal crime for "aggravated" violations, and it created a path for victims to sue.

It passed overwhelmingly. It was signed with fanfare. Then the Government Accountability Office went and checked.

What the GAO found

GAO-21-385, published June 21, 2021, runs 56 pages and reads like a post-mortem. The bluntest line is in the report's own "Fast Facts" summary:

"In 2018, Congress passed a law to hold online platform providers accountable for prostitution and trafficking facilitated by their platforms. But, federal prosecutors say they have only used the law once because it is new and they've had success using other laws to prosecute such offenses in the past."

Once. In June 2020, more than two years after the law took effect.

On victims recovering anything:

"Criminal restitution has not been sought and civil damages have not been awarded under section 3 of FOSTA... As of March 2021, restitution had not been sought or awarded."

For context on how little FOSTA mattered to actual enforcement: GAO found DOJ brought at least 11 criminal cases against people running these platforms from 2014 through 2020 — including three against Backpage.com. Only one of the eleven used FOSTA. Prosecutors kept using the laws they already had.

The part that should worry everyone

The failure isn't just that the law went unused. GAO found the landscape it helped create made trafficking harder to investigate.

Two things happened in April 2018: federal authorities seized Backpage.com, and FOSTA was enacted. In GAO's words:

"These events led many who controlled platforms in this market to relocate their platforms overseas. Additionally, with backpage.com no longer in the market, buyers and sellers moved to other online platforms, and the market became fragmented."

And then:

"The current landscape of the online commercial sex market heightens already-existing challenges law enforcement face in gathering tips and evidence. Specifically, gathering tips and evidence to investigate and prosecute those who control or use online platforms has become more difficult due to the relocation of platforms overseas, platforms' use of complex payment systems, and the increased use of social media platforms."

A single American website that cooperated with subpoenas became dozens of foreign ones that don't. Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown, reviewing the same report, pointed to a 2019 FBI document noting that the Bureau's ability to identify and locate trafficking victims and perpetrators went down significantly after Backpage was taken down — precisely because the site had been responsive to law enforcement.

That is the opposite of the outcome the law was sold on.

Wagner has never reckoned with this

Eight years on, FOSTA is still the accomplishment Wagner leads with. It's the reason she's treated as Congress's authority on trafficking policy. We could not find any public statement from her addressing GAO's findings, revisiting the law, or proposing a fix for the enforcement gap the auditors documented.

Instead the pattern repeats: a new bill, a new bipartisan press release, a new set of quotes from advocacy groups. This time it's the State Department's country report cards. What it isn't is an answer to the question of why a law she wrote, that carried 174 cosponsors and the force of federal statute, produced one prosecution and zero dollars of restitution for victims.

A law that goes unused isn't neutral. It cost something. It consumed the political energy Congress had for this issue in 2018, and it reshaped a market in a way federal investigators say made their jobs harder.

Meanwhile, in her actual committee seat

The rest of Wagner's legislative energy goes somewhere less photogenic. She chairs the Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets — the panel that writes the rules for Wall Street — and in June 2026 she introduced the SEC Reform and Restructuring Act, a package to roll back Securities and Exchange Commission regulation.

The industries governed by that subcommittee are also among her biggest funders. People at Jones Financial Companies, the parent of Edward Jones, have given her $48,750 this cycle; people at the private equity giant KKR, $46,500; and Robinhood, the trading app, $34,000 — $15,000 of that from the company's own PAC.

And she isn't easy to reach

In April 2025, more than 1,000 people turned out for a town hall-style event in Chesterfield, inside her district. Wagner didn't go, and dismissed it as "just another political stunt from the Democrats" showing "just how disconnected from hardworking Americans they really are."

That October, constituents stood outside her Manchester office asking her to communicate with them. "She is our direct line to Washington and she is refusing to be accountable for her party's lack of action and abdication of her duties," said Ammie Minton of Sunset Hills.

Wagner won her primary on August 4, 2026, and faces Democrat Fred Wellman in November. Somebody should ask her about GAO-21-385.

Source

Sex Trafficking: Online Platforms and Federal Prosecutions (GAO-21-385) — U.S. Government Accountability Office, June 21, 2021. Photo: official congressional portrait.

Jason Smith Screamed "Go Back to Puerto Rico!" Across the House Floor. Six Months Later, He Voted Against Condemning Trump for Saying the Same Thing.

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 20:52:00 +0000

On the afternoon of January 17, 2019, the U.S. House was in chaos. The government had been shut down for almost four weeks. Republicans were shouting across the aisle about a procedural fight over a bill to reopen it. And standing in the well of the House, waiting to speak, was Rep. Tony Cárdenas of California — a Democrat, and a descendant of Mexican immigrants.

Into that noise, a voice yelled: "Go back to Puerto Rico!"

The chamber erupted. It was Jason Smith, the Republican congressman from Missouri's 8th District.

Here is the part that should stay with you. Cárdenas turned around and asked, right there, who had said it.

"I responded by asking who said it and there was about 50 mostly male Republicans staring at me, and no one would admit that they said it. I asked several times but no one owned up to the fact that they said it," Cárdenas told The Hill.

Smith was standing in that room. He said nothing. It was only later — after the cameras had caught it, after reporters started asking — that his office confirmed he was the one.

The excuse

Smith's explanation was that he wasn't talking about Cárdenas at all. He was talking about a trip.

"Was speaking to all the Democrats who were down vacationing in Puerto Rico last weekend during the shutdown, not any individual member," Smith told The Hill.

His office said the same thing to Roll Call: the comment "was directed at all the Democrats who were vacationing down in Puerto Rico last weekend during the government shutdown, not towards any individual member."

Cárdenas ran that trip. He chairs Bold PAC, the campaign arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and he had led a delegation of 36 members to the island. They met with Puerto Rican officials, with business and labor representatives, and with the island's Fiscal Control Board.

So out of the entire Democratic caucus, Smith aimed "go back to Puerto Rico" at the exact moment the Latino member who organized the Puerto Rico trip was standing at the podium. Cárdenas didn't buy the timing either:

"It just so happens I was in the well on the floor of the people's House when he screamed that out very loud."

And on the explanation arriving hours later:

"I would have preferred that Jason Smith would have owned up to it at the moment so I could have asked him what he meant and he could have clarified to a fellow member. Instead it sounds like after having time to think about it he's come up with this explanation."

Smith eventually called Cárdenas and apologized. Cárdenas accepted — Smith "took responsibility for the comment and sincerely apologized. I accepted his apology," he said. He chose not to push it further.

That's more than most people in this business ever do. It still doesn't explain the rest of it.

The shutdown he wouldn't end

Smith's whole defense rests on outrage that Democrats went to Puerto Rico "during the shutdown." So look at what Smith himself did about that shutdown.

It was a real emergency. The partial shutdown ran five weeks, from December 22, 2018 to January 25, 2019. The Congressional Budget Office later found it delayed roughly $18 billion in federal spending and permanently wiped about $3 billion off the U.S. economy — money that never came back. Federal workers went without pay. CBO noted that some private businesses that lost income "will never recoup" it.

Here is Smith's record on ending it:

January 16, 2019 — the day before the outburst — the House passed H.R. 268, a disaster relief package that also included funding to reopen the closed agencies. Smith voted no. It passed 237–187 anyway.
January 17, 2019 — the same day he shouted at Cárdenas — Smith voted no on taking up the continuing resolution to reopen the government through February 28. That was the very bill the floor fight was about.
January 23, 2019 — when that resolution finally came up for passage, Smith voted no again. It passed 229–184.

Three chances to end the shutdown he was so furious about. Three no votes.

And there's one more wrinkle. That January 16 bill Smith voted against? According to the Congressional Research Service, it carried $14.19 billion in disaster relief — including more than $600 million in emergency food aid for Puerto Rico, still recovering from Maria.

So on Wednesday he voted against sending food money to Puerto Rico. On Thursday he told a colleague to go back there.

Puerto Ricans are Americans

This is the part that makes "go back to Puerto Rico" work as an insult in the first place — and the part Smith's explanation quietly depends on.

Puerto Rico is not another country. It's a U.S. territory. The people who live there are U.S. citizens, born citizens, the same as anybody in Missouri's 8th District. "Go back to Puerto Rico" only stings if you're treating an American place as a foreign one, and an American colleague as someone who doesn't belong here.

Cárdenas, a Californian and a descendant of Mexican immigrants, said exactly that:

"When people blurt things out like that, it certainly sounds like the old saying, 'go back to where you came from.'"

"Since I was a little boy I've heard that blurted at me many times, but it's sad that anything even remotely close to that would be said to me on the floor of the House."

"But they were children. To hear an adult member of Congress scream that out is very disturbing and disappointing. We have a long way to go in this country when it comes to people seeing others as equals."

That instinct — treating Puerto Rico as somewhere Americans get sent back to — didn't stop with Smith. Seven years later, Missouri's Mark Alford went on cable news to announce Congress was investigating a Super Bowl halftime show by a Puerto Rican performer, and admitted in the same breath that he doesn't speak Spanish. Tennessee's Andy Ogles said the same show was "conclusive proof that Puerto Rico should never be a state." And in Ohio, Michael Rulli went on Fox News to cheer the mass deportation of his own state's Haitians — "let's get 'em all out of here."

The vote that tells you whether he meant it

Six months after Smith apologized, the House got a chance to say, on the record, that "go back" is not something a leader says about Americans.

On July 16, 2019, the House voted on H. Res. 489, which condemned President Trump's racist comments — specifically for saying "that our fellow Americans who are immigrants, and those who may look to the President like immigrants, should 'go back' to other countries," for calling immigrants and asylum seekers "invaders," and for saying members of Congress who are immigrants "do not belong in Congress or in the United States of America."

That is, almost word for word, the thing Smith had apologized for shouting.

The resolution passed 240–187. Four Republicans voted yes. Jason Smith was not one of them. He voted no.

An apology is a private phone call. A vote is a public record. When Smith had to choose between the two, he chose the record.

Why this still matters in Missouri's 8th

Smith is not a backbencher anymore. He now chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, the most powerful tax panel in Congress, where he writes the nation's tax law — including a provision he buried on page 1,081 of Trump's budget bill that would double the prison sentence for leaking a billionaire's tax return.

The man holding that gavel is the same man who screamed an insult across the House floor, wouldn't admit it in a room of 50 colleagues, blamed a delegation trip, voted three times against ending the shutdown he was using as the excuse, and then voted against putting the House on record that Americans shouldn't be told to go back anywhere.

He apologized to Tony Cárdenas. He never had to answer to us.

We deserve better.

Source

House floor erupts after GOP lawmaker shouts 'Go back to Puerto Rico' — Roll Call, January 17, 2019. Photo: Jason Smith, 2024 official portrait (Wikimedia Commons).

Eric Burlison Won't Hold an In-Person Town Hall. He Did Fly to Mexico City to Look at 'Alien' Mummies.

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 20:45:00 +0000

In May 2026, Eric Burlison announced a win. He had sent a letter to MIT Lincoln Laboratory — one of the country's oldest federally funded research centers — demanding a classified briefing video from 1952.

The subject of the video: a "flying saucer talk."

"Their attorneys wrote back fast," he posted. "They'll comply within 30 days." Then he added the line that says everything about how this congressman spends his time:

"Congressional letters carry weight. We're going to keep sending them."

He is right that they carry weight. That's the problem. Burlison has one of the most powerful investigative platforms in American government — a seat on the House Oversight Committee, plus a subcommittee gavel — and he has pointed it at flying saucers. In another post, reported by The Hill, he wrote that his investigation is "following the trail into RAND, MITRE, Aerospace Corp, MIT Lincoln Labs, and the Northrop Grummans of the world."

Meanwhile, back in southwest Missouri, 32,626 of his own constituents are projected to lose their health insurance.

Congress's most determined UFO hunter

This is not a one-off. Burlison is a member of the UAP Caucus — UAP being the military's term for what everyone else calls UFOs — and he has made the subject his signature issue.

He asked Speaker Mike Johnson to create a whole select subcommittee on it, and got himself a classified briefing in a SCIF, as he told the Springfield Daily Citizen. And at a September 9, 2025 Oversight hearing called "Restoring Public Trust Through UAP Transparency and Whistleblower Protection", he played a video he said he'd been given — drone footage he said showed a U.S. military drone firing a missile at an object off the coast of Yemen, with the object flying on after being hit.

"I'm not jumping to the conclusion that there are aliens coming from another planet, but I'm open to that," he said at that hearing, according to KOLR/OzarksFirst.

It goes further than hearings. Burlison has been touring classified military bases connected to alleged crash-retrieval programs. On his own Fresh Freedom podcast, Newsweek reported in March 2026, he described what he'd seen:

"What you're often seeing is these glowing type orbs. They look like balls of plasma that seem to be stationary and then sometimes they'll just move at incredible speeds."

He's toured one base. He hopes to visit several more.

The trip to Mexico City

In July 2025, Burlison got on a plane to Mexico City. He explained why to Newstalk KZRG: because he's on the Oversight Committee, he "got invited to go down to Mexico City to take a look at some mummified remains of what they claim to be aliens," plus a metal ball called the Buga sphere.

Here is the part worth sitting with. The "alien mummies" circuit in Mexico City was not some fresh mystery nobody had looked into. Doll-like three-fingered specimens — the same kind a Mexican UFO promoter had paraded before Mexico's own Congress — were seized by Peruvian customs and taken apart by actual scientists. In January 2024, forensic archaeologist Flavio Estrada announced the findings of Peru's prosecutors at a Ministry of Culture press conference, as CBS News reported:

"They are not extraterrestrials, they are not intraterrestrials, they are not a new species, they are not hybrids, they are none of those things that this group of pseudo-scientists who for six years have been presenting with these elements."

They were dolls. Animal and human bones stuck together with modern synthetic glue. And the man who has promoted this material has a long record: Snopes documented that back in 2015 he unveiled another "alien" corpse that was later shown to be the body of a human child.

Burlison's own verdict after making the trip? "I wasn't totally impressed. I would say the same thing with the mummies. There's a lot of fakes out there."

He could have learned that from a fact-check. Instead he learned it in person, in another country, as a sitting member of Congress.

What he actually said he believes

To be fair to Burlison, he does not claim these are little green men. He told the Springfield Daily Citizen that extraterrestrials are "probably the least likely scenario." He has described the possibilities as "aliens, angels, or just us." When researchers told him the objects weren't traveling through space but "transitioning into our plane of existence," his response was that "you've thrown all of conventional science out the window."

He knows the ground he's standing on. He is chasing it anyway.

And his stated reason is a taxpayer argument: "we cannot have taxpayer dollars being spent on programs that are being kept from Congress." Fine. But hold that thought, because Burlison's commitment to prying secrets out of powerful institutions has some very specific limits.

Letters carry weight — except on the Epstein files

When the House was fighting over whether to force the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, there was a discharge petition — the tool that lets rank-and-file members drag a bill to the floor over leadership's objection. Burlison would not sign it.

His explanation, to Missourinet in October 2025:

"The mechanism of doing a discharge petition in a legislative body is considered one of the… most hostile moves that you can make against your leadership other than voting against the Speaker."

He also would not answer the Missouri Independent when it asked where he stood. He was, along with three other Missouri Republicans, simply silent.

The petition got the signatures anyway. And once the bill reached the floor on November 18, 2025 — once voting for it cost him nothing — Burlison voted yes along with all but one member of the House.

So: firing off demand letters to MIT Lincoln Labs and Northrop Grumman over a 74-year-old flying saucer briefing, no problem. Adding your name to a petition about a child sex trafficking ring, when your own leadership doesn't want you to? Too hostile.

This is the same instinct we've watched play out on the same Oversight Committee before. Anna Paulina Luna's Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets — the very task force that convened Burlison's September 2025 UAP hearing — also held Congress's first MKUltra hearing in 49 years and turned a real, documented government atrocity into a conspiracy free-for-all. The oversight power is real. It just keeps getting spent on the wrong things.

What southwest Missouri was dealing with the whole time

Burlison chairs the Oversight Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy, and Regulatory Affairs. Economic growth. That's his gavel.

Here is what economic reality looks like in Missouri's 7th District. According to the Joint Economic Committee's district-level analysis of the health care cuts Burlison voted for, 32,626 people in MO-7 are projected to lose coverage — 16,600 losing Affordable Care Act plans and 16,026 losing Medicaid. That is more people than live in most towns in his district.

Burlison was not a reluctant vote on this. He was out front, telling St. Louis Public Radio that his colleagues shouldn't cower: "If we're really going to save Medicaid for the people that truly need it, then we must make some reforms to the program."

He has time for mummies. He doesn't have time for you.

In that same St. Louis Public Radio interview, Burlison explained why he doesn't do in-person town halls:

"I think that the town halls create a dynamic where only political nutjobs show up."

He kept going: "Normal people who go about their daily lives do not choose to go to" them.

When constituents showed up outside his Springfield office in March 2025 to ask for a real meeting, his office told KY3 that in-person town halls "have become a target for organized opposition groups." He does his town halls by telephone instead.

And when he does hear from constituents directly, he has a habit of going the other way. When hundreds of people in his district opposed a data center that would drink up southwest Missouri's water, Burlison wrote a letter supporting it — and told voters that "what the business is doing doesn't matter."

So let's line it up. A constituent in Springfield asking to look their congressman in the eye and ask about their health insurance: political nutjob. A promoter in Mexico City with a box of glued-together bones: worth a flight, a hotel, and a personal inspection by a member of the United States Congress.

Burlison is right that congressional letters carry weight. That weight belongs to the 32,626 people in his district about to lose their coverage. He's spending it on flying saucers.

We deserve better.

Sources

UFO disclosure: GOP Rep. Eric Burlison targets private labs in search of information — The Hill/NewsNation, May 16, 2026
Congressman Burlison shows "orb" surviving missile strike at UFO hearing — KOLR/OzarksFirst, September 10, 2025
Burlison trip to Mexico to investigate possible UFO objects — Newstalk KZRG, July 18, 2025

Top image: the drone footage Burlison played at the September 9, 2025 House Oversight UAP hearing, via KOLR/OzarksFirst.

A Cable Company Dropped a Channel Over Money. Eric Burlison Went to the House Floor and Brought Up the Holocaust.

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 20:41:12 +0000

On the evening of Tuesday, January 31, 2023, the House of Representatives held a one-hour special order. It was called "Threats Facing Conservative Speech." Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado ran it, eighteen members spoke, and the last one to the microphone was a freshman from southwest Missouri less than a month into his first term.

Eric Burlison started with Harry Truman. He quoted the Missourian's line about how a government that silences opposition ends up "a source of terror to all its citizens." He talked about Big Tech, the Twitter files, and the FBI. Then he got to the thing he had actually come to talk about: a satellite TV company had stopped carrying a cable channel.

And this is how he ended:

"There is a famous quote about what happened during the Holocaust when the Nazis first came for some individuals and people said nothing. Then, eventually, they will come for you."

The Springfield News-Leader wrote it up the next morning. It was four days after International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The poem he was reaching for is about something else entirely

The words Burlison mangled belong to Martin Niemöller. Niemöller was a Lutheran pastor in Germany who supported the Nazis early on, turned against them, and spent 1937 to 1945 inside Nazi concentration camps for it. He survived. Afterward he wrote the lines everybody half-remembers:

"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists... Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, it is a confession. Niemöller was accusing himself, and other German Protestants, of staying quiet while their neighbors were rounded up and murdered.

Burlison used it to talk about a channel lineup.

What actually happened with Newsmax

Here is the whole story he was describing.

DirecTV's contract to carry Newsmax was expiring. Newsmax wanted to be paid a carriage fee. By Newsmax's own account, it was asking for about a dollar per subscriber per year. DirecTV said the demand ran into the tens of millions of dollars and would raise prices for its customers. The two sides didn't agree, and in late January 2023 the channel came off the lineup.

That's it. That's the persecution.

Nobody was arrested. No government agency ordered anything taken down. Newsmax kept broadcasting everywhere else, including on its own website — where it ran an endless stream of stories attacking DirecTV over the whole thing. DirecTV kept carrying Fox News the entire time.

And then, on March 22, 2023, the two companies announced a multi-year deal and Newsmax went back on the air. DirecTV's CEO called the settlement "a reflection of the free market at work." Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy — who had spent two months accusing DirecTV of censoring conservatives — turned around and said DirecTV "clearly supports diverse voices, including conservative ones."

Two companies argued about money. Then they agreed about money. Burlison had compared it to the Holocaust.

He made the same argument on the channel he said was being silenced

Three weeks after the floor speech, on February 20, 2023, Burlison went on Newsmax to talk about it. The show was "The Record With Greta Van Susteren."

"It's a horrible decision," he said. "This woke-leftist-cancel culture is causing us to lose the channels we want to watch. So I encourage everyone to call and let them know exactly how you feel. Let them know that you're gonna cancel your cable subscription."

Read that twice. A congressman who says a company's programming decision is censorship is telling viewers to punish that company by canceling their subscriptions. That is a boycott. It is customers using their money to pressure a business — which is exactly, precisely the thing he was calling an assault on free speech when he thought DirecTV was doing it to Newsmax.

He also delivered this message about being silenced on national television, on the very network in question, in prime time.

The people with subpoena power were the ones applying pressure

While Burlison was warning about government coming for speech, his own side was the government coming for speech.

On January 20, 2023, forty-two House Republicans — Burlison was not among the signers — sent a letter to the CEOs of AT&T, DirecTV, and TPG Capital demanding they hand over ratings data and the fees they pay every news network they carry. On February 1, Sens. Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Mike Lee, and Tom Cotton sent their own letter asking the companies to preserve and hand over their communications with the White House and with Democratic members of Congress. Other Republicans floated hauling DirecTV executives in for hearings.

Elected officials with power over a company's business leaning on that company about which channels it carries — that is the actual scenario the First Amendment is about. It was happening in the same week, in the same building, on the same side of the aisle.

And it isn't history. Missouri's Mark Alford went on cable news in February 2026, announced that House Republicans were investigating a Super Bowl halftime show, admitted he doesn't speak the language it was performed in, and said he'd be calling the FCC chairman about the broadcasters who aired it. Alford sits on the subcommittee that writes the FCC's budget. Nobody on that side called it censorship.

Fifteen months later, an actual antisemitism bill came up

On May 1, 2024, the House voted on the Antisemitism Awareness Act. The bill required the Education Department to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's definition of antisemitism when it investigates discrimination complaints at colleges. It passed 320 to 91.

Burlison voted no.

He had company on both sides — PolitiFact counted 21 Republicans and 70 Democrats voting against it, with the Democratic objectors worried about chilling campus speech and some Republicans worried the definition could sweep in Bible passages. We could not find any public statement from Burlison explaining his vote.

So the record reads like this. Cable fee dispute: worth a Holocaust reference on the House floor. Bill about how the federal government handles antisemitism complaints: no.

Who he actually won't listen to

There is one more piece of this, and it's the one that costs people in southwest Missouri something real.

Burlison presents himself as a man being denied a voice. He does not extend the same concern to the people who elected him. He holds his town halls by telephone, and he has explained why he doesn't do them in person: town halls, he told St. Louis Public Radio, "create a dynamic where only political nutjobs show up." When constituents stood outside his Springfield office in March 2025 asking for a face-to-face meeting, his spokesperson said in-person town halls "have become a target for organized opposition groups."

Meanwhile, in his district, an estimated 32,626 people are projected to lose health coverage because of the cuts he voted for, according to the Joint Economic Committee. About 33,379 households in MO-7 rely on SNAP to buy groceries, USDA data shows.

Those people don't get a special order on the House floor. A cable channel did.

What the poem was actually warning about

Niemöller's list starts with socialists and trade unionists and ends with Jews — groups singled out and hunted because of who they were.

In December 2025, House Republicans launched something called the Sharia Free America Caucus. Within a few months it had fifty members. Two of them, Andy Ogles and Randy Fine, dropped the legal argument entirely — Ogles called Islam "a religion of violence, abuse of women, and ruthless political conquest," and Fine wrote that "we need more Islamophobia, not less." We traced where the panic came from: a hate group's blog post about a subdivision that has been there for two decades.

Eric Burlison is on the roster.

The poem he quoted on the House floor is about what happens when people stay silent while a religious minority gets targeted. He recited it over a fee dispute. He joined the caucus.

This is a pattern with him — the grand principle in public, the opposite in the voting record. He was one of only two members of the entire House to vote against a bill protecting victims of revenge porn and AI deepfakes, on the grounds that Missouri already had a law covering it. Missouri didn't.

We deserve better.

Source

Southwest MO's congressman invokes Holocaust quote during speech about Newsmax — Galen Bacharier, Springfield News-Leader, February 1, 2023. Photo: Springfield News-Leader. Burlison's remarks are reproduced in full in the Congressional Record, Volume 169, Number 20, pages H560–H566.

390 to 9: Eric Burlison Wouldn't Condemn Russia for Stealing Ukrainian Children

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 20:31:00 +0000

Some votes in Congress are hard. This one wasn't.

On March 19, 2024, the U.S. House voted on a resolution condemning Russia for kidnapping children out of Ukraine and shipping them into Russia to be adopted by Russian families. It passed 390 to 9.

Eric Burlison was one of the nine.

Not nine out of a close vote. Nine out of 399 members who showed up. Every Democrat who voted, voted yes. So did 196 Republicans. The Foreign Affairs Committee had already approved it 44 to 0 four months earlier, without a single dissent.

And the roll call has one more detail that Missourians should sit with: Burlison was the only member of Missouri's entire eight-person delegation to vote no. Every other Missourian in the House — Republican and Democrat — voted yes. The person who moved the resolution to the floor that day was Ann Wagner, the Republican who represents the St. Louis suburbs.

Burlison's own party, his own state delegation, and the Republican colleague who ran the bill all landed on one side. He landed on the other.

What the resolution actually said

It's worth reading the thing he voted against, because it isn't a spending bill or a war authorization. It's four paragraphs of words.

H.Res.149 — sponsored by Rep. Susan Wild of Pennsylvania — laid out the record: that Russia's own Children's Rights Commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, "admitted to abducting and forcibly transferring Ukrainian children and facilitating forced adoptions to Russian families." That Russia declared children born in occupied Ukraine after the invasion to be Russian citizens. That Secretary of State Antony Blinken had called on Russia to halt "filtration operations" that swept up between 900,000 and 1,600,000 Ukrainians — roughly 260,000 of them children.

Then it did four things. It declared the abductions "contrary to Russia's obligations under the Genocide Convention" and said they "amount to genocide." It said Russia was "attempting to wipe out a generation of Ukrainian children." It noted those children face trafficking, forced labor, and violence. And it held Vladimir Putin's government "responsible for the wrongful and illegal abduction and forcible transfer of children from Ukraine."

That's the whole resolution. No money. No troops. No treaty. Just Congress saying, on the record, that taking other people's children is wrong.

Burlison said no.

The others explained themselves. Burlison didn't.

Here's what makes this vote worse than it already looks.

When HuffPost went to the nine Republicans who voted no, several of them gave a reason — a bad reason, mostly, but a reason. Chip Roy said the country was "under frickin' siege" at the border and this was "a Democrat messaging resolution." Warren Davidson worried it would "insert the United States and the International Criminal Court into a dispute." Tom Tiffany argued that "every war is not a genocide, and declaring one after 40 minutes of debate... isn't just irresponsible, it's reckless." Matt Rosendale said the genocide language "only escalates conflict." Thomas Massie's office called the resolution a cynical attempt to build support for foreign aid spending. Marjorie Taylor Greene refused to comment.

And Eric Burlison? His office didn't respond at all.

Two years later, there's still no public explanation to find — no press release, no statement, nothing turned up by searching for one. He took a position that put him outside roughly 98% of the House of Representatives, and he has never had to defend it out loud.

That is a choice, and it's a familiar one. This is the same congressman who holds his town halls by telephone and told St. Louis Public Radio that in-person town halls "create a dynamic where only political nutjobs show up." It's the same pattern we documented when hundreds of his constituents opposed a data center and he wrote a letter supporting it anyway. Take the unpopular position. Skip the room where somebody might ask about it.

What he is willing to say about Ukraine

He hasn't explained the kidnapping vote. But he's been perfectly clear about Ukraine in general.

Six weeks before that vote, in February 2024, Burlison posted on social media: "Funding corrupt regimes like Ukraine is wasteful and irresponsible. We should focus on problems at home, not across the globe. American taxpayers deserve better than squandered money abroad." The year before, he'd posted "Audit all Ukraine funding." Both are logged on the Ukraine scorecard kept by Republicans for Ukraine, a project of the conservative group Defending Democracy Together.

Then on April 20, 2024, he voted against the Ukraine aid package, which passed the House 311 to 112.

You can hold that view about foreign aid. Plenty of people do, and it's a real argument about money and priorities. But H.Res.149 wasn't a check. It cost nothing. Whatever you believe about the war budget, there was no fiscal reason to refuse to say that stealing children is a crime — and Burlison has never claimed there was one, because he's never said anything at all.

He's made a habit of being the lone "no"

This is not a one-off.

Just over a year later, on April 28, 2025, the House voted on the TAKE IT DOWN Act — the bill making it a crime to post revenge porn and AI deepfake nudes, and requiring platforms to remove them when a victim asks. It was championed by Melania Trump. It passed 409 to 2.

Burlison was one of the two.

Kidnapped children in one vote, sexual-abuse images in another. Both times, near-unanimous. Both times, Burlison found himself on a list you could count on one hand.

The difference is that he eventually answered for the second one. After a Springfield TV station went and asked him, his office put out a statement arguing the bill was redundant because states already had deepfake laws on the books — a claim that, as we documented, wasn't true. Missouri had no such law then and still doesn't, after five failed attempts to pass one.

A bad explanation is still an explanation. On the Ukrainian children, southwest Missouri never even got that much.

The children are still gone — and the people counting them lost their funding

The kids in that resolution are real, and the story didn't stop in 2024.

In March 2025, Senator Dick Durbin asked the Senate to pass a simple resolution condemning Russia's abduction of Ukrainian children and calling for their return. Senate Republicans blocked it, along with other straightforward resolutions on Russian war crimes and Ukraine's sovereignty. Durbin's office noted that at least 20,000 Ukrainian children have been abducted, forcibly transferred, or illegally deported by Russia since the full-scale invasion began.

At almost the same moment, the U.S. government defunded the main effort to track them. Yale's Humanitarian Research Lab ran the Conflict Observatory, the project documenting where these children had been taken and building the evidence file on it. The State Department ended its funding in March 2025, following a stop-work order on foreign aid earlier that year. Researchers got a short reprieve — just long enough to hand their data to Ukrainian authorities and to Europol before the lights went out.

That's the through-line. It's the same instinct behind Scott Perry's push to zero out the Peace Corps and America's democracy programs: treat everything the United States does beyond its borders as waste, and don't ask what breaks when it's gone. Here, what broke was the evidence trail for a war crime against children.

The bottom line

Eric Burlison has been in Congress since 2023. In that time he has voted against protecting victims of image-based sexual abuse, and voted against a resolution — costing nothing, binding no one — saying that stealing a country's children is a crime. He was the only Missourian in the House to do the second one, on a bill his fellow Missouri Republican carried to the floor.

He has never explained it. He does his town halls by phone and calls the people who show up in person "nutjobs," so the question mostly doesn't get asked.

Nobody in the 7th District voted for a congressman whose defining habit is landing on a list of nine.

We deserve better.

Sources

Roll Call 88, March 19, 2024 — H.Res.149, 390–9, Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives
These 9 House Republicans voted against a resolution condemning the Russian abduction of Ukrainian children — Business Insider, March 19, 2024
Photo: Official congressional portrait, 118th Congress, via Wikimedia Commons

The House Voted 409 to 2 to Protect Deepfake Victims. Eric Burlison Was One of the Two.

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 20:27:04 +0000

On April 28, 2025, the U.S. House voted on a bill to help people whose naked pictures get posted online without their permission — including fake ones made by artificial intelligence.

It is hard to find anything Congress agrees on anymore. It agreed on this. The vote was 409 to 2. Every single Democrat who voted said yes. All but two Republicans said yes.

Eric Burlison was one of the two.

The other was Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky. That's the whole list. Out of 411 members who showed up and voted, two of them looked at a bill protecting victims of revenge porn and AI deepfakes and said no.

What the bill actually did

The Take It Down Act made it a federal crime to post someone's intimate images without their consent. That covers real photos. It also covers "deepfakes" — fake images a computer generates that look real.

It also did something victims had been begging for. It required websites to take the images down within 48 hours once a victim asks. Before this law, a victim could find their face on a fake pornographic image, email the website, and get ignored forever. Now the platform has two days.

The bill's summary says violators face "mandatory restitution and criminal penalties, including prison, a fine, or both."

This was not a partisan bill. First Lady Melania Trump campaigned for it publicly. President Trump signed it into law on May 19, 2025, with her signing alongside him in the Rose Garden.

Burlison had already voted no.

He didn't explain for a while

Here's a small detail worth noticing. The day after the vote, Newsweek reported that Massie had explained his no vote — he called the bill "a slippery slope, ripe for abuse, with unintended consequences" — but that Burlison had not said anything about why he voted the way he did.

So his own local TV station in Springfield went and asked him. Here is the statement his office gave them:

"Sharing non-consensual intimate imagery is abhorrent, but this bill unnecessarily federalizes the criminalization of conduct that states already have laws against, and many of them already have laws tailored to address AI-generated deepfakes. As such, creating a new federal offense is both redundant and constitutionally problematic. The further federalization of criminal law in this way undermines state authority, blurs lines of accountability, and risks duplicative prosecutions. Furthermore, while the bill attempts to safeguard free speech with a 'reasonable person' test, I remain concerned about its impact on First Amendment rights and the unchecked growth of federal power."

He makes two arguments there. The second one — a free speech worry — is at least a real debate, and other people have raised it.

But the first argument is the one he leads with, and it rests entirely on a factual claim: the states have already got this covered. Don't worry about federal help, he's saying. Missouri protects you.

That claim was not true.

Missouri did not have this covered

The reporters who got that statement did something useful. They went and checked whether Missouri actually had the law Burlison said it had.

They found no such law on the books. What they found were two bills that had not passed. Missouri House Bill 362 was stuck — out of committee, but it never made it out of the Missouri House. Missouri Senate Bill 411, called the "Taylor Swift Act," had last been discussed on March 26, 2025, about a month before Burlison's vote.

So on the day he voted no because states supposedly had this handled, his own state's version was still sitting in a pile of unpassed bills.

It gets worse.

Five tries. Zero laws.

Missouri lawmakers kept trying. In February 2026 — almost a year after Burlison's vote — seven different state lawmakers were still presenting seven different deepfake bills to a Missouri House committee, all at the same hearing, and admitting to each other that they didn't know which one to pick.

One Republican on the committee, state Rep. George Hruza, put it plainly: "Clearly, these are all important bills sitting here. I have no clue which one I should consider or we should consider."

Meanwhile the Senate version, SB 1117, has its own official history page on the Missouri Senate's website. That page lists every earlier version of the same idea. Look at the list:

"This act is similar to HB 362 (2025), SB 411 (2025), SB 1424 (2024), HB 2573 (2024), and a provision in SB 1444 (2024)."

That is five earlier versions of the same idea, going back to 2024. Lawmakers don't keep refiling a bill that already passed. And SB 1117 hasn't made it either — its status is still stuck at "Voted Do Pass" out of a Senate committee.

Burlison told his constituents the states had it handled. Missouri keeps trying and keeps coming up short.

The federal law he voted against is, right now, the protection Missourians actually have.

"Undermines state authority" — except when he does it

The part that's hardest to swallow is the states' rights argument, because Burlison doesn't believe it.

Three months before this vote, on January 24, 2025, he introduced the Life at Conception Act. That bill declares that unborn children are "persons" under the 14th Amendment — the part of the Constitution his own press release quotes, the one that starts "No State shall."

He was proud of it. In that release he said the bill "uses Congress' constitutional authority to define personhood."

One of the groups that endorsed it was blunt about what that authority is for. The National Pro-Life Alliance praised the bill as more important than ever because of "the many loopholes that abortionists are using to get around state protections for the unborn."

So: reaching past state law with a federal one is smart lawmaking when the subject is abortion. When the subject is a teenage girl finding an AI-generated nude of herself online, the exact same move suddenly "undermines state authority."

That bill is not a small thing, either. It turns up three separate times in our roundup of the Republicans with the worst records on abortion — the personhood-at-fertilization bill, with no exception for rape, for incest, or for the health of the pregnant woman, that the worst offenders keep signing onto. Burlison is the one who wrote it. He is not shy about using federal power. He's selective about who it protects.

He's not worried about AI

There's one more piece of this.

Burlison has made it clear he doesn't think AI is something to be nervous about. When a constituent in Carthage asked him this July how he could promise to protect southwest Missouri's water while supporting data centers that use enormous amounts of it, he told the room that people fear data centers because AI is "an unknown thing and we tend to fear the unknown." In that same answer he said that as a free-market Republican, "what the business is doing doesn't matter."

That's the same instinct showing up twice. When AI creates a problem for a regular person — your water, or your face on a fake pornographic image — the answer is that you're overreacting, and government should stay out of it.

What this costs people

Let's be clear about who this bill was for.

It was for the high schooler whose classmate ran her yearbook photo through an app. It was for the woman whose ex posted pictures she never agreed to share. It was for people who had no way to make a website take it down, and no police department that knew what law to charge.

409 members of Congress — Republicans and Democrats, Freedom Caucus members and progressives, the First Lady, and the President — all looked at that and agreed something should be done.

Eric Burlison looked at it and said the states have it covered.

His state didn't. It still doesn't. We deserve better.

Source

'Take it Down Act' heads to Trump's Desk; Rep. Burlison explains why he voted no — Ozarks First (KOLR/KOZL), Springfield, Missouri. Photo: AP.

Mark Alford Wants the Government to Investigate a Halftime Show He Admits He Couldn't Understand

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 20:16:34 +0000

On February 8, 2026, 128.2 million people watched Bad Bunny perform at halftime of Super Bowl LX, according to Nielsen — more people than watched the game itself. It was the first halftime show performed almost entirely in Spanish, with one English song from guest star Lady Gaga.

Two days later, Missouri's Mark Alford went on cable news and announced that House Republicans were investigating it.

Here is what he said, in order:

"We're still investigating this. There's a lot of information that has come out about the lyrics… The lyrics from what we've seen from Bad Bunny are very disturbing."

Then, in the same breath:

"I don't speak fluent Spanish, okay?"

Then the threat:

"If it's true what was said on national television, we have a lot of questions for the entities that broadcast this and we'll be talking with Brendan Carr from the FCC about this."

And the closer:

"This could be much worse than the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction, let's put it that way."

All of that is on the record. A sitting member of Congress said he is investigating the content of a song, said he can't understand the language the song is in, and then said he'd be calling the federal official who controls broadcast licenses about it.

"If it's true what was said"

Read that phrase again. If it's true what was said.

Alford is not telling us what the lyrics say. He's telling us what he heard someone else say the lyrics say. He watched the show — he mentioned he was flipping back and forth to the Turning Point USA counterprogramming — and he came away with "a lot of information that has come out about the lyrics." Not the lyrics. Information about the lyrics.

That's the entire evidentiary basis for a congressman invoking the Federal Communications Commission against a broadcaster. Secondhand translations, plus a hunch.

Every one of us has had the experience of a boss, a bureaucrat, or a school board deciding something about our lives without bothering to check the facts first. This is that, except the person doing it has subpoena power.

Why the FCC call is not an idle threat

It would be easy to file this under "congressman says something dumb on TV." It isn't, and the reason is buried in Alford's committee assignments.

Alford sits on the House Appropriations Committee. Specifically, he is a member of its Financial Services and General Government subcommittee. And per the Congressional Research Service, when the Appropriations committees reorganized in 2007, the FCC was placed under exactly that subcommittee's jurisdiction.

So when Alford says "we'll be talking with Brendan Carr from the FCC about this," he is not a random member dialing a switchboard. He is one of the handful of House members who write the FCC's budget, telling the FCC's chairman that he has questions about a broadcast.

We know Alford understands that leverage, because he has spelled it out in writing. Three weeks before the Super Bowl, on January 16, 2026, he sent a letter to ICE's acting director lobbying to put a large immigration detention and processing facility in his own district. His pitch included this line:

"As a member of the Appropriations Committee, we look forward to helping make this happen in the 4th Congressional District."

That's the same seat. That's the same lever. He knows what it's for.

He also chairs the Small Business Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Regulations. Investigations are, literally, his job title.

He spent 23 years in the business he's now threatening

Before Congress, Alford was a television broadcaster. He anchored Fox 4 News at WDAF-TV in Kansas City from 1998 to 2021 — 23 years in front of a camera, at a station holding a license from the same FCC he now wants to sic on a competitor's broadcast.

Anyone who worked in a newsroom for 23 years knows exactly what "we'll be talking with the FCC about this" means to a station's lawyers. He isn't confused about the weight of what he said. He picked it up because he knows it's heavy.

What he was not working on that week

Alford is a member of the Appropriations Committee for Missouri's 4th District. Here is what is happening to that district while he investigates a halftime show:

An estimated 27,243 people in MO-4 are projected to lose health coverage because of the health care cuts he voted for — 13,200 losing ACA coverage and 14,043 losing Medicaid, according to the Joint Economic Committee.
28,154 households in the district — about 9% of all households — rely on SNAP to eat, per USDA data, including 11,805 households with children and 12,479 with someone 60 or older. He voted for the cuts that put those benefits at risk.
When ACA premiums were set to more than double, he voted for the House Republicans' fake fix — a bill that slaps a "lower premiums" label on a plan that doesn't lower premiums.
When fired federal workers confronted him at an event in Belton in February 2025, he told them a federal job is not "a lifetime appointment" and that "God has a plan and purpose for your life."

He found time for the halftime show.

The rest of the pileup

Alford wasn't alone, and the company he kept says something.

That same week, Rep. Andy Ogles called the performance "pure smut" and demanded the Energy and Commerce Committee investigate NBCUniversal and the NFL — down to how they handle translation. In a separate post, Ogles said the show was "conclusive proof that Puerto Rico should never be a state." Ogles has a habit of reaching for citizenship as the punishment; we wrote about it when he introduced a bill to gut birthright citizenship after the Supreme Court upheld it.

Rep. Randy Fine wrote directly to FCC Chairman Carr demanding a "full investigation," saying "the degenerates behind it must be held accountable" and asking for fines and "the revocation of broadcast licenses." Fine added: "no matter what foreign language you speak, you must comply." Fine's cable-news output is its own genre.

And President Trump had already set the tone the day after the game, calling the show "an affront to the greatness of America" and complaining that "nobody understands a word this guy is saying."

Nobody understands a word. I don't speak fluent Spanish. No matter what foreign language you speak, you must comply. That is one argument, made three times, by three Republicans, in the same week.

What Bad Bunny actually did to earn this

It's worth being clear about what set this off, because the timeline matters.

A week before the Super Bowl, on February 1, Bad Bunny won Album of the Year at the Grammys — the first all-Spanish-language album ever to win it. Accepting an earlier award that night, he said: "Before I say thanks to God, I'm going to say ICE out." He added: "We're not savage, we're not animals, we're not aliens. We are humans and we are Americans."

He is right about that last part. Bad Bunny was born in Puerto Rico. He is a U.S. citizen. And he has said he won't hold concerts in the mainland United States because of the administration's immigration crackdown.

So a U.S. citizen criticized ICE, and within days members of Congress were demanding a federal investigation of his broadcast and the revocation of a network's license.

That should sound familiar. A Wall Street Journal investigation found ICE paying contractors millions to scan social media around the clock, then issuing subpoenas to unmask Americans who criticize the agency. In June 2026, Alford voted to hand that same agency roughly $70 billion more. And he is lobbying to build one of its detention and processing facilities in his own district — after Kansas City said no to one.

Criticize ICE, and this is what the machine does.

The part that should bother everyone

You do not have to like Bad Bunny's music. You do not have to have watched the halftime show. Plenty of people found it boring, or too loud, or not their thing. That's a taste, and taste is free.

What Alford is describing is not taste. It's a member of Congress who controls an agency's budget telling that agency's chairman he has "a lot of questions" about content he cannot personally evaluate, based on translations he hasn't verified, aimed at a performer who criticized the administration.

Strip out the celebrity and the football, and the principle is simple: a politician wants a federal regulator to punish speech he doesn't understand. If that works on a musician, there's no reason it stops at a musician.

Meanwhile 27,243 of his neighbors are losing their health insurance.

We deserve a representative focused on us.

Source

House GOP launches Bad Bunny probe: 'Worse than the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction' — Raw Story, February 10, 2026. Photo: Kyle Terada-Imagn Images/Reuters.