MAGA Report Cards — New York

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.

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

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

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

The argument they signed is the part worth reading twice.

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

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

What the brief actually argues

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

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

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

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

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

Who signed it

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

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

Some of these names carry their own history

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the argument matters beyond this case

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

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

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

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

What the filing shows

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

Nobody is doing the thing the bill bans

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

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

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

This is control, not freedom

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

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

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

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

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

Two Republicans said no

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

The bill now goes to the Senate.

The choice they made

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

Every Republican we track who voted yes

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

Iowa: Ashley Hinson, Zach Nunn

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

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

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the SAVE America Act would actually do to voters

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

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

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

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

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

The emergency the resolution describes

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

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

It cites a federal investigation that charged four people.

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

What was actually in front of them that week

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

Outside the chamber:

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

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

In their own words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 189 who voted yes

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

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho — Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas — Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi — Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey — Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

The number nine is not in the Constitution

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

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

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

What they were actually voting on

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

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

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

The timing

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

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

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

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

Who pushed it

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who voted to freeze the Court

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey: Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The man who quit over this said so at the time

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

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

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

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

The 188 who voted yes

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

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

The four who voted no

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

How they voted

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

Claudia Tenney Told CNN 'We Don't Know If It Was Stolen or Not.' Her New Election Plan Is Built on the Doubt She Helped Spread.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:34:51 +0000

On August 28, 2026, Claudia Tenney stood in Oswego and unveiled what she calls her "Make Voting Great Again" plan — a package of bills she says will make elections "easy to vote and hard to cheat."

Read what's actually in it and that slogan falls apart. Almost every item makes voting harder for someone. None of them catches a cheater, because the cheating she's protecting against barely exists.

What the plan would do to a voter in New York's 24th

Tenney's own issue page lists the bills. Here is what they do, in plain terms:

Require proof of citizenship to register — the SAVE Act, which she cosponsored and voted for. Not a driver's license. A passport or a birth certificate, presented in person. When a fellow New York Republican went on Fox News to defend that bill, she used a snow-shovel program's photo ID requirement as her example — and the SAVE Act wouldn't accept a photo ID either.
Require photo ID and citizenship verification to vote in national elections — H.R. 7300, the "Make Elections Great Again Act," which she cosponsored.
Throw out ballots that arrive after Election Day. Same bill. That is a rule about the mail, not about fraud.
Ban ranked choice voting — H.R. 2561, which she co-led. New York City uses ranked choice voting in its primaries. Her bill would take it away from federal races nationwide.
Restrict "ballot harvesting" — also H.R. 7300. It makes it unlawful to possess a ballot that is not your own, a family member's, or that of someone you are a caregiver for. Dropping off someone else's ballot is how a lot of homebound and disabled voters actually vote.
Bar states from taking private money to run elections — H.R. 723, which she cosponsored. A state could not accept a donation for election administration, "including any programs with respect to voter education, voter outreach, and voter registration."
Defund voter registration drives on federal property — H.R. 4823, which she introduced.
Bar charitable nonprofits from funding any election activity — H.R. 4943, which she introduced.
Amend the Constitution to bar noncitizens from voting at any level — H.J.Res. 107, which she introduced.

Not one of those makes it easier for an eligible American to cast a ballot. Several of them are simply a list of ways a legitimate vote can now be rejected: wrong document, wrong ID, arrived a day late, dropped off by a neighbor.

The problem she's solving does not exist at the scale she implies

The load-bearing claim under all of it is that noncitizens are voting. Tenney's constitutional amendment, her SAVE Act support, her letters to the Justice Department — all of it rests on that.

The measurements keep coming back the same way. When another House Republican made the same argument to Minnesota's election chief, a University of St. Thomas professor's 10-year study had found three cases out of 13.3 million votes cast. Voting as a noncitizen is already a federal felony and a deportable offense. It is one of the worst risk-reward propositions in American life, which is why almost nobody does it.

Tenney's response to that gap is to go looking. She has asked the IRS to investigate more than 650 New York nonprofits. She has asked the Justice Department to investigate a New York State Senate bill — S88A, which would automatically register Medicaid applicants to vote unless they opt out. Not a fraud, not a case, a state legislature's bill she does not like.

She said the quiet part about how they plan to pass it

The SAVE Act has passed the House twice and died in the Senate both times without ever getting a vote, because it needs 60 to break a filibuster. Tenney's page explains, in her own words, what Republicans are doing about that.

She voted for a budget resolution, H.Con.Res. 113, that sets up a fast-track process carrying $10 billion for "election integrity measures." Her reasoning, verbatim from her own website:

"While legislation, such as the SAVE America Act, is subject to the 60-vote cloture threshold allowing Democrats to prevent its passage, budget reconciliation can pass by a simple majority vote in the Senate."

That is a member of Congress writing down that the point of the maneuver is to get around the 60-vote threshold that has kept the bill she cosponsored from ever reaching the Senate floor. We wrote about this route when it first appeared: House Republicans trying to move voter suppression through the budget back door. Tenney is not hiding it. She is advertising it.

Her own election was decided by 109 votes

Here is what makes Tenney a strange messenger for "restoring faith" in elections.

Tenney was not in Congress on January 6, 2021. Her own race against Anthony Brindisi was still being counted. It went through three months of court hearings over disputed and mishandled ballots, and was certified in her favor by 109 votes in February 2021.

She accepted that result. She did not call it rigged. A slow, contested, court-supervised count is what handed her the seat.

Then, in May 2021 — months after every state had certified the presidential results and dozens of courts had thrown out the fraud claims — she told CNN this about the 2020 election:

"We don't know if it was stolen or not, (Cheney) doesn't know, I don't know, the President doesn't know."

She also voted against establishing an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 attack, and against creating the select committee that ultimately did.

That is the loop. Tenney's plan says "many Americans have lost confidence in the fairness of elections." Five years ago she was one of the people telling them there was reason to doubt — while sitting in a seat that a careful count had just given her by 109 votes.

What the record shows

Claudia Tenney's "Make Voting Great Again" plan is eight bills, and not one of them makes it easier for an eligible American to cast a ballot. Most add a document a voter must produce, remove a way a ballot can be counted, or defund someone who helps people register. Its central justification — noncitizens voting — is a crime a decade-long Minnesota study measured in single digits out of millions of votes. She has written on her own congressional website that the plan for passing it is a budget maneuver designed to avoid the Senate vote threshold it cannot meet. And the member selling it is the one who said in May 2021 that nobody could know whether the last presidential election was stolen, after a three-month contested count awarded her her own seat by 109 votes.

Source

Congresswoman Tenney Unveils her 2026 "Make Voting Great Again" Plan to Strengthen Election Integrity, Office of Rep. Claudia Tenney, August 28, 2026, and the plan's full text. Photo: official congressional portrait.

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

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

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

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

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

"You have so many proteins to choose from"

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

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

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

"The Democrats invented this term 'affordability'"

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

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

"Earn more"

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

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

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

"Gasoline prices are down 40 percent"

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

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

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

"Gas prices are at five-year lows"

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

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

The rest of the list

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

What they have in common

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

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

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

The short version

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

Source

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

Qatar Paid for Claudia Tenney's World Cup Trip. On the Form Where She Had to Name Who Paid, She Wrote the Name of a Law Instead.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:33:45 +0000

In November 2022, eight members of the U.S. House flew to Qatar to watch the World Cup. The government of Qatar paid for all of it.

That is legal. The Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act lets members of Congress accept foreign-government-funded travel — the idea being that lawmakers meeting foreign officials is worth something, as long as everyone can see who paid. The whole arrangement rests on that last part. You take the trip, and then you write down on a public form who bought the ticket.

Claudia Tenney took the trip. On the form, she wrote: "Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act (MECEA) Trip."

That is the name of the statute. It is not the name of anybody who paid for anything.

What the other members wrote

The delegation was bipartisan and not small: Tenney, André Carson of Indiana, Lou Correa of California, Darin LaHood of Illinois, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Bryan Steil of Wisconsin, Eric Swalwell of California, and David Valadao of California.

Most of them filled out the same box with the actual answer. Their disclosures name Qatar directly — "Government of Qatar," "Embassy of Qatar," "State of Qatar (MECEA)." Steil and Valadao, both Republicans on the same plane, named it.

Two members didn't. Tenney listed only the statute. So did LaHood, whose entry reads simply "MECEA."

The House Ethics Committee's instruction is not ambiguous about which answer is correct. Members are told to provide the name of the sponsor or organization that actually paid for or provided the travel — and the Committee spells out that on a MECEA trip, the sponsoring entity is the government of the host country.

Here, the host country was Qatar.

Why naming the country is the whole point of the form

Strip away the acronym and this is simple. A foreign government spent money on eight American lawmakers. The public interest in knowing which foreign government is not a technicality — it is the only reason the disclosure exists.

A member of Congress who accepts a Qatari-funded trip and files a form that never says "Qatar" has satisfied the letter of showing up and defeated the purpose. Anyone searching those filings for the word "Qatar" would find six members. They would not find Tenney or LaHood.

The Daily News reported the discrepancy on August 26, 2026, after Tenney's Democratic opponent in New York's 24th District, Alissa Ellman, raised it.

Tenney's answer

Her spokesperson, Ashlie Walker, did not answer the questions about why the filing named a statute rather than a government. What came back instead was a complaint about the coverage — that the paper was writing about this rather than about what New Yorkers need.

That response is worth reading twice. The question was: why doesn't your disclosure say who paid? The answer was: why are you asking?

Ellman's own framing was that time doesn't erase it. "Does it matter if it was four years ago?" she said. "Four years ago, I think the economic problems were still here in NY-24. There are the same issues…" She said she wouldn't accept that kind of trip if elected, and that she'd rather spend what she earns in Congress in the district — on its hotels, its restaurants, its people.

The pattern this fits

For Tenney, the through-line is who she treats as her audience. She has pushed a bill that would let the Treasury Secretary strip a nonprofit of its tax status without showing evidence, and she proposed making Donald Trump's birthday a federal holiday. Her constituents in NY-24 are not the ones being served by any of it.

For LaHood, the pattern is the same shape in a different key: on the record one way and on the roll call the other. He told Peoria radio in May that the Iran war needed an "off ramp," then voted a month later against the resolution ordering U.S. forces out.

Neither of them broke a law by going to Qatar. What they did was decline to be plainly identifiable, on a public form, as people whose trip a foreign government bought — while six colleagues on the same trip managed it without difficulty.

The bottom line

The government of Qatar paid for eight members of Congress to attend the 2022 World Cup. Six of them named Qatar on the financial disclosure where House rules require members to identify who actually paid for the travel. Claudia Tenney listed only "Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act (MECEA) Trip," and Darin LaHood listed only "MECEA" — the statute that permits foreign-funded travel, not the government that funded it. The House Ethics Committee's own guidance says the sponsor on a MECEA trip is the host country's government. Asked why, Tenney's spokesperson criticized the news outlet for asking.

Source

"Ellman criticizes Tenney for Qatar-funded World Cup trip", The Daily News (Batavia), August 26, 2026.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brad Finstad chairs the subcommittee that writes SNAP policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't believe in welfare."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eight weeks. That is the gap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Cole called it "an extraordinary piece of legislation"

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

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

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

Extraordinary is one word for it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

That somebody is usually you, on your electric bill.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Barrett is running on a vote from 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Republicans Who Voted Against the CHIPS Act — Then Took Credit for the Jobs

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 12:06:19 +0000

On July 28, 2022, the House passed the CHIPS and Science Act 243 to 187. Every single one of those 187 no votes was a Republican. Only 24 Republicans voted yes.

The law has since sent billions of dollars into semiconductor plants, research corridors and tech hubs — a lot of it into districts and states represented by people who voted against it.

That created a problem for those members. Not a policy problem. A photography problem.

Because the ribbon-cuttings happen at home, in front of local news, with hundreds or thousands of new jobs standing behind you. And E&E News found that of the 31 tech hubs designated under the law, 15 would directly assist the administration's climate goals. Ten of those 15 sat in states or districts represented by Republicans who did not vote for the law — and ten of those Republicans were claiming credit or touting the benefits.

Here is what that looks like, member by member. Every vote below is from the official House roll call or the Senate's, where the bill passed 64–33.

Frank Lucas — he wrote it, then voted against it

Start with the most extraordinary one.

Frank Lucas of Oklahoma was the top Republican on the House Science Committee. The science half of the CHIPS and Science Act was, substantially, his.

He said so himself on the House floor, in a statement his own office published under the headline "Regrettably, I Will Not Be Casting My Vote for the CHIPS and Science Act Today":

"I have worked on this bill for more than three years. When I first took leadership of the House Science Committee as Ranking Member in 2019, developing legislation to strengthen American science and technology was my highest priority."

He introduced the comprehensive version in January 2020. He then worked two years with Democratic Chairwoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, gathering stakeholder feedback and holding hearings. His own words:

"This has been an exemplary bipartisan process."

Then Senate Democrats announced a separate budget deal, and Lucas voted no. He opened his floor statement with: "Just 24 hours ago, I expected my remarks on the CHIPS and Science Act to be very different."

Three years of his own work, killed in his own vote, over a deal on a different bill.

And then the sequel: once Republicans took the House and Lucas became Chairman of the Science Committee, he convened a hearing titled "CHIPS on the Table: A One-Year Review of the CHIPS and Science Act."

He gaveled in a review of the law he'd voted to stop.

Claudia Tenney — "inextricably linked," then "honored to lead this effort"

In July 2022, Claudia Tenney of New York explained her no vote by tying the bill to Democrats' budget deal. Senate Democrats had announced their reconciliation agreement, she said, "only hours after" the CHIPS and Science Act passed the Senate — and of that budget bill, which became the Inflation Reduction Act:

"The bill is poised to send our country into a crushing recession even faster, and it is inextricably linked to passage of the CHIPS and Science Act."

Fifteen months later, she thanked colleagues for their "bipartisan support" in helping her secure a tech hub designation for the New York Semiconductor Manufacturing and Research Technology Innovation Corridor — created by the law she had voted against.

Then in January 2026 she stood at the groundbreaking of Micron's plant in Clay, New York — a project worth $100 billion over at least 20 years and up to 50,000 jobs — and posted that she "was honored to lead this effort in the House."

PolitiFact rated that Half True, noting the obvious: "In 2022, Tenney voted against the CHIPS and Science Act, which eventually provided billions of dollars in federal support for the Micron plant."

Tenney did not respond to E&E News' requests for comment. We wrote about this one in full here.

Maria Elvira Salazar — Miami is "ground zero," and she voted no

Maria Elvira Salazar voted against the bill. When the South Florida Climate Resilience Tech Hub was designated, her enthusiasm was, in E&E's word, effusive:

"Miami is ground zero for sea-level rise, and we continue to lead the charge in developing resilient infrastructure."

"The establishment of a Tech Hub in Miami ensures we continue leading in innovation and technological advancement, while creating new jobs, growing our economy, and promoting national security."

Her spokesperson's explanation is worth reading closely, because it's the most honest version of the defense anyone offered:

"Regardless, it still became law, and therefore Rep. Salazar will continue to fight for any wins possible for Miami."

Translated: she opposed the thing, lost, and will now accept the winnings. That is at least coherent. It is not "we continue to lead the charge."

Jim Risch — the press release that credits his own legislation

Jim Risch of Idaho voted no in the Senate. A press release on his own website then credited him with laying the groundwork for the Inland Northwest's American Aerospace Materials Manufacturing Tech Hub — which, it said, was selected

"as a result of Risch's legislation, the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act."

That's an earlier version of the bill, which was expanded and then signed into law — the law Risch voted against. His spokesperson said he's been "a leader and chief supporter of American-led semiconductor technology his entire career," but voted no "due to last-minute changes."

So the CHIPS is his. The Act is not.

Andy Biggs — $8.5 billion, and an empty chair

Andy Biggs took a different approach: silence.

Intel received an $8.5 billion federal grant under the law to expand semiconductor manufacturing in Chandler, Arizona, with up to $11 billion in loans available on top. The administration projected 10,000 manufacturing and construction jobs in the state, plus thousands more indirect.

When President Biden announced it at Intel's Ocotillo Campus on March 20, 2024, Biggs — who voted no — did not attend. The Arizona Republic reported that he "has kept a low profile on the topic," that "his public statements on the 2022 semiconductor law are scarce," and that he did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Biggs is now running for governor of Arizona on an economic platform. The single largest federal manufacturing investment in his state's recent history is one he voted against and has said almost nothing about.

Mike Johnson — "probably will" repeal it, then "apologized profusely"

Mike Johnson voted against the bill as a member. Then he became Speaker of the House.

On November 1, 2024 — campaigning in Syracuse, near the site of the Micron plant — Johnson told reporters Republicans "probably will" try to repeal the semiconductor law if they won Congress and the White House.

The backlash was immediate, and the retreat was faster. Johnson clarified within hours:

"I fully support Micron coming to Central NY, and the CHIPS Act is not on the agenda for repeal."

The local Republican he was campaigning for said Johnson "apologized profusely, saying he misheard the question."

That is the whole dynamic in one afternoon. The Speaker's honest instinct was repeal. The politics of standing near the site of a chip factory made it unsayable. So it became a misheard question.

What the pattern actually is

None of these six is being accused of a crime. Voting against a bill is legitimate. Members are allowed to think a law is bad and still serve the constituents it helps.

But look at what they actually said. Not "I opposed this, I lost, and I'll make sure my district gets its share" — which is Salazar's spokesperson's line, and which is defensible. What they said was that they led the effort. That the hub came as a result of their legislation. That they continue to lead the charge.

That's not constituent service. It's collecting the credit for a result you tried to prevent, and it only works if voters don't check the roll call.

The roll call is right here, and it has 187 names on it.

There is a version of this that would be honest, and Frank Lucas came closest to it — he told the House exactly what he was giving up and why, on the record, before he did it. Then he chaired the victory lap anyway.

When a factory opens near you in 2026 and your member of Congress is at the podium, the question worth asking is simple: how did you vote?

Claudia Tenney Voted No on the CHIPS Act in 2022. In 2026 She Stood at Micron's Groundbreaking and Said She Was 'Honored to Lead This Effort.'

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:37:52 +0000

On January 16, 2026, ground was broken in Clay, New York, on a semiconductor plant that Micron says will eventually mean $100 billion in investment and up to 50,000 jobs for Central New York. It is the biggest economic development project the region has seen in generations.

Claudia Tenney was there. Afterward she posted:

"I was honored to lead this effort in the House as Congress reaffirmed America's commitment to long-term innovation & competitiveness."

There is one problem with that sentence, and it is on the record at the Clerk of the House.

She voted no

On July 28, 2022, the House passed the CHIPS and Science Act — the law that created the federal incentives Micron used to choose New York — by a vote of 243 to 187, according to the official House roll call.

Tenney voted Nay.

She was not a lone dissenter making a principled stand against her party. Look at how the vote split:

All 187 "no" votes were Republicans.
219 Democrats and 24 Republicans voted yes.

Tenney chose the larger side of her own conference and against the bill. At the time, she said it "lacks critical guardrails" and raised concerns about Chinese espionage through university research partnerships.

Then the money arrived in her part of the state, and the framing changed.

What the fact-checkers found

PolitiFact examined the "led this effort" claim and rated it Half True on February 13, 2026.

Their reasoning was straightforward. As PolitiFact put it, "In 2022, Tenney voted against the CHIPS and Science Act, which eventually provided billions of dollars in federal support for the Micron plant." Her later work — sponsoring a 2025 bill that expanded a CHIPS tax credit — is real, but it came nearly three years after the vote that made the project possible.

You cannot lead an effort you voted to stop.

Why this matters more than a bruised ego

It would be easy to file this under ordinary political puffery. Politicians take credit. Everybody knows.

But the credit-claiming isn't harmless, because it breaks the only feedback loop voters have.

The whole point of a recorded vote is that constituents can see what their representative did and decide whether they agree. If a member can vote no, watch the bill pass anyway, and then collect the applause when the results show up — with no cost — then the vote stopped meaning anything. The incentive it creates is to oppose things that help your district and hope they pass regardless.

That is precisely what happened here. Central New York got the plant. Tenney got the photo. The 187 votes that would have killed the whole thing got quietly left out of the caption.

This is a habit, not a slip

We keep writing this same story about different Republicans, because it keeps happening:

The pattern is identical every time: vote against the thing, let it pass, show up for the ribbon.

The rest of Tenney's record on her district

The Micron plant is genuinely good news for the 24th District. Tenney's other votes have not been.

The Joint Economic Committee's House minority staff estimates the Medicaid and ACA cuts in Trump's budget bill — which Tenney voted for — will cost more than 35,000 people in her district their health insurance. More than 43,000 households in her Upstate New York district — about one in eight — rely on SNAP to afford groceries, and that same bill cut it.

She is also the author of a bill that would let a single Treasury official shut down any nonprofit without showing evidence.

What voters should ask

Tenney is entitled to say she opposed the CHIPS Act for reasons she believed in. Plenty of Republicans did.

What she is not entitled to do is stand at the groundbreaking of a factory her vote would have prevented and tell Central New York she led the way there.

The 24th District deserves a representative whose record and press releases describe the same person.

Sources

House Roll Call 404, H.R. 4346 (CHIPS and Science Act), July 28, 2022 — Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives
Fact-checking Rep. Claudia Tenney on efforts to build Micron's big semiconductor facility in NY — Andrew McGurl, PolitiFact, February 13, 2026
Claudia Tenney Voted Against the CHIPS Act. Then Took Credit for the Jobs. — WesternNYPolitics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is actually being taken away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And TSA screeners got the same treatment

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

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

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

The House had a bill to end it permanently

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

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

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

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

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

The 20 Republicans who voted yes

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

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

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

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

The 195 who voted no

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

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

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

Colorado — Lauren Boebert, Jeff Crank, Jeff Hurd

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

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

Idaho — Russ Fulcher, Mike Simpson

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mary Miller

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

Iowa — Ashley Hinson

Kansas — Ron Estes, Tracey Mann, Derek Schmidt

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

Minnesota — Tom Emmer, Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach

Mississippi — Mike Ezell, Michael Guest, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Mike Flood, Adrian Smith

New York — Nick Langworthy, Claudia Tenney

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Mike Kennedy, Celeste Maloy, Blake Moore

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

The Senate has done nothing for eight months

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

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

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

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

This is not a fringe position they're protecting

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

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

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

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

We deserve better.

How they voted

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

Source

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

Nicole Malliotakis Sold a Voting Bill on Photo ID. Its Other Half Asks for Your Birth Certificate, in Person.

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 07:55:30 +0000

Nicole Malliotakis went to Fox News Digital last week with an argument that sounds like plain common sense.

New York City's mayor, she said, requires photo ID to use a city-run supermarket program, and more than one form of identification for a city snow-shoveling program — but his party will not require any ID to vote.

"Sadly, you see the hypocrisy when you see programs like Mayor Mamdani wanting to require photo ID to utilize a government-run supermarket or when he wanted you to use a photo ID, not just one, but multiple IDs for a snow shoveling program."

Her conclusion was that the Senate should pass the bill sitting in front of it. "We've passed it out of the House now four times and is up to the Senate to get the job done," she said. She added that "over 80% of America wants it," and that the only holdouts "are the Democrats who are in Congress right now."

Then she named the bill and described it in the same breath:

"If you want people to be confident in the outcome of the election, then we need to pass the Save America Act. We need to require voter ID."

That much is accurate. The bill does require voter ID. But requiring voter ID is one of two things it does, and she never mentioned the other one — which is the half that will cost people a registration.

Two halves, and she talked about one

The SAVE America Act is not last year's SAVE Act. It is a newer bill, and the House moved it by taking an unrelated Senate measure — a veterans bill numbered S. 1383 — and replacing its entire text with its own. As FactCheck.org put it when the Senate began debate, "Unlike last year's SAVE Act, the bill also would require voters to present photo identification before casting a vote, whether by mail or in person."

What came out of the House has two operating sections.

One is the photo ID requirement. An election official "may not provide a ballot" to a person voting in person "unless the individual presents to the official a valid physical photo identification." Someone voting by mail has to send a copy of one, or the last four digits of a Social Security number along with a sworn statement that they could not get a copy. Miss it at the polls and you cast a provisional ballot that does not count unless, within three days, you come back with the card or swear you have a religious objection to being photographed.

The list of cards that qualify is five items long: a state driver's license, a state ID card issued by a motor vehicle agency, a U.S. passport, a military ID, and a Tribal ID. Nothing a city issues is on it.

The other is the part she left out. Before anyone votes, they have to be registered, and this is where the bill does its real work. To register — or to change a registration you already have — you must hand over documents proving you are a citizen. FactCheck.org's summary is exact: the bill "would require people to present citizenship documents in person to election officials, even if they are registering by mail."

What counts as proof

The statute's list here is five items too, and only one of them is a single card an ordinary person is likely to be carrying:

A REAL ID that states on its face that you are a citizen. Five states issue an "enhanced" license that does.
A valid U.S. passport. About 53% of Americans have one.
A military ID, together with a service record showing you were born in the United States.
A government photo ID that shows a U.S. birthplace.
Any other government photo ID — but only if handed over together with a certified birth certificate, a hospital record of birth, an adoption decree, a consular report of birth abroad, a naturalization certificate, or an American Indian Card.

So for almost everyone it comes down to a passport, or a driver's license and a birth certificate carried to a government office during business hours. A Social Security card will not do it. Neither will a utility bill, a benefits card, or the photo ID you would show at a city grocery counter.

We've written before about what that requirement does to people who cannot put their hands on the documents. The numbers behind it:

The Bipartisan Policy Center, analyzing the 2024 Survey on the Performance of American Elections, found that 12% of registered voters have neither a passport nor a birth certificate paired with a government photo ID.
A 2023 survey by the Brennan Center and other groups found that 21.3 million Americans of voting age, more than 9%, did not have easy access to citizenship documents — they could not quickly find them if they had to show them tomorrow.
84% of women who marry change their surname — as many as 69 million American women whose birth certificate no longer carries their legal name. The bill says nothing about marriage certificates or change-of-name papers.

And this does not stop at first-time registrants. Nobody has to re-register just because the law passed, but anyone who re-registers for an ordinary reason walks into it. The legal director of VoteRiders told FactCheck the statute "is drafted broadly enough to encompass all changes to registration." David Becker, of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, said proof would be needed "any time you conduct what we call a registration transaction, which usually comes from a life event, a move or a change of name."

Malliotakis represents Staten Island and part of southern Brooklyn. For anyone there who has married and changed her name, moved between boroughs, or never had a reason to hold a passport, that is an errand with original documents, in person, during the working day.

Her "over 80%" is close for one half and high for the bill

Her figure is roughly right about the popular part, and the polling shows exactly where the popularity stops.

A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll of 1,999 registered voters, conducted February 25 and 26, found 71% support for the SAVE America Act as the pollster described it. Taken apart, the pieces polled higher: voter ID at 81%, removing noncitizens from the rolls at 80%, proof of citizenship to register at 75%, and sharing voter rolls with the Department of Homeland Security at 61%. Gallup in October 2024 found 84% support for photo ID at the polling place and 83% for requiring people registering for the first time to prove citizenship. A Pew Research Center poll found 83% support for showing government-issued photo ID before voting.

So "over 80%" describes voter ID well. It overstates the bill.

More to the point, none of those questions is the bill. Gallup asked about first-time registrants; this bill reaches the woman who married last year and the family that moved across the borough line. No pollster has asked whether a citizen should have to carry a birth certificate to a government office to keep a registration she has had for thirty years.

Becker made the same point about how the question is put: "If you just ask the regular question in polls, do you support voter ID, you do see vast majorities of Americans say yes, including majorities of Democrats. If you ask people, should eligible voters without voter IDs be disenfranchised, you get very different responses." The Harvard poll tested that directly. Asked which mattered more, 54% chose doing everything possible to stop fraud and noncitizen voting, and 46% chose making sure eligible citizens are not denied the ability to vote.

Selling the whole bill on the half that polls at 81% is a choice. South Carolina's new senator made the same one when she compared this bill to showing a card to check out a library book. A card at a counter is the polling-place half. The registration half has no counterpart in any city program, library, or supermarket.

She voted for it. Here is the record.

The House has taken four votes on this bill and its predecessors.

July 10, 2024 — H.R. 8281 passed 221 to 198. Malliotakis voted Aye.
September 18, 2024 — a stopgap spending bill carrying the SAVE Act failed 202 to 220. Malliotakis is recorded as not voting.
April 10, 2025 — H.R. 22 passed 220 to 208. Malliotakis voted Yea.
February 11, 2026 — S. 1383, rewritten as the SAVE America Act, passed 218 to 213. Malliotakis voted Yea.

She told Fox the House has passed it four times. The House voted four times and passed it three. She was there for all three.

She is entitled to those votes. What she is not entitled to is describing the bill to constituents as a photo ID law and stopping there, when the rest of it is what they would meet at the registration desk.

What the Senate has actually done

Her charge is that the Senate is sitting on it. The Senate took it up. On March 17 it agreed to proceed by 51 to 48 and spent ten days on it. Then, on March 26, a cloture vote fell short, 53 to 47 — sixty are needed to break a filibuster. That is the last thing the Senate has done with the bill. It has never voted on whether to pass it.

The problem the bill claims to solve

Malliotakis's stated reason is confidence in election outcomes.

Noncitizen voting in federal elections is already a federal crime, and it is already almost nonexistent. When the Brennan Center surveyed election administrators who together tabulated 23.5 million votes in the 2016 election, those officials had referred roughly 30 suspected incidents of noncitizen voting for investigation — 0.0001 percent of ballots. In the study itself, forty of the forty-two jurisdictions reported no known incidents at all.

The bill would not remove a single illegal vote that isn't already illegal. It would add a documents requirement that falls on married women, seniors, renters who move, and people who work hourly shifts.

On confidence in elections, specifically

If Malliotakis's concern is that Americans trust election outcomes, there is a more direct place to look than voter registration paperwork.

On January 9, 2025 she became one of twelve members of Congress to sign a resolution expunging Donald Trump's impeachment for inciting the attack on the Capitol — an attack aimed at stopping the certification of an election. Twelve days later she went on CNN and said of those who assaulted police officers that day, "those do need to serve the time."

You cannot spend one week arguing that the 2020 result should never have been contested and the next arguing it should be erased from the record. Confidence in elections is not damaged by citizens registering to vote. It is damaged by elected officials who treat the outcome as negotiable when they lose.

Where constituents could ask her about this

They can't, in person. Staten Islanders have been showing up outside her district office on Mondays — including with cupcakes for Medicare and Medicaid's 61st birthday — and she still has not held a town hall. The Joint Economic Committee's district table puts 39,380 people in her district on track to lose Medicaid coverage from the budget bill she voted for.

A town hall is exactly where someone would get to ask the simple question: Congresswoman, I've been registered here for thirty years and I changed my name when I got married. What do I bring, and where do I bring it?

Her Fox News answer, which she gave to a national audience instead, was that citizens need to hold senators accountable.

The senators are not the ones who described it to New Yorkers as a photo ID law.

Sources

Fox News, "New York City's lone Republican in Congress accuses Mamdani, Schumer of 'hypocrisy' in voter ID fight" by Robert McGreevy (August 14, 2026). Photo by Seth Wenig-Pool/Getty Images.
FactCheck.org, "Q&A on the SAVE America Act" by Lori Robertson and D'Angelo Gore (March 18, 2026) — the source for the photo ID comparison, the in-person requirement, the document list, the Bipartisan Policy Center and Brennan Center figures, and the Harvard CAPS/Harris, Gallup and Pew polling.
The text of the bill as it passed the House: S. 1383, Engrossed Amendment House, February 11, 2026.
Center for American Progress, "The SAVE Act: Overview and Facts."
Brennan Center for Justice, "Noncitizen Voting: The Missing Millions."
Joint Economic Committee, "District-Level Impacts of Health Care Cuts."

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.

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

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

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

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

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

What the judge did

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

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

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

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

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

What the letter asks for

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

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

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

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

The man who led it sells the products

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

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

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

Who signed

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

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

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

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

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

What registration was actually doing

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

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

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

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

Source

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

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.

Andrew Garbarino Got the Gavel Over ICE in July. By September, Three Private Prison Companies Were Writing Him Checks.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:08:35 +0000

Andrew Garbarino has the job in Congress that decides how hard anyone looks at ICE.

On July 21, 2025, House Republicans picked him to chair the Committee on Homeland Security, replacing Mark Green of Tennessee, who had just resigned from Congress. The gavel came with real authority over Immigration and Customs Enforcement: what gets a hearing, who testifies under oath, what documents get subpoenaed, which contracts get questions asked about them.

Eight weeks later, three checks arrived.

The three checks

Here is what the Federal Election Commission's records show, straight from the filings of the companies' own political action committees:

September 17, 2025 — $5,000 from The GEO Group's PAC.
September 23, 2025 — $5,000 from CoreCivic's PAC.
September 30, 2025 — $5,000 from Management & Training Corporation's PAC.

Three companies. Thirteen days. All of them go to Garbarino for Congress, his campaign committee.

GEO Group and CoreCivic are the two largest private prison companies in America; MTC is a smaller operator in the same business. All three hold ICE detention contracts. And they had never done anything like this for him before.

What they used to give him

Garbarino was first elected in 2020. Across his first three campaigns, all three of these companies combined gave him $2,500:

2020 cycle: nothing.
2022 cycle: $1,000, from GEO Group's PAC — and not even to his campaign. It went to his joint fundraising committee.
2024 cycle: $1,500, from GEO Group's PAC.

CoreCivic had never given him a dollar. Neither had MTC.

Since he took over the ICE oversight committee, the three of them have given him $30,000 — twelve times what he got in six years of not running the committee. Ten thousand dollars from each, the maximum a PAC can give across a primary and a general.

And they kept going after that first round. GEO Group added $2,500 on January 30, 2026 and another $2,500 on April 21. MTC added $5,000 on April 15. CoreCivic added $5,000 on April 22.

Nobody else in Congress got close

We pulled every disbursement these three PACs made in the 2026 election cycle. After the party committees — the NRSC, the NRCC and the RNC, which together took $240,000 through the end of June 2026 — Garbarino is the single largest recipient among members of Congress.

Not by a little. No other candidate's committee received more than $10,000 from these three PACs this cycle. Garbarino got triple that. He is also the only member of Congress all three companies decided to fund.

You can check this yourself: the FEC posts every disbursement GEO Group's PAC made, searchable by who got the money.

Why $30,000 is cheap

Because of what they're getting back.

Since January 20, 2025, ICE has obligated, according to the federal government's own spending database:

$1.20 billion to The GEO Group, Inc.
$548 million to CoreCivic, Inc.
$368 million to BI Incorporated — the GEO subsidiary that runs the ankle-monitor and check-in program ICE uses to track people who aren't in a cell. GEO tells its own investors that "our BI subsidiary" has held that contract since 2004.
$59 million to Management & Training Corporation.

That's over $2.1 billion in eighteen months, to three companies that spent $30,000 on the chairman who oversees the agency writing the checks.

For GEO Group, ICE is about half the business. Its founder's influence operation and its detention windfall were laid out in July by the Florida Bulldog, which reported that ICE contracts now account for 48% of GEO's total revenue, that the company's 2025 revenue hit $2.6 billion, and that first-quarter 2026 revenue jumped 17% to $705.2 million.

We've written before about what that boom looks like from the investor side: $1.4 billion in a single quarter for GEO and CoreCivic together, and a $1.6 billion sale of four CoreCivic facilities to the Department of Homeland Security that worked out to $307,000 per bed — after which the government paid CoreCivic to keep running the buildings it had just bought from them.

MTC's version is smaller and more direct. Last summer it bought a shuttered state prison outside Marana, Arizona for $15 million. On February 25, 2026, ICE published a notice that it intended to hand MTC a no-bid, two-year contract to fill it with up to 513 detained men. MTC's PAC wrote Garbarino its second $5,000 check seven weeks after that notice went up.

This is legal. That's the problem.

Federal law bars government contractors from giving money to federal candidates. The FEC says it plainly: campaigns "may not accept or solicit contributions from federal government contractors."

But there's a door in that wall. Under 11 CFR 115.3, a contractor may spend its own corporate money "to establish, administer, and solicit contributions to any separate segregated fund" — a company PAC. The company can't write the check. The PAC the company pays to run can.

So nobody here broke a law. Three companies holding $2.1 billion in ICE contracts routed money to the man who oversees ICE, through the one channel Congress left open for them. That is the arrangement working exactly as designed.

What Congress got for it

Garbarino has not been a bystander on this.

On June 9, 2026, the House passed the Secure America Act, funding ICE and CBP for three more fiscal years. It passed 214 to 212 — a two-vote margin in which every single Republican yes was a deciding vote, and not one Republican voted no. Garbarino voted aye. He and Rep. Michael Guest put out a statement the same day taking credit for it.

In the two months before that vote, all three private prison PACs had made their second round of contributions.

The bigger money came earlier. Trump's 2025 budget bill set aside $45 billion over four years for immigration detention, which the Brennan Center calculated as a 400% increase in ICE's annual detention budget — enough to detain potentially more than 100,000 people a year. Nearly 90% of the people already in ICE custody are held in for-profit facilities.

That is the money these three companies are dividing up. And Garbarino chairs the committee that is supposed to be watching them spend it.

Who is in those beds

As of July 11, 2026, TRAC at Syracuse University counted 65,765 people in ICE detention. Of those, 46,436 — 70.6% — had no criminal conviction of any kind.

Not a reduced charge. Not a plea. No conviction.

Seven out of every ten people filling the beds these companies are paid to maintain have been convicted of nothing.

At least 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025 — the most in any year since 2004, according to the Tucson Sentinel reporting on the Marana facility linked above.

The pattern on his own committee

Garbarino is not the only member of the Homeland Security Committee taking money from the industry his committee oversees. We wrote yesterday about the CoreCivic money flowing to Matt Van Epps, a Tennessee freshman on that same committee — $5,000 from CoreCivic's PAC plus checks from both its outgoing and incoming chief executives, arriving as he became one of Congress's loudest voices for funding ICE.

The difference is that Van Epps is a first-term member with one vote. Garbarino holds the gavel.

And we have already documented what he does with it. In January he requested testimony from ICE and CBP leadership after federal agents killed two American citizens in Minneapolis. In February, ICE told his committee that 6,000 more body cameras were being deployed. In June he voted to hand ICE three more years of money. Then on July 7, ICE agents in Houston shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — and the agents had no body or dashboard cameras. The chairman's response was to ask ICE for a briefing that, by its own terms, would not cover the shooting.

The same thing is happening one committee over, on a much bigger scale. Eleven days after Trump's budget bill passed, GEO Group sent $250,000 to a dark-money group whose president is Jim Jordan's former chief of staff — and Jordan chairs the Judiciary Committee, the other panel with oversight of ICE. GEO had given Jordan's campaign $12,500 total across 2022 through 2024. The donation only became public because an affiliated super PAC disclosed it by accident.

What we're saying and what we're not

We can't prove anyone told Garbarino what to do. There's no memo. There doesn't need to be one.

Here is what the public record shows, in order:

He got the gavel over ICE oversight on July 21, 2025.
By the end of September, all three of the biggest ICE detention contractors — two of which had never given him anything — had written him checks.
Over the cycle they gave him $30,000, more than any other member of Congress, while collecting $2.1 billion from the agency he oversees.
He voted to give that agency three more years of funding by a two-vote margin.

Garbarino's own funding tells you who he answers to before any of this. Only 5% of his money comes from small grassroots donors — ranking him #357 out of 440 House members — while 48% comes from PACs. And an in-person town hall — the place a constituent might get to ask him about any of this out loud — is not something he offers. In the spring of 2025, organizers booked a 1,000-seat Patchogue theatre for a visiting Maryland Democrat instead, saying it was held in place of any in-person town hall by Garbarino or his neighboring Republican. His own town halls are held by telephone.

An estimated 2,000 people showed up outside his Patchogue office in April 2025 to try anyway. GEO Group, CoreCivic and MTC didn't have to stand outside. They just had to file a form.

Source

Reporting on GEO Group's political spending and detention revenue: "GEO Group's immigration detention windfall follows millions in pro-Trump political spending" by Dan Christensen, Florida Bulldog, July 16, 2026. Photo: Florida Bulldog.

Contribution figures in this post were pulled directly from Federal Election Commission filings by the GEO Group PAC (C00382150), CoreCivic PAC (C00366468), and Management & Training Corporation PAC (C00208322) for the 2020, 2022, 2024 and 2026 election cycles. Contract totals are from USAspending.gov, covering ICE obligations from January 20, 2025 through August 11, 2026.

Mike Lawler Wrote a Bill That Could Put Americans in Prison for 20 Years Over a Boycott. His Own Party Pulled It Off the Floor.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:36:07 +0000

Boycotting is about as American as it gets. The Boston Tea Party came at the end of a boycott campaign against British goods. The Montgomery bus boycott helped end segregation on city buses. Conservatives boycott Bud Light and Target; progressives boycott companies that fund the NRA. The Supreme Court settled the question in 1982, in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware, holding that the government's power "to regulate economic activity could not justify a complete prohibition against a nonviolent, politically motivated boycott."

Mike Lawler is the lead sponsor of a bill that would make taking part in certain boycotts a federal felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison and $1 million in fines.

It is called the IGO Anti-Boycott Act. He introduced it in April 2023, got it through the House once, and reintroduced it as H.R. 867 on January 31, 2025. In May 2025 House leadership scheduled it for a floor vote — and then quietly pulled it, after Republicans revolted.

What the bill actually does

Start with the law it amends, because that is where the prison sentence comes from.

In the 1970s, the Arab League required American companies to boycott Israel as a condition of doing business in Arab League countries. Congress responded with anti-boycott rules barring U.S. companies from going along with a boycott demanded by a foreign government. In 2018 Congress tightened them, setting a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison or a $1 million fine. "Complying" includes something as passive as furnishing information — telling a foreign body whether a company does business somewhere.

Lawler's bill takes that machinery and points it at a different target. It extends the same rules — and the same penalties — to boycotts called for by international governmental organizations like the United Nations and the European Union.

That difference sounds technical. It is not. The old law protected American companies from economic coercion — do this or lose your market. The UN Human Rights Council has no such power over anybody. It publishes lists and passes resolutions. Nobody complies with a UN resolution because they'll be shut out of a market; people go along with it because they agree with it.

Which means, as the ACLU put it, the bill "would turn the [law] on its head." In a letter to every House member dated May 4, 2025, the organization was blunt:

"H.R. 867 would punish Americans for their purely voluntary, and constitutionally protected, participation in political boycott campaigns."

And more specifically:

"H.R. 867 plainly extends to voluntary, politically-motivated speech seeking to support proscribed boycotts. The bill would make it a federal felony to furnish information to an international governmental organization, such as the U.N. Human Rights Council, about whether any person has business relationships with or in the boycotted country."

The ACLU said it would score the vote, and that if the bill passed it would consider suing.

Read that middle sentence again, because it's the heart of it. Under Lawler's bill, an American who tells a UN human rights body which companies operate in a particular place could be committing a felony. Not organizing a boycott. Not refusing to sell anything. Telling the truth to an international organization. The ACLU noted that this exact tactic — naming companies publicly — was among the forms of boycott-facilitating speech the Supreme Court expressly identified in the Claiborne Hardware case.

His own party wouldn't vote for it

The bill did not die because of Democrats. It died because Republicans read it.

Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of Florida — no one's idea of a critic of Israel — wrote on X: "Americans have the right to boycott, and penalizing this risks free speech. I reject and vehemently condemn antisemitism but I cannot violate the first amendment."

Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky called it "a ridiculous bill that our leadership should have never scheduled for a vote," and it was Massie who revealed on a Sunday night that the vote had been quietly postponed.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene put it this way: "It is my job to defend American's rights to buy or boycott whomever they choose without the government harshly fining them or imprisoning them."

Former Rep. Matt Gaetz called it a "dangerous and unconstitutional Lawler virtue signal."

This is the same congressman who spends a great deal of energy telling Hudson Valley voters he's the reasonable one, the moderate in the swing seat. On this bill, the objection that stopped him came from his right, and the objection was the First Amendment.

Lawler's defense was that he was only extending something that already exists. "This expands existing federal law to any boycott organized by IGOs like the United Nations. President Trump signed the first bill into law," he said. His office added that the bill "does not limit free speech, political activism, or any business decision" of U.S. entities.

The ACLU, and several members of his own conference, read the text differently.

Who wanted this bill

Lawler's own January 31, 2025 press release announcing the reintroduction is filled with endorsements. One of them is a single sentence from the most powerful pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington:

"AIPAC strongly supports the IGO Anti-Boycott Act which makes clear the U.S. will not countenance U.N. instigated boycotts of our ally Israel."

AIPAC is not a bystander in Mike Lawler's career. Pro-Israel PACs, led by AIPAC, have given him $1,181,950, on TrackAIPAC's count of the FEC filings through July 2026. He sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee, which handles the policy those groups lobby for.

There is also a paper trail on where the idea came from. An Israeli government strategy memo written in February 2019 — obtained and published by the transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets in July 2024, and reported by Reason — recommended getting the UN's list of companies covered by "existing U.S. antiboycott regulations imposed by the Commerce and Treasury Departments." The memo noted the obstacle: those departments had long held that the rules apply only to boycotts enforced by governments, not to what companies choose to do on their own. Its assessment was that "new Congressional legislation" would be the "most difficult approach, but the one that would provide the most flexibility."

Lawler's bill is that legislation. Whether he ever saw the memo is unknown and not the point. The point is that his bill closes exactly the gap a foreign government identified, in exactly the way that government said would work best — and the cost of closing it is paid by Americans' right to speak.

It has already passed the House once

This is not a symbolic bill going nowhere.

An earlier version, H.R. 3016, cleared the House Foreign Affairs Committee 42–3 and passed the full House on February 13, 2024 by voice vote — meaning no member had to go on record. It died in the Senate. Lawler and Gottheimer reintroduced it expecting a better outcome with Republicans controlling both chambers.

H.R. 867 currently has 24 cosponsors, 19 Republicans and 5 Democrats. It has not been withdrawn. It is sitting there, one floor calendar away from a vote, and the only thing that has stopped it is a handful of Republicans willing to say out loud that Americans get to decide for themselves what to buy.

The pattern

Punishing people economically for their politics has become a habit in this party, and it runs in both directions. Riley Moore, as West Virginia's treasurer, blacklisted five of the largest banks in America over their climate policies — a decision analysts estimate cost his own state up to $29 million in a single year. The principle there was that a company's political choices are the government's business. Lawler's bill takes the same principle and attaches a prison sentence to it.

The consistent thing about a free-speech right is that it protects speech you hate. That is the entire job. A congressman who would jail an American for handing accurate information to a United Nations body is not defending an ally — he is proposing that Washington decide which political opinions an American is allowed to act on.

His constituents in Rockland, Putnam, Westchester and Dutchess should know he wrote it, that he is still trying to pass it, and that the people who stopped him were in his own party.

Sources

Reason, "Should sharing information about Israeli businesses get you 20 years in prison?", May 5, 2025; ACLU, "Vote No on HR 867, the IGO Anti-Boycott Act", May 4, 2025; Jewish Insider, "House cancels vote on IGO Anti-Boycott Act following right-wing objections". Photo: official congressional portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

A Data Center Wanted to Expand Next to a Drinking Water Reservoir in His District. Nine Days Later, Mike Lawler Went on TV to Say the Rules Are the Problem.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:32:47 +0000

Data centers are giant buildings full of computers that run artificial intelligence. They use enormous amounts of electricity and enormous amounts of water, and somebody has to pay to build the power lines and substations that feed them. In the Hudson Valley, that somebody is you.

Mike Lawler represents New York's 17th District — Rockland, Putnam, and parts of Westchester and Dutchess. Several data centers have been proposed there. And over the past year, his constituents have been showing up at town halls and planning board meetings, more than a hundred at a time, to fight them.

On July 17, 2026, Lawler went on Fox Business to talk about data centers. He did not talk about his constituents. He went on "Maria Bartiromo's Wall Street" to attack New York's new limits on data center permits, arguing they hurt innovation and investment and push the industry toward rivals like China. The segment's title says it plainly: banning data centers will only hurt New York's economy.

Nine days earlier, the planning board in his own district had voted unanimously to stop one.

What happened in Orangeburg

Orangeburg, in Rockland County, has quietly become a regional data center hub — with facilities operated for or associated with Bloomberg, JPMorganChase, DataBank and 1547 Critical Systems Realty, according to Rockland News. DataBank runs a 20-megawatt facility at 2000 Corporate Drive. That address sits near Lake Tappan — a reservoir that supplies drinking water to communities across the New Jersey line.

DataBank wanted to build a second phase. Residents organized against it.

In May, residents rallied outside Orangetown Town Hall, chanting "We can't drink data" and calling for a moratorium on further growth. They raised the electricity demand, the water, the jobs AI might replace, and the possibility that their power bills would go up to pay for it all.

The company scaled the project back — cutting the proposed building roughly in half, from 146,000 square feet to about 77,862, and dropping a planned electrical substation. It didn't help. On July 8, 2026, the Orangetown Planning Board voted unanimously that the expansion could have significant environmental effects and ordered a full environmental impact statement — which stops the project until that study is done. More than 100 residents gathered outside town hall before the meeting, alongside Food & Water Watch, Indivisible Rockland, the Data Center Crisis Coalition and the Sierra Club.

The reasons its consultants and residents gave were not abstract: electricity use, air quality, noise, diesel exhaust, and the site's proximity to the Lake Tappan reservoir. Peggy Kurtz of the Rockland Sierra Club put it directly:

"The possibility of contamination of Lake Tappan, which serves northern NJ communities, from leaking tanks or from an electrical fire is very real."

It is not just Rockland. In Dutchess County, residents have been fighting a proposed 1-gigawatt data center in East Fishkill — one of the largest data center proposals in New York State. More than 1,000 people signed a petition against it, citing noise, water use, electricity costs, grid instability and environmental damage. One resident's summary: "Our energy bills are already off the charts, and this new facility would likely only further burden area residents."

Then the state acted, and he objected

On July 14, Governor Kathy Hochul signed Executive Order 62, the first statewide moratorium of its kind in the country.

It is worth being precise about what it does, because a lot of the noise around it was not precise. It is not a ban on building data centers. It directs the state Department of Environmental Conservation to pause discretionary permit applications for data centers that would draw at least 50 megawatts, and only where those applications had not already been declared complete. Local zoning, planning and building approvals aren't touched. Facilities used mainly for manufacturing, research, education and medical care are exempt. The pause lasts while the state finishes an environmental review — up to a year.

The reason for it is a number: nearly 12,000 megawatts of proposed data center demand had entered New York's electric grid queue as of May 2026, more than 8,000 megawatts of that added during 2025 alone. Hochul said the surge raises the risk that residential and business customers get stuck helping pay for the transmission lines and grid upgrades large tech companies need. The order also tells regulators to consider requiring developers to pay into a grid-acceleration fund or finance new generation and battery storage themselves, and Hochul said she will seek legislation ending statewide sales-tax exemptions for the largest data centers.

Three days later, Lawler was on Fox Business calling it a mistake.

Note what he did not do. He did not say Lake Tappan should be protected. He did not say the 12,000 megawatts should be paid for by the companies asking for it. Food & Water Action, endorsing his opponent, pointed out that Lawler has not spoken out against any of the data center projects proposed in his district — in Orangeburg, in East Fishkill, or at Indian Point in Buchanan — while he has criticized the state's attempt to slow them down.

He already voted to take this power away from New York entirely

Here is the part that ties it together.

On May 22, 2025, the House passed Trump's budget bill by a single vote, 215 to 214. Lawler voted yes. The version he voted for contained a provision that would have imposed a ten-year ban on states enforcing their own AI rules — a sweeping preemption that would have stopped more than 1,000 state AI bills in their tracks.

The Senate stripped it out on July 1, 2025, by a near-unanimous vote of 99 to 1 — after criticism from state attorneys general, governors, consumer advocates and Republican senators, and after Marsha Blackburn withdrew from a compromise saying the provision was "not acceptable to those who need these protections the most."

Had the provision Lawler voted for survived, Albany's ability to write AI rules would have been frozen until 2035 — and Hochul's order would likely not have been possible, because it targets hyperscale data centers, which are generally AI data centers. We wrote about the same vote in Pennsylvania, where all ten Republicans in the House delegation backed it while their constituents' power bills climbed.

So the sequence is: vote to strip states of the power to regulate AI, watch the Senate kill that 99–1, then go on national television to complain when your state uses the power it barely kept.

"Energy affordability" — when it's a press release

Three months before the Fox Business appearance, Lawler introduced the Energy Affordability and Reliability Act of 2026, which would create an Office of Energy Affordability inside the U.S. Department of Energy to study how federal energy policy affects household bills. He described it as a response to an "energy affordability crisis":

"Energy affordability and reliability are fundamental to the strength of our economy and the well-being of Hudson Valley families."

That is a real sentence about a real problem. The trouble is what he does when the affordability crisis has a name and an address.

A new office that writes reports about energy costs is safe. Saying no to a 1-gigawatt facility in East Fishkill is not. Asking data centers to pay for their own transmission upgrades instead of putting them on the residential bill is not. When the choice was between an abstraction and the specific thing driving demand on the Hudson Valley's grid, he picked the abstraction and went on TV against the specific thing.

And the economic case he's defending doesn't hold up well up close. Rockland County's Industrial Development Agency approved nearly $77 million in sales-tax exemptions for a roughly $1 billion JPMorganChase data center expansion in Orangeburg. The project pledged to create one additional permanent job, according to documents reviewed by New York Focus and reported by Rockland News. Seventy-seven million dollars of foregone sales tax. One permanent job.

This isn't a fringe position he's standing up to

Lawler's framing on Fox Business was that restricting data centers is an anti-growth, anti-innovation idea that helps China. The public does not see it that way, and neither do his neighbors.

A June 2026 Reuters/Ipsos survey found that 57% of Americans would oppose a data center being built in their community, against 14% who said they were okay with one near them. 77% said they were worried that AI would make electricity more expensive.

In his district, that concern has a face: the retiree in Orangeburg watching a Con Edison bill, the East Fishkill parent who signed one of a thousand names on a petition, the Sierra Club volunteer worried about a reservoir. They organized, they showed up, and they got their planning board to listen.

Their congressman's contribution to that fight was a television appearance on the other side of it.

Byron Donalds ran the same play in Florida, promising data centers wouldn't raise electric bills while their developers wrote him $894,000 in checks — we covered that too. The pattern is consistent across states: the buildings go up, the bills go up, and the Republicans who represent the people paying those bills spend their airtime defending the buildings.

Mike Lawler is up for reelection in November in one of the closest House races in the country. His constituents have already told him where they stand on this. He answered them on Fox Business.

Source

Fox Business, "Banning data centers will only hurt New York's economy, says Rep Mike Lawler," Maria Bartiromo's Wall Street, July 17, 2026. Image: Fox Business.

ICE Told Andrew Garbarino's Committee the Body Cameras Were Coming. Five Months Later Its Agents Shot a Man Without Them.

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

Andrew Garbarino has one of the few jobs in Congress where you don't have to settle for a strongly worded letter.

Since July 2025 he has chaired the House Committee on Homeland Security. That gavel comes with real power over Immigration and Customs Enforcement: he decides what gets a hearing, who sits at the witness table under oath, and what documents get subpoenaed.

Here is what he has done with it over the last six months, in order.

January: he calls the hearing

On January 24, 2026, two Customs and Border Protection agents in Minneapolis shot Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old VA intensive care nurse, about ten times in roughly five seconds. Renee Nicole Good was also killed by federal agents in Minneapolis that month. Both were U.S. citizens.

That same day, Garbarino formally requested testimony from ICE acting director Todd Lyons, CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott, and USCIS Director Joseph Edlow — memorializing, the letters say, an invitation his staff had already extended on January 15, nine days before Pretti was killed.

"I take my oversight duties for the department seriously, and Congress has an important responsibility to ensure the safety of law enforcement and the people they serve and protect," he said.

Holding the hearing at all was more than plenty of Republicans managed.

February: the hearing happens, and the promise gets made

The hearing was held February 10, 2026. A staffer held up photographs of Good and Pretti in the room.

Garbarino's opening statement did name them: "I cannot put myself in the shoes of law enforcement, nor can I imagine what the families of Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti are enduring today." It also told the room the hearing "was long planned," and warned, in the same breath as the deaths, that "shutting down DHS makes Americans less safe."

Neither Lyons nor Scott answered questions about the two killings, citing the ongoing investigations. Lyons told Rep. Eric Swalwell he would not resign. He told the room, "We will not be intimidated."

But on body cameras, ICE made a commitment with numbers attached. Lyons said about 3,000 of ICE's 13,000 field agents had body cameras, and that 6,000 more were being deployed. Scott said CBP had roughly 10,000 cameras for 67,000 agents.

That was the deal on the table: the cameras are coming.

Garbarino had already paid for them. The DHS funding bill the House passed in January included money for body cameras, de-escalation training, and the DHS Inspector General — a point his committee has advertised repeatedly.

June: he gives ICE three more years of money

On June 9, 2026, the House passed the Secure America Act, funding ICE and CBP for the next three fiscal years. It passed 214 to 212 — a two-vote margin in which every Republican yes was a deciding vote. Not one Republican voted no. Garbarino was one of them.

He put out a statement the same day:

"Today, Republicans fulfilled our responsibility to fully fund the Department of Homeland Security... I am proud that Republicans voted earlier this year to fund new transparency and accountability requirements for DHS."

So by June, the chairman had held the hearing, extracted the promise, funded the cameras, and handed over the money.

July 7: a man is killed in Houston, and the cameras aren't there

On the morning of July 7, 2026, ICE agents in Houston tried to stop a van. One of them shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican national who had lived in this country for decades.

An ICE spokesperson said agents opened fire because Salgado Araujo "weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense."

Three men who were in the van with him told their lawyer that isn't what happened — that Salgado Araujo never rammed the ICE vehicles. One of them said there were no officers in front of or behind the van, only to the side. They are now in immigration custody.

We may never know which account is right, and here is exactly why. In the Texas Tribune's words: the agents "did not have body-worn or dashboard cameras."

Five months after ICE promised Garbarino's committee that 6,000 more cameras were being deployed, the agents in the most consequential encounter of the summer had none.

On July 13, six days later, ICE officers shot and killed a second person, in Maine.

July 15: the chairman responds

Garbarino told The Hill his committee would conduct oversight. Specifically, it had asked ICE for a briefing the following week.

Read the next part carefully, because it's the whole story:

He noted the briefing will not touch on ICE officers fatally shooting one man in Texas and another in Maine earlier this month, as the FBI is investigating both incidents.

He wanted the briefing to cover the status of ICE's body camera rollout — after it turned out the Texas officers weren't wearing them, as Just the News put it, "because they had yet to arrive."

That is the same answer, in slightly different words, that the agency gave his committee in February. In February the cameras were being deployed. In July they hadn't arrived. In between, Congress paid for them and a man died.

ICE had paused traffic stops after the Maine shooting. Garbarino said he was "not sure" the agency should "remove that tool" from its tool bag:

"As long as… those officers are focused on what they told us they were focused on, and they are, I don't have a problem with them doing traffic stops."

"As long as those officers are focused on what they told us they were focused on, and they are." The chairman's basis for believing that is what the agency told his committee — the same source that told his committee about the cameras.

What a subpoena is for

None of this requires Garbarino to become a liberal. He can believe every word of his own statements about border security and still notice that an agency made his committee a commitment with a number in it and did not keep it.

A committee chairman in the majority has options a rank-and-file member does not. He can put Lyons back under oath and ask, on the record, how many of the 6,000 cameras have actually shipped. He can subpoena the deployment records. He can demand the use-of-force reports.

What he has done instead is request a briefing that is scoped, in advance, to exclude the shootings.

Meanwhile every Democrat on the Senate's homeland security committee wrote to its chairman on July 31 about the same two deaths. Officials had pledged reforms at that committee's own February hearing, the senators said, but "it is clear that not enough is being done," and DHS "has still not been forthcoming about what, if any, corrective actions have been taken."

The pattern on Long Island

Garbarino's brand is the reasonable one. He voted for the January 6 commission, for the infrastructure law, for the Respect for Marriage Act. He was one of eight Republicans who voted for universal background checks in 2021. Those votes were real.

But the same man cast a deciding vote for roughly $70 billion in ICE and CBP funding — a bill that passed by two, with not one Republican voting no.

His constituents on Long Island have been asking him to show up in person for a year and a half. He does telephone town halls instead. In April 2025, about 2,000 people protested outside his Patchogue office. A month later, nearly 2,000 people came to a town hall in Patchogue, filling the Patchogue Theatre and an overflow venue, to hear a congressman from Maryland, because their own wouldn't hold the event.

He has the gavel. He has the subpoena power. He has an agency that told his committee something that turned out not to be true.

So far, what he has is a briefing that won't discuss the shootings.

Source

Misty Severi, "House Homeland Security Chair Garbarino vows oversight of ICE after shootings," Just the News, July 15, 2026, reporting on Garbarino's comments to The Hill. Photo: Samuel Corum / Getty Images, via WJAR.

DOGE Gutted the 9/11 Health Program Four Times. Andrew Garbarino Fought Back — Then Voted to Make DOGE's Other Cuts Permanent.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:02:39 +0000

Andrew Garbarino has done real work for the people who ran toward the towers on September 11, 2001. That should be said first, because it's true, and because it's what makes the rest of this so hard to explain.

Starting in February 2025, the Trump administration and Elon Musk's DOGE took a wrecking ball to the World Trade Center Health Program — the federal program that treats the firefighters, cops, construction workers, and neighborhood residents who got sick from the dust at Ground Zero. It happened four separate times in under three months. Each time, Garbarino organized his colleagues — a letter to the president, joint statements, conversations with the administration — and got some part of it undone.

And on June 12, 2025 — right in the middle of all of it — he walked onto the House floor and voted to make DOGE's cuts to other programs permanent federal law.

What DOGE did to the 9/11 program

The Citizens for the Extension of the James Zadroga Act has kept a running record of it. It reads like a chart of a patient crashing over and over.

February 14, 2025 — the day after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as Health and Human Services Secretary — HHS fired thousands of probationary employees and pushed thousands more into buyouts. The 9/11 program lost more than 20% of its staff, dropping from 93 filled positions to fewer than 73. That included 16 fired probationary workers and five who took the buyout. The program lost its medical benefits team leader and its Director of Research. DOGE also killed two cancer research grants — one studying disease rates among FDNY firefighters, one at Long Island's Feinstein Institute comparing cancer rates among lower Manhattan workers to a control group in Westchester.

This was a program that had just been planning to grow to 138 staff, because it had added more than 10,000 new members the year before.

April 1, 2025 — a second, bigger round. HHS fired nearly all the staff of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, including Dr. John Howard, who ran both NIOSH and the 9/11 program. Sixteen more program staff got termination notices. The cuts also wiped out the National Firefighter Cancer Registry, the program that investigates firefighter deaths, the office that certifies the respirators every firefighter and nurse in America wears, and the black lung research program for coal miners.

April 28–29, 2025 — the part that actually hurt patients. Garbarino and his New York colleagues had announced on April 5 that Dr. Howard was reinstated. HHS had told them so. It wasn't true — Howard was never properly restored as administrator of the 9/11 program, and because nobody had the legal authority to sign, the program stopped certifying new cancers and stopped enrolling new members. Three FDNY responders with cancer couldn't get certified for treatment; one of them had pancreatic cancer, and his doctor was told even an expedited request could not be approved. Roughly 1,200 monthly certifications went unprocessed. As many as 800 people waiting to enroll were stuck.

May 2, 2025 — the 16 staff were formally fired, effective immediately, notified after they'd already left for the day. Four days later, after another public uproar, the firings were rescinded.

May 14, 2025 — Kennedy admitted to the Senate that it had been a "mistake," restored 313 NIOSH positions, and confirmed Dr. Howard and the 15 remaining program staff were back.

Garbarino was in the middle of every one of those fights. The advocates thanked him by name.

Then came June 12

Four weeks after Kennedy's admission, the House voted on the Rescissions Act of 2025 — a bill that took $9.4 billion Congress had already approved and cancelled it, locking in DOGE's cuts to foreign aid and public broadcasting as permanent law.

It passed 214 to 212.

Garbarino voted yes.

Two votes. If he had voted the other way, the bill would have failed.

Think about what he knew by then. He had spent four months watching DOGE fire the people who process a cancer patient's paperwork, and then watching cancer patients not get treated. He had learned, in the most concrete way available to a member of Congress, that "cutting bureaucracy" is a thing that happens to specific human beings with specific diseases.

He took that lesson and applied it to exactly one program: his own.

His Long Island neighbor Nick LaLota was in the same room that day. Speaker Mike Johnson pulled LaLota aside on the floor and he switched his vote to yes, and $1.1 billion for public broadcasting died by two.

It never actually got fixed

Here's the part that makes the June vote worse rather than better. The 9/11 program didn't get put right. The pressure just moved to a slower setting.

After the staff were restored, Kennedy kept a "temporary" communications pause in place that stopped the program from talking to the 9/11 community at all. He kept a hiring freeze on. He froze the research grant process. And he stalled the decisions on whether to add cardiac conditions, autoimmune conditions, and dementia to the list of illnesses the program covers — decisions that had been due in March 2025.

Senators Schumer and Gillibrand wrote about it in August 2025. Sen. Andy Kim and five colleagues wrote again in September 2025. LaLota led another letter in March 2026. Garbarino signed that one.

April 15, 2026 — more than a year after the first firings — Kennedy finally let the program fill its 37 vacancies. That's a 30% vacancy rate it had been carrying the whole time.

July 9, 2026 — Garbarino and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand led 26 bipartisan colleagues in a letter begging Kennedy to reappoint Dr. Howard, whose term was running out. The same day, it came out that of those 37 authorized positions, HHS had actually posted four.

That's the state of play eighteen months in: letters, and four job postings.

The thing a chairman could do

Garbarino is not a backbencher writing letters into the void. Since July 2025 he has been Chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security — one of the most powerful gavels in Congress. He sits on Financial Services. He sits on the Ethics Committee.

A committee chairman in the majority has tools a letter-writer doesn't. He can hold a hearing. He can put a cabinet secretary under oath. He can subpoena documents.

What the record shows for the 9/11 program is letters — good letters, bipartisan letters, letters that sometimes worked. But the pattern over eighteen months is that the administration cuts, Garbarino objects, the administration partly backs off, and then does it again a different way. That cycle has now run four times on the firings and is running a fifth time on the hiring freeze.

Meanwhile, when the administration asked him to vote for its cuts, he voted for its cuts.

What this looks like from Long Island

Garbarino sells himself as the Republican who breaks with his party. He voted for the January 6 commission. He voted for the infrastructure law. He voted for the Respect for Marriage Act. He voted against Jim Jordan for Speaker three times.

Those are real votes and they cost him something.

But the pattern on money is the opposite. He held Trump's budget bill hostage for months over the state and local tax deduction, won a bigger deduction, and then slept through the vote and had to explain himself to the Speaker. He voted for that budget bill when it came back. He voted for the rescissions bill by two votes. The Joint Economic Committee's House minority staff estimates that the Medicaid and Affordable Care Act cuts will cost nearly 34,000 people in his district their insurance — 30,657 of them on Medicaid.

He knows what these cuts do. He watched them do it to sick firefighters from his own island, in real time, for four straight months.

Then he voted for more of them.

Source

The timeline of cuts to the World Trade Center Health Program is documented by Citizens for the Extension of the James Zadroga Act, which has tracked each round of firings, reversals, and restrictions since February 2025. Photo: AP, via NY1. Vote totals from the Office of the Clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Nicole Malliotakis Is One of Twelve Members of Congress Trying to Erase Trump's January 6 Impeachment. Twelve Days Later She Said the Rioters Should Serve Their Time.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:13:51 +0000

The House of Representatives has 435 voting members and six non-voting delegates. Twelve of them put their names on a resolution to expunge Donald Trump's impeachment for inciting the attack on the Capitol — to strike it from the record as though the House never voted on it.

Nicole Malliotakis is one of the twelve.

She is not a backbench bomb-thrower. She represents Staten Island and south Brooklyn, until recently served as vice chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, and is scored as a centrist by GovTrack based on her legislative record. This is the moderate.

The resolutions

Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced H.Res.25 on January 9, 2025 — the opening days of the new Congress. Its entire purpose is to expunge the January 13, 2021 impeachment of Donald Trump, the one for incitement of insurrection. She filed H.Res.24 the same day to expunge his first impeachment.

Eleven members signed on as cosponsors. Malliotakis signed both on day one.

The full list of names on the January 6 expungement, besides Greene and Malliotakis: Mary Miller, Randy Weber, Mike Collins, Eli Crane, James Moylan, Troy Nehls, Anna Paulina Luna, Jefferson Van Drew, Diana Harshbarger and Elise Stefanik.

That's the company. Twelve people out of 441 — eleven representatives and Guam's delegate.

What she said twelve days later

On January 20, 2025, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 January 6 defendants, including people convicted of assaulting police officers.

The next day, Malliotakis went on CNN. Boris Sanchez read her own tweet from January 6, 2021 back to her — the one she posted after Capitol Police moved her to a secure location: "Everyone who is responsible for this violence and lawlessness must stop. This is absolutely unacceptable and un-American." Then he asked whether Trump did the right thing pardoning rioters who assaulted police.

Her answer, as she gave it:

"Well, I do have an issue with those who assaulted police officers. And I think that those do need to serve the time. That is unacceptable."

And when Sanchez asked what her message was to the Capitol Police officers who were injured that day:

"Certainly I stand with our Capitol Police and all our law enforcement. I'm very proud to be one of the few individuals here in Congress that actually in the past has received the endorsement of the Capitol Police union, and we have to support our law enforcement. We need to hold those who injure them and kill them accountable."

Twelve days earlier she had signed her name to a document whose only purpose is to erase the one time Congress held the man at the top of that day accountable.

About 140 police officers were injured on January 6.

This is not one bad week

The expungement signature is the end of a five-year line, not a departure from it. Malliotakis has voted against every mechanism anyone proposed for establishing what happened that day:

January 6, 2021 — after the Capitol was cleared, she voted to reject Arizona's electoral votes. She had told a radio show two days before, "I don't see a situation in which I don't object to at least some of these states."
January 7, 2021 — the morning after the riot, she voted to reject Pennsylvania's too, telling Fox News there were "a number of irregularities, a number of changes made, that many people believe led to fraud."
January 13, 2021 — voted against impeachment. She was the only member of Brooklyn's congressional delegation to vote no.
May 19, 2021 — voted against creating an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate the attack, the kind of body used after 9/11.
June 30, 2021 — voted against creating the select committee that ended up doing the investigating instead.
January 9, 2025 — signed on to erase the impeachment from the record.

Every door: closed. No commission, no committee, no impeachment, and now no record of the impeachment.

Republican Accountability, a group of anti-Trump Republicans, grades her democracy record "F" — "Very Poor."

The two Malliotakises

She wants both of these things to be true at once, and they can't be.

In January 2026 she put out a press release announcing federal money she'd secured for the NYPD, and said: "I will always support our brave men and women in law enforcement and remain committed to ensuring they have the tools and resources they need to do their jobs safely and effectively."

That's the version her district sees — cameras, license plate readers, vests for the K-9 unit, more than $9 million for the NYPD since she took office. It's real, and she's earned the credit she takes for it.

Then there's the version in the Congressional Record: a name on a resolution to unwrite the House's only formal finding that the president bore responsibility for the day 140 officers were hurt defending the building she works in.

She was there. Capitol Police moved her to safety. She tweeted that it was "absolutely unacceptable and un-American." Then she voted against every attempt to find out how it happened, and four years later signed her name to a piece of paper saying the impeachment should never have existed.

To be fair to her: she did break with Trump on the pardons, and she said it on camera on a national network, which most of her conference would not do. It just makes the signature harder to explain, not easier. If the people who beat police officers should serve their time, then the finding that the president incited them belongs in the record — not scrubbed out of it.

The bottom line

H.Res.24 and H.Res.25 went to the Judiciary Committee in January 2025 and have not moved since. They will probably never get a vote. That's not really the point.

Twelve members of Congress decided this was worth signing. Nicole Malliotakis — the moderate, the Problem Solvers vice chair, the one who wouldn't hold an in-person town hall while constituents rallied outside her office — was one of them, on day one, before anyone asked.

Trump's own administration spent months trying to move nearly $1.8 billion of public money toward paying January 6 defendants, and dropped the plan only on August 3, 2026, when two retiring Republican senators held up the attorney general's confirmation until he killed it in writing. The record of what happened is the only thing standing in the way of the story being rewritten entirely. Malliotakis put her name on erasing part of it.

Sources

H.Res.25 — Expunging the January 13, 2021 impeachment of Donald John Trump (cosponsors) — congress.gov
House Republican Rips Trump's 'Unacceptable' Pardons of Violent J6 Convicts — Mediaite, January 21, 2025 (CNN News Central interview with Boris Sanchez)

127 Democrats Cosponsored Nicole Malliotakis' Museum Bill. Her Own Committee Added a Trans Ban, and Not One of Them Voted for It.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:10:15 +0000

Nicole Malliotakis introduced H.R. 1329 on February 13, 2025. It was a short bill with a simple job: let the Smithsonian American Women's History Museum be built on the National Mall.

It became a genuinely bipartisan bill. 231 members signed on as cosponsors — 127 Democrats and 104 Republicans, more Democrats than Republicans. Judy Chu and Nancy Pelosi were on it. So were Brian Fitzpatrick, Claudia Tenney and Mike Lawler. Malliotakis was vice chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, and this was the kind of bill that caucus exists for.

On May 21, 2026, the bill died on the House floor, 204 to 216. Not one Democrat voted for it. Six Republicans voted against it.

Malliotakis quit the Problem Solvers Caucus the next day and said bipartisanship had become "a one-way street."

Here's what actually happened to her bill.

The bill she wrote didn't say any of this

You can read the version Malliotakis introduced. It's about land. It lets the museum sit inside the National Mall's Reserve, sets up how federal agencies hand over the site, and tells the museum's advisory council to seek out a broad range of women's experiences.

The word "biological" does not appear in it. Not once.

Now read the version that went to the floor. A new section was bolted on:

"The Museum shall be dedicated to preserving, researching, and presenting the history, achievements, and lived experiences of biological women in the United States."

"Prohibition.—The Museum may not identify, present, describe, or otherwise depict any biological male as a female."

That language was added in the House Administration Committee on March 18, 2026. The committee's own report records that it "adopted an amendment in the nature of a substitute offered by Mrs. Miller by voice vote," then reported the bill out 7-4, straight down party lines. A competing amendment from Rep. Norma Torres failed 4-7.

Malliotakis knew exactly who wrote it, and defended it

She didn't just go along with the change. She put out a press release the same day naming the amendment's author and calling it reasonable:

"It's unfortunate that, despite having more than 230 bipartisan cosponsors and the support of President Trump, this legislation passed out of Committee (7-4) along party lines, with the Democrats opposing it, simply because language was added via amendment by Rep. Mary Miller to ensure the museum exhibits only biological women."

The word doing the work in that sentence is "simply."

Mary Miller is not a random colleague. Eleven weeks later she filed a resolution asking the House to formally stop recognizing Pride Month, on the grounds that Americans are "inundated with perverse Pride Month displays." That's the member whose amendment Malliotakis accepted onto her own bill and then defended as one of two "reasonable requests."

The rewritten bill also handed the President discretion to change the museum's location within 180 days — a provision Malliotakis listed alongside the trans ban in the same press release, as one of two pieces of "clarifying language."

What she said on the floor

Malliotakis' argument for the language, as she put it to the House: "I hate to alert my friends on the other side of the aisle, but a museum dedicated to women's history should have women in it."

That's a good line. It's also not what the amendment says. The amendment doesn't require that the museum include women — the museum was always going to be about women, that's the entire point of the building. It requires that the museum be prohibited from depicting a specific group of Americans. It writes a federal ban on who a Smithsonian curator is allowed to put on a wall.

Rep. Joe Morelle of Rochester answered the plain version on the floor: "I am saddened and disappointed that the Republican majority has needlessly politicized what has for years been a bipartisan priority." He called the added language "an ideological poison pill intended to dictate what the museum can and cannot say about women's history."

Six Republicans killed it too

The story Malliotakis told is that Democrats sank her bill. Democrats did all vote no. But so did six members of her own party — Andy Harris, Warren Davidson, Josh Brecheen, Tim Burchett, Keith Self and Michael Cloud — who, sources told Spectrum News, questioned whether the museum was necessary at all and worried it would divide Americans.

She had 231 cosponsors. She got 204 votes.

At least 127 members who had put their names on this bill voted against it in the end: 126 of the 127 Democratic cosponsors, plus Tim Burchett, a Republican who had cosponsored it. The one Democratic cosponsor missing from that column, Nikema Williams of Georgia, did not vote at all. That is not a Democratic problem. That is a bill that got changed after people signed it.

The part that's actually about Malliotakis

Nobody made her keep the language.

She is the sponsor. It was her bill, her name on it, her five-year project. When the amendment went in — on a voice vote, in a committee her party controls 8-4 — she had a choice: strip the trans ban and pass a women's history museum with 231 cosponsors behind it, or keep the ban and lose the museum.

She kept the ban. The museum lost. And then she resigned as vice chair of the bipartisan caucus, telling Spectrum News: "I've been a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus for five years. And it's clear that it's become a one-way street."

The one-way street runs the other direction here. A bipartisan bill was rewritten by one party, in one committee, and reported out on a party-line vote, to add a culture-war provision that had nothing to do with the bill's purpose — putting a building on the Mall. The sponsor accepted it. When the bill died, she blamed the people who had cosponsored it.

This is a pattern with her

Malliotakis has a long record of standing where the wind is. Running for mayor of New York City in 2017, she said she regretted her vote for Trump — she'd write in Marco Rubio if she had it back. Two and a half years later, running for Congress in the one part of the city Trump carried, she accepted his "Complete & Total Endorsement" and said the earlier remarks were taken out of context.

She did the same on abortion. In 2017 she told Gotham Gazette that it was "not something that I could do, but it's not to say that my views should be imposed on other women." In 2020, running in a redder seat, she told the Brooklyn Paper: "I would consider myself pro-life, my voting record is as such."

The museum bill is the same instinct with a building attached. When the choice came down to the thing she'd worked on for five years or a line that pleases the right flank of her conference, the building lost.

The bottom line

There is no Smithsonian American Women's History Museum on the National Mall. There was a bill with 231 cosponsors that could have started one. Nicole Malliotakis wrote it.

Then her party added a provision telling the museum which Americans it may not depict, she defended it as reasonable, the bill died, and she blamed everyone else and walked out of the bipartisanship caucus she was vice chair of.

Staten Island and south Brooklyn have a member of Congress who still won't hold an in-person town hall while constituents rally outside her office every Monday. The museum vote is the same story in a different room: when it costs her something inside her own party, she folds.

Source

Rep. Malliotakis leaves House caucus after failed museum vote — Spectrum News NY1, May 27, 2026. Photo: John Minchillo/AP.
H.R. 1329 — Smithsonian American Women's History Museum Act — congress.gov

Nick LaLota Told Long Island His Vote Protected Medicaid — and, in the Same Video, "I'll Always Be Honest With You." PolitiFact Rated It False.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:24:01 +0000

On February 25, 2025, Nick LaLota voted for the House Republican budget blueprint. It passed 217 to 215.

A week later he posted a video for his constituents explaining what he'd done:

"On Feb. 25, I voted yes on a budget resolution that protects Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid while cutting some spending elsewhere."

In that same video, he told the people of the 1st District to get their information straight from him. His words: "I'll always be honest with you."

PolitiFact and KFF Health News checked it and rated the claim False. Their finding: the statement "is inaccurate and mischaracterizes laws and the language included in the budget resolution, creating a false impression of what his vote supported."

The word "Medicaid" is not in the document

Here is the entire mechanism of the thing LaLota said protects Medicaid.

The resolution instructs the House Committee on Energy and Commerce to submit proposals "to reduce the deficit by not less than $880,000,000,000 for the period of fiscal years 2025 through 2034."

That's it. As the fact-check put it:

"The 32-word sentence that directs the Energy and Commerce Committee to trim $880 billion over 10 years from programs it authorizes does not include any protections, guardrails, or specific directions for the panel to follow."

The word Medicaid appears nowhere in the resolution. It does not say Medicaid is protected. It does not prescribe any specific action on the program.

What it does is set a number. And the number is the problem.

Of the $8.8 trillion in projected spending under that committee's jurisdiction over ten years — a Congressional Budget Office count that already leaves Medicare out — Medicaid accounts for $8.2 trillion, 93% of it.

Alice Burns of KFF did the arithmetic:

"Even if the committee eliminated all of non-Medicare and non-Medicaid spending, they would still have to cut Medicaid by well over $700 billion."

You cannot take $880 billion out of that committee without gutting Medicaid. Everyone involved knew it. That is what made the sentence a Medicaid cut without ever using the word — and what made LaLota's description of it a false one.

What his office said when asked

PolitiFact asked LaLota's office for the evidence behind the claim. His communications aide emailed a statement saying the resolution makes no cuts to those programs. Instead, he wrote, it

"opens the door to protect Medicaid with common-sense solutions which ensure its availability for those Americans who qualify, including the removal of illegals from the rolls, work requirements for able-bodied adults, and the elimination of waste, fraud, and abuse."

Read that carefully. It is not a defense of what he said. It's a different claim: not that the resolution protects Medicaid, but that it opens the door to a set of policies he prefers.

And the leading item on his list doesn't exist. Federal Medicaid dollars already cannot be spent on undocumented immigrants. Some states, New York among them, cover certain people regardless of immigration status — with state money only.

Burns again: "States cannot use federal funding to cover undocumented immigrants," so removing them "won't do anything for the deficit reduction targets."

Work requirements don't get there either — most Medicaid recipients already have jobs, and the savings don't approach $880 billion.

So the "common-sense solutions" that were supposed to spare Medicaid produce almost none of the money the resolution demands. The rest has to come out of coverage.

Then he voted for the real thing

A budget resolution is a blueprint, not a law. The fair test of what LaLota meant is what he did when the actual bill arrived.

On July 3, 2025, he voted Aye on the last House vote on H.R. 1, Trump's budget bill. It went 218 to 214 — a four-vote margin — and went to the president's desk.

That law made the cuts real.

Using the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of the Medicaid and ACA cuts that were enacted, the Joint Economic Committee's House minority staff projects the district-level damage. For NY-01, LaLota's own district, the figure is 21,673 people losing health insurance by 2034 — 18,673 from the Medicaid provisions and 3,000 more from the marketplace changes.

Twenty-one thousand people on Long Island. From the vote he described as protecting Medicaid.

"I'll always be honest with you"

The reason this one is worth singling out isn't that a politician oversold a vote. It's the frame he chose.

LaLota didn't make this claim in a press release or a floor speech. He made it in a video addressed to his constituents, whose entire premise was that they should trust him over what they were hearing elsewhere — and he put an honesty pledge inside the same message that carried the false claim.

That's the transaction. Come to me directly, don't listen to the noise, I'll always be honest with you. Followed immediately by a characterization of his own vote that a fact-check found created a false impression of what he supported.

It also fits a habit. He is the congressman who has never held a public, in-person town hall since taking office in January 2023 — only telephone events, one of which took seven questions in under an hour, with the opening question submitted in advance and read aloud by his own staffer, and no follow-ups permitted.

A one-way video where you promise to be honest is a lot easier than a room where someone can ask you what "protects Medicaid" means.

He is not the only one who tried this

The "I voted to protect it" line went out across the party, because the vote was unpopular and the arithmetic was ugly.

In Colorado, Gabe Evans said his Medicaid vote would protect "the people who need it most" and called the warnings "fear mongering" — and a year later nurses had named 12 Colorado hospitals at risk, including in his district. In Maine, Susan Collins ran an ad saying she "stood up for Maine" on Medicaid, leaving out the procedural vote she cast that sent the Medicaid-cutting bill to the floor. We've collected the Republicans with the worst records on health care, and the pattern in every case is identical: vote for it, then tell the district it didn't happen.

LaLota's version came with a fact-checker's verdict attached, in writing, five months before the bill he'd go on to pass.

He had the finding. He voted for it anyway.

We deserve better.

Source

Bill That Congressman Says Protects Medicaid Doesn't — And Would Likely Require Cutting It — Julie Appleby, KFF Health News, published with PolitiFact, March 25, 2025. District figures from the Joint Economic Committee's fact sheet on district-level impacts of the health care cuts, September 2025. Image: PolitiFact Truth-O-Meter via KFF Health News.

Speaker Johnson Pulled Nick LaLota Aside on the House Floor. He Changed His Vote, and $1.1 Billion for Public Broadcasting Died by Two.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:21:05 +0000

On June 12, 2025, Speaker Mike Johnson was about to lose.

The House was voting on H.R. 4 — the White House's request to cancel $9.4 billion Congress had already approved and appropriated. Most of it, $8.3 billion, was foreign aid: global public health, disaster relief, hunger programs. The rest, $1.1 billion, was two years of funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the body that sends federal money to local public radio and TV stations.

It was the first time Congress had ever formally voted on Elon Musk's DOGE cuts. And it was failing.

Nick LaLota had voted no.

Then, as CNN reported from the floor:

"Then he pulled aside Rep. Nick LaLota, a New York centrist, who had just voted no. With the vote still open, several minutes of tense conversation followed before LaLota ultimately went to change his vote. Within seconds, the package of spending cuts narrowly passed."

The final tally was 214 to 212. LaLota is recorded as a Yea.

Two votes. His was one of them.

What he says he got

Reporters asked him what changed in those minutes. He wouldn't say.

"I had some conversations with the speaker that raised my level of confidence that will put this and future issues in the right trajectory," LaLota told CNN — while declining to offer specifics of the conversations, or any promises on SALT.

SALT is the state and local tax deduction — the cap on how much of your property and state income taxes you can write off on your federal return. It is the signature issue of Long Island's Republicans, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with foreign aid or public radio.

So the trade, as far as anyone was allowed to know, was this: LaLota supplied the deciding vote to cancel money for global AIDS programs and public broadcasting, and in exchange he received a raised level of confidence about an unrelated tax negotiation.

He was not the only New Yorker in the huddle. Rep. Mike Lawler, another suburban New York Republican working the same tax issue, was in the conversation with Johnson and also agreed to vote yes. Two Republicans in all had pressed no and then switched: LaLota, and Nebraska's Don Bacon.

Texas Rep. Chip Roy posted the obvious question to X right after the vote: "Real question on the $9B rescissions package that narrowly passed – is how expensive were the 2 original no votes who flipped to yes…?"

We still don't know. LaLota has never said.

Four Republicans held. One of them was from New York.

The vote wasn't unanimous on the Republican side, and this is the part that makes the "I had no choice" defense impossible.

Four Republicans voted no and stayed no: Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Nicole Malliotakis of New York, Mike Turner of Ohio, and Mark Amodei of Nevada. Malliotakis is a New York Republican in a swing seat, facing the same Speaker, on the same night, with the same leverage available to her.

She held. He didn't.

And LaLota's first instinct was hers. He had already pressed the button for no. He knew what was in the bill. What changed wasn't the bill.

Then he did it again

Five weeks later the Senate sent back its version, and the House had to act one more time.

On July 18, 2025, LaLota voted Aye on H.Res. 590, the rule that carried the Senate's amended package to final passage. That one went 216 to 213.

The Senate had put the global AIDS money back on its way through — the $400 million PEPFAR line came out, and the enacted law bars any of the remaining global health rescission from touching "HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis, Malaria, Nutrition, or Maternal and Child Health" — which is what brought the package down from $9.4 billion to $9 billion. It did not put back a dollar of public broadcasting: the CPB clause is word for word what the House sent over.

Trump signed it on July 24, 2025. Every dollar for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting through fiscal 2027 was gone.

What that did to Long Island

On August 1, 2025, CPB announced it was winding down. Most of its staff were terminated at the close of the fiscal year on September 30. Its president, Patricia Harrison, noted it was the first time in nearly 60 years that Congress had refused to fund it, and described what the money had bought:

"Public media has been one of the most trusted institutions in American life, providing educational opportunity, emergency alerts, civil discourse, and cultural connection to every corner of the country."

Note emergency alerts. CPB was the conduit for the federal grants that keep local stations' warning equipment running — which matters on a barrier-island district that takes hurricanes.

Here is who that hit in NY-01.

WLIW-FM, 88.3 out of Southampton, is Long Island's only NPR station — it's the East End's, and it produces The Long Island Daily along with local coverage of towns like Riverhead. It sits inside LaLota's district.

WSHU, whose signal reaches eastern Long Island through repeaters, told its listeners that "this year, WSHU received over $350,000 in federal funding" — money it says is "roughly equivalent to 2.5 pledge drives," and which paid for NPR programs, music royalties, satellite interconnection, and emergency alert systems. The station called the rescission "the strongest threat to public media that we have ever seen. It is quite literally unprecedented."

That is what LaLota's switched vote bought, on the way to a tax conversation he wouldn't describe.

The design of the cut is upside down

The argument for defunding CPB is always about NPR's newsroom in Washington. That's not where the money mostly goes.

As NPR reported when CPB folded, the network relies on direct federal funds for "only a small portion of its budget." Its approximately 1,000 member stations "receive a heftier portion of their operating revenue through CPB" — and the ones in rural and poor areas lean on those grants hardest.

So the cut barely dents the thing the complaint is about, and it lands squarely on the local station. In Michigan, John Moolenaar called defunding public radio "a win for the American people" and took $1.6 million from WCMU, the station in his own district serving 42 Michigan counties. In Oklahoma, Tom Cole accepted an award for protecting public broadcasting in 2016 and then cosponsored the bill that shut its funder down — including his own tribe's radio station. In Florida, Kat Cammack wrote the Defund NPR Act and then voted for the package that cost the station housing Florida's statewide storm-alert network about 20% of its funding.

LaLota's version is different in one way, and it isn't a flattering one. Cammack, Cole and Moolenaar believed in the cut. LaLota didn't — he voted against it. He then reversed himself in the middle of the vote for something he wouldn't name.

The pattern on Long Island

There's a version of this argument that says: fine, that's how the sausage gets made, and he was fighting for Long Island taxpayers on SALT.

Except look at what the fight has actually produced. LaLota's neighbor Andrew Garbarino spent months as one of five Republicans holding Trump's budget bill hostage over the SALT deduction — and then slept through the vote when it came at 6:54 in the morning. The tax break is the thing Long Island's Republicans talk about constantly. It's also the thing they keep trading other people's programs away for, and then not showing up for.

And LaLota's own accounting of the June 12 trade never got any more specific than "a raised level of confidence."

He voted no because he thought the cuts were wrong. Then he made them law. When his constituents asked what he got, the answer was that he'd rather not say.

Long Island still doesn't know the price. It knows the bill: the public radio station in Southampton, and the emergency alerts, and $9 billion Congress had already promised.

We deserve better.

Source

House GOP narrowly approves $9.4 billion package of DOGE cuts — Sarah Ferris, CNN, June 12, 2025, with contributions from Brian Stelter and Liam Reilly. Roll calls: House Roll Call 168 (June 12, 2025) and House Roll Call 203 (July 18, 2025). Photo: CNN.

Nick LaLota Is Cutting East Hampton Off From Federal Money. The Mayor — a Former Police Chief — Says He "Obviously Hasn't Read" the Law.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:15:40 +0000

In June 2026, Nick LaLota sent a letter to town supervisors, mayors, and other local government officials across New York's 1st District. It said this:

"I will not support community project funding requests from municipalities that have adopted policies, enacted local laws, or taken official actions that deliberately obstruct, impede, or refuse lawful cooperation with federal authorities carrying out their responsibilities under federal law."

Community project funding is the money members of Congress steer to their own districts for local projects — road repairs, water mains, sewer hookups. Individual members have wide latitude over who gets it. It is one of the few things a House member can hand a hometown directly.

Only two places in the district fit LaLota's description: East Hampton Town and East Hampton Village. He named them himself.

So he cut them off.

What the laws he's punishing actually say

Here is the East Hampton Village law, passed unanimously by the village board in April 2026.

It creates a new section of the village code barring the village from entering a 287(g) agreement — the arrangement that lets ICE deputize local police officers to do federal immigration work. It states plainly that the federal government has the authority to enforce immigration law, and that federal law overrides conflicting local law.

Then it adds the operative part: village personnel

"shall not use village resources, equipment, property, databases, or funds to investigate, detain, question, arrest, or transport any individual solely for purposes of federal civil immigration enforcement, except pursuant to a judicial warrant or as otherwise required by law."

It also says the village's Flock license plate reader cameras can't be queried for federal civil immigration enforcement.

The town passed a similar law in May 2026.

Read that sentence again, because everything in this fight turns on it. Civil immigration enforcement. Except pursuant to a judicial warrant. Or as otherwise required by law. The law does not stop ICE from operating in East Hampton. It says the village won't spend its own money and staff doing ICE's civil paperwork, and that a judge's warrant still opens every door.

New York State has since banned 287(g) agreements statewide anyway, in its most recent budget. Which means the single loudest provision of East Hampton's law is now simply state law everywhere in New York.

What LaLota says the laws do

On July 13, he wrote on social media that the town and village had

"just adopted Suffolk County's first Mamdani-Hochul-style sanctuary policies, blocking cooperation with federal immigration authorities, even to remove illegal immigrants in custody on rape, assault, or DUI charges. But I won't let Long Island become NYC's sixth borough. No CPF funding until they reverse these dangerous policies."

In a July 16 letter to constituents, he went further: under these laws, he wrote, if either municipality had someone in custody after an arrest for possessing child sexual abuse material, third-degree assault, or second-degree robbery, "local officials could not use local personnel or vehicles to transport that individual into federal custody," and combined with New York's bail laws, "these sanctuary policies require that those violent criminal illegal aliens be expeditiously released from custody."

That is a description of a law that requires releasing violent criminals. It is not a description of the law East Hampton passed.

Jerry Larsen, the village mayor, spent his career in the village Police Department — he was its chief. His response:

"[The congressman] obviously hasn't read our legislation, because if he had taken the time to read the legislation, he would hopefully understand that this has nothing to do with criminal offenses and is in no way impacting our communities in a dangerous manner."

And: "What is dangerous is sending untrained immigration officers into communities, causing chaos."

Town Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez walked through the actual sequence. The town's law "does not require the release of anyone charged with a crime" and "does not prevent cooperation with federal authorities when required by law." Town police could not drive someone straight to federal immigration authorities on the charges LaLota listed because that is not how an arrest works — the person is processed and arraigned, and a judge decides whether they're released, held on bail, or sent to the Suffolk County jail. If federal authorities show up with a judicial warrant while the person is still in custody, police can hold them.

Her summary of what the town law actually changed: additional police reporting to the town board, a new citizens task force, and the 287(g) ban. "The town's law largely mirrors the rules already followed by local police departments across the East End."

Withholding federal money over a reporting requirement and an advisory committee, she said, "is not a serious public safety policy" but "a bizarre form of political retaliation over two basic measures, and the only practical result is our residents' tax dollars are sent elsewhere."

Minerva Perez, who runs Organización Latino Americana of Eastern Long Island, has been putting one question to LaLota in public: which specific provision of the local law do you oppose? Where, she asked, "does our law stop local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement when required by law?"

He hasn't answered it. He didn't respond to The East Hampton Star's request for comment either.

"Choose the money instead of going broke"

The part that should bother every voter in NY-01, whatever they think about immigration, is what LaLota did with the threat next.

Last month he stood at a ceremony announcing a $3.5 million appropriation for Huntington Town's Highway Department — a nice, ordinary piece of congressional work — and used it as a stage. As quoted in Newsday, he advised municipalities to "choose the money instead of going broke, when [East Hampton] went woke."

On WABC radio on July 3, he called the town and village "run by some pretty far-left individuals" who "are trying to out-Mamdani each other," and said their laws are the basis "of some of this mayhem we're seeing across the nation in places like Minnesota, Los Angeles, and other places."

And he told the hosts his funding cutoff was "also a warning sign to some of these other drifting municipalities: Don't go there."

That is the whole thing said out loud. The federal money isn't LaLota's — it's tax revenue his constituents already sent to Washington. He is holding it as leverage over local governments to make them repeal ordinances their own voters' elected boards passed unanimously. And he's telling every other town and village on Long Island — of which, by his own count, there are 13 and 96 — to watch what happens to the ones who don't fall in line.

By August it was working. On August 4, just before Southold's work session on immigration policy, LaLota's re-election campaign emailed supporters to claim credit: the town attorney had cited his position when recommending against the policy, warning it put "real dollars at stake." "I stood up, and Southold is poised to say no," he wrote.

He is not describing a policy victory. He is describing a town lawyer telling elected officials they can't afford to cross their congressman.

The "mayhem" he's pointing at

LaLota told the radio audience these local laws are the source of the mayhem in Minnesota and Los Angeles.

Here's what has actually happened in the places he named and elsewhere. In January, ICE agents shot and killed two American citizens in Minneapolis during protests against masked agents operating in their neighborhood. In July, ICE agents shot and killed a man during a traffic stop in Houston and a Colombian immigrant with a work permit in Biddeford, Maine — both on their way to work, neither the target of the operation, and in both cases the government's account was disputed by the families and witnesses who were there. Since January 2025, at least 12 people have been killed in shootings and violent incidents involving ICE agents, and more than 60 others have died in ICE custody or immigration detention.

That's the enforcement East Hampton's law declines to fund with village vehicles and village databases. LaLota's position is that declining to fund it is what makes people unsafe.

The pattern

This isn't a local quirk. It's the national playbook arriving in Suffolk County.

The Justice Department has filed 27 lawsuits against more than 20 cities, counties and states over sanctuary policies — including a suit to stop Philadelphia from barring ICE agents from wearing masks and hiding their badges. Tom McClintock has used his immigration subcommittee chairmanship to demand up to six years of records from Philadelphia's sheriff, including her correspondence with named immigrant-rights groups. In San Diego County, Jim Desmond cast the lone vote to keep handing people to ICE without a judge's warrant, then brought a motion to repeal the new policy three months later.

LaLota's version uses the one lever a House member has that a lawsuit doesn't: the checkbook.

What it actually costs

Here's the sour joke at the center of it. East Hampton Town has received $758,900 in earmarks this century — against an annual town budget of roughly $110 million. LaLota's threat is worth a rounding error to East Hampton's finances.

Which tells you what it's for. It was never really about the money. It's a message to Southold, to Riverhead, to Shelter Island, to every village board on the East End: pass the wrong local ordinance and your congressman will campaign against your town.

He's running for a third term this fall against Chris Gallant, who won the Democratic primary in June.

Meanwhile, the congressman who has time to write to local officials across the district about East Hampton's police reporting requirements had not held a single public, in-person town hall in his first two years in office — only telephone call-ins. The two elected officials he's punishing sat for interviews about this. He didn't return a call.

We deserve better.

Source

LaLota Doubles Down on Withholding Federal Money — Christopher Walsh, The East Hampton Star, July 23, 2026, and LaLota: Play Nice With ICE or You're Cut Off, The East Hampton Star, June 18, 2026. LaLota's Southold claim is from his August 4, 2026 campaign email, reported by The East End Beacon. Photo: The East Hampton Star.