MAGA Report Cards — New Jersey

Elon Musk's Super PAC Is Spending $5.1 Million on the Midterms, Almost All of It in Races With 18 Republicans on This Site. It Spent $3.7 Million of That Attacking Democrats.

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:44:19 +0000

In early September, a super PAC funded by Elon Musk dropped more than a million dollars into Michigan's Senate race in a matter of days. The money went to digital ads and mailers boosting Republican Mike Rogers (MI), the former seven-term congressman trying to win the seat, and attacking his Democratic opponent Abdul El-Sayed. It was part of $28 million in outside spending on that one race since the August 4 primary, according to Detroit News reporting.

Michigan is not the exception. It is one stop on a national tour.

We pulled every independent expenditure that Musk's America PAC has reported to the Federal Election Commission for the 2026 cycle. The filings show $5.1 million spent so far, spread across Senate and House races in seventeen states. Eighteen of the Republicans that money is meant to elect have report cards on this site. About $4.95 million of the total is in races those eighteen are running in; the remaining $199,000 is spread across four other races.

How the spending breaks down

America PAC's reported spending divides in two. Some of it pays for ads and mail supporting a Republican. The rest pays for ads and mail attacking that Republican's Democratic opponent. Here is how the support side breaks down for the eighteen candidates we track:

Candidate	Race	Reported in support
Mike Rogers (MI)	Michigan, Senate	$520,499
Jon Husted	Ohio, Senate	$397,848
Ken Paxton	Texas, Senate	$124,595
Randy Fine	Florida, 6th District	$87,134
Susan Collins	Maine, Senate	$78,306
Dan Sullivan	Alaska, Senate	$58,004
Ashley Hinson	Iowa, Senate	$27,300
Gabe Evans	Colorado, 8th District	$12,220
David Valadao	California, 22nd District	$12,220
Juan Ciscomani	Arizona, 6th District	$12,220
Jimmy Patronis	Florida, 1st District	$10,244
Rob Bresnahan	Pennsylvania, 8th District	$6,690
Scott Perry	Pennsylvania, 10th District	$6,431
Ryan Mackenzie	Pennsylvania, 7th District	$6,388
Tom Kean Jr.	New Jersey, 7th District	$5,908
Mike Lawler	New York, 17th District	$5,563
Derrick Van Orden	Wisconsin, 3rd District	$5,225
Jen Kiggans	Virginia, 2nd District	$5,000

That adds up to about $1.38 million. The other $3.7 million went somewhere else.

Nearly three-quarters of the money is an attack

Of the $5.1 million America PAC has reported this cycle, $3.7 million — about 73 cents of every dollar — was spent opposing Democratic candidates rather than supporting Republican ones.

The biggest single target is not a Republican's ally. It is James Talarico, the Democrat running against Ken Paxton in Texas, with $1.49 million spent against him. Sherrod Brown in Ohio drew $941,000. Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan drew $527,000. Josh Turek in Iowa, Troy Jackson in Maine, Chris Pappas in New Hampshire and Mary Peltola in Alaska each drew six figures of opposition spending.

Put plainly: the single largest expense in Musk's entire 2026 portfolio is attacking one man in Texas. It is bigger than everything the PAC has spent supporting all eighteen Republicans on this list combined.

That is a choice about what the money is for. Ads that make a case for a candidate have to say something about the candidate. Ads that attack an opponent do not.

Four races got most of it. Eleven candidates got a rounding error.

The support money is not spread evenly either. Rogers, Husted, Paxton and Fine account for $1.13 million — 82% of everything America PAC has reported spending in support of the eighteen.

Eleven of the eighteen got less than $13,000 apiece. Five of them — Gabe Evans, David Valadao, Juan Ciscomani and two candidates without pages here — each show exactly $12,220, all of it billed to the same mail vendor on the same day — the signature of a single bundled buy split across districts rather than a campaign built for any one of them. Jen Kiggans shows $5,000 in support and $4,500 spent against her opponent Elaine Luria, which is to say Musk's PAC spent nearly as much attacking her opponent as backing her.

For most of this list, the money is not the point. Being on the list is.

What the man writing the checks wanted

Musk is not a stranger to these candidates. He ran the Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting operation that took an axe to federal agencies, contracts and grants — and several of the Republicans his PAC is now paying to protect defended those cuts while their own constituents absorbed them.

Jen Kiggans called the DOGE cuts "so necessary" while her Hampton Roads district lost at least 70 contracts with veteran-owned businesses. In Arizona, 700 people in Casa Grande lost their jobs, and six weeks later Juan Ciscomani brought the Speaker of the House there to celebrate. Susan Collins is running for a sixth term, and Musk's money went to Maine to keep her in the seat.

Ken Paxton is the clearest case of what the money buys. Republican donors spent months keeping their distance from a nominee who dragged out three felony counts including securities fraud for nearly nine years before settling them, and whose own party's Texas House impeached him 121 to 23. Trump and Musk are trying to buy him the seat anyway.

And America PAC's spending is not only ads. On August 29, the PAC's voter registration site gave itself the right to sell the personal information people type into it — the same registration push the PAC is running alongside these ads in Michigan.

Why this matters where you live

Every one of these eighteen races is a race for a seat that votes on your health care, your grocery bill and your taxes. None of the eighteen candidates raised this money. They do not have to disclose it, coordinate it, or answer for it, because independent expenditures are legally supposed to be independent.

But the money is not neutral about outcomes. One man with one fortune has picked eighteen Republicans on this site, and one Democrat to spend seven figures against, and he is doing it in seventeen states at once. When those eighteen get to Washington, the person who spent $5.1 million to put them there will have interests before the government they run — and every one of them will know exactly who it was.

What the filings show

Elon Musk's America PAC has reported $5.1 million in independent spending for the 2026 cycle, almost all of it in races with eighteen Republicans who have report cards on this site. Only $1.38 million of it — 27% — paid for anything supporting those candidates. The other $3.7 million paid to attack Democratic candidates, with $1.49 million aimed at Ken Paxton's opponent alone. Four races collected 82% of the support money; eleven of the eighteen candidates got less than $13,000 each.

Source

Detroit News, Elon Musk group wades into Michigan Senate race, boosting Mike Rogers. Spending figures are from America PAC's independent expenditure filings with the Federal Election Commission for the 2026 cycle, committee C00879510, retrieved September 10, 2026, with duplicate 24-hour-notice filings removed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

Nobody is doing the thing the bill bans

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

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

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

This is control, not freedom

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

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

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

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

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

Two Republicans said no

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

The bill now goes to the Senate.

The choice they made

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

Every Republican we track who voted yes

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

Iowa: Ashley Hinson, Zach Nunn

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

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

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the SAVE America Act would actually do to voters

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

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

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

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

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

The emergency the resolution describes

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

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

It cites a federal investigation that charged four people.

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

What was actually in front of them that week

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

Outside the chamber:

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

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

In their own words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 189 who voted yes

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

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho — Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas — Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi — Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey — Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

The number nine is not in the Constitution

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

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

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

What they were actually voting on

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

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

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

The timing

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

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

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

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

Who pushed it

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who voted to freeze the Court

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey: Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The man who quit over this said so at the time

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

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

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

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

The 188 who voted yes

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

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

The four who voted no

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The vote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four of them voted for it four separate times

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

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

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

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

Arizona, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin: the promises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Source

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

Richard Hudson Told House Republicans to Stop Holding In-Person Town Halls. Since Then They Have Held 231. Democrats Have Held 1,042.

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 09:48:32 +0000

Here is a number worth sitting with.

Through June 29 of this year, Republicans in Congress had held 39 in-person town halls — 17% of all the town halls they held at all. Democrats held 451 town halls in the same six months, two-thirds of them in person.

That count comes from LegiStorm, which has been tracking town halls for years. Those 39 are the fewest in-person town halls the company has ever recorded for Republicans in the first half of any year.

It did not used to be this way. In the first half of 2024, Republicans held more town halls than Democrats — 309 to 214 — and 229 of theirs, nearly three quarters, were in person. Then came 2025: Republicans held 378 town halls but only 122 in person, while Democrats jumped to 924. This year Republicans are down to 234 town halls, 39 of them in person.

Something changed between those two years. We know exactly what it was, because it was said out loud in a room full of members of Congress.

The order

On Tuesday, March 4, 2025, House Republicans went into a closed-door conference meeting. Richard Hudson — the North Carolina congressman who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, the group that raises the money and runs the campaigns for every House Republican on the ballot — stood up and told them to stop holding in-person town halls.

NOTUS reported it from the meeting: Hudson told members to switch to tele-town halls or Facebook Lives instead. His stated reason was that they could still hear from constituents that way, without "disruption from activists."

The unstated reason was in the same story. Going online would also avoid "the recent images of Republicans running off stage, getting drowned out by boos and being challenged on unpopular cuts to programs like Medicare and Medicaid." At the time, Congress was writing the budget bill that would cut $2 trillion in spending, much of it out of Medicaid.

Speaker Mike Johnson backed him at his weekly press conference: "There are other avenues to do it than just going in to try to give the other side sound bites."

We wrote about that meeting, and about the tele-town hall Hudson went on to hold himself — 50 minutes, eleven screened callers, and a constituent who asked about Medicaid and got told the cuts were "just rumors". Seventy-two days after he said that, he voted for the cuts.

Now the receipts are in. Since March 2025, Republicans have held 231 in-person town halls. Democrats have held 1,042. The advice worked. Republicans stopped showing up, and they have not started again.

"It's a good way to get shot"

MS NOW's Mychael Schnell asked House Republicans why, and several answered on condition that their names not be used. That detail alone tells you something: these are elected officials who wouldn't put their name on their reason for not meeting voters.

"They're a setup. It's just a setup to get us — get you off something off guard. And for me, personally, it's a good way to get shot. There's a lot of crazies out there right now."

The same lawmaker added: "I just don't feel like there is any gain to be had."

Another said the reasons were political, logistical and about safety: "It's the disruptive factor. It's the screaming factor. But it's also, truthfully, a security factor."

Nobody should wave away the safety part. Political violence in this country is real and members of both parties have been targeted. But Democrats have held 1,042 in-person town halls since Hudson gave that advice, under exactly the same threat environment. Whatever is different here, it isn't the danger. It's the questions.

And listen to the order those reasons come in. Disruptive. Screaming. Then security.

Jeff Van Drew blames the voters

Jeff Van Drew, the New Jersey Republican who switched parties in 2019, gave MS NOW the version with no hedging in it. He endorsed the virtual events fully, and he blamed the people who show up at the real ones.

"The Democrats have bastardized this and ruined town halls."

He called the traditional format "completely nonfunctional and noninformational," and said town halls that are "completely weaponized and abusive and demeaning and crude and rude" don't work for anybody.

This is Van Drew's long-running position, not a new one. He told the Press of Atlantic City last year that in-person events just bring out "the same 50 or 100 people who just don't like you."

On March 13, 2025, about 600 people lined the road outside his Northfield office to ask him to protect Medicaid and Social Security. They brought their concerns in writing to hand in at the door. The doors were locked and the building was closed.

Six hundred is not fifty. And the "crude and rude" framing is how this always gets sold — Mike Bost said his constituents' protests were staged, with paid protesters, and offered nicer-looking signs as evidence. Brian Fitzpatrick went on national television to call in-person town halls a "three-ring circus". Dan Meuser, asked to name a recent town hall, couldn't come up with one — and says he won't turn up at his constituents' weekly protests because he doesn't want to be a "piñata."

Angry voters are not a scheduling problem. They're the feedback.

What replaced it

The replacement is the telephone town hall, and it's worth being clear about what that is. Your congressman's office picks who gets to speak. It picks the order. It cuts the line whenever it wants, and nobody in the room can see anybody else's face — because there is no room.

Rob Bresnahan, the Pennsylvania Republican, is a clean example. In March 2025 he held his first telephone town hall, an hour long, taken from his office in Washington. More than 9,000 constituents dialed in. His office put out another release later celebrating that 15,000-plus people joined a telephone town hall about the government shutdown.

The big participation numbers are always the pitch. They're also the point — 15,000 people on a phone line is 15,000 people who each got, at best, one question and no follow-up.

We've watched how these go. Mike Carey promised to post the call-in number for his telephone town hall, never did, and then put out a press release celebrating that 12,000 people joined. Brad Knott's first three town halls were all by telephone; when a constituent in rural Harnett County got through to ask how he could vote to cut Medicaid, he answered that lawmakers "stand ready" to fix it later.

That is the format Hudson recommended, and that is what it produces.

One Republican still does it

Not everyone took the advice. Mike Flood, who represents a safe Republican district in Nebraska, was lambasted at a forum in May 2025 — and kept holding them. He told MS NOW he promised in 2022 to hold three town halls a year and intends to keep the promise.

"Things only get better when you go to the town square and you have an exchange of ideas. For me, it works."

He also punctured the excuse his colleagues are using. The viral clips, he said, come from a tiny slice of the event: "The reality is, a lot of the times, the same people that might be animated against me, they're clapping with me when I'm talking about supporting Ukraine or where I'm at on certain issues."

One Republican stood in the room, took the shouting, and reports that it's fine. That is the whole case against every excuse in this story, delivered by a Republican.

Someone else is holding their town halls

The seats aren't staying empty. Democrats have been going into Republican districts and holding the events themselves.

In December 2025, Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania traveled into Bresnahan's district — Pennsylvania's 8th — to take questions from voters who aren't his. He told MS NOW he may do it again.

"Republicans know their agenda is deeply unpopular, so they're hiding from their constituents. After voting to gut healthcare, raise costs and shower billionaires with tax breaks, they won't even defend their record back home."

The NRCC's response, from spokesman Mike Marinella, was that "House Republicans are meeting voters where they are, delivering results that matter to working families."

Meeting voters where they are. The voters are in Northeastern Pennsylvania, in Fayetteville, in South Jersey. The congressman is on a phone in Washington choosing which of them gets to talk.

The part that isn't about town halls

A town hall is not a favor. It's the one hour where the person casting votes in your name has to stand in a room, in front of neighbors who can see his face, and account for them — and where the follow-up question is not his to switch off.

That's why they stopped. Not because voters got ruder, but because the votes got harder to defend: Medicaid cuts, rising costs, the Epstein files, a war nobody voted on. Every one of those is a question with no good answer at a microphone, and every one of them is a question a screener can drop.

Hudson didn't invent members ducking their constituents. What he did was turn it into official party guidance, in his capacity as the man who funds their campaigns — and 231 to 1,042 is what that guidance bought.

Source

The Republican town hall is vanishing — and Democrats see an opening — Mychael Schnell, MS NOW, August 20, 2026, and Why Republicans are hiding from their own voters — Nick Hilden, AlterNet, August 20, 2026. Photo of Rep. Richard Hudson: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc. via Getty Images.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two of them were sworn in before Reagan was inaugurated

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

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

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

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

Here is the part that should end the argument.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why they don't leave: eleven of thirteen gavels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ones who won't even stand in a room

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

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

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

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

And then there's Grassley

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

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

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

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

This was supposed to be a job you leave

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

Twelve Members of Congress Posed for Photos With a Group That Wants to Privatize Social Security. They're Calling It an Endorsement.

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 07:49:54 +0000

There is a simple test for whether a politician is on your side about Social Security. Look at who is handing them awards.

American Journal News reported on August 13, 2026 that a dozen House members — eleven Republicans and an independent who caucuses with them, nearly all in races they could lose — have been collecting an award from the 60 Plus Association and posting the photos.

The 60 Plus Association is not a seniors group in the way most people mean it. It is a group that has spent three decades trying to take Social Security apart.

What the 60 Plus Association actually wants

It was created in 1992 to be a conservative alternative to AARP, with seed money from the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch.

In 1997, it boasted that it was "the first national senior citizens group to endorse privatization of the Social Security program." That is its own description of itself, not an attack from an opponent. It has pushed that position since the 1990s, and its leaders have called private retirement accounts "the only real answer" for the program.

Privatizing Social Security means taking the money you paid in over a working lifetime and putting it into the stock market. When the market goes up, you do fine. When it goes down — 2008, say — you do not. The guarantee is the whole point of the program, and privatization is the thing that removes the guarantee.

The group did not stop at Social Security. It also endorsed the 2011 Republican budget that would have turned Medicare into a voucher system, then ran radio ads telling seniors the plan "protects and preserves Medicare for years to come." As Politico noted at the time, the word "voucher" did not make the ad — and the group's own audience would be held harmless, because the change fell on everyone younger. Instead of Medicare paying your medical bills, you would get a fixed check to go buy insurance yourself. If the check doesn't cover the premium, that's your problem.

None of this is a secret, and none of it is old news the group has walked away from. Its president, Saul Anuzis, has also argued for repealing the Affordable Care Act.

The money behind it has never been public. 60 Plus is organized as a 501(c)(4), which means it never has to say who funds it. DeSmog's accounting found the group took in more than $42 million between 2010 and 2012 from organizations, many of them tied to the Koch network.

Who took the award

The award is called, in the group's own words, the "Guardian of Seniors' Rights Award," and the group says it is "now sought after by many looking for the endorsement of the 60 Plus Association." The lawmakers who received it treated it that way, posing for photographs with Anuzis.

Taking it this year:

Kevin Kiley, California — an independent who caucuses with House Republicans, and who took the award in both 2025 and 2026
Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Iowa
Zach Nunn, Iowa
Bill Huizenga, Michigan
Tom Barrett, Michigan
Mike Lawler, New York
Ryan Mackenzie, Pennsylvania
Scott Perry, Pennsylvania

Past recipients include Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, and Monica De La Cruz of Texas. Rob Wittman of Virginia got it in 2025.

Eleven of the twelve are on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's list of Republican-held seats it is targeting this November. That is not a coincidence — it is the point. These are the members who most need to look like protectors of seniors, and they went and got a certificate from the people who want the program privatized.

The vote that already happened

An award is a photo. A roll call is a record.

On July 3, 2025, the House passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act by 218 to 214. Eleven of these twelve voted yes: Kiley, Miller-Meeks, Nunn, Huizenga, Barrett, Lawler, Mackenzie, Perry, Kean, De La Cruz and Wittman. Fitzpatrick was the one who voted no.

That bill cuts roughly $1 trillion from Medicaid over ten years. And because of a budget law called Statutory PAYGO — a rule that forces automatic spending cuts when Congress passes something that adds this much to the deficit — the Congressional Budget Office found the bill will trigger $490 billion in cuts to Medicare from 2027 to 2034 unless Congress acts to stop it.

So the sequence is: vote for a bill that sets off automatic Medicare cuts, then accept an award from a group that backed replacing Medicare with vouchers anyway, then put the photo online.

The one who wouldn't answer the question

The most useful thing about this list is that we already know how some of these members behave when a real person asks them about Social Security.

In June 2026, a reporter asked Rob Wittman about Republican proposals to cut Social Security and Medicare. Wittman put a phone to his ear and pretended to be on a call for 90 seconds. The camera could see his screen. There was no call.

Bill Huizenga's approach was different but no more honest. When a poll showed him trailing, he deleted whole sections of his own campaign website — including the page about the national debt and the page about health care. He didn't change a single vote. He just stopped telling voters about them.

Monica De La Cruz has never held an in-person town hall since taking office. Tom Kean Jr. skipped more than 100 votes in nearly four months while a New York Times reporter went looking for him at his house.

These are not people eager to explain a Social Security position to their constituents. They are people who found a group willing to certify one for them.

This is a pattern, not an accident

The 60 Plus award is one piece of a larger push that has been running all year.

Ron Estes, the congressman who chairs the House subcommittee that oversees Social Security, went on Newsmax to say he was looking forward to what DOGE would find at the agency he is supposed to be protecting. The agency lost 6,645 employees between January and November 2025.

Tom Cole has pushed a bill for seven Congresses that would hand Social Security to 13 appointees and then force Congress to vote yes or no on whatever they write — no amendments allowed, four hours of House debate, no filibuster. It is a machine for passing cuts that no member would have to sponsor by name.

That is what makes the photographs matter. Nobody in Congress is going to introduce a bill titled "The Privatize Social Security Act." What happens instead is quieter: a commission with no amendments, a budget rule that fires automatically, a staff cut here, an award ceremony there.

You get 65 once. There is no second try if the money isn't there. When twelve members of Congress in tough races decide the safest thing to be seen with is a group that spent thirty years trying to privatize the program, that tells you something they would rather explain in a press release than at a town hall.

Source

House Republicans embrace group that wants to privatize Social Security — Jesse Valentine, American Journal News, August 13, 2026. Photo: American Journal News.

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

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

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

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

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

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

One said yes.

The tally

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

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

Husted is the one to look at

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

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

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

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

What Van Orden said

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

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

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

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

The pattern, not the exception

None of this is new behavior around Max Miller.

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

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

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

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

Why it matters where you live

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

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

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the gloves are

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

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

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

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

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

The warnings come from the company that sells them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congress wrote guardrails. They were about equipment.

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

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

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

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

Two votes made this possible

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

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

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

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

The 201 with report cards on this site

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

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

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

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

Source

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

An ICE Camp Is Going Up in Tom Kean Jr.'s District. His Own Republican Town Council Says He Never Showed Up for Them.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:53:30 +0000

On July 10, 2026, the Trump administration told a federal judge it was going ahead with plans to turn a vacant warehouse in Roxbury Township, New Jersey, into an immigration detention facility — eleven days after New Jersey's governor announced the plan had been killed.

Roxbury is in New Jersey's 7th Congressional District. That is Tom Kean Jr.'s district. Reporters asked him where he stood.

"I have remained actively engaged on this issue from the beginning, and I will continue to bring together multiple levels of government to find a responsible, workable solution."

Read that twice. It does not say he is for the detention center. It does not say he is against it. Six months into the biggest fight his district has had in years, that is still the whole answer.

What is actually being built

In February 2026, the Department of Homeland Security closed on a 470,000-square-foot empty warehouse at 1879 Route 46 in Roxbury. It paid $129.3 million — roughly double the building's assessed value — as part of about a billion dollars in property DHS has been buying up around the country.

The plan was to fill it with people. New Jersey's own lawsuit, filed by Governor Mikie Sherrill and Attorney General Jennifer Davenport alongside Roxbury Township, says the site was designed to hold up to 1,500 detainees plus roughly 1,000 ICE staff. After the public found out, federal officials disputed that number and said it would be fewer than 550.

Either number is a problem, because of what the building actually is. It's a warehouse. Right now it has four toilets and is approved to use 12,000 gallons of water a day. Holding 1,500 people would take about 187,500 gallons a day and produce more than fifteen times the sewage the site is permitted to handle. The overflow risk runs downhill into Lake Musconetcong and Lake Hopatcong, and the surrounding aquifer feeds drinking water for a large share of the state. On top of that, taking a taxable building off the rolls costs Roxbury an estimated $1.8 million a year.

That is not a partisan complaint. Those are the engineering facts in a lawsuit brought by the township itself.

Roxbury fought it. Roxbury is Republican.

Roxbury Township is governed by a seven-member, all-Republican council. They voted unanimously for a resolution saying the town "unequivocally opposes" converting local warehouses for ICE use. When DHS moved ahead anyway, the mayor and council put out a statement saying they had to "reiterate in the strongest possible terms that this property is not an appropriate location for a facility of this nature in a suburban community."

Then the state sued. On March 20, 2026, New Jersey and Roxbury took DHS and ICE to federal court, arguing the government skipped the environmental reviews and local consultation that federal law requires. Their case is about water, sewage, traffic on an already dangerous stretch of Route 46 and I-80, and money — not about immigration policy.

In other words: the Republicans who run this town, the Republicans who elected Kean, went to war with a Republican administration over a project in their backyard.

And in the middle of that fight, they said this about their own congressman:

"Despite repeated outreach, our federal representative, Congressman Tom Kean Jr., did not engage to the level we had hoped to provide the advocacy our residents deserved."

That is Roxbury's own township officials, in a press release, naming him. Not a Democratic opponent. Not an activist group. The people running the town.

What he did instead: a bill nobody signed

Kean's answer to that criticism was to introduce a bill. On February 23, 2026, he filed H.R. 7648, the Local Taxpayer Protection Act of 2026. He said at the time:

"Local taxpayers cannot be expected to foot the bill for federal facilities, and towns like Roxbury should not have to absorb the costs."

Look at what the bill does. It doesn't stop the detention center. It doesn't slow it down. It asks the Secretary of Homeland Security — the same official building the thing — to set up a grant program to reimburse towns that end up hosting an ICE facility, for lost property taxes and utility costs.

Now read the whole bill, which is short enough to read in five minutes. Three things stand out:

It authorizes no money. There is no dollar amount anywhere in the text. A grant program with no appropriation is a suggestion.
It has zero cosponsors. Not one other member of Congress — Republican or Democrat, from New Jersey or anywhere else — has put their name on it in nearly six months.
It went nowhere. It was referred to three committees on the day it was introduced, and the congressional record shows no action on it since. February 23 is the first and last thing that ever happened to H.R. 7648.

And then there's the part of the bill that gives away the whole game. Under the "Use of Funds" section, the town receiving the grant "shall, to the extent practicable, make a facility described in subsection (a) in the municipality self-sufficient with regard to use of public utilities, or extend the capacity of the public utilities systems to accommodate the use of such systems by such facility."

The grantee is the town. So the deal Kean drafted for Roxbury is: take the check, and in exchange help expand your own water and sewer system so the detention camp works. The specific thing the township sued to stop is the thing his bill would have the township pay to make possible.

The letter that never asked for anything

On April 7, 2026, Kean wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin about the project. Here is what he asked for:

"I respectfully request that the Department take a deeper look at the proposal and give careful consideration to the concerns raised by local officials."

And:

"My priority is to ensure that any decision is the result of a thoughtful and balanced approach that considers law enforcement's operational necessities alongside the interests of the local community."

He did not ask DHS to cancel it. He did not ask them to pick a different site. He asked them to take a deeper look and be thoughtful. Roxbury's mayor, Shawn Potillo, extended his own invitation to the DHS secretary and hadn't heard back.

Note the date on that letter: April 7. By then, Kean had not cast a vote in Congress for a month, and nobody in New Jersey could tell you where he was.

He was gone for the part that mattered

Kean's last vote was March 5, 2026. He did not return to the House floor until June 30, and in between he missed more than 100 votes while his office said almost nothing about why. We wrote about that stretch when a reporter finally found him standing in his own doorway in Westfield. When he came back, he said he had been treated for depression — and nobody should be attacked for getting help.

But line the two timelines up, because they are the same four months:


February 2026	DHS closes on the warehouse; Roxbury's council says Kean didn't engage
March 5	Kean casts his last vote
March 20	New Jersey and Roxbury sue DHS and ICE
April 7	A letter goes out over Kean's name asking DHS to "take a deeper look"
May 2026	ICE agrees to pause most work pending environmental review
June 9	The House passes $70 billion for ICE by two votes. Kean is recorded "Not Voting."
June 30	Kean returns to Congress

That June 9 line deserves its own sentence. S. 2 — the bill that hands ICE and the Border Patrol nearly $70 billion, money that pays for detention facilities exactly like the one planned for his district — passed the House 214 to 212. Two votes. The official roll call lists Kean as Not Voting.

He already voted for the money

Not voting in June isn't the same as opposing it, and Kean's record on this is not a blank page. On July 3, 2025, he voted Aye on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. When the House first passed it in May, his office had already put out a press release applauding it. That law set aside $45 billion for ICE to pay private contractors to detain immigrants.

He voted for the money. Then the money came to Roxbury.

This is a pattern, and it isn't only him

Republicans in swing districts have found the same three-step routine when a detention center lands nearby: express concern, avoid taking a position, hope it goes away. In Colorado, a 1,200-bed ICE jail is opening on the edge of Gabe Evans's district and his office declined to discuss it. In Missouri, Mark Alford went further — the morning after Kansas City voted 12–1 against a 7,500-bed facility, he wrote to ICE offering land in his own district and called the local opposition "obstruction."

Kean hasn't gone as far as Alford. He also hasn't done what the Republicans who run Roxbury asked him to do, which was simply to fight.

What representation is supposed to look like

The people of Roxbury did everything right. They organized. Their all-Republican council passed a resolution. Their township hired lawyers and went to federal court. They got their state's governor and attorney general to sue on their behalf. They did not need their congressman to agree with them about immigration — they needed him to pick up the phone and say not here, not in a building with four toilets, not next to the drinking water.

Instead they got a letter asking for a "deeper look," a bill with no money and no cosponsors that would have them widen their own sewer pipes for the camp, and four months of silence at exactly the moment the decisions were being made.

As of late July, Justice Department attorneys told the court DHS is still "continuing to assess whether to proceed", with no timeline for a decision. The warehouse sits there. The lawsuit grinds on. And Tom Kean Jr. still hasn't said whether he thinks a detention camp belongs in his district.

A representative who won't take a side when his own party's town council is begging him to isn't representing anyone. We deserve better.

Source

This post was prompted by Trump Threw Missing GOP Representative Under the Bus While He Was Out — The New Republic, July 14, 2026, on the Trump administration reviving the Roxbury detention plan in Kean's district. Photo of Rep. Tom Kean Jr. by Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images. Additional reporting from Bolts, New Jersey 101.5, the New Jersey Globe, and the Jersey Vindicator.

Gabby Giffords's Group Endorsed Chris Smith Twice. Its Endorsement Page Is Still Up. His Gun Safety Record Isn't.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:28:26 +0000

Go to the website of Giffords — the gun safety organization founded by former Rep. Gabby Giffords, who was shot in the head at a constituent event in 2011 — and you can still read their endorsement of a New Jersey Republican.

"Congressman Smith's voting record reveals his tireless commitment to enacting bipartisan gun safety legislation. He was an original cosponsor of H.R. 8, the 2019 House-passed universal background checks bill."

That was 2020. The Republican is Chris Smith, who has represented New Jersey's 4th District since 1981.

Here is the thing worth knowing about that endorsement: every word of it was true when they wrote it. Smith really was one of the very few Republicans who broke with the gun lobby, and he did it when it cost him something. That's what makes this post different from the usual story about a politician who never cared in the first place.

Then it stopped. Not with a speech, not with a press release explaining a change of heart. It just stopped, and nobody outside the district noticed.

The record Giffords was praising was real

This part is not spin, and it deserves to be said plainly.

December 2017. The House voted on national concealed-carry reciprocity — a bill that would have forced New Jersey to honor carry permits issued by states with far weaker screening. It passed 231–198. Only 14 Republicans in the entire House voted no, and Smith was one of them.

January 2019. Smith signed on as an original cosponsor of H.R. 8, the Bipartisan Background Checks Act, on January 8 — five days into the new Congress.

February 27, 2019. H.R. 8 came to the floor. Smith voted yes. Eight Republicans did.

March 1, 2021. New Congress, same bill. Smith signed on as an original cosponsor again.

March 11, 2021. He voted yes again. Again, eight Republicans.

Giffords endorsed him in 2018 and again in 2020. Defending both endorsements that fall, while campaigning for a New Jersey Democrat, Mark Kelly — Giffords's husband, now a U.S. senator — put it simply: "We're a bipartisan organization and both those guys have supported our legislation and have opposed the legislation of the National Rifle Association."

That's the record. Everything in it stops on March 11, 2021.

Fifteen months later, the no votes started

The gap between Smith's last gun safety vote and his first stretch of votes against it is fifteen months. Then, in a single summer, he voted against every bill the House put in front of him that would have restricted a gun.

June 8, 2022. Two weeks after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, the House passed the Protecting Our Kids Act — raising the purchase age for semi-automatic rifles to 21 and banning large-capacity magazines. Five Republicans voted yes. Smith voted no.

June 24, 2022. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — the first significant federal gun law in nearly thirty years, negotiated by senators of both parties, signed by the president. It cleared the House with 14 Republican votes (the bill rode on S. 2938, which is why the clerk's page still carries the courthouse-naming description it started life as). Fourteen Republicans said yes. Smith was not one of them.

Read those two numbers together. In 2017 Smith was one of 14 Republicans willing to defy the gun lobby. In 2022 there were again 14 Republicans willing to defy the gun lobby — and this time he was on the other side of the line.

July 29, 2022. The Assault Weapons Ban, 217–213. Two Republicans voted yes. Smith voted no, one of 208 Republicans against it.

June 13, 2023. He voted to overturn the ATF's pistol-brace rule — a resolution that would have restored the ability to turn a pistol into what functions as a short-barreled rifle without registering it.

July 2025. He voted for Trump's budget bill, which cut the federal transfer and manufacturing tax on gun silencers and short-barreled rifles from $200 to $0. That ninety-two-year-old deterrent hit zero on January 1, 2026.

The bill he wrote his name on twice, now missing his name

The cleanest measure of the change isn't a vote at all. It's a signature he stopped giving.

The background-check bill Giffords specifically credited him for has been reintroduced in every Congress since. Smith has not cosponsored it once:

118th Congress (2023), H.R. 715 — introduced by a Republican, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, and picked up 209 cosponsors, every single one a Democrat. The two-time original cosponsor stayed off it.
119th Congress (2025), H.R. 18 — 214 cosponsors, and this time two Republicans did sign: Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Mike Lawler of New York.

That second one matters most. The excuse that a Republican simply can't put his name on this bill anymore collapses the moment two Republicans do. Smith knows the bill — he helped write his name onto the top of it twice. He has served in the House for 45 years and does not need to be told how a cosponsor sheet works. He just doesn't sign it.

To be fair about where he actually stands: Smith has not flipped all the way. He is not a cosponsor of H.R. 38, the concealed-carry reciprocity bill he voted against in 2017 — the current version has 189 cosponsors and he isn't among them. That bill is now so aggressive that the nation's largest police union came out against it, warning that it strips officers of the power to verify whether someone carrying a gun is legally allowed to.

So this isn't a conversion. It's an abdication. He didn't join the other side; he stopped showing up on his own.

What it costs New Jersey

New Jersey has one of the lowest gun death rates in the country — 4.0 deaths per 100,000 people. That is not luck or geography. It is the direct result of laws the state fought to pass, and it is exactly what national concealed-carry reciprocity would override: a federal law forcing New Jersey to accept permits from states that require no class, no live-fire test, and no sheriff's sign-off.

Smith understood that in 2017. He said so with a vote that put him in a group of 14 in a chamber of 433.

His constituents cannot ask him what changed. Asked in 2025 when he had last held a town hall, his own staff could recall only one, in 1992 — thirty-four years ago, a drought so complete that voters in NJ-04 built a website just to ask where he is. There is no forum in the district where someone whose family survived a shooting can stand up and ask the man who once voted with them why he stopped.

A record you abandon isn't a record

Most Republicans in Congress have never done a single thing for gun safety, so there's nothing for them to walk away from. Smith is a harder case in the way that Brian Mast is a harder case — Mast begged Trump to pause AR-15 sales after Parkland and then voted against every gun bill including the assault weapons ban he'd demanded. Both men had standing. Both spent it.

The difference with Smith is the paperwork. Giffords, an organization founded by a woman who was shot in the head while meeting constituents, publicly staked its bipartisan credibility on him — twice — and the endorsement page praising his "tireless commitment" is still live on their website today, five years and a full reversal later.

Chris Smith proved he was capable of casting the hard vote. He did it in 2017, in 2019, and in 2021. Then in 2022 he stopped, and he has not signed the bill that made him an exception in the first place since.

Voters in New Jersey's 4th District aren't being asked to believe he could never stand up to the gun lobby. They have the receipts showing he could. They're being asked why he quit.

Source

Giffords, Chris Smith endorsement (2020), and Insider NJ, Smith Scores Gabby Giffords Organization Endorsement (July 17, 2020). Vote records from the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House and cosponsor lists from Congress.gov. Photo: official House portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

Jeff Van Drew Ran a Hearing Called 'False Narratives.' Then He Told Detainees They Could Always Self-Deport.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:47:44 +0000

Congressional oversight is supposed to work like this: something might be going wrong, so Congress calls in the people responsible and makes them answer questions under oath.

On Wednesday, July 22, 2026, Jeff Van Drew ran a hearing that did the opposite. He announced the answer in the title, then spent nearly two hours making sure nobody who could contradict it was in the room.

The hearing was called "False Narratives Surrounding Conditions at the Delaney Hall ICE Detention Center."

Delaney Hall is a 1,000-bed immigration jail in Newark, run for ICE by a private prison company. Detainees there have described rotten food, waits of more than a week to see a doctor, and broken air conditioning in 100-degree heat. Hundreds of them went on a hunger strike over it.

Van Drew's committee decided, in advance and in writing, that all of that was made up.

He didn't call anyone who runs the place

Van Drew chairs the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight. That gavel is real power. It means he decides who has to show up and answer.

Here is who he did not make show up:

Nobody from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which pays for the facility
Nobody from the Department of Homeland Security, which runs ICE
Nobody from GEO Group, the private prison company that owns and operates Delaney Hall

Instead, the official witness list shows he called three witnesses to defend the facility: a retired ICE deputy field office director, a border security adviser from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.

Not one of them had current firsthand knowledge of Delaney Hall. Two had never set foot in it. The third had last been there before the building closed in 2017 — nearly a decade ago.

One of them said so out loud, in his opening statement.

"First, a confession. I've never been to Delaney Hall, and I've never toured the facility to assess any of the allegations that have been made about it." — Andrew Arthur, Center for Immigration Studies

That is the hearing. A chairman announces the reports are false, and then calls three witnesses to agree with him, at least one of whom has to open by admitting he has no idea.

The one witness Democrats were allowed was Amol Sinha, executive director of the ACLU of New Jersey — the only person at the table who had actually talked to people held inside.

What the witness who had done the work said

Sinha described a man who did not eat for three days after arriving at Delaney Hall because the food smelled rancid. When hunger finally forced him to eat it, he was in severe pain. He asked for a doctor and waited seven more days to see one. After he got out, he spent a week in the hospital and needed surgery for a serious stomach condition that developed while he was locked up.

Then Sinha made clear that man was not a one-off.

"I wish I could tell you that his case was unusual, but I could sit here and tell you about the man denied his wheelchair for 40 days, the 18-year-old denied the ability to finish high school on time, the husband who lost so much weight that even lying down became physically painful."

He described the pattern the same way every time: no access to medical care, pressure to sign "voluntary" departure papers, filthy conditions, inedible food, broken air conditioning in 100-degree temperatures.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the full Judiciary Committee, added what Sen. Andy Kim found on unannounced visits: milk so spoiled it had curdled, water people said was undrinkable, and detainees sleeping on floors because the place was too crowded.

Raskin also brought the numbers that undercut the whole "dangerous criminals" framing. Of the 891 people held at Delaney Hall in April, he said about 90% had no criminal record at all. For the ones who did, the most common offense was a traffic violation. Sinha put it at more than 70% with no criminal history, nearly 90% with no conviction, and 84% with no final removal order.

And people have died. Sinha noted that more than 50 people have died in ICE custody under this administration. ICE's own death-reporting data backs that up: 54 people have died in ICE custody since the start of fiscal 2025 — 125% more than died across all four previous fiscal years combined, which was 24. One of them was Jean Wilson Brutus, who died after being at Delaney Hall for a single day.

This is not a New Jersey problem alone. Senate Judiciary staff who got two hours inside a CoreCivic-run family detention center in Texas came back with a report describing worms in the food and coloring books passed off as school.

"Potato chips and Twinkies"

Van Drew's answer to all of it was that he had walked through the building himself.

"I walked the facility. I met with the staff. What I saw goes against all the narratives that you hear and that the Democrats have tried to say about this facility."

He said detainees get three meals a day reviewed by dietitians, plus medical, dental, and mental health care, a gym, and soccer fields. He cited a state inspection that found the kitchen satisfactory and no sign of vermin — an inspection that looked at the kitchen and did not examine any of the things Sinha had just described.

Then he took on the hunger strike. Hundreds of people refusing food to protest the conditions, and Van Drew's rebuttal was that commissary sales went up:

"They were going to the commissary, and they were getting their potato chips and Twinkies. They were getting plenty of food."

He also went after a man he identified as a leader of the strike, telling the room the man had been arrested on a domestic violence charge before ICE picked him up, and adding: "He ain't my hero."

And then Van Drew offered the people inside Delaney Hall his solution.

"If it's so bad at Delaney Hall, just so you know, everybody has the option to self-deport."

That is a chairman of a congressional oversight subcommittee telling detained people that if they don't like the conditions, they can leave the country. It is not oversight. It is a taunt.

Raskin answered it in the room with the case of Marlon Andres Torres Gomez — a man who did try to leave. An immigration judge approved his departure. He had a plane ticket and an agreement with ICE. Federal officers stopped him at the airport and hauled him back to Delaney Hall. A federal judge ruled the day before the hearing that holding him was unlawful.

So the option Van Drew was so sure everybody had was one the government had physically prevented at least one man from taking.

The company he didn't subpoena writes him checks

Delaney Hall is not a government building. It is owned and operated by GEO Group, a publicly traded private prison company.

GEO's own annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission spells out the deal. On February 27, 2025, the company announced it had been awarded a 15-year, fixed-price contract from ICE for the company-owned, 1,000-bed Delaney Hall Facility in Newark. The same filing lists the contract as starting in May 2025, and credits Delaney Hall as one of the new activations behind $152.4 million of a $222.6 million rise in its U.S. detention revenue last year.

Sinha put the local number on it at the hearing: "We're spending billions of taxpayer dollars detaining people who pose no threat to the public, while GEO Group pockets over $60 million a year from Delaney Hall alone."

That is the company Van Drew declined to put under oath. It is also a company having an extremely good year — GEO Group and CoreCivic together booked $1.4 billion in a single quarter as ICE detention neared record levels, paid for by money Congress appropriated.

Van Drew helped appropriate it. He was one of the Republicans who voted to send $70 billion to immigration enforcement on a 214–212 margin, where every single Republican yes vote was the deciding vote.

And Federal Election Commission records show GEO Group's political action committee gave $3,000 to Van Drew for Congress on June 30, 2025 — weeks after Delaney Hall opened under the new contract, and roughly a year before he gaveled in a hearing declaring that complaints about the place were false narratives.

Three thousand dollars is not a fortune. That's not the point. The point is that the chairman deciding whether GEO Group has to answer questions is on GEO Group's donor list, and he resolved that question by not calling them.

He is not the only one. The Republican who took over the House committee that oversees ICE last July collected $30,000 from three private prison companies in the months right after he got the gavel — more than any other member of Congress.

He has done this before

There is a pattern in how Jeff Van Drew handles a story where the facts aren't in yet: he goes on television, states a conclusion with total confidence, and never revisits it.

In December 2024, during the New Jersey drone panic, he told a national Fox News audience that Iran had parked a "mothership" off the Jersey Shore and was launching drones from it, citing "high sources." The Pentagon knocked it down within hours. He accused the Pentagon of lying instead.

In January 2026, after federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, Van Drew went on Fox and said, "Peaceful protesters don't have 9mm weapons with two extra magazines" — while three Republican senators were asking for independent investigations.

Now his subcommittee has ruled on conditions inside a jail without hearing from the people who run it. Sinha closed by asking Van Drew's members for the one thing that would actually settle it:

"Allow the press in. Allow members of Congress in. Allow advocacy organizations in for full access."

Van Drew adjourned instead, noting that members had five days to submit written questions.

What this costs South Jersey

Van Drew has the gavel that decides what gets investigated. His constituents have been asking him to use it on something closer to home.

In March 2025, about 600 people lined the road outside his Northfield office asking him to protect their health care. They brought written concerns to hand in. The doors were locked and the building was closed. He has no plans for an in-person town hall, telling a reporter they just draw "the same 50 or 100 people who just don't like you."

They had a reason to show up. The Joint Economic Committee projects that 30,460 people in his district will lose health coverage — 17,960 of them from the Medicaid cuts in the budget bill he voted for, and 12,500 from the Affordable Care Act.

No hearing on that. But a nearly two-hour hearing, in the Rayburn building, with a title written to pre-decide the outcome, to tell the country that a private prison company's customers are lying about the food.

Congress has one tool for finding out whether the government is mistreating people in its custody. Jeff Van Drew is holding it. He used it as a shield.

Source

This post is based on reporting by the Jersey Vindicator: At House hearing, Republicans dismiss reports of abuse at Delaney Hall by Krystal Knapp. Photo: screenshot via YouTube, House Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight.

$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.

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.

Chris Smith Held the Gavel for Two Minutes. He Used Them to Shut Down a Vote on the Iran War.

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:10:00 +0000

Two days earlier, the President of the United States had posted that "a whole civilization will die tonight."

On Thursday morning, April 9, 2026, the House of Representatives met for a pro forma session — the kind of session that exists mostly on paper. Almost nobody is there. A single member walks to the front, bangs a gavel, and the House is technically in session. A few minutes later they bang it again and it's over.

The member holding the gavel that morning was Chris Smith, the Republican who has represented New Jersey's 4th District since 1981.

A handful of Democrats had shown up on purpose. Rep. Glenn Ivey of Maryland asked to be recognized so he could try to pass a resolution limiting the president's ability to keep fighting in Iran. Smith, presiding as speaker pro tempore, would not recognize him. He gaveled the session out.

The other Democrats in the room — Don Beyer, Sara Jacobs, Mary Gay Scanlon, Madeleine Dean, James Walkinshaw and Suhas Subramanyam — shouted over the gavel.

"End the war. Let us vote," Walkinshaw said.

"The Congress needs to consider this. The time has come," Ivey said.

C-SPAN filed the video clip under the title "Fourth Iran War Powers Resolution Blocked in the House." Fourth.

What he was gaveling over

Understand what the country had just watched.

Two days before, on Tuesday, April 7, Trump gave Iran an 8 p.m. deadline to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and posted on Truth Social: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will."

That is a president of the United States publicly threatening to wipe out an entire country. A ceasefire was announced that same Tuesday.

Democrats came to the floor that Thursday because they thought Congress — the branch the Constitution actually gives the war power to — ought to say something about it. Rep. Jacobs put it plainly afterward: "Threatening genocide is not a negotiating tactic."

Smith's answer was the gavel.

To be fair about the mechanics: a request to pass something by unanimous consent in a nearly empty chamber was never going to succeed. Everyone knew that. But Smith didn't defeat the request. He didn't let it be made. He wouldn't let a colleague finish a sentence on the floor of the House about a war nobody in that building had voted for.

This is his pattern, not his slip

Three and a half months later, Democrats finally forced a real vote.

On July 23, 2026, the House voted 214 to 208 to order the president to remove U.S. forces from hostilities with Iran. It passed. Chris Smith voted no — one of the 182 Republicans with a report card on this site who voted to keep us in the war.

He is not an outlier in his party on this. He's part of the wall. The Senate has now been through more than a dozen of these votes, and the answer is always the same: not now, not this way, not with a Republican in the White House. His New Jersey colleague Jeff Van Drew went on national television during the drone panic and blamed Iran for a "mothership" that didn't exist. Different style. Same direction.

The war started in February 2026. Congress has still never authorized it.

The human rights guy

Here's the part that's hard to square.

Smith is the Republican co-chair of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission — the House's own bipartisan human rights body. He has built a 45-year career on it. He is, by reputation, the House Republican you call when a government somewhere is doing something monstrous to its own people.

Then the President of the United States threatened to end a civilization, and the House's human rights co-chair used his one official act of the day to make sure no one could talk about it on the floor.

He didn't rise to condemn the post. He didn't ask his own party's leadership to bring the House back. He held the gavel, and he brought it down.

Who he does make time for

Smith is not shy about Israel policy when the vote is one he likes.

On April 20, 2024, the House passed the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act 366 to 58. Smith voted yes. The bill's own floor manager, Appropriations Chairman Ken Calvert, told the House it "provides $26.38 billion".

Smith took the floor to speak for it. From the Congressional Record that day:

"Both defensive weapons systems like Iron Dome and David's Sling and all necessary offensive military capabilities must be conveyed without delay to Israel for as long as it takes to defeat Hamas and deter Iran, Hezbollah, and other radical Islamists."

So he can find the floor when he wants it. He had a minute to demand offensive weapons "without delay." He did not have a minute for a colleague asking whether Congress should get a say in the war that followed.

Track AIPAC's tally of Federal Election Commission records puts his career haul from pro-Israel PACs at $241,318 as of July 5, 2026.

He won't take the question at home, either

There's a reason none of this gets asked of him directly.

When constituents rallied outside his Toms River district office in March 2025 demanding a town hall, his own staff could only recall one held in 1992. That is thirty-four years. His constituents built a website just to ask where he is.

So the record stands like this. He will not hold a town hall where a voter in NJ-04 can ask him about the war. And when a member of Congress tried to ask about it on the floor of the House — the one place a representative is guaranteed the right to speak — Smith was the man holding the gavel, and he refused.

That is not a scheduling problem. That is the job of representing people, declined twice.

Source

Emily Brooks and Sudiksha Kochi, "GOP blocks Democrats' attempt to limit Trump's Iran war powers," The Hill, April 9, 2026.

Chris Smith Got a Weaponized-Tick Conspiracy Written Into Federal Law

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:05:00 +0000

On December 18, 2025, President Trump signed the annual defense bill into law. It runs to hundreds of pages of shipbuilding, pay raises, and weapons programs.

Buried at Section 1068 is something else entirely.

The law now orders the Government Accountability Office — the federal government's audit arm — to comb through Pentagon records from 1945 to 1972 looking for proof that the U.S. military turned ticks into biological weapons. The text is right there in Public Law 119-60: the Comptroller General must review "the use of ticks as hosts or delivery mechanisms for biological warfare agents," including experiments involving two families of bacteria, Spirochaetales and Rickettsiales. The auditors have to check classified files. They have two years to report back.

The provision even names specific Fort Detrick documents by their catalog numbers.

That language belongs to Chris Smith, who has represented New Jersey's 4th District since 1981. He has been trying to get it into law since 2019. It failed twice. On the third attempt, it stuck.

What the theory actually claims

Smith's interest traces back to a book. He has said he was inspired by Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons, by science writer Kris Newby, which argues that Cold War bioweapons researchers experimented on ticks and that something got loose — seeding the Lyme disease epidemic in the Northeast.

When Smith first brought the idea to the House floor in July 2019, he told colleagues the amendment came from "a number of books and articles suggesting that significant research had been done at US government facilities including Fort Detrick, Maryland, and Plum Island, New York, to turn ticks and … insects into bioweapons," according to The Guardian. His question for the Pentagon was direct: was there an accidental release, anywhere, at any time?

The House passed it on a voice vote.

Scientists who study the disease say it doesn't hold up

Reporters took the theory to people who study Lyme for a living. It did not go well.

Richard Ostfeld, a disease ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, told VICE News that "both the tick and the bacterium that causes Lyme disease are ancient creatures," and that "there is strong scientific evidence that the present-day forms of the [Lyme disease] bacterium diverged from a common ancestor at least 60,000 years ago." A 5,300-year-old mummy found in the Alps carried traces of it.

Phil Baker, then executive director of the American Lyme Disease Foundation, added two more problems. There is evidence Lyme was in North America before Columbus. And Lyme is a lousy weapon — it usually causes fatigue and flu-like symptoms, not death.

Ostfeld also pointed out that the geography is wrong. Lyme shows up across Europe, Western Asia, and the Mediterranean. "The notion that Lyme was created on Plum Island doesn't represent the real geographic distribution of the disease in recent decades," he said.

His warning about the cost was the sharpest part:

"What gets neglected is scientific research in tick control, which would prevent people from getting sick in the first place."

That is the real problem here. Lyme disease in New Jersey is not imaginary. Roughly 476,000 new cases are diagnosed nationwide every year, according to the Global Lyme Alliance, and people who get it late can be sick for years. Smith co-chairs the Congressional Lyme and Tick-Borne Disease Caucus. He has a real platform, a real disease, and real suffering constituents.

He spent that platform buying a two-year records hunt through Cold War filing cabinets. When his 2019 version passed, VICE News reported it came with $1 million in new CDC Lyme research money — next to a CDC Lyme budget that was then about $11 million. The conspiracy audit got the headlines. The research got the rounding error.

Smith's own framing is that the truth will lead somewhere useful. "The hundreds of thousands of New Jerseyans suffering from Lyme disease — in addition to the millions across the United States — deserve to know the truth about the origins of their illness," he said in a statement this January. At a Lyme disease discussion hosted by the Department of Health and Human Services a month earlier, he put it more bluntly: "GAO will be fully empowered to leave no stone unturned."

Every stone except the ones the scientists keep pointing at.

We have seen this movie before

Smith is not alone in this. There is a whole cohort of House Republicans who have discovered that a congressional letterhead makes an excellent conspiracy-hunting tool.

Eric Burlison runs a UFO investigation from his Oversight subcommittee — he flew to Mexico City to look at "alien" mummies and has been touring classified bases. Anna Paulina Luna chaired Congress's first MKUltra hearing in 49 years and turned it into a session about USAID and Anthony Fauci — so thoroughly that Mike Evans of the National Security Archive, the group that spends its days prying real government secrets loose, called the hearing "underwhelming."

The pattern is always the same. A real historical wrong gets used as a doorway into something unprovable, the hearing or the audit generates a news cycle, and the actual constituents get nothing.

The other test: 27 names on a piece of paper

If you want to understand how Smith's office thinks, there is an older document worth looking at.

In 2015, a Capitol Hill staffer sent POLITICO New Jersey a section of Smith's college internship application. It asked student applicants to mark a plus, a minus, or a zero next to 27 different personalities, organizations and political issues — indicating whether they agreed, disagreed, or had no opinion.

The list included Rachel Maddow. Pope Francis. Planned Parenthood. The National Right to Life Committee. John Kerry. The NRA. The National Endowment for the Arts. PETA. The Sierra Club. The Cato Institute. Gun control. The Susan B. Anthony List. The Autism Society of America.

Undergraduates. Applying for an unpaid summer job answering constituent mail.

Ross K. Baker, a political science professor at Rutgers, told POLITICO he had a student — one of Smith's own constituents — thinking about applying, and that he would now talk him out of it:

"I just don't think that kids, undergraduates, ought to be subjected to what is obviously an ideological test. … There's something about this that's really, really troubling."

Baker's point wasn't that a congressman can't look for interested interns. It was the mechanism. Ask a student whether they care about foreign policy or the refugee crisis, he said, and you learn something useful. Tie it to a list of organizations, and a pattern of plus signs next to Planned Parenthood and EMILY's List will flag the applicant — and, he suspected, sink the application.

Brigid Harrison of Montclair State University put the problem plainly: "If you're assigning pluses or minuses, it is giving the appearance that you need to agree with a certain position." Even if nobody ever used it as a litmus test, how is a 20-year-old supposed to read it?

Smith's spokesman said the form "helps students identify interests and provides an opportunity to demonstrate awareness of issues at the federal level." POLITICO asked a simple follow-up — did the office actually make hiring decisions based on the answers? — and got no response.

Other New Jersey members, Republican and Democrat alike, managed to ask applicants what interested them without handing them a scorecard.

What his district actually needed

Here is the part that ties it together.

Smith has not held a public in-person town hall since 1992. When constituents rallied outside Toms River Town Hall in March 2025 demanding one, his own staff could only recall that 1992 event. Thirty-four years.

In that same stretch, he voted for the health care cuts in Trump's budget bill twice — Yea on May 22, 2025, and Aye again on July 3. An estimated 35,536 people in his district are projected to lose their health coverage as a result, according to a Joint Economic Committee analysis — 16,900 losing ACA coverage and 18,636 losing Medicaid.

So the ledger for New Jersey's 4th District looks like this. Thirty-five thousand neighbors losing health insurance: no town hall, no explanation. A Cold War tick theory that disease researchers say is not supported by the evidence: three attempts across seven years, and now a line in federal law commanding a two-year audit with access to classified files.

Forty-five years in Congress buys a lot of leverage. This is what he chose to spend it on.

We deserve better.

Sources

Congress calls on GAO to look for origin of Lyme disease in Cold War military programs — Rose L. Thayer, Stars and Stripes, January 23, 2026. Photo: Graham Snodgrass/U.S. Army Public Health Center.
Chris Smith's intern applicants rate Rachel Maddow, NRA, the pope — Matt Friedman, POLITICO New Jersey, October 8, 2015.

Jeff Van Drew Told Fox News an Iranian 'Mothership' Was Parked Off the Jersey Shore. There Was No Mothership.

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 17:52:00 +0000

In late 2024, people all over New Jersey started looking up and seeing lights in the sky they couldn't explain. Sightings were reported starting November 18, and by one Sunday in December, Gov. Phil Murphy said 49 had come in over a single day. Some were near Picatinny Arsenal, a military research site. Some were near Donald Trump's golf course in Bedminster. Nobody had a good answer yet.

People were nervous. What they needed from their congressman was a straight answer, or an honest "I don't know."

What they got from Jeff Van Drew was Iran.

"These are from high sources. I don't say this lightly."

On Wednesday, December 11, 2024, Van Drew went on Fox News and told a national audience that a hostile foreign government had parked a warship off the coast of the United States and was flying drones over New Jersey from it.

"That mothership... is off the East Coast of the United States of America. They've launched drones into everything that we can see or hear."

He wasn't hedging. He said the information came "from high sources." He said, "I don't say this lightly." And he said the drones should be "shot down."

That is about as serious a thing as a member of Congress can say. He was telling his own constituents that a foreign adversary was conducting an active operation in their airspace, right now, and that our government either didn't know or wasn't telling them.

The Pentagon knocked it down the same day

It took the Defense Department a matter of hours. At a briefing that same Wednesday, deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh was asked about Van Drew's claim.

"There is no truth to that. There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States, and there's no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States."

The Pentagon's assessment, Singh added, was that "these are not drones coming from a foreign entity or adversary." The next day, White House national security spokesman John Kirby said there was "no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or a public safety threat or have a foreign nexus," and that a lot of what people were seeing was ordinary manned aircraft.

Van Drew's response to being told he was wrong was not to check his sources. He went back on Fox the following day and said "we aren't being told the truth," and accused the Pentagon of "dealing with the American public like we're stupid."

What the drones actually were

Five days later, on December 16, 2024, four federal agencies — the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the FAA, and the Defense Department — put out a joint statement laying out what they'd found after chasing down more than 5,000 tips and roughly 100 leads.

"Having closely examined the technical data and tips from concerned citizens, we assess that the sightings to date include a combination of lawful commercial drones, hobbyist drones, and law enforcement drones, as well as manned fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters, and stars mistakenly reported as drones."

Stars. Some of it was stars. There are more than a million drones legally registered with the FAA, and thousands are in the air on any given day. The agencies said flatly: "We have not identified anything anomalous."

And this wasn't a Biden-administration brush-off that a new government later overturned. On January 28, 2025 — a week into Trump's second term — his own press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said the same thing: the drones were "authorized to be flown by the FAA for research and various other reasons," plus hobbyists and private citizens. The whole thing, she said, "got worse due to curiosity."

No mothership. No Iran. No adversary. A busy sky and a panic.

The panic had a body count risk, and he told people to shoot

Here's the part that should stay with South Jersey voters. Van Drew didn't just guess wrong in public. He told frightened people that enemy aircraft were overhead and that they should be shot down. Firing at an aircraft is a federal crime, and some people were already close to trying.

Reported laser strikes on pilots in New Jersey jumped 269% that December compared with the year before — 59 incidents between December 1 and 16, versus 16 in the same stretch of 2023. A laser in a cockpit can temporarily blind a pilot. The FBI's Newark office had to release a video begging people to stop.

"We're also concerned people will take matters into their own hands and fire a weapon at an aircraft," Acting Special Agent in Charge Nelson Delgado said. "Not only is this act against the law, but it poses an incredible danger to the pilots and passengers on those aircraft."

That is a federal law enforcement agency asking the public to please stop doing the thing a sitting congressman had suggested on television.

The correction nobody was supposed to see

On Friday, December 13, Van Drew quietly changed his story in a written statement:

"While it has been verified that Iran does have three drone ships, new satellite images show they are currently stationed off the southern coast of Iran. This new information only brings us closer to figuring out what is really going on."

Read that again. The ships he said were off New Jersey turned out to be off Iran, on the other side of the world. And somehow that "brings us closer" to the truth. There is no apology in that statement. There is no "I was wrong." There isn't even an acknowledgment that he had told millions of people something false.

The National Iranian American Council, which had written to him the day before asking him to correct the record, made exactly that point. "Spreading misinformation to scare Americans into fearing a so-called Iranian threat is profoundly reckless," said policy director Ryan Costello, who noted the mismatch: "Congressman Van Drew's initial false statement was broadcast to an audience of millions while his retraction was buried in a Friday news dump posted to his website."

Then, when the government finally delivered the answer he had spent weeks demanding, Van Drew put out a statement praising Trump for transparency — "This is what transparency looks like" — and pivoted to warning that "we are nearly a decade behind China in our drone technology." Iran does not appear in it. Neither does the mothership.

This is how he operates

The mothership wasn't a one-off. It's a habit: hear something, say it on Fox as fact, and never circle back.

In January 2026, after federal agents killed Alex Pretti on a Minneapolis street, Van Drew went on Fox and said, "Peaceful protesters don't have 9mm weapons with two extra magazines." POLITICO noted what he left out: that was a concealed handgun Pretti had a permit to carry, and eyewitness video showed no evidence he ever drew it. Republican senators were calling for independent investigations. Van Drew was on television building the case against a dead man.

He is also, right now, demanding subpoenas and sworn answers from New Jersey over a voter registration foul-up created by a 2018 law he himself voted for. He is very good at demanding accountability from other people.

And the Iran fearmongering had a sequel. When the actual war with Iran started in 2026 without a vote in Congress, Van Drew called the question of war powers "a judgment call". In July 2026, when the House voted to order U.S. forces out of that war, he voted no.

The bottom line

A congressman's word is supposed to mean something. When Jeff Van Drew says "these are from high sources, I don't say this lightly," South Jersey has every right to expect that he checked. He didn't. The Pentagon corrected him in hours, he accused the Pentagon of lying, and when the facts caught up with him he pushed out a walk-back on a Friday and moved on.

Two years later he is asking those same voters to trust him again — while sticking to telephone town halls. As of March 2025 he had no plans for an in-person one, the kind of room where somebody could ask him about all this to his face.

We deserve better.

Source

Pentagon says mystery New Jersey drones not from Iranian 'mothership' — BBC News, December 13, 2024. Photo: Reuters, via BBC.

ICE Is Reading Your Posts. Congress Paid for It.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:30:00 +0000

Somebody on Reddit used the handle Tired_Thumb. Over two months, they left three comments that mentioned ICE. Two of them included the letters "ACAB" — an old protest slogan that stands for "all cops are bastards." One of them shared a phone number for an agent, pulled off a public records website, with the link to that website pasted right underneath.

For that, the federal government has spent six months trying to learn their name.

First the Department of Homeland Security sent Reddit an administrative subpoena asking for the poster's name, address and billing records. It didn't say what law had been broken. When a legal nonprofit fought back, the government dropped that subpoena — and came back with a grand jury subpoena, which carries more weight, asking for another month of the person's activity.

Nobody has been charged with anything. The government just wants to know who they are.

That story comes from a Wall Street Journal investigation published August 3, 2026, by Hannah Critchfield and Shane Shifflett. And Tired_Thumb, as the Journal put it, is far from alone.

A round-the-clock dragnet

Here is what the Journal found.

ICE now runs a nonstop digital operation that scans the public internet — Facebook, Instagram, X, and close to 20 platforms in all, including Reddit, Discord, Snapchat and LinkedIn — looking for speech the agency decides is dangerous to its mission. Not just threats to agents. Also, in the government's own contracting language, "activities that could disrupt ICE's operations."

Private contractors do the work. They write daily reports and build files on people. Those files can include a person's name, location, date of birth, workplace, Social Security number, vehicle registration and criminal history.

The money grew fast. ICE spending on surveillance technology and consultants hit $258 million during President Trump's first full year back in office — a 57% jump from the year before, according to the Journal's analysis of federal budget data. The agency has signed at least six contracts to scan public records for "threats," paying out nearly $50 million since 2020, with more than half of that money committed since last January.

One of those contracts went to a small Virginia software firm called Amivero — more than $8 million to monitor social media. Amivero handed the actual work to Guidehouse, a big consulting company that also works on defense and intelligence. Neither company would talk to the Journal.

The government's shopping list for this program asks contractors to pull DMV records and police reports, map out who a flagged user knows, and use machine learning for something called "anticipatory threat intelligence" — software that guesses at threats before anything happens.

To find out who anonymous critics are, DHS has sent hundreds of subpoenas to social media companies.

Reddit said no. The government kept going.

Between July and December of last year, DHS sent Reddit administrative subpoenas for the information behind 11 accounts that had posted "content critical of federal actions."

Reddit looked at them and concluded these users were doing something the First Amendment protects. The company objected to every single one. DHS eventually withdrew all of them.

"Privacy is central to how Reddit operates," said Ben Lee, the company's chief legal officer, adding that Reddit routinely objects to government requests that are "overbroad or threaten users' privacy or civil rights, including their First Amendment rights."

So the government switched tools. It started using grand jury subpoenas instead, which are harder to fight.

The Journal identified 10 people — nine Americans and one Canadian — who tried to stop the government from unmasking them. Judges upheld four of the grand jury subpoenas. The government gave up on three cases. Three are still going.

No charges have been filed in any of them.

That pattern is the whole story. As civil-rights attorney Lauren Regan told the Journal:

"They're not actually filing any criminal charges where we can challenge the vagueness, the overreach and the abuse of that statute. If they just want to use this as an intimidation tactic, it's not even a fair fight."

What actually counts as "doxxing"

The administration has been rewriting a word.

In September 2025, President Trump signed a national security memo called NSPM-7. It lists "organized doxing campaigns" alongside swatting, rioting, looting, trespass and assault as the kinds of acts that can get a group labeled a domestic terrorist organization. It specifically names ICE agents in Los Angeles as an example.

Congress never voted on any of that. It's a presidential memo. As Government Executive reported, the structure "allows the president to direct law enforcement and national security agencies, with little opportunity for congressional oversight." Thirty-one members of Congress wrote to Trump in October 2025 warning of "serious constitutional, statutory and civil liberties risks." Nothing changed.

The ACLU called the memo "a fever dream of conspiracies, outright falsehoods," and warned that it "stitches together a few disparate, serious acts of actual or attempted criminal conduct with First Amendment-protected beliefs and protests against the president and his policies."

From there, the definition kept stretching. DHS has argued that filming law enforcement doing their job in public and posting the video counts as doxxing.

It even applied that logic to a newspaper. When the Minnesota Star Tribune named Jonathan Ross as the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good — a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother of three — in Minneapolis on January 7, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin responded with this:

"The Star Tribune should be absolutely ashamed of themselves for their reckless behavior, and they should delete their story immediately."

Ross has not been charged. The Star Tribune did not delete the story.

Here's the thing about all of this: the Supreme Court drew this line back in 1969. In Watts v. United States, the Court threw out a conviction and wrote that "the language of the political arena, like the language used in labor disputes, is often vituperative, abusive, and inexact." Real threats aren't protected. Angry political talk is. That's not a new or controversial idea. It's 57 years old.

Two agents, a printed screenshot, and a form to sign

On Election Day in New York — June 23, 2026 — a poll worker named Paigelynne Gonyea was working at the Central Library in Syracuse when she got a voicemail from a man who said he was a Homeland Security special agent.

He said agents had just been by her apartment. He said they were calling about a post "where you doxxed an ICE agent back in January."

Then two agents with ICE badges walked into the polling place. They carried a file on her with her name, address, date of birth, height, weight and eye color, plus printed screenshots of her posts. They asked her to sign a notice from ICE's Office of Professional Responsibility. It said, in capital letters at the top, "YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW," and directed her to "promptly remove and/or discontinue the aforementioned behavior."

What had she posted? On January 8, the day after Renee Good was killed, she wrote this:

"The ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good in broad daylight has been identified as Jonathan Ross by the Minnesota Star Tribune. I think today is a great day for Jonathan to be indicted!"

That's it. A newspaper's reporting, repeated, plus an opinion that a man should face a grand jury.

Gonyea refused to sign. She refused to delete the post. DHS later told NPR she had published an ICE officer's address online — but has not produced any evidence of that, and Gonyea says she has looked through her own accounts and can't find any address.

A local Republican election commissioner confirmed to NPR that the badges were real. He called the whole thing "a comedy of errors" and said it was "a mistake" for agents to enter a polling site at all. Federal law bars armed federal officers from polling places — NPR notes it's unclear whether these two were armed — and New York has a state law barring immigration agents from voting sites, period.

Perry Grossman of the New York Civil Liberties Union put it plainly:

"If this is the kind of speech that the administration, that DHS wants to go after, then they are trying to fundamentally redefine the First Amendment and the scope of permissible public debate. And that is wrong. That is ridiculous."

According to the Journal, the agents who visited Gonyea delivered that same letter to several other people that day. One recipient sued. A special agent tracked down David Streever while he was on vacation — five months after Streever emailed then-acting ICE director Todd Lyons following the killing of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse shot by federal agents in Minneapolis on January 24, and called Lyons "a monstrous human being." Streever says DHS is retaliating against protected speech and that it will chill the public.

The number they won't show you

DHS's whole defense rests on a statistic: an 8,000% increase in death threats against ICE officers since Trump took office.

Go read the press release it comes from. It's dated January 26, 2026. It contains one voicemail transcript and the number. No counts. No baseline. No time period. No methodology. Nothing you could check.

We've been here before with this agency. A September 2025 executive order claimed assaults on ICE agents were up "more than 1,000 percent." NPR and Colorado Public Radio went and pulled five years of federal court records to check. Comparing charges for assaulting a federal officer through mid-September 2025 against the same stretch a year earlier, they found about a 25% rise — not 1,000%.

When reporters asked DHS to show its work, the department "repeatedly declined to provide any justification." It sent back links to its own earlier press releases repeating the same number.

Bob Pence, a 30-year FBI veteran, told NPR why that matters:

"There are a number of ramifications, if the public can't believe what law enforcement is saying then law enforcement probably can't depend on the cooperation of citizens to report information to them accurately."

By January 2026, the same DHS press release that carried the 8,000% figure had bumped the assault claim up to "more than 1,300%."

Congress wrote the check

None of this built itself. It runs on money, and money comes from Congress.

In June, Senate Republicans passed S. 2 — the "Secure America Act" — at 4:42 in the morning by a vote of 52 to 47, handing ICE and Border Patrol nearly $70 billion. Combined with the mass-deportation money approved the year before, that's close to a quarter of a trillion dollars.

They moved it through a fast-track budget process that needed only a simple majority, which let them strip out the guardrails that normally ride along with funding bills — required oversight of detention conditions, transparency rules forcing ICE to report basic data to the public, and civil-rights protections in enforcement. Those protections aren't in the law. That was a choice, and you can read the full breakdown in our post on the senators who voted yes.

Be clear about the timeline, because it matters. This vote did not create the dragnet — the Amivero contract was signed in September 2025, and attorneys started seeing the subpoena spike that same month. The surveillance operation was already running.

What these senators did was vote, on June 5, 2026, to pour another $70 billion into the agency running it — five months after federal immigration agents killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, and Alex Pretti weeks after her — and to do it in a way that left out the transparency requirements that would make a program like this visible to the public in the first place.

The Senate: 52 to 47

Fourteen of the senators who voted yes have report cards on this site:

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

The House: 214 to 212

Four days later, on June 9, 2026, the House passed the same bill by 214 to 212 and sent it to the president, who signed it the next day as Public Law 119-98.

Look closely at that roll call, because the margin hides something. It was two votes — but not because Republicans were split. Every single Republican who cast a vote voted yes. Not one voted no. Three didn't vote at all: Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey, and Nancy Mace and Ralph Norman of South Carolina. The 212 no votes came from 211 Democrats and one independent.

It was close because it was unanimous on one side and near-unanimous on the other.

A hundred and ninety of the House members who voted yes have report cards here:

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

One name is missing from that list on purpose. Kevin Kiley of California, who the clerk's roll call lists as an independent rather than a Republican, voted no. He is the only member tracked on this site outside the Democratic caucus who did.

Twenty-four other House Republicans voted yes and don't have pages here yet.

Not one of the 204 members listed above made the money conditional on ICE telling the public what it collects, or on whom.

So who is watching the surveillance program? On paper, the ICE Privacy Office, in consultation with the DHS Privacy Office. The Journal reports the ICE Privacy Office is down to two full-time staffers.

Two people. Overseeing a $258-million-a-year surveillance operation with hundreds of subpoenas and files on American citizens.

And when members of Congress did go looking, it was one party doing the asking. Rep. Maxwell Frost and 11 other Democrats wrote to DHS in February asking what data the department collects on protesters. Lyons wrote back on April 21. He denied ICE keeps a database of protesters — but acknowledged that ICE collects "essential biographic and biometric information and situational details" on people it believes may be interfering with its operations, and keeps those records even when nobody is arrested.

ACLU attorney Scarlet Kim noticed what the letter left out: "He did not deny that, essentially, that information would not be placed in other existing databases."

The Republicans who control both chambers wrote the checks and stripped the guardrails. The questions about what ICE is collecting on Americans came from the minority.

Why this should bother you even if you never post about ICE

You might think none of this touches you. Look at the actual conduct that drew federal attention here.

A Reddit comment with the letters "ACAB" in it. An Instagram post saying an agent should be indicted, quoting a newspaper. An angry email to an agency head. Filming officers in public.

That is the ordinary stuff of American political argument. It is exactly what the Supreme Court described as "vituperative, abusive, and inexact" — and protected.

Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Virginia who studies privacy and cyberstalking, pointed out the part that ties it all together:

"We're seeing the weaponization of privacy in ways that privilege the powerful, and in particular, law enforcement. Law enforcement who are serving the public, they're hiding their names. They're hiding their faces. If they had their names on badges and they weren't wearing masks, you might see less of this activity."

That's the trade being made. Agents get anonymity. You get a file.

And notice how little the government has to do to win. It doesn't need convictions. It doesn't even need charges. It needs you to see two agents walk into your workplace holding a printout of your Instagram, and decide it isn't worth posting again.

Some of what the government is looking at is genuinely ugly. One woman the Journal spoke to had compared ICE officers to Nazis on X in January and written that "All ICE Agents need to be put down like the dogs they are." That's a vile thing to write, and nobody has to defend it.

But look at what happened next. Roughly four months later, plainclothes ICE agents showed up at her home, told her not to post like that again, and left. She was never charged. She has curbed what she says online.

If the government believed that post was a real threat, there is a courtroom for that. It went to her doorstep instead. And that tells you which outcome it was after.

That's not law enforcement. That's a warning system, paid for with public money, aimed at the public.

Source

Hannah Critchfield and Shane Shifflett, "How ICE Is Weaponizing Social Media Against Its Critics", The Wall Street Journal, August 3, 2026.
Photo: federal agents inside the Syracuse polling place where Paigelynne Gonyea was working, June 23, 2026. Video by Gracious Golden via Facebook; screenshot by NPR.

Jeff Van Drew Wants to Subpoena New Jersey Over a Voter Registration Law He Voted For

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 09:05:00 +0000

Jeff Van Drew has found the issue he wants to run on. New Jersey mistakenly registered about 6,600 noncitizens to vote, and Van Drew — who chairs the House Judiciary Committee's oversight subcommittee — plans fall hearings and told POLITICO he is "absolutely exploring" the use of congressional subpoenas.

He sent Gov. Mikie Sherrill a letter with 12 questions and a deadline of August 21. If the answers don't come, he says, subpoenas are on the table.

There's a detail buried in that same story that changes how the whole thing reads.

He voted for the law that created the problem

The mistaken registrations trace back to New Jersey's 2018 "motor voter" law. That law let people applying for a driver's license or state ID register to vote automatically. Noncitizens are supposed to be screened out of that process. During a stretch in 2023 and 2024, they weren't.

In 2018, Jeff Van Drew was a Democrat in the New Jersey state Senate. He voted for that bill.

Asked about it by POLITICO, he said he has no regrets, and put the blame on the agency running the system: "How was I to assume that the agency would break the law?"

That's a convenient standard. When a program he voted for fails, the failure belongs to the bureaucrats. When it's time to investigate that failure, the investigation belongs to him.

What actually happened, according to the state

The facts as the governor's office has laid them out are narrower than the outrage suggests:

About 6,600 noncitizens were added to the rolls between June 2023 and June 2024 — more than a year before Sherrill took office.
Around 400 of them cast ballots in later elections.
Sherrill has said she does not believe any of those ballots swayed an election.
Responsibility is still disputed. State officials and the France-based vendor IDEMIA are each pointing at the other.

Sherrill has also commissioned an independent outside review, which is not yet finished. New Jersey legislative Democrats have said they want to see that review before acting. Van Drew isn't waiting for it.

Meanwhile the Trump administration has demanded that New Jersey hand over names, addresses, and other records on those individuals. Sherrill has been cool to that: "We are not in the practice of turning this kind of personally identifying data over to the federal government."

Asked about deporting people, he left the door open

Top Trump administration officials have floated prosecuting or deporting the noncitizens who cast ballots. POLITICO asked Van Drew where he stands. He didn't rule it out:

"It depends on the case, and what the intent was."

He went on to wonder aloud how many of the registered or voting noncitizens "possibly could have been felons or criminals," and concluded, "We don't know. There's some homework to be done."

That's the shape of it: an admitted absence of evidence, paired with a public suggestion that criminals might be involved. He is the one who would do the homework, and he is talking about consequences before he's done it.

Why he is the wrong man to lead this

Van Drew is not a neutral referee arriving at a question about election administration. He has a documented record of trying to overturn an election result he didn't like.

He signed onto the Supreme Court amicus brief asking the justices to throw out millions of votes in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and hand the 2020 election to Trump.
In a December 2020 op-ed, he announced he'd vote against certifying the election, calling it "a rejection of the status quo and a no confidence vote in the politicians, corporate special interests, and legacy media establishment."
Hours after the Capitol was attacked, he voted to reject Biden's Electoral College win — the only member of New Jersey's entire congressional delegation to do so. POLITICO noted that fact in its story too.
He then voted against impeaching Trump for inciting the mob, against an independent bipartisan commission to investigate January 6, and against the House select committee that eventually did.

A member who voted to discard the certified votes of four states is now the one deciding what an "election integrity" investigation looks like. Whatever this inquiry produces, that history is going to be attached to it.

It's also worth remembering how he handles claims that turn out to be shaky. In 2024, during a stretch of unexplained drone sightings, Van Drew claimed Iran had parked a "drone mothership" off the New Jersey coast. The Pentagon publicly disputed it.

What his constituents actually asked him about

Here's the other thing about Van Drew's sudden appetite for hearings and subpoenas: his constituents have been trying to get his attention on something else entirely.

He refuses to hold in-person town halls, saying they just draw "the same 50 or 100 people who just don't like you." In March 2025, an estimated 600 people lined Tilton Road outside his Northfield office asking him to protect Medicaid, Social Security, and Medicare. His office was closed.

They had reason to show up. Van Drew voted for Trump's budget bill, and the Joint Economic Committee projects 30,460 people in his district will lose health coverage as a result. More than 36,000 households in NJ-02 rely on SNAP for groceries, and he voted for the largest SNAP cut in history.

No hearings on any of that. No subpoenas. No town hall.

The bottom line

Roughly 400 improper ballots, in elections nobody claims were changed by them, caused by a registration system Jeff Van Drew himself voted to create — and his response is fall hearings, a subpoena threat, and an open door on deportations.

Thirty thousand of his own constituents are losing health coverage because of a vote he cast last year. That one he's in no hurry to investigate. We deserve better.

Source

This post is based on reporting by POLITICO: Jeff Van Drew says he's 'absolutely exploring' subpoenas in NJ noncitizen voter fiasco by Joey Fox (Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP).

His District Is On Fire. Pete Stauber Blamed Canada.

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 18:30:56 +0000

There is a 36-mile gravel road in northern Minnesota called the Echo Trail. It runs north of Ely, between two halves of the Boundary Waters. For years, the people who manage the Superior National Forest wanted to clear the dead spruce and balsam fir piled up along that road — to turn it into a firebreak, a line a wildfire couldn't easily cross.

They had the plan. They had the money. They were, in the words of one of the men who ran the project, "shovel-ready."

Then DOGE froze it.

On July 25, the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration held up a $10 million wildfire-prevention grant meant to thin about 4,000 acres of dry, dead-choked forest in northeastern Minnesota. Most of that work never got started. And this month, some of those exact acres caught fire.

That forest sits in Minnesota's 8th Congressional District, represented since 2019 by Pete Stauber — a Republican who joined the congressional DOGE Caucus and defended the cuts when people back home asked him to fight them.

What was supposed to happen

In 2024, the Superior National Forest won $10 million as part of a $100 million national wildfire initiative. The money would have paid to strip out decades of dead trees and undergrowth, build fuel breaks around remote homes, and treat the corridor along the Echo Trail.

Aaron Kania, a retired U.S. Forest Service district ranger who helped lead the project, told the Post the team moved fast. They applied, won the money, cleared their environmental review and contracting in a matter of months.

"We were shovel-ready. Had that work been implemented, it would have been effective in stopping or slowing down these fires."

Then, at the start of 2025, the U.S. DOGE Service paused or canceled federal grants across the government to check whether they touched diversity or climate programs. That swept up nearly all of the Forest Service's grants. Over the following months the agency lost roughly a third of its workforce — including the people who processed timber reviews and administered grants, the exact staff you need to get a project like this out the door.

The money did eventually come back, at the end of 2025, after Minnesota officials flew to Washington twice to plead the case. But it came back with strings: the team had to rewrite the plan so more of the trees they cut would go to timber mills. As Kania put it, "When you focus on marketable timber sales, it undermines the concept of strategic fuel reduction."

The Star Tribune confirmed the project got its green light — and still hasn't started.

Total damage, in Kania's words: "It's the totality of all these things that set us back about a year and a half."

Then the lightning came

Around July 7, a storm dropped lightning on a tinder-dry forest and started roughly 15 fires. They have since burned nearly 64,000 acres of northeastern Minnesota. About 1,000 firefighters have been flown in from Alaska, California and Florida. The Boundary Waters was fully closed and evacuated, and Minnesotans breathed some of the worst air quality in the world.

One of those fires, the Sioux Fire, jumped the Echo Trail. The same road the grant was supposed to harden.

Fire crews are now out there doing that thinning work along the Echo Trail, while the woods burn around them. Kania's assessment of that arrangement is worth reading twice:

"They are doing it under emergency conditions … and that is the most expensive way to do this work imaginable."

During a fast-moving fire, agencies hire loggers and machine operators at premium rates and pay for 16-hour days. DOGE was sold to the country as a way to save money. In the Superior National Forest, it turned a planned $10 million job into an emergency one.

Stauber's answer: it's Canada's fault

Here is where it stops being a story about a federal agency and starts being a story about a congressman.

On July 20 — five days before the Post published — Stauber and 18 other House Republicans sent a letter to the EPA blaming Canada for the smoke and accusing its government of violating a 1991 air-quality treaty. Their central complaint? That Canada hasn't done enough controlled burns.

"Responsible wildfire management, such as controlled burns, is critical to reducing the frequency and severity of wildfires and protect families from harm," the lawmakers wrote.

Read that again, and then remember what the $10 million grant in Stauber's own district was for: "mechanical and prescribed fire treatments, creating strategic fuel breaks."

The other 18

Stauber didn't sign alone. The letter carries 19 signatures, and every one of them belongs to a Republican who has a page on this site:

Minnesota: Pete Stauber (MN-08), Brad Finstad (MN-01)
Wisconsin: Bryan Steil (WI-01), Derrick Van Orden (WI-03), Glenn Grothman (WI-06), Tony Wied (WI-08)
Ohio: Mike Carey (OH-15), David Joyce (OH-14), Michael Rulli (OH-06)
Pennsylvania: Brian Fitzpatrick (PA-01), Mike Kelly (PA-16), Rob Bresnahan (PA-08), Ryan Mackenzie (PA-07)
New Jersey: Tom Kean Jr. (NJ-07), Jeff Van Drew (NJ-02)
New York: Nick Langworthy (NY-23), Nicole Malliotakis (NY-11)
Florida: Carlos Gimenez (FL-28)
Virginia: John McGuire (VA-05)

Dave Joyce, whose office posted the letter, described it as urging the EPA "to use the authorities available under the U.S.-Canada Air Quality Agreement to work with Canada to address the causes of ongoing wildfire smoke."

Three days earlier, a partly overlapping group had made the same argument on a narrower footing: Steil, Van Orden, Grothman, Wied, Scott Fitzgerald (WI-05) and Tom Tiffany (WI-07) wrote Zeldin a Wisconsin-specific version of the letter, closing with the line that Canada "must meet its clean air promise and prevent future wildfires from impacting Wisconsin families."

The argument all 19 signed onto is that prescribed burns and fuel reduction are the answer, and that a government failing to do enough of them is failing its people. That is a defensible position. It is also, precisely, the case against what happened in Stauber's district.

Asked to defend the letter, Stauber told the Star Tribune:

"Regarding the ongoing fires in the Boundary Waters, I'm fully aware they were sparked by lightning strikes. As I have said for years, we need to do better here in the United States to get rid of the overgrowth that has turned our forests into tinderboxes."

He is right that we need to get rid of the overgrowth. That is precisely what the frozen grant was going to do. He didn't mention it.

A University of British Columbia ecologist quoted in the same story said the Republicans cherry-picked their evidence from one agency that manages a sliver of Canada's 1.3 billion acres of forest, and criticized the lawmakers for scrutinizing Canada but not themselves. A Minnesota state legislator called the letter what it looks like: "This letter feels more like an attempt to deflect blame rather than responsibly govern."

He was warned, and he had an answer ready

This isn't hindsight. Stauber was told in real time.

In February 2025, when the Trump administration fired thousands of probationary Forest Service employees, state Sen. Grant Hauschild wrote directly to Trump and to Stauber, urging them to reverse the cuts to Superior National Forest staff. Hauschild's argument was that these workers keep people safe: "Without adequate staffing, the ability to manage these resources sustainably and safely is compromised, risking environmental degradation and economic loss."

As of the paper's reporting a week later, neither Trump nor Stauber had responded, a Hauschild spokesperson told the Duluth News Tribune.

He did give the paper a statement about the firings, though:

"However, the American people elected President Trump to ensure taxpayer dollars are spent serving the public rather than expanding government. I am thankful to those of my constituents who have pursued a path in public service, and I know they understand that the taxpayers' needs can and do change over time."

That was his position while the Forest Service lost a third of its people and the grant for his own district sat frozen.

Stauber had already announced he was joining the congressional DOGE Caucus. And when Trump froze federal grants in January 2025, Stauber went on NPR to defend the freeze, repeating a claim about $50 million headed to Gaza for condoms — a claim fact-checkers found no evidence for.

That was the same stretch of weeks when the grant money for his own forest stopped moving.

What we can and can't say

We should be straight about the limits here, because the people closest to it are.

Nobody can prove these specific fires would have been smaller. Kania says so himself. So does Dale MacDougall, whose nonprofit partnered on the grant and did some thinning in the area in May: "Had that made a big difference, we can't say. That we will never know." Kania is also a Democrat now running for the Minnesota House, and his Republican opponent, Roger Skraba, told the Star Tribune he blames the Forest Service rather than DOGE.

But the Post didn't take one man's word for it. It built the story on five people familiar with the situation plus a Forest Service document from October 2025 that showed the grant's targets pushed out roughly a year.

And the thing that isn't in dispute is the sequence. The money was awarded. The plan was ready. DOGE froze it. The staff who would have run it were fired. The work didn't happen. The forest burned. The work is happening now, at emergency prices, with fire on the other side of the road.

The bill came due

Stauber has represented this district for seven years. The Superior National Forest is one of the reasons people live there and one of the reasons people visit. He joined the caucus that cheered the cuts, defended the grant freeze on national radio, left a letter warning him about his own forest unanswered, and then — with parts of the Echo Trail under evacuation orders and smoke hanging over Duluth — signed a letter telling Canada it needed to do more controlled burns.

He was right about one thing. Somebody should have cleared the overgrowth.

The money to do it was sitting right there.

Sources

Brianna Sacks, The Washington Post: "'We were shovel ready': A Minnesota forest hit by DOGE cuts is now ablaze" (July 25, 2026). Photo: Scott Bauer/AP.

Kristoffer Tigue, The Minnesota Star Tribune: "Republican lawmakers are blaming Canada for wildfire smoke, but cause is complicated" (July 25, 2026).

Letter from 19 House Republicans to EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, July 20, 2026.

182 House Republicans Just Voted to Keep Us in Trump's Iran War — And Lost

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 08:20:15 +0000

The war with Iran started in February. Congress never voted to authorize it. Five months later, American troops are still dying in it.

On Thursday, July 23, 2026, the House of Representatives voted 214 to 208 to order the president to pull U.S. forces out of the fighting. The resolution — H. Con. Res. 89, written by Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington — passed.

It passed despite 207 Republicans voting against it. Only four Republicans in the entire House voted yes.

182 of the Republicans who voted no have a report card on this site. Their names are below.

What they were voting on

Nothing complicated. The resolution said: the president does not have authorization from Congress for this war, so bring the troops home.

That's not a partisan idea. It's the War Powers Resolution, the law Congress wrote precisely so a president couldn't keep the country in a war on his own indefinitely. Voting yes meant Congress gets a say. Voting no meant the president decides alone.

182 Republicans we track voted for the president deciding alone.

The cost while they stalled

This isn't an abstract fight over process. According to the Pentagon, 18 U.S. troops have died since the fighting broke out in February — and four of those deaths came after July 17 alone. U.S. forces have suffered nearly 500 injuries, 100 of them in the two weeks before this vote.

The fighting is getting worse, not better. And back home, the bill keeps arriving in other forms: gas prices climbed after the Iran war started, squeezing drivers, farmers, and families who never got a vote on any of it.

A majority of Americans oppose military action in Iran. A majority of the House now agrees. The war continues anyway.

Congress already said no. Twice.

Here's the part that should make you angry.

This was not the first time. On June 3, the House passed an almost identical resolution, H. Con. Res. 86. On June 23, the Senate agreed to that same resolution, 50 to 48.

Both chambers of Congress. The same resolution. Already passed.

The administration ignored it and kept fighting. That's why the House had to vote again on July 23 — and why Rep. Gregory Meeks, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, announced he would file a lawsuit to enforce the resolution Congress already adopted.

And when the second vote came, the same Republicans lined up the same way. Of the 182 Republicans on this list, 181 voted no both times — in June and again in July. They watched Congress get overruled by the White House, and their response was to vote to be overruled again.

The president, for his part, has called these votes "meaningless" and dismissed them as Democrats "fueled by Trump Derangement Syndrome." When 182 members of his own party vote to make Congress irrelevant, it's hard to argue he's wrong about the "meaningless" part.

The Senate blocked the version with teeth

There's a catch in all of this, and it's worth understanding, because it's how the whole thing gets to keep happening.

H. Con. Res. 89 is a concurrent resolution. As Roll Call explained, it "did not go to the president for his signature and therefore had little power to actually force him to withdraw troops from the war." It's a formal statement, not a binding order.

The binding version came up in the Senate the very same day. Sen. Chris Van Hollen's S.J. Res. 180 was a joint resolution — the kind with legal force. The House finished voting at 10:24 a.m. At 11:51 a.m., about ninety minutes later, the Senate rejected the binding version, 47 to 49. Susan Collins of Maine was the only Republican who voted to advance it.

So on one day in July, Congress voted for the version that can't stop the war and voted down the version that could.

Who leads this

Some of the names on this list aren't backbenchers. They're the people who decide what the House does.

Speaker Mike Johnson voted no. So did Majority Leader Steve Scalise and Majority Whip Tom Emmer. The chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Brian Mast of Florida, held up photographs of U.S. service members killed in the war during floor debate and said, "To belittle this mission is to belittle and demean the very service these members gave their life for."

That's the argument: because Americans have died, Congress must not be allowed to ask whether they should have been sent. It gets the moral logic exactly backwards. The way you honor a service member's life is by voting before you spend it — not by using their death to shut down the vote.

Jayapal put the other side plainly after the resolution passed: "From the beginning, this war has had no clear mission, no strategy, no end goal. Congress has not been consulted."

Four Republicans managed it

It was possible to vote yes. Four Republicans did: Tom Barrett of Michigan, Warren Davidson of Ohio, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, and Thomas Massie of Kentucky.

Four out of 211. Nobody on the list below can claim there was no room to break ranks — four of their colleagues stood in exactly that room.

The 182 who voted to keep the war going

Every one of these Republicans has a report card on this site, and every one of them is recorded on the official House roll call voting no on ordering U.S. forces out of an unauthorized war:

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

California — Ken Calvert, Vince Fong, Young Kim, Tom McClintock, Jay Obernolte, David Valadao

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

Florida — Aaron Bean, Gus Bilirakis, Mario Diaz-Balart, Byron Donalds, Randy Fine, 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

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 — James Comer, Brett Guthrie, Hal Rogers

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

Michigan — 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 — 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, 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, 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, Andy Ogles, 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

The bottom line

Going to war is the most serious thing a government does. The Constitution deliberately made it hard, and gave the decision to Congress — the branch that has to go home and face the voters.

These 182 Republicans had the simplest possible chance to do that job. Not to end the war on their own, not to overrule the president — just to record that Congress, the branch that represents us, wants the fighting to stop. A majority of their colleagues managed it. Four members of their own party managed it. Both chambers of Congress had already managed it once in June.

They voted no anyway. And they'll vote no again unless something changes.

Eighteen families have buried someone in a war nobody in Congress ever authorized. Nearly 500 more troops have been wounded. When the next vote comes, remember which of your representatives thought the question wasn't worth asking.

We deserve representatives who answer to us — not to a president who calls our Constitution "meaningless."

How they voted

This post is based on the official congressional roll calls:

House Roll Call 282 — H. Con. Res. 89, July 23, 2026 (passed 214–208)
House Roll Call 199 — H. Con. Res. 86, June 3, 2026 (passed 215–208)
Senate Vote 184 — H. Con. Res. 86, June 23, 2026 (agreed to 50–48)
Senate Vote 207 — S.J. Res. 180, July 23, 2026 (rejected 47–49)

With reporting from NPR and Roll Call.

The Iran War Is Back On — and These Republicans Say Trump Doesn't Need Congress's Permission

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 00:02:00 +0000

The Constitution is clear about one thing: Congress, not the president, has the power to take the country to war. That was supposed to be a check — a way to make sure the American people, through their representatives, get a say before their sons and daughters are sent to fight.

Right now, some House Republicans are helping the president throw that check out the window.

The war restarted — and Congress never voted

U.S. military action against Iran resumed on July 7, 2026, and the White House didn't notify Congress until three days later. Under the War Powers Resolution, the president has a 90-day clock to get congressional authorization for military action. But the administration has a clever workaround: it argues that because there was a ceasefire earlier this year, this is a brand new war — so the 90-day clock resets, and Trump gets another three months of fighting with no vote required.

Democrats call that what it is: a way to dodge Congress entirely. And instead of defending their own institution's power, a number of Republicans are cheering the workaround on.

Who's backing it

Brian Mast, the Florida congressman who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has publicly backed keeping the military campaign going, as the New York Times reported. As the top House Republican on foreign policy, Mast is exactly the person who should be insisting Congress get a vote. Instead, he's providing cover.

Nick Langworthy of New York embraced the reset theory directly: "Hostilities had ceased, so now hostilities have restarted. I think the president's within the law."

Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey shrugged it off as "a judgment call" — as if whether to keep the country in a war is a minor administrative matter rather than the most serious decision Congress can make.

Notably, even some conservatives balked. Rep. Thomas Massie accused the administration of "breaking the law," and Sen. Tom Cotton wouldn't say he was comfortable with the approach. So this isn't a case of Republicans having no choice. Mast, Langworthy, and Van Drew are choosing to hand the war power away.

Why this should worry everyone

This isn't just a debate for law professors. War costs lives and money. The renewed fighting in Iran has already sent gas and fuel prices climbing, squeezing families and farmers back home. And an open-ended conflict with no congressional check means no real accountability — no vote these representatives ever have to answer for.

That's the point of the reset theory. If Congress never votes, then Mast, Langworthy, and Van Drew never have to go on record for a war and its consequences. They get to support it quietly while ducking responsibility for it.

The bottom line

When the country goes to war, the people deserve a voice through the Congress they elected. These Republicans are helping the president take that voice away — trading their own constitutional duty for a legal gimmick about a "reset" clock.

A representative who won't even insist on a vote before a war continues isn't representing you. They're just getting out of the way.

Source

"Republicans back Trump's legal theory to continue the Iran war without congressional approval," MS NOW, July 20, 2026; and "G.O.P. Boxed In on Iran War as Trump Sidelines Congress," The New York Times, July 20, 2026.

These 188 Republicans Voted to Let an Energy Board Block Clean-Air Rules

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 21:53:44 +0000

On December 17, 2025, the House passed a bill with a friendly-sounding name — the Reliable Power Act — by a vote of 225 to 203. The name is about the only friendly thing about it.

Here is what the bill actually does. It rewrites the Federal Power Act so that whenever the grid's reliability watchdog flags a risk that the country could run short on electricity, the Environmental Protection Agency — and every other federal agency — has to hand its rules over to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission before those rules can take effect. And here's the kicker: the agency cannot finalize the rule until FERC decides it won't hurt the power supply. In plain English, a panel of energy regulators gets to stand in the way of clean-air and climate rules on power plants.

Why this matters to you

Power plants that burn coal and gas are some of the biggest sources of the pollution that lands in the air your kids breathe. For decades, the EPA has been the agency that tells those plants how much soot, mercury, and carbon they're allowed to dump on the rest of us. This bill hands another agency a way to block those protections before they ever start.

The League of Conservation Voters — which tracks how members of Congress vote on the environment — urged lawmakers to reject the bill, warning that it would give FERC "the over-reaching authority to suggest changes and block any rule from any other agency if it relates to any electricity generation resource." That's not a narrow fix. That's a veto over clean-air rules, dressed up as a reliability study.

It was written by Ohio's own Troy Balderson, with Texas's Randy Weber and North Dakota's Julie Fedorchak as the lead cosponsors. When the roll was called, every Republican on the floor voted yes — not a single Republican voted against it.

Who voted to block the clean-air rules

188 Republicans on this site's report cards voted for the Reliable Power Act. Here they are, grouped by state:

Alabama: 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

California: David Valadao, Jay Obernolte, 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, Byron Donalds, Carlos Gimenez, Cory Mills, 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, Mike Collins, Rich McCormick, Rick Allen

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mary Miller, 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, 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, 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

The vote

None of this is our opinion about how they voted. It's the official record. You can read every name and every vote for yourself on the House Clerk's roll call for H.R. 3616, and the full text of the bill that spells out the new roadblock for clean-air rules. When your representative tells you they're looking out for the air you breathe, ask them why they voted to give a panel of energy regulators the power to stop the EPA from cleaning up the plants next door.

Tom Kean Jr. Got Help for His Depression. He Voted to Make It Harder for Everyone Else.

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 08:26:00 +0000

There is nothing shameful about getting treatment for depression. It takes courage to ask for help, and no one should be attacked for it. Tom Kean Jr. deserves credit for that part of his story.

But that's not the whole story. When Kean returned to Congress after a four-month absence — during which he missed more than 100 votes while collecting his full salary — he told the House floor that he was "grateful that I accepted help" and that he's a longtime "supporter of mental health care."

That last part is where the honesty runs out. Because Kean's actual record is a long list of votes that make it harder for regular people to get the exact kind of help he was lucky enough to receive.

He had what he voted to deny others

Kean got months of treatment, kept his job, and kept getting paid the whole time. Most working people in New Jersey's 7th District don't have that safety net — in large part because of how Kean has voted over 20 years in office.

As Mother Jones documented, during his two decades in the New Jersey State Senate, Kean:

Opposed the state's Earned Sick Leave Act, which guarantees workers paid sick days — the kind of time off you need to see a doctor or recover without losing your paycheck.
Opposed New Jersey's paid family leave laws — twice — leaving workers to choose between caring for themselves or a loved one and keeping their income.
Opposed protections against surprise medical bills, the shock charges that can turn a single trip for care into a financial crisis.

As Yarrow Willman-Cole of New Jersey Citizen Action put it, Kean "has been able to rely on things he directly voted against." He got to take the time and the treatment. He voted to make sure his constituents couldn't.

Then he voted to cut Medicaid

In Congress, Kean didn't change course. He voted for Trump's giant budget bill — the "One Big Beautiful Bill" — which imposes new work requirements on Medicaid and drives the largest cuts in the program's history. Kean didn't just vote for it. He applauded it.

Medicaid is one of the biggest payers for mental health and addiction treatment in the country. When you add paperwork and work requirements, people fall off their coverage — not because they're gaming the system, but because the system is designed to trip them up.

Matthew Camarda of the National Alliance on Mental Illness in New Jersey said cuts like these make it "very challenging for millions of Americans … who do have mental health conditions like depression to get the care that they need without risking their employment." That's a plain description of what Kean voted for.

More than 10,000 people in Kean's own district rely on SNAP to afford groceries, and he voted to cut that too. The through-line is simple: the programs that help people through a hard stretch — health coverage, food aid, paid time off — are exactly the ones Kean keeps voting to shrink.

"Supporter of mental health care" doesn't match the votes

Kean wants it both ways. He wants the sympathy that comes with his own recovery, and he wants to keep voting for a party agenda that makes recovery harder for everyone who isn't a wealthy congressman.

You can't call yourself a champion of mental health care while voting against paid sick leave, against paid family leave, against surprise-billing protections, and for the biggest Medicaid cuts ever. Those aren't small technicalities. They are the difference between a person being able to get help and a person going without.

This also fits a bigger pattern with Kean. He campaigned as pro-choice and then voted against protecting abortion rights. He promised to ban congressional stock trading and then violated the STOCK Act himself. Over and over, Kean says one caring, moderate-sounding thing — and then votes the other way.

We deserve leaders who mean it

The lesson of Kean's story shouldn't be that mental health care matters only when it's your own. It should be that everyone deserves the same shot at getting well that he just got.

Kean had good insurance, job security, and time to heal. He used his power in office to deny those things to the people he represents. If he truly supported mental health care, his record would show it. Instead, his record shows a man who took the help — and then voted to take it away from you.

Source

This post is based on reporting by Mother Jones (lead photo: Francis Chung/POLITICO/AP), with additional detail from PBS NewsHour and Kean's own statement applauding the budget bill.

They Found Tom Kean Jr. — at Home, in a Suit, Still Not Doing His Job

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 15:09:50 +0000

For nearly four months, the people of New Jersey's 7th District have had a simple question: where is their congressman?

This week, they got a strange answer. A reporter for the New York Times walked up to Tom Kean Jr.'s home in Westfield on Wednesday night, rang the doorbell, and there he was — standing in a brightly lit front room just before 8:45 p.m., wearing a dark suit and a red tie, his wife smiling behind him.

"It's good to see you," Kean said. "I'll talk to you next week." Then he closed the door.

That was it. The first real sighting of Tom Kean Jr. since he vanished from Capitol Hill in March. No explanation. No apology. Just a man in formalwear at bedtime, telling a reporter to come back later.

More than 100 missed votes

Here is what "I'll talk to you next week" actually costs. Kean was last seen on the House floor on March 5. Since then he has missed more than 100 floor votes. His aides say he is being treated for a health condition and is expected to recover, but for months they refused to say anything more — not what is wrong, not where he was, not when he would come back.

Nobody begrudges a sick person time to heal. But a member of Congress is not just any job. When Kean doesn't vote, his roughly 760,000 constituents have no voice on the House floor at all. Every bill on health care, on grocery prices, on Social Security passed without anyone casting a vote for the 7th District. For months. And his office told them nothing.

His own constituents have been left looking for answers while their representative stayed silent.

Missing for voters — but present for the things that helped him

Here is the part that should make people angry. Kean was too absent to vote. But he was not too absent to keep his career and his money moving.

He kept trading stocks. While no one knew where he was, Kean disclosed at least 13 stock trades made between March 10 and March 31, buying and selling shares in eight companies worth somewhere between $50,000 and $190,000. He personally certified those disclosures on April 13 — during the same stretch he was too unwell to show up and vote.
His campaign kept cashing in. With Kean off the grid, his campaign racked up about $167,000 on autopilot. The money never stopped, even when the congressman did.
He won a primary without showing up. He ran unchallenged, made zero campaign appearances, and won anyway.
The Congressional Record kept moving. While Kean was nowhere to be seen, the record shows he introduced three bills, co-sponsored others, and submitted five entries — including a birthday tribute. House rules require members to personally sign those submissions. His office never explained how a man too sick to vote managed to sign them.

So he could trade stocks. He could raise money. He could file paperwork. He just couldn't vote for the people who elected him.

A pattern, not an accident

This is not the first time Tom Kean Jr. has told voters one thing and done another. In 2022, he campaigned on banning members of Congress from trading stocks and even attacked his opponent over it. After he got elected, he violated the STOCK Act more than once and never put his assets in the blind trust he promised. The ghost trades during his disappearance are just the newest chapter of the same story.

Kean's office says he will return to Congress on June 30 and finally explain the mystery. New Jersey voters have waited a long time for that. The real test is not whether he gives a speech — it's whether he ever again treats showing up to vote for them as seriously as he treats showing up to trade for himself.

He was lost. Now he's found. He's just still not doing the job.

Source

This post was prompted by Mother Jones, They Found Tom Kean Jr., reporting on the New York Times sighting of the congressman at his home. Photo: Tom Williams/AP via Mother Jones.

197 Republicans Voted to Spike Your Health Insurance Premiums

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

If you buy your own health insurance, your bill is about to jump. The extra help that millions of families use to afford their plans — the enhanced premium tax credits — expired at the end of 2025. Congress could have stopped that. Republicans had two chances. They blew both on purpose.

Here's what happened, and here's every Republican we track who made it happen.

Two votes, one result

First, the Senate. On December 11, 2025, the Senate took up a bill (S. 3385) to extend the very tax credits that keep insurance affordable. Republicans filibustered it. The motion to move forward failed 51–48 — it needed 60 votes — so the bill died without ever getting an up-or-down vote.

Then, the House. On December 17, 2025, House Republicans passed their own health bill, H.R. 6703, and gave it a friendly name: the "Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act." There was just one problem. It does not extend the expiring tax credits — the one thing that would actually keep premiums down for next year. The Congressional Budget Office found it would leave about 100,000 more people uninsured.

So one chamber blocked the fix, and the other passed a fake one. Same outcome: your costs go up.

What it costs you

This isn't a small change. If the tax credits go away, the amount families actually pay out of pocket for the same plan would more than double — about a 114% jump on average.

On top of that, insurance companies are raising their sticker prices about 26% for 2026. Put those together and a lot of people simply can't afford to stay covered. Enrollment is projected to fall from 22.3 million people in 2025 to around 17.5 million in 2026 — millions of Americans priced out of their own health insurance.

These are the people who get hit: small-business owners, farmers, early retirees, gig workers, and anyone who doesn't get insurance through a big employer. In other words, a huge share of the working families these members were elected to represent.

The "alternative" that wasn't

When you block the real fix, you need something to point to. That's what H.R. 6703 is for. It loosens the rules on "association health plans" — cheaper plans that don't have to cover all the benefits a normal plan does. It lets members go home and say they "voted to lower premiums." But the bill leaves the actual price hike in place, and the CBO says it covers fewer people, not more. It's a press release, not a solution.

The Senators who blocked the fix

These Republican senators we track voted to filibuster the extension and let your premiums climb:

Tommy Tuberville (Alabama)
Tom Cotton (Arkansas)
Ashley Moody (Florida)
Jim Risch (Idaho)
Roger Marshall (Kansas)
Cindy Hyde-Smith (Mississippi)
Pete Ricketts (Nebraska)
Jon Husted (Ohio)
Mike Rounds (South Dakota)
Bill Hagerty (Tennessee)
Shelley Moore Capito (West Virginia)

The Representatives who voted for the fake fix

185 Republican House members we track voted to pass H.R. 6703 — the bill that slaps a "lower premiums" label on a plan that doesn't lower premiums:

Alabama: Dale Strong, 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
California: David Valadao, Jay Obernolte, 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, Byron Donalds, Carlos Gimenez, Cory Mills, Greg Steube, Gus Bilirakis, Jimmy Patronis, John Rutherford, Kat Cammack, Laurel Lee, Maria Elvira Salazar, Mario Diaz-Balart, Mike Haridopolos, Randy Fine
Georgia: Andrew Clyde, Brian Jack, Mike Collins, Rich McCormick, Rick Allen
Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher
Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mary Miller, 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, 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, Russell Fry, Sheri Biggs, William Timmons
Tennessee: Andy Ogles, 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

The bottom line

Every one of these members will tell you they care about the cost of living. But when a bill landed on their desk that would have kept health insurance affordable for millions of their own constituents, they killed it — and then voted for a knockoff designed to give them cover. The price hike is real. The "alternative" is not. And in 2026, the people paying double for their insurance get to remember exactly who chose that for them.

How they voted

Senate — S. 3385, Roll Call Vote 644 (Dec 11, 2025)
House — H.R. 6703, Roll Call Vote 349 (Dec 17, 2025)