MAGA Report Cards — Nebraska

Jim Pillen Sent Nebraska's State Patrol to Work With ICE. His Own Hog Farms Employed Undocumented Workers for More Than a Decade.

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:49:30 +0000

Nebraska's governor has spent this year putting the machinery of his state behind President Trump's deportation drive. He directed the Nebraska State Patrol to partner with ICE. He turned a former state prison into an ICE detention center. In December he posted that "the criminal illegal aliens who have invaded our country must be removed."

On September 9, the Flatwater Free Press and the New York Times published what they found when they looked at the hog company that made him rich.

Jim Pillen built Pillen Family Farms from 60 sows on a dirt lot into one of the largest hog producers in the country. Reporters reviewed state and federal court records and interviewed more than 40 current and former employees, prosecutors, immigration lawyers and community organizers. What they documented:

At least 20 Pillen hog farms employed undocumented immigrants.
Six former workers acknowledged that they had no legal status while working for the company.
At least 12 Pillen workers were charged between 2015 and 2024 with using fake or stolen identification to get hired. Nine were convicted. Three did not appear in court.
At least 10 more used false identities, according to them or their relatives, and were never charged.

The reporting describes undocumented labor as an open secret at some Pillen operations. David Armendariz, who overstayed a tourist visa in 2008 and worked at two Pillen farms through 2023, said a farm manager accepted the fake driver's license he had bought when he was hired — the same ID that got rejected when he tried to use it somewhere else years later.

His description of how it worked is one sentence long:

"Everyone knows that it's not your name, but they don't ask you what your name is."

The E-Verify defense, and when it started

Pillen and his company deny knowing. His spokeswoman, Laura Strimple, said Pillen "never knowingly hired an illegal immigrant and went above and beyond the legal requirements to verify the immigration status of his employees." Sarah Pillen, the company's co-CEO, said "We have never knowingly hired an illegal immigrant," and pointed to the company's voluntary participation in E-Verify, the federal system for checking whether a new hire is authorized to work.

Here is the part of that defense worth sitting with. According to the investigation, Pillen Family Farms opted into E-Verify on the day Pillen launched his campaign for governor.

The company describes that participation as voluntary — which means it was free to opt in during all the years before that day, and did not.

So the timeline is: build the business, employ the workers, run a governor's campaign, join the check on the day the campaign starts, then spend this year putting the state behind the federal crackdown on other people's undocumented workers.

What he did with the office

The immigration enforcement Pillen has delivered as governor is not rhetorical. He put the Nebraska State Patrol into a partnership with ICE, and he approved converting a state prison in McCook into an ICE detention facility — the one Pillen and federal officials dubbed the "Cornhusker Clink."

We have already looked at how that has gone. Pillen projected $2.45 million a month in revenue from the McCook ICE jail; a year in, Nebraska had collected $14.6 million in total and was building solitary confinement cells.

He has also tried to hold two positions at once. In December he posted that "the criminal illegal aliens who have invaded our country must be removed." After an ICE raid on an Omaha meatpacking plant in June 2025, he said "Anybody that is here working hard and being a good neighbor, they're A-OK," and that he was "100 percent opposed" to mass deportation.

Local officials and immigration lawyers told the reporters that the line Pillen draws between hardworking people and criminals ignores legal reality: a worker who buys a fake ID to get hired has committed a crime. The people doing the hard work and being good neighbors, in the version of the story where they are A-OK, include the ones who staffed his barns — and nine of them were convicted.

Who actually pays for this

The workers charged with using fake IDs to get a job at Pillen's farms went through the courts. Nine of them were convicted. Pillen Family Farms was not accused of any wrongdoing in those cases.

That is the ordinary shape of immigration enforcement in agriculture, and it is the reason the story matters beyond one governor's hypocrisy. The employer gets the labor. The worker gets the record. And when the employer becomes governor, he gets to run on the crackdown.

Pillen himself did not respond to interview requests and declined to answer the reporters' written questions. His campaign manager called the investigation "nothing more than a political hit piece from the New York Times targeting the Pillen family, their business and Nebraska agriculture."

Hours after it landed, his campaign put out "The Pillen Playbook 2.0", an updated policy wishlist for a second term. The Nebraska Examiner counted its references to immigration: one, with no specifics. "Eliminate state taxpayer benefits for illegals."

What the record shows

Jim Pillen directed Nebraska's State Patrol to partner with ICE and converted a state prison into an immigration jail, while posting that "the criminal illegal aliens who have invaded our country must be removed." A Flatwater Free Press and New York Times investigation found at least 20 farms in his own hog company employed undocumented workers, that at least 12 of his workers were charged between 2015 and 2024 for using fake or stolen IDs, and that nine of them were convicted. His company started using the federal work-authorization check on the day he launched his campaign for governor. It was not accused of wrongdoing in any of those cases.

Source

Flatwater Free Press and the New York Times, Gov. Pillen backs ICE crackdown. His company employs undocumented workers.. Photo by Nikos Frazier/Omaha World-Herald, via Flatwater Free Press.

Jim Pillen Says Ballot Initiatives Aren't 'the Way Policy Should Be Made.' Now He Wants the Legislature to Make Them Harder to Get on the Ballot.

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 05:56:39 +0000

In November 2024, Nebraskans voted directly on two things their Legislature had refused to give them. Paid sick leave passed with nearly 75% of the vote. Medical cannabis passed with 71%.

In April 2026, Jim Pillen stood at a press conference and said this about the process that produced those results:

"I just don't think that's the way policy should be made. We have a Unicameral. We elect 49 representatives. We have three government system. The people speak by electing people."

On September 3, 2026, Pillen and Secretary of State Bob Evnen announced they will ask the Legislature to rewrite the rules for gathering petition signatures.

What happened, and what actually caught it

There is a real fraud case here, and it is serious. It is worth stating plainly before anything else.

A group called the Good Government Lincoln Project submitted more than 30,000 signatures for three Lincoln city charter petitions. In early August the Lancaster County Election Commission rejected more than 65% of them, overwhelmingly for suspected fraud. Warrants went out for out-of-state circulators. As of Pillen's press conference, four had been extradited back to Nebraska.

Statewide, petitioners filed about 767,000 signatures across 17 petitions this year. Election officials in Lancaster and Hall counties caught thousands of suspect signatures and referred them to law enforcement.

Note who found it. Not a new law. County election officials and the secretary of state's own elections staff, doing the job the current system already asks of them. Evnen said so himself:

"We caught the signature fraud. This is not an accident. This is the result of the hard work and dedication of our county election officials and the hard work and dedication of the people in the Elections Division of the Secretary of State's Office."

He also said, in the same appearance, that "no state runs better elections than Nebraska."

Both of those things are the strongest possible argument that the existing process works. Pillen's response is to change it anyway.

What he wants to change

The proposals target paid signature gathering. No more paying circulators per signature. Circulators would have to be U.S. citizens, would be barred if they have felony convictions, would have to complete training and consent to Nebraska's jurisdiction.

Some of that is unobjectionable on its face. But the pay-per-signature rule is not a fraud rule, it is an economics rule — it governs how expensive and how practical it is for ordinary Nebraskans to put anything on a ballot at all. Paying per signature was banned in Nebraska from 2008 until 2015, under a law a bipartisan group of senators passed over a governor's veto. Pillen's predecessor, Pete Ricketts, signed the 2015 bill that repealed that ban.

And Pillen's own words about ballot initiatives, from five months earlier, tell you what he thinks the process is worth in the first place.

He didn't respect the results he already had

This is the part that turns a policy fight into a credibility problem.

Nebraskans passed paid sick leave with roughly three-quarters of the vote. On June 4, 2025, Pillen signed LB 415, which narrowed the law before it ever took effect — exempting businesses with 10 or fewer employees, and stripping the benefit from temporary agricultural workers and workers under 16.

Nebraskans passed a minimum wage increase. In February 2026 the Legislature capped the annual increases at 1.75% and created a teenage wage that stays below $15 until 2065.

Nebraskans legalized medical cannabis with 71%. Pillen, Attorney General Mike Hilgers and U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts publicly campaigned against the bill that would have regulated it, and peeled off enough Republican senators to stop it.

State Senator George Dungan of Lincoln put it to KOLN this way:

"I find it surprising that the governor has suddenly decided defending the voice of the people is an important issue after so clearly ignoring the people of Nebraska on issues like medical cannabis, earned paid sick leave, and minimum wage."

The pattern in Lincoln

Senator Danielle Conrad told the station she is worried about a "double standard," and said of the governor and attorney general: "We shouldn't use these excuses to clamp down on the voice or the right of the people, which is exactly what the governor and the attorney general want."

Both Conrad and Dungan have asked for an independent investigator and prosecutor on the fraud cases, rather than leaving them with officials who have said out loud what they think of ballot initiatives.

It fits what we've already documented about how Pillen handles Nebraskans who disagree with him. He called them "libtards" three times in one hour and then had his staff block reporters from asking about it. When a reporter found nitrate contamination on his hog farms, his answer was that the author "is from communist China". When Nebraska was offered $18 million to feed hungry children over the summer, he said "I don't believe in welfare".

What the record shows

Nebraska voters used ballot initiatives to win paid sick leave with about 75% support and medical cannabis with 71%. Jim Pillen signed a law narrowing the sick leave measure before it took effect, helped kill the bill regulating medical cannabis, and watched the Legislature cap the voter-approved minimum wage. In April he said of ballot initiatives, "I just don't think that's the way policy should be made." In September, pointing to a fraud case his own county election officials caught and referred for prosecution, he asked the Legislature to make the petition process harder to use.

Sources

Darsha Dodge, After criticizing ballot initiatives, Pillen seeks to reform Nebraska petition process, 10/11 NOW / KOLN (September 3, 2026).
Pillen, Evnen, county election officials call for changes to Nebraska petition circulator laws, Nebraska Examiner (September 3, 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

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

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

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

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

Then a second missile killed them.

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

Congress never voted to authorize any of it.

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

We do not know who most of these people were

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

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

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

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

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

What the Senate actually voted on

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

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

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

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

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

It failed, 48 to 51.

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

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

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

Two of them switching sides would have carried it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The legal case for all this is classified

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The House looked into it for ten days

The Senate is not the only chamber that folded.

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The man who quit over this said so at the time

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

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

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

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

The 188 who voted yes

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

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

The four who voted no

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

He told them it had nothing to do with vaccines.

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

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

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

What Kennedy did not tell the senators

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

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

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

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

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

The fourteen votes

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

Fourteen of those yes votes came from Republicans we track:

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

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

What Susan Collins was promised

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

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

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

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

What happened to the promises

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

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

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

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

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

The MMR vaccine is now the target

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who would have to investigate

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brad Finstad chairs the subcommittee that writes SNAP policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't believe in welfare."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eight weeks. That is the gap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Cole called it "an extraordinary piece of legislation"

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

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

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

Extraordinary is one word for it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Sources

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

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

Jim Pillen Expected $2.45 Million a Month From the McCook ICE Jail. A Year In, Nebraska Has Collected $14.6 Million Total — and Is Building Solitary Cells.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:55:36 +0000

Nebraska used to run something called the Work Ethic Camp in McCook. It was a state corrections facility for minimum-risk inmates, built around rehabilitation. Its inmates helped set up community events in town, including Santa Claus Lane.

In August 2025, Jim Pillen announced he had made a deal with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to convert it into a 300-bed jail for immigrant detainees.

On August 15, 2026 — one year later — about 300 people gathered on private land within sight of the facility to say they hadn't forgotten. Nearly 60 of them had ridden a bus from Omaha, a roughly 10-hour round trip. Their signs read: "We have not forgotten."

Pillen's office responded that he remains committed to the partnership. The Nebraska Examiner covered the rally and the year that led to it.

The money didn't show up

Start with the number Pillen used to sell this.

He said last year that he expected the federal government to pay Nebraska a $2.45 million "base" fee every month.

Here is what the state has actually received, according to a spokesperson for the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services: $14.6 million in total. And most of that isn't the recurring payment — it breaks down as $9.3 million based on occupied beds and $5.3 million in one-time costs like vehicles and equipment.

Detainees started arriving in November. Through March, the daily population bounced between about 100 and 171 — well short of 300 — according to the Deportation Data Project, a Freedom of Information Act repository maintained by UC Berkeley Law School.

The state's explanation is that the bigger payments arrive once the facility can hold 300, and that renovations finish later this summer. Maybe so. But Nebraskans were sold a monthly figure, and a year later the state has collected less than what six months of that figure would have been — while the facility itself is a permanent fixture through at least September 2027.

The Republicans in McCook found out on TV

The people most opposed to this aren't who you'd guess.

John and Deborah Walters are registered Republicans who own agricultural land near McCook — including the acres where the protest was held. John was born in McCook 79 years ago.

They learned that their state was putting an ICE detention center in their town by watching a national newscast over hotel breakfast in Iowa.

"We were shocked," John said.

Deborah described most of the immigrants swept up in the deportation campaign as "our neighbors." Both were disturbed when federal and state officials started calling the facility the "Cornhusker Clink."

"Everything's been so secretive, that's what bothers us. It's a perfect location, right? Rural Nebraska, nobody is going to complain."

That is the whole design, stated by a Republican landowner who lives there.

Mindy Rush Chipman, executive director of ACLU Nebraska, said the same thing about the original announcement: "Those plans were shrouded in secrecy."

Pillen went around the Legislature

Nebraska has a 49-member, officially nonpartisan Legislature. Thirteen Democrats and one independent demanded more transparency and asked whether Pillen had violated the Nebraska Constitution by repurposing a state correctional facility without direct legislative approval.

Pillen's argument is that he was doing his duty to help the federal government enforce immigration law.

Thirteen McCook residents, joined by former State Sen. DiAnna Schimek, sued through Nebraska Appleseed to stop it. A Red Willow County district judge ruled for the governor and dismissed the case, finding the Legislature had already tasked the executive branch with managing state prisons. Appleseed has appealed.

So the sequence is: a governor converts a state facility to a federal purpose without a legislative vote, the courts say the Legislature already gave that power away, and the people who live there find out from television.

Now they're building isolation cells

The newest development is the one two state senators are trying to get answers about.

Solitary confinement space is under construction at McCook. State Sens. Margo Juarez of South Omaha and Terrell McKinney of North Omaha met with Correctional Services staff and were told the isolation area is a requirement of the Department of Homeland Security.

The department's spokesperson, Dayne Urbanovsky, says the facility has had a "short-term observation area" for people with thoughts of self-harm, combative behavior, or who request separation — and that more space is being finished this summer as part of the expansion.

Juarez first heard about a planned solitary area during a visit in March, when she says state escorts described it as somewhere detainees could take a "time out."

She wants a record of who goes in and for how long.

"Absolutely I am worried about it. My main concern is how long somebody would be confined in one of the rooms."

McKinney, known as a watchdog of Nebraska's prison system, asked the more basic question. He says he wants to know "why people are being placed in those rooms in the first place."

Asked about accountability, Urbanovsky said "room usage documentation is maintained in alignment with Department of Homeland Security ICE standard procedures" — which is not the same as telling Nebraska's Legislature anything.

Who is actually in there

It matters who these cells are for.

About 70% of people in ICE detention nationally have no criminal convictions, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. They are held on civil violations — being in the country without authorization.

"They're people that are being taken away from their families, taken away from their jobs and taken away from the communities they call home," Rush Chipman said.

ACLU attorney Grant Friedman said McCook offers the "worst lawyer-client accommodations" he's encountered. He can't get a message to a detainee without a full name and immigration identification number — which detainees don't always have.

A rehabilitation camp whose inmates once helped run the town Christmas display is now surrounded by what one McCook resident described as "rows and rows and rows of barbed wire."

The state patrol, too

The ICE jail wasn't the only thing Pillen announced that day. He also disclosed a 287(g) agreement turning Nebraska State Patrol troopers into federal immigration enforcers.

It started with six trained troopers. It's now 16. Since August 2025, troopers have assisted in about 275 immigration-related detentions or transports across 30 Nebraska counties, and Homeland Security has reimbursed the patrol $277,037.

Nationally, a Homeland Security spokesperson told the Examiner in August 2026, 287(g) partnerships had gone from 135 to 2,179 since the start of Trump's second term.

The pattern

Pillen's governing style has a recognizable shape, and Nebraskans have seen it repeatedly:

Nebraska was offered $18 million to feed hungry children over the summer. Pillen turned it down, saying "I don't believe in welfare."
When a reporter found nitrate contamination 44 times the safe limit on his hog farms, his response was that "the author is from communist China."
He called Nebraskans who criticize him "libtards" three times in one hour, then his staff blocked reporters from asking about it.
In January he said Nebraska had "bushel baskets and bushel baskets of money." By August his agencies were proposing that employees sleep in their cars.

Decide without telling anyone, dismiss the people who object, and don't answer the follow-up questions.

What Nebraskans should ask

The contract runs through at least fall 2027, and Sen. Juarez says she'll work to end it when it expires.

Until then, three questions have gone unanswered for a year:

Where is the $2.45 million a month? The state has $14.6 million total to show for a year, most of it not recurring.
Why did a state facility change purpose without a vote of the Legislature?
Who is going into the isolation rooms, and for how long? Two state senators have asked. They've been told the paperwork exists.

Gary Power, 84, stood in the August heat at the rally and offered his read on why more of his neighbors are showing up: "Six months ago I would never have seen something like this. They woke up. They're paying those gas prices, wouldn't that wake you up?"

Nebraska deserves a governor who tells the town before the television does.

Source

One year after Pillen announced McCook ICE jail, protests continue, governor doubles down — Cindy Gonzalez, Nebraska Examiner, August 17, 2026. Photos by Cindy Gonzalez/Nebraska Examiner.

Nebraskans Voted to Raise Their Own Minimum Wage. Republicans Cut It Back — and Are Now Suing the Cities That Tried to Restore It.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 10:59:01 +0000

In 2022, Nebraskans were asked a simple question: should the state's minimum wage go up to $15, and then keep pace with the cost of living?

They said yes. Not narrowly — 59% to 41%, with majority support in 38 of the state's 49 legislative districts.

Four years later, that raise has been cut back by the Legislature, signed into law by the governor, and is now being defended in court by the attorney general against two cities that tried to give their own workers what the voters asked for.

On Tuesday, Nebraska Attorney General Mike Hilgers announced he is suing the City of Omaha to block its new minimum wage ordinance. He has already sued Lincoln, and got an injunction — a judge blocked Lincoln's ordinance on July 17, one day before it was set to take effect.

His argument: "Our Constitution does not permit the City of Omaha to repeal any portion of a statewide law passed by the Legislature."

Which is a fine sentence, until you ask where that statewide law came from.

What voters actually passed, and what replaced it

Initiative 433 raised Nebraska's minimum wage from $9 to $15 between 2023 and 2026. After that, it would rise every year alongside the Consumer Price Index — the standard measure of what things cost.

That last part was the whole point. A wage that doesn't track prices is a wage that shrinks a little every year without anyone having to vote for a pay cut.

In February, the Legislature took that out. Legislative Bill 258 replaced the cost-of-living link with a flat 1.75% per year.

Here is why that number matters. The Nebraska Examiner ran the history: over the past 26 years, average inflation in the Midwest has been 2.4% — and it hit 8.7% in 2022 alone. Locking raises at 1.75% doesn't freeze the minimum wage. It sets it to fall behind, quietly, every single year.

Governor Jim Pillen signed it on February 10.

The part about 14-year-olds

LB 258 did something else. It created a "youth minimum wage" of $13.50 for workers aged 14 and 15.

That wage goes up 1.5% — not every year, but every five years, starting in 2030.

Do that math and you get the detail that gave the Examiner's story its headline. A 14-year-old bagging groceries in Nebraska will not be guaranteed today's $15 minimum wage until 2065. By then the regular minimum wage is projected to be $29.51, and the youth wage will have finally crawled to $15.20.

State Sen. Terrell McKinney of North Omaha — whose district backed the 2022 raise with 89.67% of the vote, the highest in the state, and who helped sponsor the original ballot measure — did not soften it:

"We don't care about our youth. We just want discounted labor."

State Sen. Megan Hunt of Omaha said the Legislature's first act of 2026 would be cutting workers' wages:

"Families are asking us, how are they going to keep up with prices? How are they going to keep up with the cost of living? And we're answering by cutting their paychecks."

"Opinion polls"

The most honest thing anyone said during the debate came from State Sen. Tony Sorrentino of the Elkhorn area, who has repeatedly called ballot measures "flawed" and described them as "opinion polls" that shouldn't be used to make laws.

"I would suggest we focus on the facts and not the opinion polls," he said.

He is describing a statewide election in which 59% of Nebraskans voted for it. That is not an opinion poll. That is the thing opinion polls are trying to predict.

And this wasn't a one-off. Ballotpedia notes LB 258 was the second voter-approved initiative the Legislature has rewritten since 2024 — the year before, lawmakers carved exemptions into a 2024 initiative requiring Nebraska businesses to offer earned paid sick leave. Voters keep passing worker protections. Lawmakers keep editing them down.

How it passed, and who paid for the favor

Altering a voter-approved law in Nebraska takes a two-thirds supermajority: 33 of 49 votes. LB 258 got exactly 33.

Two details are worth knowing about that vote:

The bill's sponsor, State Sen. Jane Raybould, is a registered Democrat — and her family operates B&R Stores, the parent company of Super Saver, Russ's Market and other grocery chains. She said the bill was "a request from many of the business communities." She was one of them.
One Republican voted no: State Sen. Dave Wordekemper of Fremont, a former firefighter.

An earlier attempt actually failed when a supporter missed the vote. The chamber's conservatives scrambled to revive the bill, and the speaker held it until this year, when it finally cleared with nothing to spare.

Cities tried to fix it. The state sued.

Omaha and Lincoln did the obvious thing. Both passed ordinances keeping the inflation link voters approved and setting a $15 floor for all workers, with a $13.50 training wage limited to 16- to 19-year-olds for their first 90 days.

Omaha's city attorney told the council it had the authority as a "home rule charter city," and made the practical case in writing: "Given the higher costs in Omaha, compared to the balance of Nebraska, the Legislature-enacted minimum wage increases may not be sufficient to deal with costs unique to Omaha."

Hilgers disagreed, and went to court. His office argues the ordinances will "inevitably" drive up the cost of goods statewide, and that wages are a "matter of statewide concern" where the Legislature has the final say.

Notice how that works in practice. When Nebraskans use the ballot box, they're told the Legislature has the final say. When Nebraskans use their city councils, they're told the Legislature has the final say. The one branch of government where working people actually won gets overruled, and then the overruling gets enforced by lawsuit.

Omaha's ordinance is set to take effect October 1 unless a judge blocks it first.

The bigger picture

Nebraska is not an outlier here so much as an example. We've written before about how the ten lowest-paying states in America are nearly all Republican-run, and how the "low cost of living" excuse doesn't survive contact with the data. In Wisconsin, a Republican congressman wrote a bill making it easier to pay disabled workers a median of $3.46 an hour.

The through-line is the same: when workers win a raise, someone goes looking for the exception that takes it back.

For Pillen specifically, this fits a pattern we've already documented. He's the governor who turned down $18 million in federal summer grocery money for low-income Nebraska kids because "I don't believe in welfare," reversing only after a petition and a sit-down with children who were living it, and whose agencies, under his budget squeeze, floated the idea of employees sleeping in their cars to cut travel costs.

Now he's signed a law that pays 14-year-olds less and guarantees every minimum-wage worker in the state a raise smaller than inflation — while his attorney general goes to court to stop two cities from doing better.

Nebraskans already voted on this. Twice, counting 2014. The answer keeps being yes.

Source

Nebraska AG sues City of Omaha over minimum wage ordinance — Zach Wendling, Nebraska Examiner, August 18, 2026. Photo by Zach Wendling/Nebraska Examiner. Background from the Examiner's February report on LB 258's passage.

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.

Asked Why Americans Should Pay Record Prices for Gas, Mike Flood Said You "Play the Hand You're Dealt"

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

On Sunday, August 16, Mike Flood went on "The Hill Sunday" and was asked a simple question. Two days earlier, President Trump had told a crowd of law enforcement officers in Garden City, New York: "For you to pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember, you're doing it so that a very evil country cannot have… a nuclear weapon." Host Chris Stirewalt put it to Nebraska's congressman directly: "The president's saying that paying high gas prices may just be part of a patriotic duty to help protect the world. Please explain."

Flood's answer:

"Well, prices are too high. I don't want to dismiss that. It's important. It's something that every single person talks about in my district and across the country. … We've done a good job on housing affordability. Obviously, I was the architect of that bill to … increase supply and bring down prices. As it relates to gas prices, you've gotta, you know … play the hand you're dealt."

Play the hand you're dealt.

Here is the thing about that phrase. It's what you say about weather. About a bad harvest. About the cards, which somebody else shuffled and somebody else dealt to you.

Mike Flood dealt this hand.

What the Hand Actually Costs

The day after that interview, AAA put the national average for regular gasoline at $4.06 a gallon — more than 92 cents higher than a year earlier. GasBuddy petroleum analyst Patrick De Haan said that was the highest ever recorded for mid-August.

Not high. Not elevated. The highest mid-August price in the history of the country.

In the same Garden City speech, Trump said of the higher prices from his war on Iran: "I'll never apologize, I did the right thing."

That is the hand. Now here is who dealt it.

He Voted Six Times to Protect the Tariffs

Flood has defended Trump's tariffs from the start. Days after the first round took effect in March 2025, he told reporters that "the right to place tariffs on countries is solely the right of a president" — "And so I have to trust the president." He voted six separate times to protect them — including in April 2025, when he voted to shield the tariffs from any check.

Tariffs are a tax. The Tax Foundation estimates the tariffs raised taxes by an average of about $1,000 per American household in 2025. And Nebraska has taken the hit twice over — farmers bracing for harvest as tariffs and low prices hit, and manufacturers from chocolate makers to farm-equipment companies calling them pain points.

When "every single person" in his district talks to him about prices, they are describing a bill he voted six times to keep them paying.

He Voted to Keep Us in the War

The gas price is not an act of God either. Iran has shut down the Strait of Hormuz — the shipping route Flood himself named on air, where roughly 20 percent of the world's oil and gas exports originate.

On July 23, the House voted 214–208 to order U.S. forces out of a war with Iran that Congress never authorized. It passed, over the objection of 207 of the 211 Republicans who voted. Flood was one of 182 Republicans we track who voted no — voting to keep American forces in the war whose disruption is driving the price he now describes as a hand he was dealt.

He had a chance to fold. He voted to stay at the table.

And He's Been Paid

Pro-Israel PACs, led by AIPAC, have given Mike Flood $48,340, according to TrackAIPAC's tally of FEC filings through July 5, 2026.

That is not a side note in a story about Iran policy. It is a running theme across the party — we've documented how a handful of billionaires bought the Republican Party's foreign policy — and Flood is on the receiving end of it while telling Nebraskans that the resulting price at the pump is just how the cards fell.

The Tell: What He Said Next

Stirewalt then asked Flood a fair question. Democrats made this exact argument during the inflation spike after Russia invaded Ukraine, and Republicans hammered them for it. Was there any "reverse sympathy"?

Flood didn't engage with it at all. He answered:

"Right now, ironically, Republicans are united, and Democrats are busy trying to defund the police, close prisons, and [cancel] Thanksgiving because it's a colonist holiday, have government grocery stores."

A Nebraskan filling up at record prices got a culture-war riff about Thanksgiving.

That is what happens when a politician has no defense of his own record: he changes the subject to something you're supposed to be angrier about than your grocery bill.

Even Karl Rove Isn't Buying It

You do not have to take a Democrat's word for any of this. Karl Rove — George W. Bush's White House adviser, as Republican as the job gets — said on Fox News that Trump should stop "gaslighting" Americans about the economy:

"The president made a mistake, in my opinion, last week in saying we've got the greatest economy in the history of the world and prices for groceries and gasoline and everything are coming down rapidly. That's not the experience of the American people."

Flood's own instinct in the interview was the same — "prices are too high. I don't want to dismiss that." He knows. He said so on television. Then he dismissed it anyway.

What Nebraskans Are Owed

In May 2026, ahead of a Flood town hall in Madison County, the group Nebraska For Us asked him to prioritize policies that lower prices for Nebraskans struggling to pay the bills: "From rolling back tariffs and providing refunds to ending the war and eventually lowering gas prices, there are many moves our leaders could take." They were asking for the thing he keeps saying he understands.

This is not the first time Flood's public explanation hasn't matched his voting record. He voted to strip federal courts of their power to enforce their own orders, then told a town hall he hadn't read that part of the bill.

There is a pattern in how Mike Flood handles the gap between what he votes for and what his constituents live with. He doesn't defend the vote. He describes the consequence as something that simply happened — a provision he didn't read, a hand he was dealt.

Somebody dealt it. He was holding the deck.

Source

GOP Rep. Mike Flood says 'too high' prices are worth stopping Iran's nuclear ambitions — Ryan Mancini, The Hill, August 16, 2026. Photo: Greg Nash / The Hill.

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.

In January Jim Pillen Said Nebraska Had "Bushel Baskets and Bushel Baskets of Money." In August His Agencies Proposed Employees Sleep in Their Cars.

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 07:52:56 +0000

On January 20, 2026, Jim Pillen held a telephone town hall and told Nebraskans the state's budget shortfall was something the press made up.

"Quite simply, we've got bushel baskets and bushel baskets of money. And when these people try to make it like we're broke, it's just crazy. It's unacceptable."

Six months later, in July, Pillen sent state agencies a memo. His State Budget Division would withhold at least 5% of their monthly allotments, and most state hiring was frozen.

On Friday, Nebraska Public Media obtained the agencies' written responses. This is what bushel baskets of money look like when the bill arrives.

What agencies said they would do

The Nebraska Board of Barber Examiners proposed doing fewer inspections to save on travel — and that when employees do have to travel, they sleep in their cars instead of getting hotel rooms.

The State Electrical Division will reissue used uniforms rather than buy new ones, so long as they're still clean.

The rest of the list:

The Nebraska Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired will discontinue a pilot Support Services Provider program for the DeafBlind community.
The State Fire Marshal will cut a full-time deputy position and an accountant, and limit staff training.
The Nebraska State College System will freeze 14 full-time positions and leave 12 more vacant.
The State Historical Society will cut about $240,000 by eliminating positions — then raise museum admission from $5 to $7 for adults and from $3 to $4 for children, and double the History Nebraska magazine from $35 to $70.
The Department of Revenue proposed closing its offices in North Platte and Norfolk.
The Tourism Commission will eliminate positions.
The Public Employee Retirement Services will install software to pre-answer calls so it needs fewer call-center staff, and cut back in-person seminars for members — even though the educational outreach is required by statute.

And a string of new fees on Nebraskans: insurance licensing fees up $2.2 million a year, contractor registration up from $25 to $40 (the Labor Department wants the Legislature to take it to $100 for a year), broker-dealer and adviser fees up more than $3 million over the next few years, and $325,000 in unspecified fee increases at the Department of Water, Energy, and Environment.

Pillen's office called all of it "hypothetical fiscal restraint considerations" requiring "substantial analysis." He asked for the plans. His agencies wrote them.

The one that hits hardest: seniors and disabled Nebraskans would start paying property tax

Buried in the Department of Revenue's response is the most consequential item.

Nebraska's homestead exemption relieves property taxes for seniors and people with disabilities, and the credits have been based on income — the lowest earners have received a 100% exemption. Revenue's proposal narrows eligibility so that everyone with a homestead exemption would pay at least 10% of their property taxes before credits apply.

That means the poorest elderly and disabled homeowners in Nebraska, who currently owe nothing, would start owing something.

Remember what Pillen ran on. Property tax relief is his signature issue — it is the first item on his report card, and the story there is that he promised to fix property taxes and reached for sales taxes on nearly everything else instead.

Now the budget squeeze he ordered has produced a proposal to raise property taxes on disabled Nebraskans and low-income seniors — the narrowest, most sympathetic group the state protects.

Where the money actually went

Pillen keeps describing this as a spending problem. It started as a tax problem.

Nebraska walked into the 2023 legislative session with a record $1.9 billion surplus — nearly 17% of a year's budget. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities documented, that surplus came from one-time federal pandemic relief, not from recurring growth.

Lawmakers spent it anyway — permanently. LB 754 lowered both personal and corporate income tax rates to 3.99% by 2027. LB 243 expanded property tax credits and pulled funding away from public schools.

The promised boom did not arrive. Revenue slowed, costs rose, and to get through last year lawmakers flat-funded most agencies and raided $150 million from cash funds, including the rainy day fund. When a bill came up — LB 171 — that would have simply paused the next round of income tax cuts, the Legislature declined to consider it.

As CBPP put it: when one-time money is used to fund permanent tax cuts, the math doesn't hold, and the bill eventually comes due.

Nebraska is now $208 million in the hole this year and facing an additional $840 million deficit in the next two-year budget. The income tax rates keep stepping down on schedule.

A Republican auditor told him no

The sharpest response in the whole cache came from Mike Foley, Nebraska's auditor of public accounts — and a Republican who spent eight years as lieutenant governor under Pete Ricketts before voters returned him to the auditor's office.

Foley refused, over five pages. He listed what his office has caught — state employees using state vehicles for personal use, ineligible former employees claiming benefits, nonprofits misusing funds — and pointed out that a 5% cut would cost him at least three auditors.

"Such a 'penny-wise and pound-foolish' approach to budgeting would unquestionably jeopardize countless taxpayer dollars by dramatically increasing their risk of undetected (much less unprevented) loss or misappropriation."

Foley also described what happened when his office audited the WIC nutrition program: rather than answer the findings, he wrote, Department of Health and Human Services managers "enlisted Federal bureaucrats in an unsuccessful attempt to dissuade this office from publicizing some of the more startling details contained in the document."

Foley did not object to the policy itself — he told Pillen the call for fiscal restraint was prudent and timely. He objected to taking it out of the office that finds the waste.

Secretary of State Bob Evnen declined to propose reductions too. And four of the largest agencies in state government — Health and Human Services, the State Patrol, Administrative Services, and Motor Vehicles — didn't submit plans at all.

Meanwhile the Military Department warned that the Governor's Emergency Fund, which pays for disaster response, cannot absorb more cuts. It projects just $1 million left in fiscal year 2027-28, assuming no new disasters.

Nebraska is a state with floods and tornadoes. One million dollars is not a disaster fund.

The pattern

This is the same governor who, in January, told a phone line full of his own constituents that the shortfall was a press invention — on the same call where he used an ableist slur three times and proposed cutting roughly $152 million from the agency that runs Medicaid, child welfare, and services for people with disabilities.

It is the same governor who turned down $18 million in federal money to feed low-income Nebraska kids over the summer because, as he put it, "I don't believe in welfare." He reversed only after a petition and after sitting down with children who were going hungry.

The through-line isn't fiscal discipline. Pillen is not asking wealthy Nebraskans to give back any part of a tax cut that is still phasing in. He is asking a state agency's inspectors to sleep in their cars, asking children to pay a dollar more to see the state museum, asking disabled homeowners to start paying property tax, and asking the state auditor to fire the people who find waste.

He is running for a second term in 2026. The bushel baskets are gone, and Nebraskans can see who is being handed the empty one.

Source

Nebraska Public Media, "Following Pillen's budget memo, Nebraska leaders detail plans to cut staff, increase fees" by Jackie Ourada and Noelle Annonen (August 15, 2026). Photo: Nebraska State Capitol / Nebraska Public Media.

Republicans Are Coming for IVF and Surrogacy. Twenty-Five of the Ones We Track Signed the Bill.

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:31:40 +0000

For years, the political line on in vitro fertilization was simple. Everybody said they were for it. It is one of the most popular things in American medicine — this March, the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology reported that for the first time, more than 100,000 babies were born in a single year with the help of IVF. Even Donald Trump has talked about making it cheaper.

That line is breaking. And you can watch it break in two places at once: in state Republican party platforms, and in a bill sitting in Congress right now with a long list of Republican names on it.

What the state parties wrote down

In June, the Texas Republican Party adopted a 2026 platform that opposes public funding for IVF and calls for regulating the whole assisted-reproduction industry, including mandatory reporting on how embryos are created and stored. One section says the Texas Legislature must "protect fetal life from destructive practices, such as IVF and commercial surrogacy."

Another section goes after surrogacy directly:

"We support a ban on contract surrogacy involving foreign nationals, which may involve a form of trafficking and may lead to claims of citizenship. We also support prohibiting third-party egg and sperm donations and the commercialization of human reproduction in Texas; and support policies that promote the welfare of children, medical transparency, and the protection of biological parents."

The Idaho Republican Party added language to its own 2026 platform opposing "the destruction of human embryos." Republicans in Missouri, North Carolina and Oklahoma adopted similar language in 2024 and 2025. That is five states in two years.

Party platforms are not law. But they tell you where a party is heading. As Sean Tipton of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine put it to Stateline, "Party platforms are mostly about intraparty politics and jockeying for position, but at the same time, you have to pay attention, because that symbolism matters."

The bill below is what happens when the symbolism grows teeth.

The SAFE KIDS Act

On November 4, 2025, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida introduced S. 3101, the SAFE KIDS Act. On January 13, 2026, Rep. Blake Moore of Utah introduced the House version, H.R. 7040.

Here is what it does, in the sponsors' own words: it "invalidates commercial surrogacy agreements with citizens of foreign adversary countries, such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, and creates a misdemeanor for brokers — not surrogates — who knowingly facilitate these agreements."

Read that again. A surrogacy contract — the document that protects the surrogate, the intended parents, and the child — becomes legally void if one of the parties holds the wrong passport. The people who signed it in good faith are left with nothing to enforce.

The bill is pitched almost entirely as a national security measure. John Moolenaar of Michigan, who chairs the House Select Committee on China, said Chinese nationals "are exploiting gaps in US law to buy children from America," and that "this legislation will ensure accountability and protect innocent children from nationals of foreign adversary countries who want to buy American babies."

Blake Moore said the "espionage risks that could emerge from China and Russia bringing children with U.S. passports into their countries should be further cause for alarm."

Rich McCormick of Georgia was blunter about which door this actually opens:

"The SAFE KIDS Act closes a dangerous loophole that allows foreign adversaries to exploit our 14th Amendment through surrogate pregnancies. This bill protects vulnerable women and children while preventing hostile regimes from abusing U.S. birthright citizenship."

That is the tell. The 14th Amendment "loophole" McCormick is describing is birthright citizenship — the rule that people born here are citizens, in place since 1868. The Supreme Court upheld it on June 30, 2026, rejecting Trump's order trying to end it. Republicans have been hunting for a way around that ruling ever since, and subpoenaing maternity clinics while they look. Surrogacy is the newest angle of attack.

Robert Aderholt of Alabama, Jen Kiggans of Virginia, Nathaniel Moran of Texas, Mike Kennedy of Utah, Addison McDowell of North Carolina, John McGuire of Virginia and Jefferson Shreve of Indiana all supplied supporting statements for the same announcement.

Who signed it

These are the cosponsors who have report cards on this site. In the House, alongside Moore and Moolenaar:

Robert Aderholt
Jen Kiggans
Nathaniel Moran
Paul Gosar
Diana Harshbarger
Rich McCormick
Michael Rulli
Addison McDowell
Mike Kennedy
John McGuire
Pete Sessions
Jefferson Shreve
John Rose
Ben Cline
Harriet Hageman
Andy Harris
Chuck Fleischmann
Sheri Biggs

And in the Senate, on Rick Scott's version: Dan Sullivan, Pete Ricketts, Ashley Moody, Marsha Blackburn and Mike Rounds.

Neither bill has passed. The Senate version was referred to the Judiciary Committee the day it was introduced and has not moved since. But 25 sitting members of Congress decided this was worth attaching their name to.

The part they don't put in the press release

Here is the thing about the "we support IVF, we just want guardrails" position: four of the senators on that list already had a chance to vote on protecting IVF, and did not take it.

On September 17, 2024, the Senate voted on whether to take up the Right to IVF Act, which would have written a federal right to fertility treatment into law. Sen. Tammy Duckworth rewrote an earlier version of it after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in February 2024 that discarded embryos were children under state law — a ruling that prompted doctors in that state to halt IVF procedures.

The motion needed 60 votes to advance and failed 51–44. Two Republicans voted to advance it: Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. Sen. John Thune told reporters that week, "Republicans support IVF full stop," and called the vote an attempt "to create a political issue where there isn't one."

The roll call says otherwise. Dan Sullivan voted no. Marsha Blackburn voted no. Pete Ricketts voted no. Mike Rounds did not vote at all.

Rick Scott — who would introduce the surrogacy bill fourteen months later — spent that week floating his own IVF proposal to expand health savings accounts, and noted that his own daughter was undergoing IVF. Duckworth's answer to him at the time reads differently now: "you can't support a fertilized egg being a human being — this personhood stuff which Rick Scott has said he supported — and also say you support IVF. The two are contradictory."

This is the same pattern at the state level. In Nevada, a bill writing a right to IVF into state law passed the state Senate with Republican votes — and Joe Lombardo vetoed it anyway, while saying he supports making IVF more accessible.

Saying you support IVF costs nothing. Voting for it costs something.

Why surrogacy, and why now

The people pushing this are not shy about the reasoning. Emma Waters, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation — the group behind Project 2025 — calls surrogacy "baby selling," and says people from countries hostile to the U.S. can hire a surrogate to obtain citizenship. She has said that by age 35, a surrogate-born child from China could run for president.

Waters also thinks couples turn to IVF too early without exploring the underlying causes of infertility, an idea tied to a conservative philosophy called restorative reproductive medicine that also discourages birth control. In a blog post last month, she said that over the past six months she has received more requests for help drafting surrogacy legislation than on any other topic.

Tipton, of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, thinks the appeal is broader than national security. "For groups like Heritage, (surrogacy) is a nice synergy that allows them to be xenophobic, homophobic and anti-choice all at once," he said.

There is a reason he says homophobic. Many same-sex couples build their families through IVF and surrogacy. There is no other route.

The numbers do not support a crisis. Babies born through surrogacy made up about 14 out of every 100,000 deliveries between 2017 and 2020, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. A study found about 32% of surrogate pregnancies between 2014 and 2020 were for international couples, and about 41% of those were from China — where surrogacy is illegal, which is why people leave.

Meanwhile, as of June, lawmakers in at least 17 states had introduced 36 bills this year to give embryos or fetuses legal personhood, according to a Guttmacher Institute count reported by Stateline. Those are the bills that actually threaten IVF, because a clinic that discards an embryo is suddenly exposed. Opponents beat them back by arguing that they might limit IVF — which remains broadly popular.

What this costs real people

Ashley Kirk-Robertson, an Idaho woman who has carried four surrogate pregnancies, described what these arrangements actually look like. Her first was for a single father from Spain, where surrogacy is illegal. The second was for a husband and wife from Israel. The third was for a same-sex couple from Israel. The fourth was for Brooke Green, a Democratic Idaho state representative who could not carry a second child because she was diagnosed with a hormone-fueled breast cancer weeks before her last embryo was to be implanted.

"They truly are just here because coming here for the surrogacy is cheaper or because in their country it's not allowed," Kirk-Robertson said.

None of Kirk-Robertson's four contracts would be touched by the SAFE KIDS Act. It reaches only prospective parents who are citizens or permanent residents of the four countries the defense code calls foreign entities of concern — North Korea, China, Russia and Iran — and Spain and Israel are not among them. But look at where the bill draws its line. Not at whether anyone was harmed. At a passport.

Twenty-five Republicans on this site's report cards signed their names to that.

Source

Kelcie Moseley-Morris, Stateline: "More GOP party platforms include anti-IVF language. Is surrogacy next?" Cosponsor lists from congress.gov; sponsor statements from Rep. Blake Moore's office.

Tommy Tuberville Asks ChatGPT About Medicare While He Drives Across Alabama. "You Don't Know Whether or Not They're 100 Percent Correct."

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 07:54:43 +0000

A United States senator has a staff. He has committee hearings, nonpartisan analysts at the Congressional Budget Office, the Congressional Research Service, and the actual text of every bill he votes on.

Tommy Tuberville has a different method for the drive home.

A Washington Post investigation published August 13, 2026 found that members of Congress and their staff are handing large parts of their jobs to AI chatbots — with almost no rules anyone can name and no real enforcement. Tuberville is one of the members who told the Post about it on the record.

He asks ChatGPT questions about Medicare and Medicaid while driving across Alabama.

"It's kind of like you can sit there and talk to an expert," Tuberville told the Post. "You don't know whether or not they're 100 percent correct. But they put you on the right path."

Read that second sentence again. He is describing a source he knows may be wrong, on the two programs that pay for his constituents' health care.

Alabama is not an abstraction here

Medicare and Medicaid are not hypothetical topics for a senator from Alabama. They are the topics.

Alabama is one of the ten states that still has not expanded Medicaid, which means the coverage gap there is already about as wide as it gets in America. When a senator from that state says he is asking a chatbot about Medicaid to get "on the right path," the path in question runs through hospitals deciding whether to keep a labor and delivery unit open.

This is also not the first time Tuberville has talked about a program he clearly hasn't studied. In July, he stood on the Senate floor and called Social Security a government-approved "Ponzi scheme" — a program he has personally drawn about $93,000 from in three years, on top of his Senate salary.

He is now running for governor of Alabama, on the strength of that judgment.

The staffer who fed his phone into a chatbot

The Post's findings go well past one senator's commute.

The House and Senate have cleared staffers to use ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini; the House also approved Claude. The House bought 6,000 Copilot licenses last year to push staff toward using them.

What staff are actually doing with them:

Drafting speeches, press releases and questions for congressional hearings
Managing constituent mail
Drafting bill amendments
One staffer fed years of his phone contacts and text messages into Claude and had it build a database of reporters — what he pitched, what they took, what went badly
That same office has Claude running its communications budget, overseeing taxpayer-funded mailers and every ad sent to constituents

Congress does have rules. AI can't be used to make deepfakes, make personnel decisions, handle sensitive information like constituent data, or finalize legislation. A bot may help draft a bill, but a human has to do the final review. A bot may help draft a constituent reply, but it isn't supposed to be told who the constituent is.

Most staffers who talked to the Post didn't know those rules existed. Enforcement is left to staff policing themselves or turning in a colleague.

"You're still not supposed to put constituent data into AI," one staffer said. "There are weird things around where the rules are. I don't know all of them."

"Claude responded:"

We already know what happens when nobody checks, because it happened in public this summer.

Anna Paulina Luna filed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act — the annual bill that sets Pentagon policy and spending levels — directing Defense Department resources to the southwest border. Her office posted a summary of it.

The summary began: "increasing example specific factors. Identical to H.R. 100 (118th Congress).11:25 AM???? Claude responded:"

Washington Post reporter John Hudson posted the screenshot. The site was quietly edited to remove the line. Luna defended the practice, saying her staff had used AI to spell- and grammar-check the summary rather than the amendment text, and that "most staff use it."

That defense is worth taking seriously, because of what it concedes. The chatbot output went out under a member of Congress's name, with the chatbot's own words still in it, and nobody in the office read it before it published. If that is the level of review a summary gets, the question of what review the amendment got answers itself.

The one who admitted he hadn't read the bill

Mike Flood also turned up in the Post's reporting. He asked a chatbot where private equity firms were buying single-family homes while he worked on a bipartisan housing bill last year.

On its own that's the most defensible use on this list — a factual lookup, in an area where the answer is checkable.

But Flood is a specific case. In May 2025 he voted for Trump's budget bill, and five days later stood in front of constituents in Seward, Nebraska, and admitted that a provision stripping federal courts of the power to enforce their own orders "was unknown to me when I voted for that bill."

That's the worry in one sentence. The problem in Congress was never a shortage of information. It's that members vote on 1,100-page bills they haven't read. A tool that produces a confident-sounding paragraph in four seconds doesn't fix that. It makes not reading feel like reading.

Why this matters more than it sounds

It is easy to make this a joke about an old senator and a chatbot. It isn't one.

A chatbot will answer a question about Medicaid eligibility rules with total confidence whether or not it is right. It does not know which version of a bill passed. It cannot tell you that the CBO revised a number last month. It has no idea how many people in Alabama's 3rd District are on SNAP.

Tuberville knows that — he said so. "You don't know whether or not they're 100 percent correct."

He said it anyway, out loud, to a national newspaper, as a description of how he learns about the programs he votes on. The only account any of these three has given of checking the output is Luna's, after the fact: she said she had told her staff to double-check and be more thorough.

There is a version of this story where AI helps a small congressional office do more with less. There is also the version the Post actually found: no training, rules nobody has read, no enforcement, and a member of Congress deciding what he thinks about Medicare somewhere on I-65.

Source

The Wild—and Unregulated—Ways Lawmakers Are Using AI Chatbots — Hafiz Rashid, The New Republic, August 13, 2026, reporting on The Washington Post's investigation, also summarized by Raw Story. Photo: Finn Gomez / Getty Images via The New Republic.

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.

Adrian Smith Voted Twice to Defund Public Media. Eight Months Later, the Worst Wildfire in Nebraska History Tore Through His District.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:33:00 +0000

On June 12, 2025, the House voted 214–212 to claw back $9.4 billion Congress had already approved — more than $8 billion from foreign aid programs and $1.1 billion from public broadcasting. Adrian Smith voted yes. He'd telegraphed his support for days, and afterward he called it another "step toward fiscal responsibility."

Before that vote, Nebraska Public Media had told anyone who would listen exactly what the cut would cost. The organization runs most of the public TV and radio stations in the state. It stood to lose about $4 million a year — up to 16% of its entire budget. And it warned that the loss "could put essential services, including emergency alert systems, at risk."

Smith represents Nebraska's 3rd District: the rural three-quarters of the state, the part where those transmitters are often the signal you actually get. He voted for the cut anyway. Then he voted for it again on July 18, 2025, when the Senate's version came back to the House.

Eight months later, the prairie caught fire.

March 12, 2026

The Morrill Fire started that afternoon northeast of Bridgeport. Driven by high wind, low humidity and extreme drought, it raced east across the prairie and grew past 600,000 acres — the largest wildfire Nebraska has ever recorded. It burned through Morrill, Garden, Arthur, Keith and Grant counties. Three other big fires burned at the same time: the Cottonwood Fire in Lincoln and Dawson counties, the Road 203 Fire near Halsey in the Nebraska National Forest, and the Anderson Bridge Fire in Cherry County.

All of it is central and western Nebraska. All of it is Adrian Smith's district.

One person died. Gov. Jim Pillen confirmed it two days later at a briefing in Ogallala:

"One Nebraskan lost their life – Rose White. I won't go into the circumstances. Hurts a little bit, but a grandma that was trying to get away."

She was 86 years old, in Arthur County. In the same briefing, Pillen said what every emergency manager says after a fast fire: it is important that people heed evacuation warnings and orders from officials.

That only works if the warning reaches them.

Smith's own words

A week later, Smith wrote a column about the fires. He called it "the worst wildfire crisis Nebraska has ever experienced" — more than 826,000 acres, "destroying homes, infrastructure, and forcing families to evacuate with little notice."

He's right. That's what happened. Wind-driven grass fire moves faster than word of mouth, and in Morrill, Garden, Grant, Arthur and Keith counties there isn't much between you and the weather except a radio.

Which is the part of his own column Smith did not connect to his own voting card. Eight months before he wrote "evacuate with little notice," he voted to cut the budget of the organization that had just said in writing, the day before the vote, that the money at stake "underpins our statewide emergency communications."

What the money actually paid for

The rescissions package wiped out everything Congress had appropriated for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for fiscal years 2026 and 2027. CPB — the nonprofit that had distributed that money since 1967 — announced two weeks later that it was shutting down.

Federal money is a small slice of what national outlets like NPR and PBS run on. That was never who it was for. It goes disproportionately to the small rural affiliates that a commercial market won't support, in places like the Nebraska Panhandle. Nebraska Public Media's general manager, Stacey Decker, put it this way after the vote:

"These aren't just numbers on a spreadsheet. Federal investment underpins the journalism we produce, the educational resources we share with children and families, the remarkable stories we tell about our state."

Nebraska Public Media also carries the state's severe-weather and emergency alerts, live-streams the Legislature, and covers state government daily. Losing 16% of your budget doesn't take one of those away cleanly. It takes a little out of all of them.

Who told Nebraska what was burning

Here's the detail that ought to settle the argument.

The report of Rose White's death — the one quoted above, the one that told the rest of the state a Nebraskan had been killed — was written by Jackie Ourada and Macy Byars of Nebraska Public Media News.

The newsroom that covered the worst fire in Nebraska history is the newsroom Adrian Smith voted twice to take $4 million a year away from.

It's not that public media was the only thing working. It wasn't. NOAA's satellite fire-detection system spotted the Morrill Fire at 1:40 p.m. Mountain Time that Thursday, and the county was alerted 13 minutes later — federal infrastructure, doing exactly the job it exists to do, on the day it mattered most. In Keith County alone, a local fire chief counted about 32 fire departments coming in on mutual aid to help the volunteer crews.

Nearly all of that is public. Nearly all of it is the kind of spending that gets called waste in a press release.

This is a pattern, not an accident

Smith is not the only Republican who defunded the emergency-information system in his own backyard and then watched a disaster roll through it. In Florida, Rep. Kat Cammack introduced the Defund NPR Act in February 2025 and voted for the same rescissions package in July — and WUFT in Gainesville, home of the Florida Public Radio Emergency Network, lost about 20% of its operating funds in hurricane country.

And Smith has a habit of describing federal spending as a burden right up until his district needs it. A year after the Republican tax law passed, he wrote an op-ed telling Nebraskans the tax cuts were "working for Nebraska" — while the same law stands to cost the state up to $4 billion in Medicaid over a decade and has already stripped food assistance. He has represented the 3rd District since 2007. Nineteen years is long enough to know what a $4 million hole does to a rural network.

We deserve better

Nobody is saying a public radio budget would have saved Rose White. We don't know that, and we're not going to pretend we do.

What we know is this. The people whose job is running Nebraska's emergency alerts said it in advance, in writing, and said it again the day before the second vote: cutting this money put those alerts at risk. Adrian Smith voted for the cut twice. Eight months later the largest fire in state history swept his district, a woman died trying to outrun it, and Smith wrote a column about families evacuating with little notice.

He called the vote a step toward fiscal responsibility. In the counties that burned, it's just less warning.

Sources

Nebraska House GOP members vote to cut $9.4B federal funding from foreign aid, NPR, PBS — Nebraska Examiner, June 12, 2025.
Governor says Nebraska grandmother died in Morrill Fire trying to escape — Nebraska Examiner / Nebraska Public Media News, March 14, 2026. Photo: Courtesy of the Governor's Office.

Pete Ricketts Is Leading the Senate Push for the Congressional Stock Trading Ban. Read It Closely: It Never Makes Anyone Sell What They Already Own.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:44:28 +0000

On July 29, 2026, Pete Ricketts stood on the Senate floor and asked his colleagues to pass H.R. 7008 — the House-passed bill that contains the Stop Insider Trading Act — by unanimous consent. No debate, no roll call, just done.

"Clearly Americans are not trusting this institution on this issue," he said, in remarks covered by KLKN. "We have an opportunity to course correct."

He has been at this all year. In March he introduced the Senate companion to a House bill written by Bryan Steil of Wisconsin. He wrote a weekly column about it. He went on CNBC to call it "common sense legislation." And he has a good story to tell with it, because Congress trading stocks on what it learns in closed briefings is a real scandal that both parties have refused to fix for a decade.

So we did the thing nobody does with a bill named after a good idea. We read it.

What the bill actually says

Here is the operative sentence of S. 4134, the Senate companion Ricketts introduced. It is also, word for word, the operative sentence of the House bill he asked the Senate to pass:

"Except as described in subsection (c), no covered individual may purchase a covered investment."

Purchase. That is the whole prohibition. Members of Congress, their spouses and their dependent children may not buy individual stocks while in office.

The bill says nothing about what they already own. There is no divestiture requirement anywhere in the text. A member who walks into the Senate holding $50 million in individual stocks walks back out holding $50 million in individual stocks, and everything those stocks earned in between.

The rest of the bill confirms it. Selling isn't banned — it is permitted, subject to filing a public notice seven to fourteen days beforehand. The one place the bill forces a sale is when a member breaks the rule and buys something they shouldn't have; then they have to unwind that specific purchase. The enforcement section is a fee schedule: $2,000 or 10% of the transaction, whichever is larger, plus any gain.

Two more exclusions matter. Investments held in a trust don't count as "covered investments" at all, so long as the member can't direct the trust's decisions and the trustee isn't an immediate family member. And "excepted investment funds" — diversified funds — are outside the ban entirely.

This is not a hidden loophole. It is the architecture of the bill. It restricts a member's future trading. It does not touch a member's existing wealth.

Which matters quite a lot, if you are Pete Ricketts

Ricketts is a billionaire. His family founded TD Ameritrade. He did not build a stock portfolio on a senator's salary and he does not need to buy anything.

Three days before that floor speech, Quiver Quantitative estimated that Ricketts made $8.6 million in the stock market in a single month — as we wrote at the time, money that arrived passively, while he was doing his job, in an amount that makes his Senate salary a rounding error.

Every dollar of that would be untouched by his own bill. He wasn't buying. He was holding.

That is the gap between what the Stop Insider Trading Act sounds like and what it does. It reads as a ban on lawmakers getting rich off their office. It functions as a ban on lawmakers newly buying individual stocks — which constrains a member who actively trades a modest account far more than it constrains a member who inherited a fortune and simply sits on it.

Ricketts is the second kind. He is leading the Senate push for a rule that regulates the first kind.

There is a version that would reach him

This is not a hypothetical objection or a design nobody thought of. It is the exact line that divides the serious stock-ban bills from the symbolic ones.

Back in July 2024, Josh Hawley, Gary Peters, Jeff Merkley and Jon Ossoff announced a bipartisan agreement on a stock trading bill that did three things Ricketts's does not: it covered the President and Vice President as well as Congress, it barred both buying and selling of covered assets, and it required elected officials, their spouses and their dependent children to divest starting in 2027.

Divest. Sell what you hold. Ricketts had that model available to him and put his name on a different one.

The unanimous consent request that was never going to work

There is a second thing worth knowing about the July 29 speech.

Two days earlier, on the night of July 27, Ashley Moody of Florida had already tried the same maneuver and it had already failed. Alex Padilla of California objected, calling the bill "nothing more than a political gimmick that was never truly intended to become law," and he gave two reasons. The first was that it exempts the President and the Vice President from the trading ban. The second was what else is in it.

The version the House passed on July 22 — by 232 to 198, roll call 280 — did not arrive clean.

Open the House-passed text and Section 3 is titled "Requiring voters to provide photo identification." It rewrites the Help America Vote Act so that an election official "may not provide a ballot for an election for Federal office to an individual who desires to vote in person unless the individual presents to the official a valid physical photo identification."

It reaches mail ballots too. Vote by mail and your ballot cannot be accepted unless you enclose a photocopy of a photo ID, or the last four digits of your Social Security number plus a sworn affidavit that you couldn't get one, or a notary's signature.

That is a national voter ID mandate, bolted onto a financial ethics bill.

You can think voter ID is good policy and still see what happened here. A bill passes by unanimous consent only if literally no senator objects. Attaching a contested, party-line election measure to it guarantees an objection. Ricketts stood up on July 29 and demanded unanimous passage of a bill that had drawn an objection on that same floor 48 hours earlier. Padilla objected again, in the same terms: "This measure contains two giant poison pills."

He got the objection. He also got the clip.

"Public service is a privilege, not a profit center"

That is Ricketts's own line, from the press release announcing the bill in March. He added: "Trust in Congress remains at an all-time low. To fix that, we need to prove we are playing by the same rules as everyone else."

Nebraskans are not playing by the same rules as Pete Ricketts, and his bill would not change that by a dollar.

He is not the only one who found this a comfortable bill to sponsor. We wrote earlier this month about Roger Marshall, who hid his family's pandemic stock trades for 17 months and is now a cosponsor of this same legislation — a bill whose provisions read like a description of what happened in his own household, offered without a word about it.

What Nebraskans should take from this

Ricketts is in a competitive race this fall. He has held one open round of town halls, in April 2025, where constituents in Kearney booed him over DOGE cuts, tariffs and the budget. Since then his most visible act of reform has been a bill that regulates a kind of wealth he does not have and leaves alone the kind he does.

The question to ask him at the State Fair debate isn't whether Congress should stop insider trading. Everyone says yes to that. The question is why the bill he wrote asks nothing of a senator whose portfolio earns more in a month than most Nebraskans will earn in a lifetime.

Source

"Sen. Ricketts asks Senate for unanimous vote on the Stop Insider Trading Act," KLKN-TV, July 31, 2026. Photo via KLKN-TV.

Adrian Smith Advertised His School Voucher Bill as '$10 Billion in Annual Tax Credits.' The Version Congress Passed Has No Limit at All.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 09:17:48 +0000

In less than five months, a brand new federal program starts handing out money. Twenty-seven states have already signed up for it. It is the first national private school voucher in American history.

Most people have never heard of it.

That is not an accident. It was not passed as an education bill. It was slipped into the tax section of the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," the giant budget bill Trump signed on July 4, 2025. If you were following the news that summer, you were hearing about Medicaid cuts and food aid. This was in the same bill, on a different page.

Here is what it does, in plain English — and what it takes out of all our pockets.

How it works

Starting January 1, 2027, you can give up to $1,700 to a nonprofit called a "Scholarship Granting Organization." That group hands out scholarships — vouchers — that families use for private school tuition and other school costs.

Then the federal government gives you the entire $1,700 back on your taxes.

Not a deduction. Not a percentage. The whole thing. It is a dollar-for-dollar credit worth 100% of what you gave, and it comes straight off your tax bill. You are not richer than before — you gave away $1,700 and got $1,700 back. But the donation cost you nothing. The government paid for it.

There is no other charity in America that works this way. As the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy put it, there is no other cause — "not children's hospitals, veterans' groups, or disaster relief" — where the federal government picks up the entire tab for your gift.

A few details that matter:

The $1,700 is per person, regardless of filing status. A married couple filing jointly gets $1,700, not $3,400.
It is nonrefundable. You need to owe federal income tax to use it. If you owe little or nothing, this tax break is not for you.
Contributions have to be cash. An earlier version let people donate stock, which would have let wealthy donors dodge capital gains taxes on top of everything else. That part got cut.
You claim it when you file your 2027 return, in 2028.

This is not like the state voucher programs you've heard about

A lot of states run vouchers. Arizona started the first tax-credit scholarship program back in 1997, and by August 2025 there were 22 such programs operating across 18 states.

But every one of those is a state program, paid for out of a state budget, on terms a state legislature wrote. Most cap the total credits they hand out in a year, and those caps run from under $2 million up to $540 million; some states set no cap either. Lawmakers argue about that number every session, and voters can throw them out over it.

The new federal program has no cap at all.

Not a small cap. Not a generous cap. None. Each person is limited to $1,700, but there is no limit on how many people can do it, and no limit on the total amount of money it pulls out of the U.S. Treasury. The more people who claim it, the more it costs — forever, with no vote required.

That was a choice, and it was made late. The version the House passed had a safeguard: total payouts capped at roughly $5 billion a year. The bill's own author had written a $10 billion annual cap into his original version. Then the Senate parliamentarian ruled the provision broke the chamber's budget rules, and senators rewrote it to survive — a rewrite that threw the cap out entirely.

The House version would also have expired after a few years. The final one is permanent.

What it costs all of us

Congress's own scorekeeper, the Joint Committee on Taxation, estimates the program will drain about $26 billion from federal revenue over ten years. That is the official number.

Outside analysts think it could be far bigger, because with no ceiling, the cost depends entirely on how many people sign up — and there is a large, well-funded movement whose whole job is getting people to sign up. ITEP ran the math. If roughly 59 million taxpayers who like the idea of vouchers all claimed the credit, it would cost $101 billion a year. If only half of them do, it is nearly $51 billion a year. Even if just 5 million people participate — roughly the number of children already in private school — it runs past $8 billion a year.

Put the high end next to what the federal government actually spends on schools:

Program	Annual federal spending
Title I, for schools serving low-income kids	$18.4 billion
IDEA state grants, for kids with disabilities	$14.6 billion
The new voucher credit (high estimate)	up to $51 billion

One uncapped tax credit for private schools could cost more than the two biggest federal K-12 programs combined — the money for poor districts and the money for children with disabilities.

And here is the part that reaches everyone: your state does not have to opt in for you to pay for this. States choose whether to participate. But a taxpayer in a state that opted out can still donate to a scholarship group in a state that opted in, claim the credit, and shrink the federal Treasury by $1,700. The families in the non-participating state get nothing. The bill still comes to everybody.

"Low-income" can mean half a million dollars

The program is sold as help for low-income families. Read the definition.

A student qualifies if the household earns up to 300% of the area median gross income. Not 300% of the poverty line, which is what most state programs use. Three times the median — the middle — for wherever you live.

The Congressional Research Service spells out what that means. If the median income in your area is $60,000, a household making $180,000 qualifies. If the median is $100,000, a household making $300,000 qualifies. In 2025, the highest area median income in the country was $195,200, in Santa Clara County, California. Three times that is more than $585,000.

One more wrinkle: area median income does not change based on how many people are in your household. A single adult and a family of six face the same cutoff.

Nobody has to answer for the money

State voucher programs usually come with strings. Private schools taking the money might have to be accredited, run background checks, or give students the state test.

The federal program has none of that. The Congressional Research Service notes that the law does not place any "requirements on private schools that enroll scholarship recipients." No accreditation. No state tests. No background checks. And a private school does not have to take a scholarship student at all — it can say no and keep taking everyone else's money.

The scholarship groups themselves face a thin set of rules: be a 501(c)(3), keep the money in a separate account, serve at least 10 students at more than one school, and spend at least 90% of the money on scholarships. They keep up to 10% for overhead.

And they must give priority to students who got a scholarship the year before, then to those students' siblings — before any new family is considered. Whoever gets in first stays in first.

We have written about what happens when nobody is watching. An Arkansas private school taking state voucher money had students attack a 13-year-old and made kids scrub floors as punishment — and the state has no record of ever visiting or investigating it. The Wichita school Iowa candidate Zach Lahn co-founded never sought accreditation, which left it free of state regulation, state tests and any duty to hire licensed teachers.

Where the money actually goes

Every state that has opened vouchers to everyone gets the same result. The money goes to families who were already paying private tuition.

In Arkansas, 95% of voucher users in the program's first year had never attended a public school.
In Florida's first universal year, 69% of new recipients were already in private school. Only 13% had ever attended a public one.
In Iowa, about two-thirds were already in private school.
In Ohio, the share of voucher students who had been in private school the year before jumped from 7% in 2019 to nearly 55% in 2023 — and in Cleveland, the share of voucher users who were low-income fell from 35% to 7%.

For the kids who do switch, the research is not kind. Josh Cowen, a Michigan State professor who spent years evaluating these programs before turning against them, says studies of vouchers in Washington D.C., Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio found some of the largest test score drops "ever seen in the research record" — on par, he writes, with what the pandemic did to test scores.

Who wrote it

The House bill behind all this is H.R. 833, the Educational Choice for Children Act. Its author is Adrian Smith, who represents Nebraska's 3rd District.

When he reintroduced it in January 2025, Smith said it was about giving students "a brighter future, no matter their background or address." His press release listed 30 House cosponsors and endorsements from former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, former Attorney General Bill Barr, and more than 150 national and state groups. It also described his bill as providing "$10 billion in annual tax credits" — a number, a ceiling, a limit.

The law that passed has no such number.

Nebraska voters had already weighed in. In November 2024, they voted to repeal their own state's private school scholarship program, killing its $10 million a year. Colorado and Kentucky voters turned down voucher measures the same night; Nebraska's margin was the widest of the three, 65% to 35%. Nebraska has since opted into the federal program anyway.

The vote, and what happens next

The final bill cleared the House on July 3, 2025 by 218 to 214. Republicans voted 218–2 for it. The Senate had split 50–50 two days earlier, and Vice President JD Vance broke the tie.

The Treasury Department is still writing the rules; officials said in June that full guidance is expected by the end of September. Democrats have introduced a repeal bill in both chambers — the Keep Public Funds in Public Schools Act, S.4297 and H.R.9289. Both were referred to committee on the day they were filed and have not moved since.

Meanwhile the state-by-state fight is live. Pennsylvania Treasurer Stacy Garrity, running for governor, was asked whether her state should join and answered "I would a hundred percent". In Tennessee, Marsha Blackburn's push to expand vouchers drew $3 million from Club for Growth and billionaire Jeff Yass. This program is the quiet half of a much louder campaign to take apart the Department of Education.

About 49.6 million American kids go to a public school — around nine in ten. Those schools have to take every child who walks in the door: rich or poor, disabled or not, any faith or none. They are the only schools that do.

Congress just built an unlimited pipeline out of the Treasury and pointed it somewhere else, and it never had to say out loud what it was doing. We deserve better.

Source

Details of the program from the Congressional Research Service report on P.L. 119-21 and The Hechinger Report's explainer, "10 things to know about Trump's new school voucher program." Photo: Alex Brandon/Getty Images.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the money is for

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

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

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

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

The only limits Congress wrote were about equipment

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

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

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

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

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

Why the margin matters more than the bill

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

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

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

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

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

The 187 with report cards

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

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

How they voted

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

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

Mike Flood Wrote Nebraska's Crypto Bank Law. America's First Crypto Bank Landed in His Hometown — and Its CEO Is One of His Biggest Donors.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:29:50 +0000

On November 12, 2025, Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen signed a piece of paper that made history: the first digital asset bank charter in the United States, granted to a cryptocurrency company called Telcoin.

Telcoin is an international company. One of its two U.S. locations is in Norfolk, Nebraska.

Norfolk is Mike Flood's hometown.

And the law that made the charter possible is a law Flood wrote himself. The station that covered the signing said so plainly: Telcoin began filing in October 2023, "two years after the Nebraska Financial Innovation Act, put forward by then-State Sen. Mike Flood, went into effect."

He wrote the law

In January 2021, State Senator Mike Flood of Norfolk introduced LB 649, the Nebraska Financial Innovation Act. According to the Legislature's own account of its passage, the bill "allows creation of digital asset depository institutions in Nebraska" — crypto banks, regulated by the state Department of Banking and Finance.

Two provisions matter here. LB 649 set a minimum capital requirement of $10 million. And it required that a digital depository's headquarters and the office of its chief executive be located in Nebraska.

In other words, the law Flood wrote guaranteed that any company chasing this charter would have to plant its executive suite in his state.

The Legislature passed LB 649 on May 20, 2021, 46–2. Nebraska became the second state in the country, after Wyoming, to authorize digital asset depositories.

Fourteen months later, Flood was in Congress.

The company that used it

Telcoin's founder and CEO, Paul Neuner, put it this way:

"This charter is a milestone in the history of banking, but it also demonstrates that rural communities can play a part in emerging technologies — Norfolk, Nebraska can be at the center of the internet of money."

Then he named the people he was grateful to:

"We're very thankful to Governor Pillen, Congressman Flood, Director Lammers and his team for having the vision to see that this is about more than cryptocurrency."

That's the CEO of the first crypto bank in America thanking a sitting member of Congress, by title, for the state law that created his charter.

Then look at the campaign filings

According to FEC records compiled by Who Bought My Rep, Paul Neuner — listed with the employer Telcoin — is one of Mike Flood's largest individual contributors, at $23,800.

For scale: that site counts about $6.2 million in contributions and outside spending behind Flood since 2020, and only about $131,600 of it — roughly 2 percent — came from small grassroots donors.

Neuner is not the biggest crypto money in Flood's orbit. Not close.

$126,740 from the crypto industry's super PAC

The single largest outside spender backing Flood is Defend American Jobs, the cryptocurrency industry's Republican-facing super PAC and part of the Fairshake network. FEC filings show $126,740 spent supporting him in the 2024 cycle — more than every other outside group that has ever spent on his behalf.

Super PAC spending is not a donation — it's money spent independently, with no limit on the amount. That's exactly what makes it worth noticing. There is no ceiling on it, and the industry chose to spend it on him.

If that pattern sounds familiar, it should: the same network spent more than $12 million to make Barry Moore Alabama's Senate nominee — its single biggest bet of the 2026 cycle. Crypto does not spread its money evenly. It buys the people who are useful to it.

Flood is useful to it. He sits on the House Financial Services Committee, which writes the federal rules for digital assets.

What he did with that seat

On July 17, 2025, the House passed the two biggest crypto bills in American history within hours of each other. Flood voted yes on both:

The CLARITY Act, setting the regulatory framework for the broader digital asset market — roll call 199
The GENIUS Act, creating the first federal framework for dollar-backed stablecoins — roll call 200

The next day he co-wrote a column with Rep. Kevin Hern celebrating them, describing the previous four years as a period when "the digital asset industry was under assault" and casting the bills as House Republicans following through on Trump and Vance's promise to "usher in a new 'golden age' for digital assets."

The column's own author bio ends: "Rep. Mike Flood is a member of the Republican Policy Committee and the House Financial Services Committee."

It does not mention that he wrote the state law that produced America's first crypto bank, in his own hometown, or that the industry's super PAC is the biggest outside backer of his campaigns.

Why this is worse than a normal donor story

Most conflict-of-interest stories go one direction: an industry gives money to a politician, and the politician votes its way. This one runs a full circle.

Flood built the legal machinery in Nebraska that lets a crypto bank exist, with a residency requirement that forced the winner to put its headquarters and its CEO's office in the state.
A company with a location in his hometown became the first in the nation to use it.
That company's CEO became one of his largest individual donors.
He now sits on the committee that writes the federal rules those same companies operate under, and votes for their priorities.
The industry's super PAC spends six figures keeping him there.

None of the steps is illegal. Each one is disclosed. That's the thing about how this actually works — it isn't a briefcase of cash, it's a career.

What it isn't paying for

About $6.2 million in contributions and outside spending has gone into keeping Flood in Congress. Two percent of it came from ordinary Nebraskans giving small amounts.

Meanwhile the district he represents is losing things. Nebraska stands to lose up to $4 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade under the budget bill Flood voted for — a bill he later admitted at a town hall he hadn't fully read. About 18,000 Nebraskans stopped getting food assistance in the year to April 2026 — a drop of 11 percent in the state's own data, which Nebraska Appleseed's food and nutrition manager attributes to that bill.

There is no super PAC spending $126,740 on their behalf.

Sources

Nebraska governor signs charter allowing Telcoin to operate as nation's first digital asset bank — Gina Dvorak, 10/11 NOW / WOWT, November 12, 2025. Photo: Office of Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen.
Digital asset depository bill approved — Unicameral Update, Nebraska Legislature, May 21, 2021.
LB649 — Adopt the Nebraska Financial Innovation Act — Nebraska Legislature. Introduced By: Flood. Date of Introduction: January 20, 2021.
Becoming a Leader in Cryptocurrency Banking: Nebraska Adopts Financial Innovation Act — Husch Blackwell, July 8, 2021.

Mike Flood Co-Owns 26 Nebraska Radio and TV Stations. He Also Co-Chairs the Caucus That Lobbies Their Regulator.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:26:12 +0000

Most members of Congress have a donor problem. Mike Flood has something rarer: he owns the media.

Flood started a radio station in Norfolk, Nebraska during his second year of law school. By the time the Nebraska Examiner checked in in April 2023 — nine months after he was sworn into the U.S. House — Flood Communications had grown to 18 radio stations and seven low-power TV stations across Nebraska, operating together as News Channel Nebraska, plus Telemundo Nebraska and the Spanish-language station Radio Lobo.

That Examiner story was about the company buying two more stations, from its longtime owners, one of them a retiring conservative radio commentator, while its founder sat in Congress.

The count has grown since. The FCC's own licensing database today lists twelve FM and seven AM radio stations plus seven low-power TV stations — 26 in all, and seven FM translators on top of that — every one of them licensed to a company that appears on Flood's financial disclosure. None of the licenses is outside Nebraska.

He still owns it, and it still pays him

This isn't a past life he left behind. It's on his own paperwork.

Flood's annual financial disclosure for 2024, filed with the Clerk of the House on August 11, 2025, lists nine companies — eight of them described on the form as radio station broadcasting, one as employment services:

Company	Value	2024 income to Flood
Flood Communications of Omaha, L.L.C.	$1,000,001–$5,000,000	$50,001–$100,000
Flood Communications West, L.L.C.	$1,000,001–$5,000,000	$100,001–$1,000,000
Flood Communications, L.L.C.	$500,001–$1,000,000	$15,001–$50,000
Red Beacon Communications, L.L.C.	$250,001–$500,000	$15,001–$50,000
Flood Communications of Beatrice, L.L.C.	$250,001–$500,000	—
Flood Broadcasting, Inc.	$100,001–$250,000	—
Flood Digital Networks LLC	$50,001–$100,000	—
Flood Multimedia of Columbus, L.L.C.	$50,001–$100,000	—
Flood Communications Tri-Cities, L.L.C.	—	—

Add up the ranges and the media holdings are worth somewhere between $3.2 million and $12.4 million, and they paid him between $180,000 and $1.2 million in partnership income in a single year.

And he isn't a passive shareholder. In Section E of the same filing — the section for positions held — he lists himself as a Member of each of these companies, ten entries in all.

Then he co-chairs the caucus for his own industry

In the 119th Congress, Flood is a co-chair of the Congressional Broadcasters Caucus. Its stated purpose is to educate Congress about the challenges broadcasters face and highlight the importance of local radio and TV stations.

He is a broadcaster. His companies hold the licenses for 26 Nebraska stations. He is advocating for himself, in a room he helps run, and it's listed on his official House website four lines below the 4-H Caucus.

Then it stopped being abstract.

On March 27, 2026, Flood and his fellow caucus co-chairs led a letter to the Federal Communications Commission — signed by 87 more members of Congress — pressing FCC Chairman Brendan Carr and his fellow commissioners to set "a firm timeline" for the national transition to NextGen TV.

The FCC is the agency that issues and renews the licenses for Flood's seven television stations.

The letter's argument is a broadcast-industry argument, made in broadcast-industry terms:

"Broadcasters and device manufacturers alike need regulatory certainty to make long-term investments and fully realize the potential of this technology... broadcasters cannot spark that demand until they regain access to their full channel capacity."

Whether the FCC is right or wrong about NextGen TV isn't the point. The point is who was asking. A sitting congressman who co-owns television stations wrote to the regulator of television stations to ask for a rule change that television station owners want.

Why the media part matters more than the money part

The dollar figures are the smaller half of this.

News Channel Nebraska describes itself as "the only in-state, independent television network of its kind" and "one of the largest news operations in Nebraska." Its Spanish-language sister operation is billed as the state's only local Spanish-language network TV station.

So in much of Nebraska — especially the rural counties where the local paper has thinned out or closed — a large share of the local news reaching people is produced by a company their congressman founded, still owns a piece of, and still draws six or seven figures from.

That's the actual problem. Not that Flood personally spikes stories — there's no evidence of that. It's that the arrangement makes the question unanswerable from the outside. A voter in Norfolk or Beatrice or Columbus who wants to know whether their news is being shaped by the person they're voting on has no way to check. They just have to take his word for it.

Local news is how people find out what their representative did. Owning it is not the same as any other business.

It's legal. That's the point.

Nothing here is hidden. It's on his House disclosure, on his committee page, on a press release. When the four co-chairs launched the caucus on March 20, 2025, Flood said this:

"As someone who grew up in the broadcasting world before coming to Congress, I know firsthand how critical this kind of advocacy is for broadcasters."

He's right that he knows firsthand. That's the conflict, stated out loud. Note the tense, though: that release describes his broadcasting career entirely in the past, as something that happened "prior to their elections to Congress." The financial disclosure he filed five months later says he's still a member of every one of those companies — ten entries in Section E, because one of them is listed twice — and still collecting partnership income from four of them.

The National Association of Broadcasters, the industry's lobby in Washington, put out a statement in the same release thanking the four of them for relaunching the caucus.

We keep finding the same machine in different industries. Diana Harshbarger vice-chairs the health subcommittee that oversees the FDA, takes money from compounding-pharmacy lobbies, and asked the FDA to loosen the rules on peptides — the products her family's business sells. Flood's version is cleaner and more direct: he skipped the donors and owns the industry himself.

To his credit, Flood does something most of his colleagues won't — he holds real, in-person town halls, and Nebraskans have used them to confront him about everything from SNAP cuts to a court-stripping provision he admitted he hadn't read before voting for it.

Someone should use the next one to ask him about the FCC letter.

Sources

Media company founded by U.S. Rep. Flood adds two stations, plans Sandhills news bureau — Paul Hammel, Nebraska Examiner, April 16, 2023.
Rep. Mike Flood, Financial Disclosure Report for calendar year 2024 — Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives, filed August 11, 2025.
FCC station lists for Nebraska — FM, AM and TV query results, retrieved September 10, 2026. Search each for "FLOOD" and "RED BEACON."
Alford, Broadcasters Caucus Co-Chairs Lead 91 Lawmakers in Urging FCC to Set Firm Timeline for National Transition to NextGen TV — Office of Rep. Mark Alford, March 27, 2026.

Mike Flood Voted to Strip Federal Courts of Their Power to Enforce Orders. Then He Told a Town Hall He Hadn't Read It.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:22:57 +0000

On May 22, 2025, the House passed Trump's budget bill by a single vote, 215 to 214. Mike Flood voted yes.

Five days later he stood in front of a room of constituents in Seward, Nebraska, and the very first question was about a provision buried on page 500-something of the 1,100-page bill he had just voted for.

His answer, as KMTV reported:

"I'm not going to hide the truth, this provision was unknown to me when I voted for that bill."

What was in the part he didn't read

Section 70302 of H.R. 1 was one sentence long. Here is the version the House actually passed, in full:

"No court of the United States may enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), whether issued prior to, on, or subsequent to the date of enactment of this section."

That is broader than the version reported out of committee two days earlier, which barred courts only from using "appropriated funds" to enforce contempt. The Congressional Research Service notes the change: the funding language "was removed in an amendment to the bill and does not appear in the engrossed version." What Flood voted for was the flat bar.

Strip out the legal language and here is what it does.

When a federal judge orders the government to stop doing something, the only thing that makes that order real is contempt — the judge's power to punish officials who ignore it. Section 70302 would have taken away the courts' power to enforce contempt in a huge category of cases, and it would have done it retroactively: every injunction and restraining order already sitting on the Trump administration would have become a piece of paper with no teeth.

A court order nobody has to obey is not a court order. It's a suggestion.

This is not an abstract worry. It's already happening in the cases where courts do still have teeth — a federal judge had to order the EPA a second time after the agency read a ruling voiding its grant terminations and concluded it had to do nothing. Section 70302 was designed to make that the permanent default.

"Unknown to me"

This was not a secret. Two days before the vote — on May 20, 2025 — Rep. Laura Friedman and 20 members of Congress sent a letter warning that the provision "would block courts from enforcing contempt rulings" and demanding it be struck.

Flood's own Nebraska colleague, Rep. Don Bacon, told KMTV flatly:

"I knew about this provision and I'm totally fine if the Senate strips it out."

So the information was available. Bacon read it. Nebraska's Adrian Smith not only read it, he defended it, telling the station the provision "reinforces those existing requirements" and that he supported its inclusion.

Flood — a lawyer, and a former speaker of the Nebraska Legislature — did not read it, and voted for it anyway.

The crowd in Seward reacted about how you'd expect. One constituent:

"You say, oh I care about the rule of law but you voted for a bill that contains a provision that guts the checks the judicial branch has and you didn't even read it? It's ridiculous."

Colleen Nygern, the constituent who asked the question, walked out of the town hall rather than listen to the rest of his answers.

What he promised, and who actually did it

Flood told the room he'd fix it:

"When I return to Washington I am going to very clearly tell the people in my conference that we cannot support undermining our court system and we must allow our courts to operate and issue injunctions."

Section 70302 did come out of the bill. Flood didn't do it.

The Senate wrote its own version of the attack on the courts — a bond requirement that would have blocked judges from issuing an injunction against the government unless the plaintiff put up security "in an amount proper to pay the costs and damages" the government sustained — and on June 23, 2025, Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled that language violated the Byrd rule, the Senate procedure that keeps non-budget policy out of a fast-track budget bill. The House's contempt language was, as NBC News put it that day, "a different version of the provision" — and it did not survive into the Senate's rewrite either. Neither one is in the law Trump signed; the words "contempt citation" appear nowhere in it. A Senate referee and a Senate rewrite saved the enforceability of federal court orders. Not the lawyer from Nebraska who voted for the thing.

Then, on July 3, 2025, the final bill came back to the House and Flood voted for it again.

The other 1,095 pages

Here's the part that should actually worry Nebraskans. Section 70302 got caught because one constituent in Seward read the bill herself and stood in line to ask about it.

Nobody caught the rest on Flood's behalf. And the rest is what's hitting his district right now:

Nebraska stands to lose up to $4 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade, with up to 55,000 Nebraskans projected to lose health coverage.
About 18,000 Nebraskans have stopped participating in food assistance over the past year — an 11% drop, per the state's own DHHS data, which Nebraska Appleseed attributes to the new law.

Flood has been asked about that too. Confronted at a town hall over the SNAP cuts, his answer was "we do not have unlimited money in the United States." The room booed him.

He didn't say that provision was unknown to him.

Why "I didn't read it" is not an excuse

Reading the bill is the job. It is close to the whole job. A member of Congress has one vote and a staff whose entire purpose is to tell them what's in the thing they're voting on.

The May 22 vote passed 215–214. Flood's yes was not a formality; a single member changing their mind would have stopped that version of the bill in its tracks. One Republican, Brian Fitzpatrick, later voted against the final version while staying quiet about the May 22 vote that kept it alive. Flood voted yes both times.

To his credit, Flood keeps holding real, in-person town halls — which is more than most of his colleagues will do, and it's how Nebraskans found this out at all. But the point of a town hall is that constituents get to hold him to something. He told them he'd go fight the provision. What actually killed it was the Senate — a rewrite, and a parliamentarian ruling ten days before he voted for the bill one more time.

Source

Congressman Mike Flood tells crowd he didn't read portions of the Big Beautiful bill before voting to pass it — Max Williams, KMTV 3 News Now, May 28, 2025.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The answer is 45.

What the STOCK Act actually asks

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

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

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

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

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

The roll call

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

The biggest offenders:

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

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

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

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

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

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

"My broker did it"

Read the responses side by side and a script emerges.

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

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

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

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

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

The penalty is $200

Here's why none of them seem especially worried.

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

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

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

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

Why the timing is the whole story

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

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

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

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

The ones who campaigned on this

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He has been late on his own disclosures twice.

Back to that July vote

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

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

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

The bottom line

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

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

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

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

We deserve better.

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

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

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

It sued the United States Department of Justice.

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

The lawsuit names acting Attorney General Todd Blanche personally.

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

What New Mexico is asking for

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

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

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

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

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

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

And:

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

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

Here's the part that should make you angry.

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

They never did.

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

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

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

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

What they're looking for

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twenty years. Nobody wrote it down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now: the part that's on Republican senators

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

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

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

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

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

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

They already voted to keep these files sealed once

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

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

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

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

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

Thirteen for thirteen.

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

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

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

Who this actually hurts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We deserve better.

Source

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

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

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 22:20:53 +0000

At 4:17 a.m. on Saturday, August 8, 2026, the United States Senate made Todd Blanche the attorney general of the United States.

The vote was 50 to 49. Every one of the 50 yes votes was a Republican. Every Democrat voted no. Two Republicans — Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — voted no with them. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky did not vote.

One vote. That's the whole margin.

Todd Blanche is Donald Trump's personal criminal defense lawyer. Not "was, a long time ago." He was hired in 2023 to defend Trump against criminal charges, he was a lead attorney on Trump's defense team at the hush-money trial in New York, and he defended Trump in the two federal cases brought by the Justice Department he now runs.

Fifty Republican senators looked at that and said: perfect, give him the whole building.

What they actually voted for

This wasn't a close call that turned on some technical dispute. The objections were enormous, they were public for weeks, and several Republicans raised them out loud before folding.

A $1.8 billion fund for Trump's supporters. Trump sued the IRS. Then he settled that lawsuit with his own administration. The settlement created a $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" to pay people who say the criminal justice system mistreated them — and Trump was explicit that he meant the people who attacked the Capitol on January 6. He called them "great American Patriots."

Tax audit immunity for the Trump family. The same settlement shielded Trump, two of his sons, and the Trump Organization from IRS audits and enforcement on past returns. A federal judge who handled the IRS case described Trump's lawsuit as an improper exercise in self-dealing. The union representing IRS workers went to court two days before the vote to try to block the immunity deal.

Prosecuting the president's enemies. Under Blanche, the Justice Department charged former FBI Director James Comey with threatening the president — over a photo of seashells arranged to read "86 47" that Comey posted online. It charged the Southern Poverty Law Center. It opened an investigation into the lawsuits E. Jean Carroll brought and won against Trump for sexual abuse and defamation. Comey's lawyers are asking a judge to throw his case out, accusing the department of misleading judges and withholding key facts.

Blanche's answer to all of this was two letters, written on August 2. One said the order creating the fund "is rescinded and shall have no force or effect." The other narrowed the tax immunity deal.

That was enough for fifty senators.

The letters aren't worth much

Here is the part nobody should skip past.

ABC News reported that the agreement Cornyn and Tillis accepted contains no language preventing the fund from being brought back under a different name or a different method. The Judiciary Committee advanced Blanche anyway on August 4, on a 12–10 vote along party lines.

Brandon DeBot of the Tax Law Center at NYU Law told NPR what the letters were worth:

"These assurances are not worth the paper they're written on. They don't pull back on the attempts to give the president and his affiliates unauthorized immunity from tax audits. And they don't do anything new to stop the president from trying to bring back the fund."

And the president himself spent the week before the vote saying he wanted the fund back. Trump told reporters the fund would have been "very fair," that it could have given "some solace" to Jan. 6 defendants, and: "I view that fund as a positive, and a lot of Republicans do too."

So the deal was: Trump says out loud he still wants it, his own lawyer signs a piece of paper saying it's cancelled, and the Senate calls that a win and goes home for a month.

Thirteen of them had already done this once

This is the fact that should follow every one of these senators around.

On March 5, 2025, the Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as deputy attorney general — the number-two job — by 52 to 46. Everything anyone objected to on Saturday morning happened after that vote, on the job that vote handed him.

Every single Republican we track who was in the Senate in March 2025 voted yes then, too. Blackburn, Capito, Cotton, Hagerty, Husted, Hyde-Smith, Marshall, Moody, Ricketts, Risch, Rounds, Sullivan, Tuberville — all yes, both times.

They didn't get fooled. They got exactly what they voted for, twice.

Susan Collins voted yes in March 2025 as well, and then announced a no vote on August 4 — hours after the two Republicans with real leverage had already given theirs away.

What Blanche did to the Justice Department

Before the vote, more than 1,200 former Justice Department employees — people who served across 14 administrations, including dozens of former U.S. attorneys — signed a letter to the Judiciary Committee urging senators to reject him.

Their director, Stacey Young, put it this way:

"Since his confirmation as Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche has shown time and again that his guiding star is fealty to the President, not the Constitution."

The letter's numbers are the part that should worry anyone who has ever called the FBI or reported a fraud. Under Blanche's watch, over 16,000 employees left the department, including more than a quarter of its attorneys. Agents, analysts, immigration judges and career prosecutors were fired for declining to bring vindictive prosecutions, for refusing to lie in court, or for working assigned cases the president didn't like. Others were pulled off their real work to patrol streets in Washington, D.C.

The letter says the consequences reach far past the Justice Department's own hallways:

"They've meant that much of the department's vital work isn't being done, or isn't being done as well – leaving communities less safe, Americans' rights less protected, and our national security more vulnerable."

That is 1,200 people who spent their careers inside the Justice Department, serving under presidents of both parties, telling the Senate this man should not get the job. Fifty senators voted yes anyway.

The Epstein survivors told them, too

Murkowski, one of the two Republican no votes, said part of her reason was the Justice Department's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. She wasn't alone — Sen. Thom Tillis had pushed Blanche to meet with Epstein survivors, and Blanche finally did in July.

It did not go well. Afterward, survivor Annie Farmer said in a July 16 statement that she found Blanche "abrasive, condescending, and intentionally noncommittal to survivors," and survivors urged senators to block him.

Blanche was the public face of the Epstein files at the Justice Department. He is the official who personally sat down with Ghislaine Maxwell in a Florida courthouse for two days of interviews on July 24 and 25, 2025, after granting her limited immunity so she could talk without fear of being prosecuted over what she said. She told him she never saw Trump act inappropriately. Shortly afterward she was moved from a low-security prison in Florida to a minimum-security camp in Texas. Neither her lawyer nor the Bureau of Prisons has explained why.

Fourteen senators on this site voted to promote him. One of them, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, voted to keep the Epstein files sealed and then took checks from two men named in them.

The fourteen we track

Ashley Moody of Florida spent six years as her state's attorney general before Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed her to the Senate. She knows better than almost anyone in that chamber what it means for a chief law enforcement officer to be independent of the politician above him. She sits on the Judiciary Committee. She voted yes.

Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee also sits on Judiciary, and is running for governor while she does it.

Darline Graham of South Carolina has been a senator since July 14. Nobody elected her — Gov. Henry McMaster appointed her to the seat left vacant by the death of her brother, Lindsey Graham, on Trump's public recommendation. She has never held elected office in her life. She now sits on the Judiciary Committee, and the first bill she put her name on was one that would make it harder for millions of citizens to register to vote. Now she's voted to confirm the president's defense lawyer as attorney general.

Jon Husted of Ohio spent the same week writing a brand-new photo ID bill that the Senate voted on nineteen minutes after it confirmed Blanche. His state lost more Obamacare coverage than any other in the country this year.

Tommy Tuberville of Alabama is running for governor while still holding his Senate seat.

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

The three who talked tough and voted yes anyway

The best part — if you like this sort of thing — is who made the noise.

Cornyn and Tillis spent two weeks holding the nomination hostage. Cornyn accused the Justice Department of having "stonewalled" him and said flatly, "They've simply refused to cooperate." Tillis said the fund was "an insult to the police officers and the people that defended us on January the 6th." Then he said, "It's done. It's been rescinded, and I am satisfied." Both of them voted yes.

Bill Cassidy of Louisiana was the decisive vote. He listed the problems himself — the $1.8 billion fund, the tax immunity deal, the prosecutions of Trump's political opponents — and then said: "This is not a referendum on President Trump. It is a decision regarding Mr. Blanche in very specific circumstances."

Here's what those three men have in common. All of them are on their way out. Cornyn lost his May primary to Ken Paxton after Trump endorsed against him. Tillis isn't running again. Cassidy lost his primary this year to a Trump-backed challenger.

The only Republicans who used any leverage at all were the three with nothing left to lose. And they gave it away for two letters.

That tells you what the other 47 yes votes were really about.

What they did with the night

The Senate pulled an all-nighter to get this done. In the same session it confirmed Blanche, passed a stopgap funding bill, and held a pre-dawn vote on a photo ID requirement for voting. Then everyone went home for a month of recess.

They did not lower anyone's grocery bill. They did not lower anyone's rent, or premiums, or electric bill.

They stayed up until 4:17 in the morning to hand the Justice Department to the president's defense attorney, and then they left town.

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, told them what the moment was before they voted:

"If there is ever a moment in history when we need an Attorney General above reproach, who is clearly dedicated to ending corruption, even at the highest level of our government, it's right now."

Fifty of them heard that and voted for the president's defense attorney anyway.

We deserve better.

Source

Alanna Durkin Richer and Lisa Mascaro, "Todd Blanche narrowly confirmed as Trump's attorney general in overnight vote" (Associated Press via PBS News, August 8, 2026). Additional reporting from the Associated Press, NPR, and The Hill. Roll call from Senate vote #230. Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters.