MAGA Report Cards — Ohio

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.

Vivek Ramaswamy Says a Candidate Who Won't Debate 'Can't Lead the State.' He Never Debated the Republican Who Took Nearly 18 Percent Off Him in the Primary.

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:22:00 +0000

Vivek Ramaswamy has a test for whether someone is fit to run Ohio.

"If you certainly are not willing to debate then you certainly can't lead the state," he said on Fox News last week, after Democratic nominee Amy Acton declined his invitations to debate. In a Statehouse News Bureau interview on Thursday he called debates "a basic part of the job interview" and said Acton should "show up."

Earlier this year, when Ramaswamy was the overwhelming favorite in Ohio's Republican primary, a Republican named Casey Putsch was asking him for exactly that.

"Debate me," Putsch said in one public challenge. He went on to campaign on the line: "Vivek won't debate me."

There was no Republican gubernatorial debate. Putsch got nearly 18 percent of the primary vote anyway, TiffinOhio.net reported.

Putsch was on the ballot

This matters because the usual excuse does not apply. Putsch was not a write-in or a protest candidate. He qualified for the Republican gubernatorial primary ballot alongside Ramaswamy and Heather Hill, and official Republican ballots listed all three tickets.

Nearly one in five Republican primary voters picked him over a candidate with a national profile and, by then, tens of millions of dollars behind him. Ramaswamy never debated him.

He had a rule about this in 2023

Three years ago, Ramaswamy was the one demanding that a frontrunner show up.

In May 2023, with Donald Trump weighing whether to skip the Republican presidential primary debates, Ramaswamy told Fox News Radio's Guy Benson Show: "I think it would be fundamentally uncourageous for Donald Trump to refuse to debate." Republicans, he said, "should be unafraid of open debate," and he was not going to let Trump "get away with that very easily."

Then Trump skipped the first debate. By August, Ramaswamy told CNN he had "no issue" with Trump missing the first couple, though he would object if Trump sat out the whole season.

So the standard has now moved three times. Skipping debates is uncourageous when Trump considers it. It is acceptable when Trump does it. It is disqualifying when Amy Acton does it. And it was not worth discussing when Casey Putsch asked.

There is a third candidate still waiting

Libertarian nominee Don Kissick has also been asking. He posted video of himself putting the question to Ramaswamy after an Ohio Conference of Teamsters event, and says he is "still waiting" for a commitment from either major-party candidate.

Ramaswamy has accepted invitations from CNN and Cincinnati's WLWT. He framed them as a two-man affair: "Ohioans deserve a substantive debate between their two candidates for Governor. I challenge Amy Acton to join me on the debate stage." Kissick and his running mate James Mills say they feel left out of the conversation — "Ohio voters deserve to hear from every candidate who earned a place on the November ballot," Mills said.

The standard, in other words, applies to the opponent Ramaswamy wants on a stage and to nobody else.

Why Acton says no

Acton's campaign has not argued debates are unimportant. It says the volume and content of the attacks aimed at her make sharing a stage counterproductive. Her campaign manager, Phil Stein, said Ramaswamy and allied groups have spent more than $50 million on attack ads.

Independent newsrooms have found real problems in those ads. PolitiFact rated Ramaswamy's claim that Acton "called off" Ohio's 2020 primary "Mostly False," noting that Republican Governor Mike DeWine has repeatedly said the decision was his. The Cincinnati Enquirer found that an ad blaming Acton for the isolation and death of a Republican activist's mother concerned a woman who lived in Kentucky and died after Ohio's stay-at-home order had ended and after Acton had left her state post.

University of Akron political scientist David Cohen calls Acton's decision "political malpractice," and voters are entitled to weigh that. The League of Women Voters of Ohio has taken no position on either candidate — its director, Jen Miller, said only that the league encourages "every political candidate in Ohio to participate in nonpartisan candidate events." None of it changes what Ramaswamy did when the request pointed at him.

The other questions he won't answer

Refusing debates is one item in a longer list. Cleveland.com has described this governor's race as having "a transparency problem" centered on Ramaswamy: he did not provide a position when the outlet surveyed candidates on marijuana policy, and did not answer on expanding online gambling either.

That gambling question followed him into September. Asked directly last week, after a reporter noted the industry money behind his campaign, he said only that he would "take a fresh look and a fresh perspective to this whole discussion." The Sports Betting Alliance has given $650,000 to the super PAC working to elect him.

For months before that, he would not tell Ohio where he stood on the state's most pressing issues — he ran attack ads until cleveland.com badgered a platform out of him.

What the record shows

Vivek Ramaswamy says a candidate unwilling to debate "can't lead the state." He never debated Casey Putsch, the Republican who won nearly 18 percent of Ohio's GOP gubernatorial primary vote against him, and Ohio had no Republican gubernatorial debate at all. The Libertarian nominee says he is still waiting for an answer. In 2023 Ramaswamy called it "fundamentally uncourageous" for a frontrunner to duck debates, then dropped the objection once the frontrunner was Donald Trump.

Source

Ramaswamy refused to debate his GOP challenger. Now he says candidates who won't debate 'can't lead.' by Bonnie Lucas, TiffinOhio.net, September 5, 2026. Photo: YouTube, via TiffinOhio.net.

Lisa McClain Says She Supports 'Anybody With an R Behind Their Name.' She Was Talking About Max Miller, Whose Ex-Wife Says He Threw Boiling Water at Her.

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:20:40 +0000

On Sunday, September 6, 2026, Lisa McClain went on CBS's "Face the Nation" and was asked whether she supports the reelection of her Ohio colleague Max Miller, whom Margaret Brennan introduced as "the Ohio Republican congressman who's been accused of domestic abuse by his two former partners."

McClain is the House Republican Conference Chair — the fourth-ranking Republican in the House. Her answer was not that the allegations were false, or that she had looked into them. It was this:

"I support anybody with an R behind their name."

She added, in the same interview: "At the end of the day, he's our nominee right now. I wish the allegations weren't true."

What she is supporting

On July 30, 2026, Miller's ex-wife, Emily Moreno, asked a court for a restraining order barring Miller from contacting her lawyers. In her filings she alleged that Miller verbally and physically abused her and their two-year-old daughter. According to CBS News, she says he threw boiling water at her, pointed a gun at her, and threw her against a wall — and that their daughter suffered a fractured clavicle and bruising.

Emily Moreno's father is Senator Bernie Moreno, Republican of Ohio. He said in August that his daughter "lives in constant fear of this man," that he now picks his granddaughter up at a police station for custody exchanges because he does not know "what this guy's capable of," and that Miller "should not serve in the House of Representatives." We covered that when he said it.

Miller denies everything. On an August 2 livestream he said his former wife "is engaging in a pattern of reporting incredible, serious and destructive allegations with absolutely no evidence." To rebut her, he released a Dropbox folder of documents — which, CBS reported, appeared to include naked photographs of his own daughter.

Her own party has already broken with him

McClain's line was that she supports anybody with an R next to their name. A lot of Republicans with an R next to their names have declined to.

Brennan read her the list on air: Katie Britt of Alabama, Jim Banks of Indiana, Jon Husted of Ohio, Roger Marshall of Kansas and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia have all called on Miller to resign or quit, and Tim Sheehy of Montana said "this guy is clearly a degenerate sociopath. He should step aside and seek help." Miller's former father-in-law, a sitting Republican senator, says he needs "serious psychological help."

President Trump himself called Miller on August 3 — the day before the deadline to withdraw without triggering a special-election primary in Ohio — to raise concerns, CBS reported at the time.

Miller did not withdraw. The deadline passed on August 4.

So the position McClain is defending is not the party's consensus. It is leadership's, and only leadership's. Speaker Mike Johnson took the same line on August 31, calling Miller "a great member of Congress" and describing the allegations as "some issues in his personal life."

"Let the process play out"

McClain's other formulation was that "divorces are ugly" and "at the end of the day, we got to let the process play out."

That is a reasonable thing to say about a contested custody filing. It is a strange thing to say as a reason to actively campaign for someone in the middle of it. Nothing about letting a court process play out requires the fourth-ranking House Republican to go on national television and vouch for the man.

She then explained what the vouching is for:

"I'm focused on winning the House back, taking the House back, keeping the House because we are the only party that's actually putting more money in your pocket, making sure that crime is down, securing the border, and rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse. And Max Miller has been a good advocate for his constituents doing that."

Republicans hold a narrow House majority. The party in the White House usually loses seats in a midterm. That is the whole calculation, and McClain said it out loud: the seat is worth more than the question.

This is not McClain's first careful sentence

McClain told POLITICO in February 2025 that the secret to her leadership job was honesty — "just tell the truth." We went through her record against that standard: in the same interview she repeated a false claim about Social Security, and a month later she told a Michigan mother there were no cuts to Medicaid, then voted for the bill that cut it.

"I support anybody with an R behind their name" is at least candid. It is also a description of a job she is not doing.

What the record shows

Lisa McClain, the fourth-ranking Republican in the House, said on national television on September 6, 2026 that she supports Max Miller's reelection because "I support anybody with an R behind their name." Miller's ex-wife has told an Ohio court he threw boiling water at her, pointed a gun at her, and injured their two-year-old daughter. Six Republican senators named on the program had already called on him to quit, and a seventh, the accuser's own father, says he should not serve in the House. McClain's stated reason for backing him anyway is holding the House majority.

Source

House GOP conference chair says Rep. Max Miller is "our nominee right now" despite abuse allegations by Sophia Vlahakis, CBS News, September 6, 2026, and the program's own transcript. Photo: CBS News.

Troy Downing Wrote a Bill to Cut Off Every HUD Housing Grant to Cities That Limit ICE Cooperation. Nineteen Republicans We Cover Signed On.

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 05:55:09 +0000

On September 2, 2026, Troy Downing of Montana introduced a bill that would strip every dollar of federal housing grant money from any city, county or state that limits how much its police help federal immigration agents.

Not immigration money. Housing money.

H.R. 10222, the No HUD Funding for Sanctuary Cities Act, says a "sanctuary jurisdiction" is "ineligible for any grant funds distributed by the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for use in such jurisdiction."

Any grant. All of them.

What that money actually pays for

The Department of Housing and Urban Development does not hand out one grant. It hands out many, and they are the backbone of how communities keep people off the street.

In Montana, the state's homelessness grant is worth about $7.2 million. Montana Free Press has described what it covers: "permanent supportive housing, rapid rehousing rental assistance, supportive services, transitional housing, youth homelessness programs and the state's database that housing providers use to place homeless people into housing programs and connect them to other resources."

That is the money Downing's bill would switch off — not for the people who wrote a city resolution, but for whoever is currently sleeping in a shelter it pays for.

How wide the net is

Read the definition carefully. The trigger is refusal. A place loses its housing money for what it declines to do, not for anything it does. Downing's bill covers any "State or political subdivision of a State" that has a law, an ordinance, a policy or even a "practice" telling its officials not to:

share information about someone's citizenship or immigration status with a federal, state or local agency, or
hold someone in jail past their release date when Homeland Security asks, or tell federal agents when that person is let go.

Decline either one and the entire jurisdiction is a sanctuary jurisdiction. The word "State" is in there. Under this bill an entire state can be declared a sanctuary jurisdiction and lose every HUD grant inside its borders. And the decision doesn't go to a court — HUD would consult with the Department of Homeland Security to decide who qualifies.

The Montana communities in the crosshairs

Downing has said what he thinks:

"If a sanctuary city is not complying with federal law, we should not allocate American taxpayers' hard-earned money to those areas."

He posted a sharper version on social media: "If a city refuses to cooperate with federal immigration law, it should not receive a dime in HUD funding."

Montana Free Press asked him a specific question — what would this bill have done to Helena? Helena passed a noncooperation resolution in January 2026, then rescinded it after Attorney General Austin Knudsen threatened to sue. Bozeman police say their job is public safety, not immigration enforcement. Missoula police don't ask about immigration status.

Downing did not respond.

That is the whole problem with the bill in one exchange. He will say the principle. He will not say which Montana towns lose their housing money under it, or how much.

Nineteen Republicans on this site signed it

Downing didn't do this alone. Nineteen of the Republicans we track cosponsored the bill within two days of introduction:

Warren Davidson (Ohio) · Pete Sessions (Texas) · Scott Fitzgerald (Wisconsin) · Rich McCormick (Georgia)
Scott Perry (Pennsylvania) · Michael Cloud (Texas) · Barry Moore (Alabama) · Harriet Hageman (Wyoming)
Ben Cline (Virginia) · Randy Weber (Texas) · Josh Brecheen (Oklahoma) · Sheri Biggs (South Carolina)
Andy Harris (Maryland) · Brian Babin (Texas) · Michael Rulli (Ohio) · Keith Self (Texas)
Tim Moore (North Carolina) · Andy Barr (Kentucky) · Pete Stauber (Minnesota)

Barry Loudermilk and Buddy Carter, both of Georgia, also signed; we don't have pages for them.

All but two of those names are printed in the bill's own text as introduced on September 2. Andy Barr and Pete Stauber added theirs the next day. Twenty-one Republicans in total. Not one Democrat.

The part nobody is saying out loud

There is a straightforward argument for making cities cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. Six in 10 Montanans support local police working with ICE, according to Montana Free Press polling. Downing could make that argument on its merits and put it to a vote.

This bill doesn't do that. It takes housing assistance hostage.

The person who loses is not the city council member who voted for the resolution. It's the family in rapid rehousing, the teenager in a youth homelessness program, the person in permanent supportive housing who would otherwise be outside. None of them had a vote on the resolution. All of them are the leverage.

What the bill does

Troy Downing's bill would make any city, county or state that limits police cooperation with immigration agents ineligible for every housing grant the federal government gives out — homeless shelter money, rapid rehousing, youth homelessness programs and the rest. In Montana the homelessness grant alone is about $7.2 million. Nineteen Republicans we cover cosponsored it within two days, along with two more we do not track. Downing declined to say which Montana communities it would hit.

Sources

Tom Lutey, Downing proposes HUD cuts for cities noncompliant with ICE, Montana Free Press (September 4, 2026).
H.R. 10222, the No HUD Funding for Sanctuary Cities Act — full text and cosponsors, 119th Congress.
Katie Fairbanks, Montana could lose millions for low-income housing under new federal policy, Montana Free Press (November 26, 2025).

Gambling Companies Put $650,000 Behind Vivek Ramaswamy. Asked Where He Stands on Expanding Gambling in Ohio, He Said He'd Take 'a Fresh Look.'

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 05:52:54 +0000

Ohio lawmakers are weighing two bills that would legalize online casino gambling across the state. Whoever is governor next year may be handed one of them to sign or veto.

On September 3, 2026, Statehouse News Bureau chief Karen Kasler asked the Republican nominee for governor where he stands. She did not leave the money out of the question.

"Where are you on expanded gambling? Since actually gambling interests have been donating to get you elected."

Vivek Ramaswamy did not say.

"I'm going to take a fresh look and a fresh perspective to this whole discussion."

He talked about listening to lawmakers on both sides. He said he wanted to protect young Ohioans from addiction. He never said whether he supports legalizing online casino gambling.

The money

The Sports Betting Alliance has given $650,000 to V-PAC: Victors, Not Victims, the super PAC formed by Ramaswamy allies to elect him governor. It came in two pieces: $500,000 in 2025 and another $150,000 in January 2026, according to federal filings reviewed by Signal Ohio.

The money did not go to his campaign directly, and federal law bars a super PAC from coordinating its spending with a candidate. That is the technical answer, and it is true.

It is also not the point. The people paying for the ads that elect him want a specific thing from the office he is running for, and he will not tell voters whether he intends to give it to them.

Who the Sports Betting Alliance is

This is not a group with a general interest in Ohio policy. Its members are Bet365, BetMGM, DraftKings, Fanatics and FanDuel, and it exists to expand legal online sports betting and online casino gaming.

It has already come to Columbus to ask for exactly that. In May 2025, alliance representative Scott Ward testified to the Ohio House Finance Committee.

"I am here in support of legalization of igaming in Ohio."

The pitch was the usual one: consumer protections, pulling gamblers off illegal sites, more tax money for the state.

The bills are real and they are pending

Two competing proposals are live in the Ohio General Assembly:

House Bill 298 would legalize and regulate internet gambling and tax the companies offering it.
Senate Bill 197 would legalize internet gambling and also allow internet lottery games and online betting on horse races.

Neither has passed. If one does during the next governor's term, it lands on that governor's desk.

So this is not a hypothetical about a distant issue. It is a decision the next governor could well be asked to make, on behalf of an industry that has already put $650,000 into electing one of the candidates.

He has had months

This is not the first time he has been asked. Signal Ohio reported in April 2026 that Ramaswamy had taken no public position on sports betting while the gambling money was flowing into V-PAC. His spokesperson didn't respond to that request for comment either. His campaign did not respond to TiffinOhio.net for this story.

The September interview was the clean opportunity — on camera, with the donations named out loud in the question. He promised a fresh look.

What he says about candidates who won't answer

Earlier in that same interview, Ramaswamy made a point of saying this:

"I do think it's really important that candidates actually take voter questions and tell the voters where we're at."

He said that, and then declined to tell voters where he's at.

The pattern is documented. He spent months refusing to state positions until a newsroom badgered him into one answer. The same super PAC taking the gambling money is funded largely by five men who don't live in Ohio. And when he promised Ohioans free electricity, energy-industry PACs had just given his campaign $97,000.

The short version

The gambling industry's trade group has put $650,000 into the super PAC working to make Vivek Ramaswamy governor of Ohio, while two bills to legalize online casino gambling sit in the legislature awaiting a governor's signature. Asked on camera where he stands, with the donations named in the question, he would not say. In the same interview he said it was "really important" that candidates tell voters where they stand.

Source

Bonnie Lucas, Ramaswamy dodges gambling question after industry money backs his campaign, TiffinOhio.net (September 5, 2026). Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr.

Jon Husted Says He May Strip States of Their Federal Highway Money Over Immigrant Driver's Licenses. Investigators Have Not Said Immigration Caused the Crash He Is Citing.

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 06:59:07 +0000

On August 29, 2026, a driver failed to yield at a stop sign in Fulton County, Ohio. He struck an SUV, which overturned. Austin Karr Grimes, 29 years old, died at the scene. Two passengers, one of them three years old, were taken to the hospital with minor injuries.

The Ohio State Highway Patrol says the driver, Washington Naula Ochoa, ran the stop sign. He has been charged and is being held on an immigration detainer. Husted's office says he was in the country unlawfully and had obtained a Connecticut drive-only license, the kind the state issues to people who cannot establish lawful presence. WTOL says it has requested the underlying investigative records from law enforcement, including information about that license.

Jon Husted now wants to use that crash to force 19 states and the District of Columbia to stop issuing those licenses — and he says he may go after their federal highway money if they refuse.

He told WTOL's 11 Investigates he plans to raise it with Trump personally.

"I intend to have a conversation with the president. When I get back to Washington, I'm going to take this up with everybody that I can because this is something that's got to stop."

The part of the story his argument depends on

WTOL put it plainly, in the middle of its own reporting:

"The investigative materials released so far do not establish that his immigration status or Connecticut's decision to issue him a license caused the crash."

The patrol's account is that a driver ran a stop sign. That is what killed Austin Grimes. Nothing released so far connects it to where the driver's license came from.

Husted said something different. "Ohioans are dead as a result of it," he told WTOL.

He also repeatedly questioned whether people who get these licenses can read traffic signs or safely operate a vehicle. Connecticut's own rules answer that. A drive-only applicant has to get a learner's permit, pass a vision test, pass a written knowledge test, meet driver-training requirements and pass a road test. The state's motor vehicle department says every applicant "must understand and speak enough English to understand basic driving instructions from the DMV agent and to read the road signs."

Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont has defended the program on the grounds that people without status will drive regardless, and that testing and insuring them puts safer drivers on the road.

Husted's answer: "That's fantasy. These people are in the country illegally, and instead of enforcing the rule of law, this governor of Connecticut makes it more dangerous."

What he is actually threatening

Husted admitted the federal government cannot simply cancel a state's licenses.

"Right now, the administration cannot take action against these states. But I intend to ask the governors to stop this practice, and if they refuse to do it, I could take it a step further and deny those states their highway funding."

He compared it to the way Washington once used highway money to push states into a drinking age of 21.

That threat goes beyond the letter he sent on Thursday to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, which asked those departments to prohibit or discourage the licenses.

Ohio does not issue drive-only licenses. Neither does Michigan. Both are required to honor Connecticut's, because they are legally issued documents.

He has run this play before, on a crash that did not fit either

In August, an ad boosting Husted's campaign used footage of a fatal Ohio crash and a family friend's photograph of Lynnea, Luke and one-year-old Logan Soposki to warn voters about "dangerous illegals." The family did not consent to the use of the photo. The driver charged in that crash is a U.S. citizen, and FactCheck.org found no connection between the crash and the votes the ad was attacking.

This is the same construction. Take a real death, attach it to immigration, and let the connection go unexamined.

It is also not the first time his immigration claims have failed a fact-check. PolitiFact rated False his Fox News claim that Sherrod Brown backed "Social Security payments for illegals".

Why this, and why now

Husted's Senate campaign is not going well. Cleveland.com's Today in Ohio described the move as reaching for an outdated page in a worn-out playbook, and noted that Ohioans are preoccupied with costs, taxes and data centers.

Content director Laura Johnston pointed out the licenses cannot be used to vote or to board a plane. Their purpose is to make sure people who are going to drive have been trained and tested.

She also noted the awkwardness of Republicans demanding federal control here. "Remember what I said about states rights yesterday?" she said. "I mean, now the Republicans are the ones to want to trample all over that idea."

Editor Chris Quinn's point was about what Husted has not been doing. He has been largely invisible on the cost-of-living issues Ohioans care about, and only recently started talking about data centers, despite having helped bring many of them to Ohio. "He's not involved in the things that matter, but he seizes on this."

Quinn said even the site's conservative commenters responded by asking where Husted has been on anything that affects them.

We wrote last month about Husted voting three times to keep the tariffs squeezing Ohio farmers, which is one answer.

What the record shows

An Ohio man died on August 29 when a driver ran a stop sign. The state patrol's released materials do not tie the crash to the driver's immigration status or his Connecticut license. Jon Husted has said "Ohioans are dead as a result of it," written to two cabinet secretaries, and threatened to take away the federal highway funding of 19 states and the District of Columbia. It is the second time in two weeks that an immigration attack tied to his Senate campaign has rested on a fatal crash the known facts do not connect to immigration.

Source

Husted says he may target federal highway funding over licenses for undocumented immigrants; plans to raise issue with President Trump, by Brian Dugger, WTOL 11 Investigates, September 4, 2026.

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

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

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

The argument they signed is the part worth reading twice.

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

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

What the brief actually argues

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

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

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

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

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

Who signed it

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

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

Some of these names carry their own history

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the argument matters beyond this case

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

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

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

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

What the filing shows

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

Nobody is doing the thing the bill bans

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

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

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

This is control, not freedom

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

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

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

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

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

Two Republicans said no

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

The bill now goes to the Senate.

The choice they made

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

Every Republican we track who voted yes

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

Iowa: Ashley Hinson, Zach Nunn

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

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

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the SAVE America Act would actually do to voters

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

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

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

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

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

The emergency the resolution describes

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

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

It cites a federal investigation that charged four people.

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

What was actually in front of them that week

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

Outside the chamber:

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

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

In their own words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 189 who voted yes

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

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho — Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas — Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi — Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey — Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

The number nine is not in the Constitution

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

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

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

What they were actually voting on

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

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

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

The timing

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

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

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

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

Who pushed it

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who voted to freeze the Court

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey: Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

Then a second missile killed them.

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

Congress never voted to authorize any of it.

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

We do not know who most of these people were

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

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

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

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

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

What the Senate actually voted on

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

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

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

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

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

It failed, 48 to 51.

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

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

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

Two of them switching sides would have carried it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The legal case for all this is classified

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The House looked into it for ten days

The Senate is not the only chamber that folded.

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Source

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

Mike Johnson Says Max Miller Has Been a 'Great Member of Congress.' Miller Is Under an Ethics Investigation for Domestic Violence, and the Accuser's Father Is a Republican Senator.

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:47:21 +0000

The House Ethics Committee opened an investigation in August into whether Rep. Max Miller of Ohio "may have engaged in domestic violence and abuse or illegal drug use," in violation of the House's own conduct rules.

On Monday, August 31, 2026, CNN's Manu Raju asked the Speaker of the House whether he supports Miller's reelection campaign.

Mike Johnson said yes.

"He has been a great member of Congress," Johnson said. "He has some issues in his personal life he's working through. The House Ethics Committee is looking into that and any implications it may have." He added that he would "let due process play out."

What "some issues in his personal life" refers to

Max Miller's ex-wife, Emily Moreno, has accused him of hurling scalding hot water at her, holding a gun to her head, and breaking their 2-year-old daughter's collarbone. The two divorced last year and have been in a custody fight over the child.

Miller denies all of it. He sued his ex-wife for defamation in May, and says he filed his own paperwork to open an ethics investigation to clear his name.

Emily Moreno's father is Bernie Moreno, the Republican senator from Ohio. He is one of several Republicans who have called on Miller to resign. Last month he described what his family has been through:

"My daughter lives in constant fear of this man, not like something that's existential, but deeply in her heart, she fears what this guy is capable of. You can't fathom what that makes me feel like when the dad's number one job is to protect your kids."

Moreno said his family had gone through "the seventh level of hell," and asked Miller to "seek professional help to end the clear pattern of abuse he has left in his wake."

That is the record the Speaker of the House looked at before calling Miller a great member of Congress.

"Due process" is doing work it cannot do

Johnson's answer has a defensible-sounding structure. There is an investigation. Let it finish. Do not prejudge.

Except that is not what he did. He was not asked whether Miller should be expelled or punished. He was asked whether he supports Miller's campaign — a political endorsement, entirely within his discretion, requiring no finding of fact from anyone.

He could have said the honest version of "due process": I'm not going to weigh in on his race while the Ethics Committee is working. Instead he volunteered a character reference.

And the timing is not neutral, either. The Ethics Committee observes a 60-day blackout before an election, which begins September 4. The committee is not expected to report anything before November. "Let due process play out" means, in practice, that voters go to the polls with nothing.

The rest of the party is not united behind this

The striking thing about Johnson's answer is how much company Miller has lost.

Republican senators called on him to resign. A conservative group called him unfit to serve. A poll had him down 14. Miller's response to all of it was to loan his own campaign $1 million and stay on the ballot. Cook Political Report has since moved Ohio's 7th District from "likely Republican" to "toss up."

His own former father-in-law, a sitting Republican senator, wants him gone.

Against that, Johnson is not "letting the process play out." He is picking a side in a fight where much of his own party has already picked the other one.

He is the third Republican leader to take this position, and the pattern is the point

Johnson is not alone, and that is what makes this worth writing down rather than filing as one bad answer on a rope line.

Rep. Jim Jordan, asked on CNN whether Miller should resign, called it "a family matter" and said he hopes Miller wins — weeks after going hard at a Democrat facing similar accusations.

Ohio's Republican nominee for governor, Vivek Ramaswamy, was caught on leaked audio backing Miller "up and down the ticket," explaining that Republican control of the House comes first: "If we compromise that, we're done."

Three Republican leaders, three versions of the same answer. Ramaswamy's is the only one that says the quiet part: the seat matters more.

The party that spent years telling America it stands for family values has settled on a rule for its own members. When the accused is one of ours and the seat is a toss-up, the allegations become a personal matter and the process becomes a reason to wait.

What the record shows

On August 31, 2026, House Speaker Mike Johnson publicly endorsed the reelection of Max Miller, a member under House Ethics Committee investigation for possible domestic violence and abuse, calling him a "great member of Congress" with "some issues in his personal life." The accusations — scalding water, a gun to the head, a 2-year-old's fractured collarbone — come from Miller's ex-wife, whose father is a sitting Republican senator who says she lives in constant fear of him and has asked Miller to resign. The Ethics Committee's pre-election blackout begins September 4, so its findings are not expected to reach voters before they vote.

Source

Sarah Davis, "Johnson says he supports Max Miller's reelection bid: 'Great member of Congress'", The Hill, September 1, 2026. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

A Federal Judge Ruled That Vivek Ramaswamy Must Face a Whistleblower Who Says He Demanded She Break Securities Laws

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:43:50 +0000

Vivek Ramaswamy built a political career on the argument that he is good at business, and that being good at business qualifies him to run Ohio. His campaign biography calls him "one of the most successful business leaders of his generation."

On August 25, 2026, a federal judge ruled that a former senior executive at the investment firm Ramaswamy co-founded has alleged enough to keep him in the case over her claim that he personally demanded she break federal securities laws — and then took part in firing her when she refused.

What the judge decided

U.S. District Judge Julien Xavier Neals issued a 24-page ruling in Rosely v. Strive Asset Management. Ramaswamy had asked to be thrown out of the case personally, arguing that the complaint never showed he was actually involved in the firing.

"The Court disagrees," Neals wrote.

The judge listed the four things Joyce Rosely alleges, and found they were enough:

Ramaswamy supervised her.
Ramaswamy demanded she and another employee violate securities laws.
She and the other employee objected repeatedly, directly to Ramaswamy.
Ramaswamy took part in the decision to fire her after she refused.

"Taking her allegations as true, Plaintiff sufficiently states a CEPA claim against Ramaswamy," the judge wrote — CEPA being New Jersey's whistleblower law, which protects workers who refuse to do something they reasonably believe is illegal.

The judge has not decided whether any securities law was actually broken. What he decided is that Ramaswamy does not get out of the case at the start of it. Three years after Rosely sued, he tried to get his name off the lawsuit, and failed.

What she says he wanted her to do

Rosely was Strive's executive vice president and co-head of institutional sales. She started in August 2022. She alleges that "almost immediately," Ramaswamy and Strive co-founder Anson Frericks demanded she violate securities laws.

The specifics were not abstract compliance disagreements. Contemporaneous Forbes reporting on the complaint, cited by TiffinOhio.net, said she accused Ramaswamy and Frericks of pressuring her to use sales materials that promised customers future investment returns, and to let employees who were not properly registered pitch securities to customers. She also objected to Ramaswamy's own social media activity, which she believed amounted to unlawful sales of securities.

Promising future returns to investors is one of the oldest things securities law forbids, for the obvious reason.

The other employee who objected was fired too

Ramaswamy's lawyers argued that seven months passed between Rosely's complaints and her March 2023 firing, which is too long a gap to call it retaliation.

The judge did not buy it, and the reason was the second person.

"According to Plaintiff, Defendants asked her and Nye to break the law; Plaintiff and Nye repeatedly refused to do so and complained to management; and Defendants fired Plaintiff and Nye seven months later," the opinion states.

The judge found that firing both of the people who complained was enough, at this stage, to support the inference that the complaining is why they were fired.

A third name is in this story too. John Phillips, a former Strive regional sales chief, filed his own lawsuit in 2023 alleging Ramaswamy misrepresented Strive's financial condition to employees and investors, and that he too was pressured to violate securities laws. Phillips had left a job at JPMorgan to join Strive. He was terminated in the same March 2023 restructuring.

Two separate former employees, in two separate lawsuits, accusing the same firm of the same thing.

The company was supposed to be the fix for this

Strive is not incidental to Ramaswamy's politics. It is the proof.

He co-founded it in 2022 as the anti-BlackRock — the firm that would put fiduciary duty and financial performance first, against a Wall Street he said had sold out investors for environmental and social politics. He was running for president when the lawsuit landed, holding Strive up as evidence he could disrupt the industry.

The allegation is that inside that company, the founders were leaning on the sales staff to do exactly the kind of thing the rules exist to stop.

Not every claim survived. Neals dismissed Rosely's separate age discrimination and related claims without prejudice. But the two counts at the center of the securities allegations — retaliation by Strive, and individual liability for Ramaswamy and Frericks — are both still alive.

It is not the first time the money and the story have not matched

This site has documented Ramaswamy's business record before, and it keeps producing the same shape.

He bought a discarded Alzheimer's drug for $5 million, put his mother on the payroll to reanalyze the failed trial data, raised $315 million, and took a $1.1 billion SoftBank investment into the parent company 20 days before the drug failed its decisive trial. A California teachers' pension fund lost more than $1 million.

And Strive is still in his portfolio and still in his politics: he holds a stake worth about $137 million in the company, which lost $257.6 million in a single quarter.

What the record shows

A federal judge ruled on August 25, 2026 that Vivek Ramaswamy must personally face a whistleblower claim from Joyce Rosely, a former executive vice president at the firm he co-founded, who alleges he demanded she violate securities laws, heard her object directly, and helped fire her seven months later. The other employee who objected was fired the same day, and a third former employee filed a separate suit making similar accusations. Ramaswamy is running for governor of Ohio on the strength of that company.

Source

Bonnie Lucas, "Federal judge refuses to toss whistleblower case alleging Vivek Ramaswamy demanded employees break securities laws", TiffinOhio.net, September 1, 2026. Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, published by TiffinOhio.net.

Trump Told Towns That Don't Want a Data Center They Want to Be 'Backwards and Poor.' He Signed the Order Giving Data Centers Federal Land, Fast-Tracked Permits and Taxpayer Loan Guarantees.

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:34:03 +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 build the power plants and power lines that feed it. That somebody is everybody else on the grid.

All over the country, people have been showing up at county meetings to say no. Not activists — county commissioners, farmers, retirees, parents worried about a well.

On Monday morning, August 31, 2026, President Donald Trump answered them on Truth Social:

"The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor. If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign. The good news is that there are plenty of other places that want them. If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame. China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement. Actually, they can't believe it is happening!"

That is the whole argument. Not "here is why your electric bill won't go up." Not "here is what the company has to pay for." If you don't want one, you want to be poor, and China is glad you exist.

He is not describing a fringe

Gallup asked. Between March 2 and March 18, 2026, it found that 71% of Americans oppose building an AI data center in their area — including 48% who are strongly opposed. That is more opposition than a nuclear power plant next door gets, which is 53%.

It is not a partisan number, either. Gallup found majorities in every party opposed, and 39% of Republicans were strongly opposed — not merely against it, strongly against it. Those are his own voters.

And the number has been climbing. In mid-August, an Embold Research poll published by Heatmap put opposition at 75%.

You could see the same thing in his own replies. Truth Social exists because Trump owns it, and its users still told him he was wrong. "I have to disagree with this one," wrote one. Another wrote: "I don't think it's so much that we are against data centers. What we are against is our electric bill shooting through the roof and our water supply going low. And this is happening."

The order he signed

The reason this is not just a bad post is that Trump is not a spectator here. He is the person who put the federal government's thumb on the scale.

On July 23, 2025, he signed Executive Order 14318, "Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure." It applies to any project drawing more than 100 megawatts of new electricity for AI, to any project whose sponsor has committed at least $500 million, and to the transmission lines, gas pipelines and substations built to feed them. What it does for those projects:

Opens federal land. The Interior and Energy departments are directed to offer sites; the Defense Department can lease out land on military installations.
Cuts the environmental review. Agencies had ten days to list the "categorical exclusions" — the pre-approved reasons a project can skip a full environmental study — that could be used to speed data centers through.
Points developers at contaminated land. The EPA was ordered to identify brownfield and Superfund sites for reuse.
Puts public money behind it. The Commerce Secretary was told to launch an initiative to provide financial support that "could include loans and loan guarantees, grants, tax incentives, and offtake agreements."

Federal land, a shortened review, and taxpayer credit — for the companies. For the town, a phone number to call.

His EPA has kept going in the same direction. It is now proposing to scrap the federal rule that requires states to tell you when an air-polluting facility applies for a permit near your home, and to let developers start building before the permit is approved. The one mechanism that reliably gets an ordinary person to a county meeting in time is the notice — and the notice is what's on the chopping block.

And in May 2025, almost every House Republican voted for a ten-year ban on any state, city or county enforcing a law that limits AI systems — a definition written broadly enough to cover the buildings, the cooling and the power hookups. The Senate stripped it out 99–1. The House vote still happened.

So when Trump says communities that don't want data centers should go ahead and be poor, he is talking about communities whose ability to say no he has spent the past year narrowing.

"China could not be happier"

The China line is not new, and it is not his alone. We have already written about the seven Republicans who decided the neighbors objecting to a data center might be on a foreign payroll — including four who asked federal law enforcement to open a file on them.

It is not an argument every Republican is making. Greg Abbott, who branded Texas "the epicenter of AI development" and whose state hands data centers a sales-tax break the comptroller now expects to cost $3.3 billion in a single budget cycle, says Chinese propaganda is not why Americans oppose these things. On August 3, 2026, Abbott paused new data center hookups in Texas pending a state audit — after years of selling the state to them.

Trump's response to that pause, in an August interview with Punchbowl News, was to call it a mistake:

"I saw Texas the other day sort of is against data centers. I think it's a mistake. And I'm not taking positions, I just think it's a mistake, because there are other communities that want it. When a community wants it, it means a lot of money is going to come into that community."

He also told Punchbowl data centers could be "bigger than oil."

The part about your bill

Vice President JD Vance was asked about the post on Monday and gave a more honest answer than the president did:

"I think probably 99% of the backlash to data centers has come in areas where building a data center means higher utility and higher electricity for the people on the ground."

That is the whole objection, stated by the administration's own vice president. His fix was deregulation — "if you build a data center, you should be putting power back into the grid, not taking it out."

Nothing in the executive order requires that. The order accelerates the building. The power plants are somebody else's problem.

Meanwhile the federal government's own forecasters are saying out loud what the county meetings are about. The Energy Information Administration expects U.S. electricity demand to rise for a fourth straight year — the strongest four-year growth since 2000 — and names the cause as "increasing demand from large computing facilities, including data centers." It forecasts residential electricity at 18.2 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2026, a nearly 5% increase over 2025, with parts of the East Coast rising as fast as 7% a year for two years running. In 2027, for the first time, commercial electricity use — the category that holds the hyperscalers — is expected to pass residential.

Republicans running for office have noticed, even where the president hasn't. Ohio Senator Jon Husted is the clearest case: his own party's Senate campaign committee wrote a memo calling his data center record an "anchor" on his campaign and told AI companies that fixing the public's view of data centers was up to them if he was to survive November.

The bottom line

Seven in ten Americans — including 39% of Republicans who are strongly opposed — don't want a data center built near them, mostly because of what the things use up: half of Gallup's opponents named data centers' excessive use of resources, and 18% each named their water and their energy. Trump's answer on Monday was that they are choosing to be "backwards and poor" and that China is delighted with them. Thirteen months earlier he had signed an executive order handing those same projects federal land, a shortcut around environmental review, and taxpayer-backed loans and loan guarantees — while his EPA moves to end the public notice that tells a town one is coming, and residential electricity heads to 18.2 cents a kilowatt-hour.

Source

Emily Chang, "'Let Data Reign': Trump goes all in on controversial data centers," ABC News, August 31, 2026. Additional reporting from Matt Novak, "Trump to Communities Fighting Data Centers: Have Fun Being Poor," Gizmodo, August 31, 2026. Photo: Kent Nishimura / AFP via Getty Images.

Vivek Ramaswamy's Campaign Bio Credits the Public School That Shaped Him. It Won't Name the $19,500-a-Year Private School Where He Spent All Four Years of High School.

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 07:17:17 +0000

Vivek Ramaswamy says he supports taking Ohio's school choice programs "to the next level," routing more public money to private schools. He is also running on a public-school origin story. His campaign biography carries the second one. It mentions two schools, and calls only one of them public.

Two sentences, one missing word

Ramaswamy's official campaign biography credits a teacher at his "Greater Cincinnati public school" with challenging him to "aim higher and believe in what he could achieve."

The very next sentence skips ahead: "That spark stayed with him, graduating as valedictorian from his Cincinnati high school."

"His Cincinnati high school" was St. Xavier — a private, all-male Jesuit school where Ramaswamy spent grades nine through twelve and graduated valedictorian in 2003. Tuition today is $19,500 a year.

So the biography identifies one school as public, and strips the other of both its name and the fact that it was private. The public school is part of the origin story. Four years at a $19,500-a-year private school becomes three vague words.

He knows how to tell the full version, because he does it sometimes

This isn't a case of a candidate never mentioning it. Ramaswamy names St. Xavier freely — in the rooms where naming it costs nothing.

2021, C-SPAN: "I went to public school till 8th grade, went to a Catholic high school and graduated in 2003."
April 2025, The State of Ohio: "I'm a product of public education in Princeton schools through eighth grade. I went to Saint X for high school."
A May interview with Cincinnati radio host Bill Cunningham, where he walked through the whole history — Evendale Elementary, Robert E. Lucas Intermediate, Princeton Junior High — and then named St. Xavier.
His 2026 Republican primary victory speech, where he named it again.

Now compare that to the version he uses when the point he's making is about public education:

June 23, 2026, in an interview with Wall Street Journal columnist Kim Strassel about the opportunities Ohio gave his family: "I went to public schools through eighth grade." Then straight to his parents, his business career, the American Dream. No St. Xavier.
2023, ABC News, discussing affirmative action and the racial diversity of the schools he attended: "I went to public schools through eighth grade." Again, no St. Xavier.

Every one of those statements is technically true. They stop in exactly the same place each time — at the end of the part that helps.

Why the omitted school matters to the policy

Ohio already runs EdChoice scholarships on a sliding scale, reduced by family income — but any family qualifies regardless of income, including families already paying private-school tuition. Ramaswamy has cheered the program, and says he supports taking Ohio's school choice programs "to the next level."

St. Xavier is one of the private schools that can take that money. The school tells prospective families that eligible students can use Ohio EdChoice scholarships there, with high-school awards of up to $8,408.

Put those together. A candidate is asking Ohio voters to route more public money into private schools. The private school he personally attended is one that would receive it. And his campaign biography declines to name that school while going out of its way to call the other one public.

Ohio Republicans have been running versions of this play for a while. Stacy Garrity, campaigning for governor in Pennsylvania, dismissed court-ordered public school funding as money with "nothing to show for it" while pushing vouchers. Marsha Blackburn's voucher push in Tennessee arrived with $3 million behind it from a single billionaire.

The same edit, made before

Trimming the inconvenient half of his own upbringing is a habit with Ramaswamy.

At the first Republican presidential debate in 2023, he told a national audience: "My parents came to this country with no money 40 years ago." Later in the same debate: "I didn't grow up in money."

His own book, Nation of Victims, describes the household he actually grew up in: "We were a comfortably middle-class family with two incomes." His father was a General Electric engineer who later became a patent attorney. His mother was a physician — a geriatric psychiatrist. Fox News scrutinized the "no money" framing during his presidential run.

The pattern is identical in shape. His parents did arrive with little; he did attend public schools. Neither statement is false. Both are used to leave an impression the rest of the facts would ruin.

We have documented Ramaswamy refusing to state his positions and calling for shutting down universities. This is a smaller thing, and it is the same instinct: control which true facts the voter gets.

What the record shows

Vivek Ramaswamy is running for governor of Ohio on taking its school choice programs "to the next level." His campaign biography credits a teacher at his "Greater Cincinnati public school" and, in the next sentence, reduces the four years he spent at St. Xavier — a private Jesuit school charging $19,500 a year, eligible to receive up to $8,408 per student in the very voucher money he wants expanded — to "his Cincinnati high school." He has named the school plainly in a C-SPAN interview, on Ohio public television, on Cincinnati radio and in his own primary victory speech. He leaves it out when he is talking about public education.

Source

Ramaswamy sells a public school origin story. His campaign bio airbrushes out years of elite private school. — Bonnie Lucas, TiffinOhio.net, August 29, 2026. Photo: TiffinOhio.net.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

"You have so many proteins to choose from"

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

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

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

"The Democrats invented this term 'affordability'"

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

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

"Earn more"

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

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

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

"Gasoline prices are down 40 percent"

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

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

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

"Gas prices are at five-year lows"

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

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

The rest of the list

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

What they have in common

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

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

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

The short version

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

He told them it had nothing to do with vaccines.

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

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

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

What Kennedy did not tell the senators

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

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

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

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

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

The fourteen votes

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

Fourteen of those yes votes came from Republicans we track:

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

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

What Susan Collins was promised

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

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

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

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

What happened to the promises

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

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

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

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

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

The MMR vaccine is now the target

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who would have to investigate

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Source

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

Jon Husted Pushed Washington to Put Billions Into Intel. His Wife Owned Intel Stock the Whole Time.

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:02:14 +0000

Jon Husted is Ohio's junior U.S. Senator. He was not elected to the job. Governor Mike DeWine appointed him at the start of 2025 to fill the seat JD Vance left when he became vice president.

On Friday, August 28, 2026, the Ohio Capital Journal reported something Husted has never volunteered: while he was working to rescue Intel's troubled factory outside Columbus, his wife owned as much as $15,000 of Intel stock.

His office was asked about it. His office did not answer.

What the disclosures show

Husted's Senate filings show that as of January 21, 2025 — the day he was sworn in — his wife owned up to $15,000 in Intel common stock. His most recent financial disclosure, covering all of 2025, shows the same holding.

That is the entire period in which he was pushing the company's Ohio project forward.

Husted says he personally lobbied the Trump administration to put federal money into Intel. In August 2025, the government took a roughly 10% stake in the company, buying 433.3 million shares for about $8.9 billion. Critics said Washington was picking winners and losers. Intel's stock went up.

Husted's reaction, to The Columbus Dispatch, was not the reaction of a bystander:

"It's foundational. It's a big deal. It's the perfect relationship. And they had no relationship before. It's something I've been working on and hoping for for some time."

Three times he knew first

The Ohio Capital Journal found three occasions where Husted was privy to Intel developments before they were public, and where the news moved the stock his family owned.

August 2025. The federal government announced its stake. Intel shares rose 6%. Husted said he had been working on it.
May 2026. Husted told the Dispatch he had discussed a preliminary chipmaking deal between Intel and Apple. Intel would not confirm it. After Trump posted about the deal, the stock rose 10%.
July 2026. Husted told the Dispatch that Intel had informed him of a possible partnership with the South Korean firm SK Hynix. Shares jumped nearly 9% when the news broke — even though SK Hynix denied there was a deal.

Nobody has shown that Husted's family traded on any of it. That is not the point. The point is that a sitting senator's household held a position in a company that was calling him with market-moving news, and he saw nothing worth fixing about that.

The lobbyist who paid him

The Intel connection does not stop at the stock.

Josh Rubin signed on as a lobbyist for Intel in 2022 — the same year DeWine and Husted announced the Ohio plant. That year Rubin and his wife gave nearly $15,000 to Husted's state political committee. The year before, they gave at least $20,000. Rubin has given $60,000 to DeWine's committee over the years, according to the watchdog group Transparency USA.

In September 2023, DeWine appointed Rubin — an active Intel lobbyist — to chair the board of JobsOhio.

JobsOhio is the state's private economic development arm. It is funded by the state liquor business, which Ohio leases to it for far less than it is worth. It has handed out more than $2 billion. It is exempt from most of Ohio's ethics and transparency laws. And it gave Intel more than $27 million.

Lobbying records show Rubin was registered to lobby JobsOhio for Intel — the agency whose board he ran — until the end of 2025. JobsOhio would not say whether he ever declared a conflict or stepped back from a funding decision. Intel declined to say how much it paid him. Rubin did not respond. DeWine's press secretary said there was no conflict.

Husted was Ohio's second-ranking executive for all of this. The state gave Intel more than $600 million.

Catherine Turcer of Common Cause Ohio put the problem plainly to the Ohio Capital Journal: "The problem has to do with how very cozy everything is." When you own stock in a company, she said, "it's very hard to look just at economic policy."

The project Ohioans were sold

The reason any of this matters to people who do not own Intel shares is what Ohio bought.

The plant was announced in 2022 as a $20 billion investment that would bring chipmaking back to America. The state pledged $2 billion in incentives. JobsOhio pledged $150 million more.

Then Intel delayed construction at the start of 2024, citing weak chip sales. In July 2025 the company laid off 24,000 people worldwide, walked away from two European projects, and pushed Ohio back again. The factory was supposed to be making chips by the beginning of this year. The earliest it will now make anything is 2030.

Ohioans are still on the hook for the incentives. Husted's family was on the upside of the stock.

The ban he won't take a position on

There is a straightforward fix for this, and Congress has been circling it for years: ban members and their families from trading individual stocks.

Bipartisan bills to do exactly that were filed in both chambers last year. One passed the House this summer — but only after Republicans welded an unrelated photo-ID voting mandate onto it, which cost it Democratic support. We wrote about who built that trap: Virginia Foxx's Rules Committee wrote the closed rule that fused the voter ID mandate to the stock ban and barred every amendment.

In February, Husted would not take a position on a trading ban, Columbus television station WCMH reported. His office did not answer the Ohio Capital Journal's question about it either.

Husted is not the only Republican with a stock problem. John James of Michigan bought SpaceX stock the day it went public while sitting on the committee that oversees the agency regulating Starlink.

Nor is Intel the only industry money question around him this summer. His campaign has taken $69,750 from the tech and utility companies at the center of Ohio's data center fight — the same fight over who pays for the electricity those companies use.

What the filings show

Jon Husted's wife held as much as $15,000 in Intel stock through the entire period in which he pushed Washington to put about $9 billion into the company and was told in advance about three developments that each sent Intel's share price up between 6% and 10%. Intel's own lobbyist and his wife had given Husted's state political committee nearly $15,000 in 2022, the year the plant was announced, and at least $20,000 the year before. The Ohio he helped run gave Intel more than $600 million and JobsOhio gave it another $27 million, for a factory that will not make a chip until 2030 at the earliest. Asked whether members of Congress should be allowed to trade individual stocks, his office said nothing.

Source

Marty Schladen, Ohio Capital Journal: "As he worked to advance the Intel project, an Ohio senator's wife was invested in it" (August 28, 2026). Photo by Graham Stokes for the Ohio Capital Journal.

Asked If He'd Campaign With Max Miller, Vivek Ramaswamy Said Republican Control Comes First: 'If We Compromise That, We're Done.'

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:35:18 +0000

A man walked up to Ohio's Republican nominee for governor and thanked him for standing behind a congressman his own party has been asking to quit.

"Thank you for supporting Max, Max Miller," the man said.

"Absolutely," Vivek Ramaswamy answered. "Up and down the ticket."

The man pressed: would Ramaswamy actually go out and campaign with him?

"My view is this is the most important election for preserving the Republican control of the House, the Senate, and also protecting the Republican control of the state. If we compromise that, we're done. So that's the way I look at it."

The exchange was captured on audio published by Headquarters News on X on August 26, 2026, and reported by Raw Story the same day.

Read the answer again, because it is not an evasion. He was asked about a specific man and specific allegations, and he answered with a calculation. Losing the majority is the thing that cannot be compromised. Everything else is downstream of that.

A necessary note up front: none of the allegations against Max Miller has been proven in court. He has never been criminally charged over any of them, and he denies all of them. What follows is what has been filed in court, reported in public records, and said on the record.

What Ramaswamy is choosing to stand behind

Miller is fighting two court cases at once, one with his ex-wife and one with his ex-girlfriend. Both women say he abused them.

Mother Jones obtained more than 2,000 pages of court filings and police reports through public records requests. We went through what those records contain: his ex-wife Emily Moreno told detectives she couldn't rule out that Miller caused their 2-year-old daughter's broken collarbone, because he had previously thrown hot water at her, shoved her, and held a gun to her head. The child protective services investigation into the collarbone was ruled unsubstantiated. The records also include a threat to a sitting U.S. senator.

That senator is Bernie Moreno of Ohio — Emily's father, and the toddler's grandfather.

His own party already answered this question

This is not a case where Republicans have gone quiet and Ramaswamy is simply declining to be the first one out. Three weeks before that audio, they went on the record.

On August 6, 2026, two U.S. senators publicly told Miller to resign — Ohio's Jon Husted and Montana's Tim Sheehy. Four days earlier, Moreno himself had said Miller "should not serve in the House of Representatives." A major conservative group called him unfit to serve. A poll showed him losing a safe Republican district by 14 points. Miller's response was to loan his own campaign $1 million and stay on the ballot, past the deadline for the party to swap in anyone else.

So when Ramaswamy says the majority can't be compromised, he is disagreeing with Republican senators who decided it could be — and with the grandfather of the child in the file.

President Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson have avoided calling for Miller to go. Ramaswamy went further than avoiding it. He said "absolutely," and "up and down the ticket."

What it says about the man asking to run Ohio

Ramaswamy is running to be governor of Ohio. The job is almost entirely about judgment calls made without a roll call to hide behind — who gets appointed, which investigations get funded, who is told their conduct is disqualifying.

He was handed the easiest version of that test anyone could construct. A man asked him a yes-or-no question about one man. Two senators from his own party had already answered it. And his reasoning was that the seat count comes first.

This is of a piece with how he has run. He spent months refusing to tell Ohio what he actually stands for, to the point that a newsroom had to badger him into stating a single position. Here he stated one plainly, and it turned out to be about the majority.

The bottom line

In audio published August 26, 2026, Vivek Ramaswamy — the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio — was asked whether he would campaign with Rep. Max Miller and said "absolutely," "up and down the ticket," explaining that this is "the most important election for preserving the Republican control of the House, the Senate, and also protecting the Republican control of the state. If we compromise that, we're done." Miller faces two civil cases from two women alleging abuse, all of which he denies; on August 6, two Republican senators — Ohio's Jon Husted and Montana's Tim Sheehy — called on him to resign, four days after his former father-in-law Sen. Bernie Moreno said he should not serve in the House; Miller stayed on the ballot after loaning his campaign $1 million.

Source

"Vivek Ramaswamy caught on audio defending GOP candidate accused of domestic abuse", Raw Story, August 26, 2026. Audio published by Headquarters News. Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Raw Story.

An Ad for Jon Husted Used a Dead Ohio Family's Photo to Warn About 'Dangerous Illegals.' The Driver Charged in the Crash Is a U.S. Citizen.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:29:46 +0000

Lynnea Soposki was a veterinarian in Dublin, Ohio. Her husband Luke brewed beer. They kept bees and sold the honey at markets. On April 11, 2026, they and their one-year-old son Logan were killed in a multi-vehicle crash on an interstate in Delaware County.

Four months later, their faces were in a television ad for a U.S. Senate campaign, and their family did not know it was coming.

On August 26, 2026, the Columbus Dispatch's Haley BeMiller reported that the Soposki relatives were asking for the ad to be taken down. The spot was paid for by the National Republican Senatorial Committee to boost Jon Husted, Ohio's appointed U.S. senator, against former Senator Sherrod Brown.

"This is not a statement about immigration policy, and we are not making one for any party or candidate. It is a statement about our family. Lynnea and Luke were not political symbols. ... Our grief is not raw material for a campaign, and their images are not public property to repurpose for anyone's advantage."

The ad used footage from the crash site. It also used a photograph of the three of them, taken by a family friend. The family said they were never asked, and would not have agreed.

The claim the ad makes

The ad says Brown's position on immigration let "dangerous illegals" into the country, and then cuts to the crash and to the man charged in it. It closes on the line: "Because of him, Ohioans paid the price."

There is a problem with that, and it is not a matter of interpretation.

The driver charged in the crash is Modou F. Ngom of Columbus. Authorities said he was driving a tractor trailer that rear-ended the Soposkis' vehicle and pushed it across multiple lanes into other cars. He was charged with multiple counts of aggravated vehicular homicide and vehicular assault.

Ngom's attorney told a Delaware County court in April that he came to the United States from Mauritania 20 years ago and is now a U.S. citizen. Ohio officials later shared information about him with Immigration and Customs Enforcement after learning he had obtained citizenship under an alternate identity — a serious allegation in its own right, and a completely different one from the one the ad makes.

The ad's whole argument is that a border policy let a foreign national in and that person killed an Ohio family. The person it shows is an American citizen who has lived here for decades.

The connection to Brown doesn't exist either

FactCheck.org examined the ad and found nothing behind it.

Asked to justify the claim, an NRSC spokesperson pointed to Brown's votes on immigration bills, saying he voted for "open border policies" and "to protect illegal aliens like Ngom from deportation." FactCheck.org found no evidence of any tie between those votes and this crash. According to the Ohio Department of Public Safety, Ngom entered the country sometime in the 1990s, and it is not even clear how or where he entered. Almost every vote the NRSC pointed to came after that — a 2001 amendment, a 2019 bill, a 2021 budget amendment, and Brown's opposition to Trump's border wall, which came after Ngom had reportedly obtained citizenship. The one vote that predates his arrival, against a 1996 immigration bill, made no difference to what became law: the legislation was folded into an omnibus appropriations bill that Brown then voted for. And with so few details about his immigration, FactCheck.org wrote, it is "difficult to say how passing or not passing the legislation would've had an impact on Ngom."

So the ad blames a senator's votes for an event that happened decades after the man in question arrived, involving a man who is a citizen.

What Husted did about it

The family said they did not want to go public. They wrote to the campaign first and heard nothing back. Only after getting no response did they release a statement.

A Husted spokesperson said the campaign forwarded the family's letter to the NRSC.

That is the whole response. Not "we're sorry." Not "we'll ask them to stop." The ad exists to elect him, and when the people whose dead child is in it asked him to make it stop, the answer was that the letter had been passed along to someone else.

The NRSC did not apologize either. Spokesperson Nick Puglia said: "For 32 years, radical leftist Sherrod Brown backed open border policies that cost Ohioans their lives, without ever apologizing. Our ad campaigns will continue to hold Sherrod Brown accountable."

A source familiar with the ad traffic told the Dispatch the spot had run its full cycle and been replaced with new content. It was still posted on the committee's YouTube page.

Update, August 30: he says his campaign had nothing to do with it. The ad says his campaign authorized it.

Three days after the family went public, Husted addressed the ad for the first time. He was at a Republican rally in Hilliard, in suburban Columbus, on August 29, and he told reporters that his campaign had asked the NRSC to pull it.

"Our campaign had nothing to do with it. As soon as we learned that the family didn't like the ad, we told the people who put it up to take it down. I'm with them on this. They've suffered enough. They don't need to suffer any more."

There is a problem with the first sentence.

The Columbus Dispatch's Haley BeMiller reported that an additional, unlisted version of the clip — one that has been viewed more than 5.5 million times — carries a disclosure stating the ad was funded by the NRSC and authorized by Husted's campaign.

That wording is not decoration. The FEC requires a political ad to say who paid for it, and the two available answers mean opposite things. An ad a candidate did not authorize has to say so out loud — the disclaimer must "state that the communication was not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee." That is the line on every genuinely independent expenditure. This clip does not carry it. It carries the other kind, the one that names the campaign as having authorized the spot.

A campaign that authorizes an ad is not a campaign that had nothing to do with it.

Three more things from that reporting:

The ad is still up. It has been replaced on air with new content, but as of August 30 it remained posted on the NRSC's YouTube page — the same thing the family was told a week earlier, when a source said the spot had simply run its cycle.
Nobody from the campaign has called the family. Lynnea Soposki's brother, Jesse Mallen, said no campaign official had reached out to him or to other relatives since the issue became public. "I'm disappointed that this wasn't just the default behavior," he said. "Why did it need this much attention to do what was obvious to so many was the right thing?"
Husted still defended the ad's claim. Presented with the FactCheck.org finding that there is no evidence connecting Brown's votes to this crash, he said the broader point still stands, arguing that some undocumented immigrants have improperly obtained commercial driver's licenses. "When you do not follow the rule of law, when you let millions of people into this country illegally, it endangers everyone," he said. "Including on our highways."

The man charged in this crash is a U.S. citizen who came to the United States in the 1990s. He is not currently facing immigration-related charges, the New York Times reported.

So the position, as of August 30, is this: the ad was authorized by his campaign, he says his campaign had nothing to do with it, the ad is still online, the family has not heard from him, and the claim at the center of it — the one a fact-checker found unsupported — is one he is still making in his own voice.

This is a pattern, not a slip

This is the second time this month a fact-checker has taken apart an immigration claim about Sherrod Brown made on Jon Husted's behalf. In the first, Husted told Fox News that Brown backed "Social Security payments for illegals" — a claim PolitiFact rated False after his campaign pointed to three votes, none of which would have handed a federal benefit to anyone in the country illegally.

Both times, the pattern is the same: pick an emotionally loaded immigration frame, attach Brown's name to it, and let the fact-check arrive after the claim has already been made.

The difference this time is who paid for it. In this one, the cost fell on a family in Dublin who lost a veterinarian, a brewer and a one-year-old, and then had to write a public letter asking a sitting senator to stop putting their child's photograph on television.

What we know

An NRSC ad supporting Jon Husted used crash-site footage and a family friend's photograph of Lynnea, Luke and 1-year-old Logan Soposki without their relatives' consent, to claim Sherrod Brown's immigration votes let "dangerous illegals" into the country. The man charged in the crash, Modou F. Ngom, is a U.S. citizen; his attorney told a Delaware County court he came from Mauritania 20 years ago, while state officials put his entry sometime in the 1990s. FactCheck.org found no evidence connecting Brown's votes to the crash. The family wrote to Husted's campaign, got no reply, and went public; his campaign's response was to forward the letter to the NRSC. The ad was still on the committee's YouTube page.

Source

Haley BeMiller, "'Our grief is not raw material' for Husted Senate ad, family says in call for removal", Columbus Dispatch / Newark Advocate, August 26, 2026.

Jon Husted Told Fox News That Sherrod Brown Backed 'Social Security Payments for Illegals.' PolitiFact Rated It False.

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:05:04 +0000

On August 4, 2026, Jon Husted went on Fox News and said this about the man trying to take his Senate seat:

Sherrod Brown "supported Social Security payments for illegals, healthcare for illegals and COVID checks for illegals."

On August 25, PolitiFact rated that claim False.

Not "mostly false." Not "needs context." False — as in, the three votes Husted's own campaign pointed to would not have handed a single federal dollar to anyone in the country illegally.

The three votes, one at a time

Husted's team gave PolitiFact three roll calls. Here is what each one actually was.

Social Security, July 19, 2007. Brown voted against an amendment that would have stopped immigrants who were once in the country illegally but had since become legal residents from getting Social Security credit for taxes they had already paid.

Read that again. Nobody in this scenario is here illegally. They paid into the system, they gained legal status, and the question was whether the money they'd already paid counted. Any benefit would be collected only after they were legal residents.

Healthcare, March 23, 2013. Brown voted against an amendment from then-Sen. Jeff Sessions saying immigrants in the U.S. illegally shouldn't get federally subsidized healthcare.

They already couldn't. Federal law already barred people in the country illegally from Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program and Affordable Care Act subsidies. The amendment would not have changed who received anything.

COVID checks, March 6, 2021. Brown voted for the American Rescue Plan, which sent $1,400 checks to millions of Americans, and against a Republican amendment to bar checks for anyone "not lawfully present."

The bill already blocked them. It required a valid Social Security number to get a check, which excluded the overwhelming majority of people here illegally. The amendment's backers said they were aiming at a narrower group — some DACA recipients, people brought here as children who have work authorization and Social Security numbers.

That is the whole case. Three votes, none of which did what Husted said they did.

The part Husted left out

Three months after that 2007 Social Security vote, in October 2007, Brown voted in favor of an amendment blocking immigrants from getting Social Security credit for taxes paid while they were in the country illegally.

That is the vote Husted was describing. Brown cast it — on Husted's side.

PolitiFact called this out directly: Husted's assertion "cherry-picked Brown's votes."

There's a second one. The same day as the 2013 healthcare vote, the Senate took up an amendment reaffirming that immigrants here illegally can't receive federal benefits. It passed by voice vote, so no individual names were recorded — but Brown's campaign told PolitiFact he voted for it.

How these votes get manufactured

PolitiFact explained the machinery plainly, and it's worth knowing, because it explains why this ad exists at all:

"Some of the measures he voted on stemmed from a practice both parties engage in: forcing members of the other political party to vote on amendments that don't align with the party's positions, and using those votes in later campaign messaging."

That's the trick. Write an amendment that restates a law already on the books. Attach it to a bill. Dare the other side to vote no on a redundant provision. Then, years later, describe the "no" vote as if the underlying law didn't exist.

Husted is running the third step of that play. Brown ran into the same accusations in 2024 from his then-challenger, Bernie Moreno.

PolitiFact's ruling, in full

"Husted said Brown 'supported Social Security payments for illegals, healthcare for illegals and COVID checks for illegals.'

The votes in question — in 2007, 2013 and 2021, respectively — did not make immigrants in the country illegally eligible for those benefits.

The Social Security vote addressed how past tax payments would be counted for immigrants who later gained legal status. The healthcare vote would not have legalized the payment of benefits to people in the U.S. illegally, because federal law already bars such payments. Similarly, the COVID-19 relief bill already outlawed stimulus payments to the vast majority of people in the U.S. illegally.

We rate this claim False."

This isn't Husted's first fact-check

Ohio's junior senator has a growing file of statements that didn't hold up next to his own record. He told disabled Ohioans his Medicaid vote wouldn't hurt them, then skipped their forum. He told Ohioans their rising electric bills were their own doing, while his own party's campaign memo called his data-center record an "anchor".

The pattern is the same each time: a clean, quotable line for a TV hit, and a record underneath it that says something else.

What this costs Ohio

The word "illegals" does a lot of work in that Fox News sentence. It's meant to make you picture someone getting something you don't get.

What the three votes actually involve: people who paid taxes and later became legal residents, a healthcare ban that was already law, and a check program that already required a Social Security number. Nothing in there is anyone jumping the line.

Ohio has real problems Husted could be talking about on national television. Ohio lost a bigger share of its Obamacare coverage than any state in America. Ohioans' electric bills are climbing. He used his airtime on a claim about his opponent that a fact-checker took apart three weeks later.

What the record shows

On August 4, 2026, Jon Husted told a Fox News audience that Sherrod Brown supported Social Security, healthcare and COVID checks for people in the country illegally. PolitiFact examined the three votes Husted's own campaign supplied and rated the claim False on August 25: none of them would have made anyone here illegally eligible for those benefits. On the Social Security question, Brown voted the way Husted describes just three months later — a vote Husted's campaign didn't mention.

Source

Jon Husted's inaccurate claim that Sherrod Brown voted for benefits for immigrants in US illegally — Cami Henry-Seymore, PolitiFact, August 25, 2026.

Jon Husted Voted Three Times to Keep the Tariffs Squeezing Ohio Farmers. Now Trump Is Dropping the Tariff on Imported Ground Beef.

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 19:09:56 +0000

At the Mercer County fair last week, farmers loading cattle told a New York Times reporter that business conditions were getting scary. Fertilizer costs up. Machinery costs up. Few people in that deeply conservative corner of western Ohio were inclined to blame the president for any of it.

Then, on Friday, the president gave them one more thing to worry about.

On August 21, 2026, Trump announced he was waiving the tariff on imported ground beef that kicks in once foreign shipments pass a set limit — clearing the way for up to 300,000 metric tons of it over the next 90 days, with a promised discount of 25% off market price. Cattle futures dropped on the news that same morning.

So here is where Ohio's farmers stand. The tariffs that raised the price of nearly everything they buy are still in place. The one tariff that was holding cheap foreign beef out of the grocery case is off for 90 days.

And Jon Husted, the senator who is supposed to be their voice in Washington, voted three separate times to keep the first set of tariffs exactly where they are.

Three votes, three days, three no's

This isn't a matter of interpretation. It's in the Senate's own roll call record, from three days running in October 2025:

October 28, 2025 — S.J.Res. 81, to end the emergency declaration behind the tariffs on Brazil. Passed 52–48. Husted voted no.
October 29, 2025 — S.J.Res. 77, to end the emergency declaration behind the tariffs on Canada. Passed 50–46. Husted voted no.
October 30, 2025 — S.J.Res. 88, to end the emergency declaration behind the global tariffs. Passed 51–47. Husted voted no.

All three passed the Senate anyway. That chamber has a Republican majority, so none of those tallies happened without Republicans voting yes — which means Husted wasn't stuck with his party. He had a choice, and he made the same one three days running.

What the tariffs did to Ohio

Ohio is not a small farm state. According to USDA's 2025 state agriculture overview, Ohio has 73,600 farm operations, 1.23 million head of cattle as of January 1, 2026, and soybean and corn crops worth roughly $2.7 billion and $2.5 billion a year.

The soybeans are where the trade war landed hardest. China was a major customer for Ohio-grown soybeans. After a 20% tariff went on, China stopped buying U.S. soybeans — not fewer, none — and started buying from Argentina instead. Sherrod Brown, the Democrat running against Husted, asked the Statehouse News Bureau why the administration was giving Argentina $20 billion at the same time.

By harvest 2025, Shelby County farmer Chris Gibbs — a former chairman of his county GOP who quit the party in 2019 over Trump's first trade war — described Ohio's family farms as "in a hell of a mess". China had bought 54% of U.S. soybean exports the year before and none at all so far that year, while tariffs drove up the cost of fertilizer, steel and machinery at the same time.

That's the squeeze. Costs up on one side, markets gone on the other. It's the same story we've reported from Indiana, Michigan and southern Minnesota. Ohio's version is no different.

What Husted said when Ohio farmers spoke up

Husted's public line as the damage mounted was that the people complaining were mistaken. In a clip collected by the Ohio Democratic Party, he says the critics "are wrong," that the tariffs "haven't affected the economy negatively," and that "the policies are working."

In October 2025, the Statehouse News Bureau went to him about the tariffs and Ohio's farmers. His office said he was not available for an interview. It sent a written statement instead, which the newsroom quoted in part:

"My record shows that I support Ohio's farmers and consumers. I voted for the working family tax cuts, which allows farmers and job creators to immediately expense investments in new factories, capital investments in machinery and equipment, and in research and development—all of which Democrats opposed."

Read it twice. He was asked about tariffs. He answered about a tax deduction. A write-off for buying new equipment does nothing for a farmer who can't sell his crop, and it does not lower the price of the fertilizer he already bought.

Not being available is a pattern with Husted. He also didn't show up when Ohio's disability community held a forum about his Medicaid vote.

Now the tariff comes off — on the one product that competes with Ohio cattle

The beef waiver is the part that should sting most in Mercer County.

Most beef the United States imports is lean trimmings, according to USDA's report on beef import quotas — the grass-fed cuts that get blended with American beef to make ground beef. That is precisely the product now coming in without that tariff, up to 300,000 metric tons of it.

Cattle producers have spent years shrinking their herds through drought and high input costs. U.S. cattle inventory sits at its lowest level in about 75 years, and that tight supply is finally letting ranchers turn a profit. One market analyst quoted by the cattle trade publication Drovers put the incoming shipment at roughly 44 days' worth of American ground beef consumption.

The cattle industry did not read it as help. The National Cattlemen's Beef Association said that "flooding the market with government-subsidized, below-market beef is not the way to rebuild the American cattle herd." The United States Cattlemen's Association was blunter: "You don't put America first by putting U.S. cattle producers last."

Notice what the waiver concedes. Husted has said the tariffs "haven't affected the economy negatively." The administration just suspended one for 90 days for the stated purpose of bringing a grocery price down. Both of those cannot be true.

None of this is a defense of the beef tariff the president is now dropping. It's the direction that matters. When tariffs were raising Ohio farmers' costs, their senator voted three times to keep them. When a tariff was the thing standing between Ohio's cattle farmers and cheap imports, it came off in an afternoon, with no vote at all.

What the record shows

Jon Husted voted three times in three days to keep tariffs that had already pushed up Ohio's fertilizer, steel and machinery costs and cost U.S. soybean farmers their largest customer outright. He told Ohioans the critics "are wrong" and that "the policies are working," and when a public radio newsroom asked him about the damage, his office would not make him available and answered with a tax deduction. Ten months later the president waived the tariff on imported ground beef — up to 300,000 metric tons of it, about 44 days of the country's ground beef consumption — and cattle prices fell the same morning, with 1.23 million head of cattle standing in Ohio fields.

Source

Reporting from Millersport, Dayton, Celina, North Ridgeville and Akron by Campbell Robertson and Jessica Contrera, "Angry Ohio Voters Could Turn Their State Purple Again," The New York Times, August 23, 2026. Photo: Madeleine Hordinski for The New York Times.

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

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

Joe Wilson wrote it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ohio said no in 2011. Jim Jordan signed anyway.

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

Jim Jordan is Ohio's signature on this bill.

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

Pennsylvania sent five signatures on a law it never wanted

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

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

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

What it costs a paycheck

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

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

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

This is not a one-off

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

Jon Husted Told Disabled Ohioans His Medicaid Vote Wouldn't Hurt Them. He Skipped Their Forum and Went Shooting Clay Targets.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 12:56:58 +0000

On Thursday, August 20, Ohio's disability community set aside four hours to hear from the people who want to run their state.

The Ohio Disability Candidates Forum ran from noon to 4 p.m. at the Fawcett Center in Columbus. It was organized by the Ohio Olmstead Task Force, billed as nonpartisan, and built to be easy to attend: ASL interpreters, live captioning, a universal changing station, and a request that everyone come fragrance-free. Fourteen statewide candidates were invited — the Republican and the Democrat for every office on the November ballot. The questions were written and shared in advance, so nobody could be ambushed.

Jon Husted was on the list. He did not come.

At 3:10 p.m., an attendee typed into the event's question channel asking whether Husted was joining. Staff answered that he was not — that he was "unable to participate."

At 8:19 p.m., Husted's verified account posted photographs of him at the Black Wing Shooting Center, north of Columbus, shooting clay targets. "It's National Shooting Sports Month!" the post read. "It was great to be at the Black Wing Shooting Center in Columbus today with fellow Ohio sportsmen and hear about the issues that matter most to them."

He had time that day to hear about the issues that mattered most to somebody. Just not to them.

The vote behind the empty chair

This forum mattered because of a vote Husted already cast.

Husted voted for Trump's budget bill — the one Republicans called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — which carries the largest cut to Medicaid in the program's history. KFF puts Ohio's share of that at roughly $33 billion in lost federal Medicaid money over the next decade, about a 13% cut against what the state spends now.

The piece of it disability groups have spent a year warning about takes effect January 1, 2027. Roughly 769,000 Ohioans will have to prove, every month, that they worked or studied or volunteered 80 hours. The Urban Institute projects that paperwork alone could cost as many as 356,000 Ohioans their coverage by 2028.

That is on top of the people Ohio has already lost. When the Obamacare tax credits expired, 161,385 Ohioans dropped their plans — and Ohio lost a larger share of its ACA enrollment than any other state in the country.

And more than 45,000 Ohioans with disabilities are on Medicaid waivers. Waivers are the thing that pays for a caregiver to come to your house so you don't have to live in an institution. Under federal law, waiver services are optional. That is exactly why advocates are frightened: when a state budget gets squeezed, the optional things go first. Ohio has already seen where that road ends — we've written about how Husted helped nursing homes make themselves harder to sue for abuse and wrongful death.

"There's nothing in this bill that would impact them"

Husted has told Ohioans, over and over, that none of this reaches disabled people.

In July 2025, as the bill moved through Congress, he told News 5 Cleveland that people with disabilities would not be affected: "There's nothing in this bill that would impact them." His office told NBC4 the same week that "Disabled Americans, children, and their caretakers are at no risk for losing benefits because of this bill."

Later that month he posted a statement on his Senate website saying there were "whoppers of a lie" going around about Medicaid, and that the law would leave Ohioans with more health care than ever.

Here is the problem with that. The 80-hour work rule is the specific provision disability groups flag as the danger, and the Center for American Progress found it reaches at least 2.6 million adults nationally who have trouble working because of a disability or illness but who don't get SSI or disability insurance — so they get no automatic exemption. Those people keep their coverage only if they fill out the forms correctly, every month, forever.

On a Columbus radio show in October 2025, Husted called the Medicaid changes "purposeful." "So I love fighting for those things," he said. "I love doing that kind of stuff."

The forum on August 20 was four hours in a room where people living on those waivers could have asked him about that. He was not there.

This is not new for him

Husted's record on disability benefits did not start in the Senate. It started when he ran the Ohio House.

In April 2005, three months into his speakership, Husted led a House budget proposal that eliminated the Disability Medical Assistance program — which paid for prescriptions and doctor visits for about 15,000 very low-income adults described at the time as destitute and chronically ill. The same proposal cut off Medicaid for 25,000 working-poor parents earning between 90% and 100% of the poverty line.

The next March, he voted for Senate Bill 7, an overhaul of Ohio's workers' compensation system that made it harder for injured workers to qualify and shorter for them to collect. It:

required objective medical proof that a workplace injury had made a pre-existing condition substantially worse, instead of a worker's own report of more pain;
narrowed who counts as permanently and totally disabled, overturning an Ohio Supreme Court ruling that had treated the loss of a single limb as the loss of two body parts;
capped non-working wage-loss payments at 52 weeks, down from a 200-week allowance.

It passed the House 58 to 37 and became law.

The hug

In June 2025, a Columbus attorney named Sarah Bloom Anderson brought her 14-year-old daughter Audrey to Husted's Washington office. Audrey has PURA Syndrome, a chromosomal disorder. She relies on a waiver that pays for a full-time caregiver at home.

Husted hugged her. His office posted the photo.

Then he voted for the bill.

Bloom Anderson told the story months later at a campaign event in Columbus. "You can't hug my daughter, look her in the eyes and tell her Medicaid won't be cut," she said, "and then sign that bill."

One more thing

Three years ago, as lieutenant governor, Husted stood in front of a camera and handed CareSource the 2023 Governor's Inclusive Employer Award for hiring people with disabilities. "Governor DeWine and I have made working with Ohioans with disabilities an important priority in our administration," he said.

CareSource was a listed sponsor of Thursday's forum. Its logo sits on the event page, a few inches above the roster of candidates — a roster with Husted's name on it.

A photo op with a disabled teenager is easy. An award ceremony is easy. Four hours of pre-written questions from the people your vote actually lands on is not, and he skipped it. It's the same pattern we've seen from him on electric bills, where his own party's internal memo calls data centers an "anchor" around his campaign — the appearances are managed, and the accounting never happens in public.

Ohio votes November 3.

Source

Husted skips disability forum, posts clay-shooting photos hours later — R.L. Porter, TiffinOhio.net, August 21, 2026. Photo: screenshot via Senator Jon Husted / YouTube.

Tampa Electric's Rates Are Up 86%. Ohio's Bills Are Up 53%. These Five Republicans Took the Utilities' Money and Handed Data Centers the Grid.

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:58:01 +0000

An AI data center is, from the power grid's point of view, a small city that never sleeps and never leaves.

A typical new one runs 100 to 1,000 megawatts — a load equal to a new neighborhood of 80,000 to 800,000 average homes, around the clock. Hundreds of them are being built. And the grid they're plugging into is the same one your house is on.

That leaves exactly one question, and it is not a technical one: who pays to build the extra power?

There are only two possible answers. Either the companies that want the electricity pay the full cost of the poles, wires, plants and substations needed to serve them — or the cost gets spread across everybody's bill, and your neighbor with a fixed income helps finance a server farm.

We've already written about the Republicans who accused their own constituents of working for China for objecting to a data center, and the eight who took the industry's money and then discovered concerns.

This one is about the money coming out of your account every month.

Greg Abbott gave away $3.2 billion and put the bill on the grid

Texas already knows what a fragile grid costs. In 2021 it collapsed and hundreds of people died.

Since then, Greg Abbott has branded Texas "the epicenter of AI development," personally announcing deals like a $40 billion Google build-out.

What he gave them:

A sales-tax exemption the comptroller's office says will cost $3.2 billion in forgone sales-tax revenue over two years — already one of the state's costliest incentive programs, and soon to be the most expensive of its kind in the nation.
A regulatory door held open. ERCOT expects Texas power demand to nearly double by 2030, with large-load projects wanting up to 56,458 more megawatts queued for its approval. Texas now has more data centers under construction than any other state — 142, against Virginia's 141.

What Texans got:

The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that data-center demand could push wholesale electricity prices at ERCOT's North hub roughly 79% higher than otherwise expected by 2027.
A $33 billion transmission build-out — ERCOT's own estimate for its 765-kV expansion plan — that shifts long-term costs onto ratepayers.

And now, in an election year, with voters in both parties turning on Big Tech, Abbott has suddenly proposed new restrictions and started saying data centers "must operate in ways that reduce costs for residential electricity customers."

He invited the build-out. He's campaigning against the consequences.

Ashley Moody spent six years as Florida's top lawyer and never once fought a rate hike

Between December 2020 and January 2026, Florida households watched this happen:

Tampa Electric: up 86%
Duke Energy: up 49%
Florida Power & Light: up 45%

Ashley Moody was Florida's Attorney General for six years, until January 2025 — an office with standing to walk into a utility rate case and fight on behalf of customers.

She never did it. Not once.

That is not how the job used to work. As the Florida Phoenix documented, previous Florida attorneys general — Republicans Bill McCollum and Charlie Crist among them — intervened against rate increases and won multi-year rate freezes for customers.

A possible explanation sits in her own filings. Moody has taken $431,000 in career campaign money from Florida's investor-owned utilities. This cycle she has raised more from electric utilities than any other Senate candidate in the country.

Florida just passed a data-center law, SB 484, that is supposed to make big customers pay their own way. Her party's front-runner for governor promised it means rates "will not go up." PolitiFact checked that promise and found the law directs a process, not a result.

Vivek Ramaswamy is running for the office that picks who pays

Ohio electricity bills have climbed 53% since 2021. In the year ending May 31, AEP's Ohio Power disconnected 15% of its customers — the worst rate of any utility in the state.

Here is what Ohio's governor actually does: appoints all five members of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and designates its chair. That's the body that sets electricity rates and decides who pays for data centers.

Vivek Ramaswamy is running for that job, and the industry has noticed. Utility, gas, oil and solar PACs gave his campaign $97,468.91 during 2026. AEP's own political committee gave $17,000 of it.

His opponent, Amy Acton, received nothing from those PACs.

And when a watchdog exposed the utility money in May, it didn't stop — it doubled. Another $65,603 arrived over the following ten weeks, from a wider set of companies. The largest checks landed on July 31, the final day of the reporting period: $16,615.67 from the Utility Scale Solar Energy Coalition of Ohio — matching Ohio's per-election ceiling to the penny — plus $16,615 from Vistra's employee PAC and $10,000 from Diversified Gas & Oil.

The man who would appoint every rate regulator in Ohio is being funded by the companies those regulators oversee.

Rick Jackson owns a piece of one and wants them to pay no property tax

Rick Jackson, the billionaire running for governor of Georgia, has an unusually direct stake in this fight.

At the Georgia Chamber of Commerce's luncheon in August, he told more than a thousand business leaders that counties should be able to host data centers with no property tax bill at all.

He is personally invested in a data center in Texas.

Property tax is the money that pays for the county's schools, roads, fire department and water system — the local services a data center's construction and power demand put pressure on. Jackson's proposal is that the facility contributes nothing to any of it, and everyone else in the county covers the difference.

At the same luncheon, he ruled out expanding Medicaid in a state where 624,000 Georgians are projected to lose health coverage by 2034.

Gregg Hull's answer for a state running out of water is to cool them with fracking waste

New Mexico is drying up. At an Albuquerque Journal town hall on May 11, Gregg Hull, the Republican running for governor, faced a flurry of questions about whether he supports a moratorium on data centers. He said he is not opposed to them. What the state should explore instead, he said, is requiring developers to cool their servers with alternative water — brackish water, or produced water from oil and gas operations.

"I think there's some very creative ways we can work with these industries. Every time we tell an industry that we don't want them here or we push them out of the state without coming up with a way that we can actually work with those industries, we're sending a message out to the rest of the United States that we don't want those opportunities here."

Produced water is the wastewater that comes back up out of an oil and gas well. New Mexico's Water Quality Control Commission spent 18 months studying it and concluded it "contains hundreds of known and unknown chemicals, many of which are toxic to human health and the environment" — that no technology can treat it safely at scale, and that the state has no surface water quality standards for at least 180 of the potentially toxic chemicals in it. In May 2025 the commission banned discharging it into New Mexico's ground and surface water.

That ban is now under attack. In May 2026 — the same month Hull was answering the Journal's questions — the commission voted 7–4 to open a rulemaking on an industry petition that would let the wastewater back into surface and ground water and into agriculture.

Hull's own platform is on the industry's side of that fight: rules on produced water handling, he writes, are "overly complex and drive up costs without clear safety benefits. I support streamlining these rules so water can be safely treated and reused only within the industry while protecting our freshwater resources." And the next governor appoints the Environment Department that petitioned for the ban in the first place.

So: a state running out of water, a candidate for governor who won't back a pause on data centers, and an answer that points them at the fracking industry's leftovers — from a man who wants the rules on that waste streamlined.

The pattern

Five states, five Republicans, and the same arrangement underneath all of it.

The tech companies get the tax exemptions, the interconnection, the water and the political cover. The politicians get the ribbon-cuttings and the checks — $431,000 to Moody, $97,468 to Ramaswamy, a data center stake in Jackson's own portfolio, $3.2 billion in Abbott's giveaways.

And the cost of the extra generation, the extra transmission, the extra everything lands in the one place nobody negotiated on behalf of: the line at the bottom of your bill.

None of this is an argument against data centers. They will get built. Somebody will build them.

The argument is about who pays — and every one of these five had a chance to say "the companies that want the power," and said something else instead.

You will find out what they chose the same way most people do. When the bill comes.

Sources

The build-out. The scale of a single facility is EPRI's, from Powering Intelligence 2026, executive summary, updated Feb. 25, 2026: "A typical new data center of 100 to 1000 megawatts represents a load equal to that of a new neighborhood of 80,000 to 800,000 average homes."

Texas. The 2021 blackout death toll is from Andrew Weber and Mose Buchele, "Texas has an official death count from the 2021 blackout. The true toll may never be known," KUT via Texas Standard, Aug. 5, 2022 — the state's official count is 246, which researchers call a severe undercount. Paul Cobler and Apurva Mahajan, "Texas losing a billion dollars a year on data center tax break," Texas Tribune, April 8, 2026 — the comptroller's $3.2 billion two-year estimate, the tax break as "soon to be the most expensive of its kind in the nation," and the 142-to-141 count of data centers under construction against Virginia's. The interconnection queue and ERCOT's demand forecast are from Kayla Guo, "Data centers are booming in Texas. What does that mean for the grid?" Texas Tribune, Jan. 24, 2025. The price forecast is Robert Walton, "Data center demand spike could drive 79% ERCOT price hike in 2027: EIA," Utility Dive, March 16, 2026 — EIA's 78.9% is for the ERCOT North hub under a high-demand scenario. ERCOT's $32.99 billion estimate for its 765-kV Strategic Transmission Expansion Plan is reported in Paige Feild, "Permian Basin Power Fix Becomes $33 Billion Statewide Project," Texas Scorecard, Oct. 28, 2025. Abbott's directive to the PUC and ERCOT: Sarah Davis, "Abbott seeks new limits on Texas data centers," The Hill, June 11, 2026. The "epicenter of AI development" quote and the $40 billion Google announcement are from the governor's own press release.

Florida. Mitch Perry, "Florida's GOP AGs used to intervene in utility rate cases, but no longer," Florida Phoenix, June 17, 2026 — the Tampa Electric, Duke and FPL increases from December 2020 to January 2026 (Food & Water Watch), Moody's $431,000 in career money from the investor-owned utilities (CLEO Institute), her lead among Senate candidates in electric-utility fundraising (OpenSecrets), and the McCollum and Crist rate-case interventions. On SB 484: Samantha Putterman, "Donalds says FL law will prevent electric bill hikes from data centers. That's not guaranteed," PolitiFact, Aug. 7, 2026.

Ohio. Bonnie Lucas, "Ramaswamy takes nearly $100K from energy PACs as bills soar," TiffinOhio.net, Aug. 6, 2026 — the $97,468.91 total, the $65,603.24 that arrived after the Energy and Policy Institute flagged the giving, the July 31 checks, the governor's five PUCO appointments, Ohio's 53% rise in electricity bills since 2021, and AEP Ohio Power's 15% disconnection rate, first reported by Canary Media.

Georgia. Ross Williams, "Bottoms, Jackson offer competing visions on data centers, Medicaid expansion at business luncheon," Georgia Recorder, Aug. 5, 2026 — the luncheon, the property-tax proposal, the Medicaid answer and Jackson's stake in a Texas data center. His net worth is from Forbes. The 566,000 projection is the Joint Economic Committee's fact sheet on district-level impacts of health care cuts.

New Mexico. Joshua Bowling, "NM GOP governor candidate Gregg Hull touts experience leading, growing Rio Rancho," Source New Mexico, May 12, 2026, reporting the Albuquerque Journal town hall of May 11. On produced water, the Western Environmental Law Center's releases of May 14, 2025 and May 12, 2026. Hull's regulatory position is from his own campaign site.

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.

Max Miller Says Unions Are Abandoning Him Over the Allegations Against Him. The AFL-CIO Scored His Votes for Working People at 14 Percent.

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:50:42 +0000

In a sworn statement filed on July 8, Ohio Congressman Max Miller told a court that unions are walking away from his campaign.

"A lobbyist for a trade union informed me by text message that the union was withdrawing its support for my campaign because of these allegations," he wrote. "Representatives of two other organizations that had supported my campaign likewise informed me or my campaign that their support was ending because of these allegations."

One union's national organization, he said, notified him in writing that it will endorse his opponent in November.

Miller put the cost at about $30,000 in lost organizational support, plus individual donors who told him they were done. He estimated his reelection would now cost $2.5 million to $3 million — up from $1.4 million before.

The filing is part of a defamation lawsuit Miller brought against his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, after a May report on allegations about his conduct toward her. Miller denies those allegations.

His explanation for the union exodus is that the allegations drove it.

There is a simpler explanation sitting in his voting record.

14 Percent

The national AFL-CIO, the largest federation of unions in the country, scores members of Congress on how they vote on issues affecting working people.

Through 2025, it scored Max Miller at 14 percent.

That is not a number a "friend of labor" posts. Fourteen percent means that on roughly six out of every seven votes the AFL-CIO tracked, Miller voted the other way.

Here is one of them.

The Vote on a Million Workers' Contracts

In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order stripping collective bargaining rights from federal employees. A second order in August 2025 widened it. Together they ended union contracts for more than a million federal workers — one out of every 14 workers in the whole country covered by a union contract.

On December 11, 2025, a bipartisan bill to give those workers their contracts back passed the House 231–195.

Miller voted no. He was one of the 195 Republicans who voted to keep the orders in place. The Senate has not touched the bill since.

Seven months later, he was telling Ohio radio audiences what kind of Republican he is.

"I've been a Davis-Bacon Republican since Day One."

That was Miller on July 13, referring to the 1931 law that guarantees construction workers on federal projects a decent wage.

"We are not a right-to-work state, ladies and gentlemen," he added. "And, you know, this is one of these things where hopefully this shows you and the rest of the district that I am representing the district as it is — I am not going to Washington, D.C. to represent my own wants, feelings, wishes and needs."

To be fair to his record: in June, Miller did break with Speaker Mike Johnson and vote for a bill making it easier for workers to unionize — after Democrats used a procedural maneuver to force it onto the floor. He has also collected some union endorsements, including from the Ohio Conference of Teamsters in early July and a local operating engineers union later that month.

But a 14 percent lifetime score is what the whole record adds up to. One good vote, forced to the floor by the other party, doesn't move it.

His Ex-Wife's Lawyer Made the Point Bluntly

Miller's affidavit came with no proof attached — no text message, no letter, no name of a union.

Moreno's attorney, Subodh Chandra, called the claim hearsay in a July 20 filing and offered an alternative reading.

"Nor is the reason self-evident," Chandra wrote. "Even if it's true, the union could have been walking away from Miller because he's a lousy candidate to champion its issues."

A Miller spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

The District Is Union Country

Miller represents Ohio's 7th District, in the Cleveland area. Ohio is more unionized than the country as a whole — 11.6 percent of wage and salary workers, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

His opponent is Brian Poindexter, a city councilman and a member of the local ironworkers union. Poindexter has built his campaign on workers' rights.

The endorsement math has moved with him. The Cleveland Building and Construction Trades Council endorsed Miller in 2024. This cycle, the Ohio State Building and Construction Trades Council — Cleveland is one of its 14 member councils — endorsed Poindexter. So did the Ohio AFL-CIO, which called him the "best and easy choice to elect someone who will spend every day fighting for us." So did the American and Ohio Federation of Teachers, the United Steelworkers, and the American Federation of Government Employees — the union whose members lost their contracts in the order Miller voted to preserve.

"Strengthening collective bargaining rights, allowing more and more people to join the union of their choice if they so choose — those are the types of things that I really want to fight for," Poindexter told Politico.

Recent polling shows Miller trailing in a district Trump carried by 11 points.

The Rest of the Ledger

The union story is one line in a long year for Miller. Two Ohio senators have told him to resign, while Kroger, Walmart and Nike are still on his donor list. He asked the House Ethics Committee to investigate him, and within hours it agreed. Two thousand pages of records have detailed further allegations, including a child abuse investigation. And when Republican senators called on him to quit, he answered by announcing a $1 million loan to his own campaign and staying on the ballot.

Through all of it, his message to Ohio's 7th District is that he's a union guy who got a raw deal.

The AFL-CIO put a number on the first half of that: 14.

Source

Riley Rogerson, "Max Miller insists he can win again — but warns in court filings he's bleeding union support and cash", Politico, August 19, 2026. Photo: AP.

Vivek Ramaswamy Spent $690,000 on Private Jets to Campaign in Ohio. Most of It Went to a Company Listed at a House He Owns.

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:49:09 +0000

Ohio is about 220 miles across. You can drive from one border to the other in a few hours.

Vivek Ramaswamy has spent nearly $690,000 leasing private jets to campaign in it.

That number comes from his own campaign finance reports, reviewed by the Ohio Capital Journal. And the biggest piece of it is the part that should worry Ohio voters most.

Most of the Money Went to a Company at His Own Address

Of that $690,000, nearly $560,000 went to a company called V Leasing LLC.

The address listed for V Leasing LLC is a house Ramaswamy owns.

The remaining $130,000 or so went to TVPX Aircraft Solutions, a company in North Salt Lake, Utah.

Ramaswamy has also loaned his own campaign more than $25 million. Candidates are allowed to pay themselves back for loans like that out of money donors give them.

Put those two facts together and you get why a watchdog group is paying attention.

"If he is basically fronting money to rent a plane from himself, and then if he does not forgive the loans but reimburses himself, he'll essentially be using donor funds to pay himself," said Jordan Libowitz of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Money comes in from supporters, goes out to a company at his house, and can come back to him again.

Ramaswamy's campaign did not answer the Ohio Capital Journal's questions. The paper says it sent them multiple times.

Thirty-Minute Flights

Federal flight records show where the plane actually went. In April and May alone, Ramaswamy flew to at least six campaign events. Several of the Ohio flights lasted about 30 minutes.

April 7 — Columbus to Port Clinton, for an event in Lakeside.
April 8 — Columbus to Cleveland, for an event with the Cleveland Police Patrolmen's Association.
April 15 — Columbus to Youngstown, to meet the Fraternal Order of Police at the Mahoning County Sheriff's Office.
May 13 — Columbus to Washington, D.C., for a campaign event with Medicare and Medicaid chief Mehmet Oz.
May 21 — Columbus to Cleveland, for an event in Brecksville.
May 22–25 — Columbus to Salt Lake City, and back to Cleveland, for a data center energy conference.

David Cohen, who directs the Applied Politics Program at the University of Akron's Bliss Institute, said he can't think of another candidate for Ohio office who has used a private jet as their main way of getting to campaign events.

"He's flying between Columbus and Akron for crying out loud, and Columbus and Cleveland," Cohen said. "That's a two hour drive. Get in the car."

"The fact that Ramaswamy has spent two years flying around on his own private jet is really a bad look," he added. "I mean, let's face it: Ohio is not California or Texas."

What He Told Ohioans in May

Here is Ramaswamy talking to a Youngstown television station in May — during the same stretch of weeks as those flights.

"I love long drives."

"You think about the time we spend in Trumbull County, and you think about the time we even spend just going for a nice jog. You think about Cuyahoga National Park, not far from where we are. I'm a nature guy."

He was flying Columbus to Cleveland.

The Same Pattern, Again

This is not the first time Ramaswamy's campaign spending has been hard to see through.

The Ohio Capital Journal previously found that his campaign put more than half a million dollars on credit cards — a practice that hides what the money was actually spent on, because only the card company shows up in the filing. And the outside group buying his ads is funded overwhelmingly by five men who don't live in Ohio, through Ohio records that leave the purpose of the spending blank.

A jet leased from himself, a credit card that doesn't itemize, and out-of-state donors whose spending records are blank. Together they describe a campaign whose money is very difficult for an Ohio voter to follow.

Who This Is For

Ramaswamy is running to govern a state where people are struggling with what things cost. His answer to that has been a property tax plan that a progressive Ohio group estimates would cut about $4 billion a year from schools, police and fire departments.

His Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, talks about driving a Jeep.

"As life becomes even more expensive for Ohio families, Vivek Ramaswamy is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars flying around the world to luxury destinations on his private jet, treating Ohio like a flyover state," said Addie Bullock, a spokeswoman for Acton's campaign. "Ohioans know they can't trust a billionaire who looks down at us from 30,000 feet to understand the challenges we're facing or to fight for us."

That's a campaign talking. But the underlying facts aren't a talking point — they're in the filings Ramaswamy submitted himself.

He spent $690,000 on jets to cross a state you can drive across in an afternoon. He sent most of it to a company listed at a house he owns. He has $25 million in loans out to his own campaign that donors' money can be used to repay. And when a reporter asked about it, his campaign said nothing at all.

Source

Megan Henry, "Ohio Governor Race: Vivek Ramaswamy spent nearly $700,000 leasing private jets for campaign events", Ohio Capital Journal, August 21, 2026. Photo by WEWS.

Your Town Fought a Data Center. Seven Republicans Decided You Might Be Working for China.

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 07:10:18 +0000

Data centers are enormous warehouses full of computers that run AI. They drink electricity and water, and somebody has to build the power plants and power lines that feed them. That somebody is everyone else on the grid.

So people have started showing up at county meetings to say no. Not activists — county commissioners, farmers, retirees, parents worried about a well.

They are not a fringe. Gallup found that 71% of Americans oppose building a data center in their area — far more than the 53% who oppose a nuclear plant nearby. Seven in ten of your neighbors.

Seven Republicans have landed on the same answer to those seven in ten. Not "here's why you're wrong." Not "here's how we'll protect your bill."

They have decided you might be on a foreign payroll — and several of them have asked federal law enforcement to find out.

Tom Cotton asked the Justice Department to investigate the objectors

On June 10, 2026, Tom Cotton sent a two-page letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche asking DOJ to "investigate foreign influence efforts targeting the buildout of American AI infrastructure."

Not the companies building them. The people objecting to them. The specific ask was an investigation under the Foreign Agents Registration Act — the law for people secretly working for foreign governments.

The remarkable part is what's in the middle of his own letter:

"Americans certainly have valid concerns about potential rising energy costs and strains on natural resources related to data centers, and we should implement common sense regulations and legislation to protect communities from adverse effects."

He agrees with them in writing, then asks the federal government's top law enforcement agency to open a file on them anyway.

His evidence names one person and reaches for a professor who appeared on a panel. That's the case.

Bob Latta, Brett Guthrie and John Joyce wrote to the FBI

Six days earlier, on June 4, three House Republicans signed a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel asking what the administration was doing about "foreign influence campaigns" behind the data center backlash.

Bob Latta chairs the Energy Subcommittee. Brett Guthrie chairs the full Energy and Commerce Committee. John Joyce chairs its Oversight Subcommittee. These are the three men in the House with the most direct power to actually do something about an electric bill.

Their press release quotes Guthrie: "Americans deserve to know who is bankrolling the disinformation campaign that seeks to block critical infrastructure investments."

The letter leans on two reports — one from the Bitcoin Policy Institute, one from a group called Power the Future. Neither establishes any link between a foreign government and a township meeting in Ohio or Kentucky.

Latta's problem is the calendar. Thirty-six days before he signed it, he gaveled in his own subcommittee hearing and said this in his opening statement:

"Many question whether AI, and the data centers that power it, will ultimately do more harm than good, particularly when it comes to individual energy costs. These concerns deserve to be taken seriously."

In April the concerns deserved to be taken seriously. In June they were an FBI matter. Nothing changed in between except that the backlash got louder — because the bills got bigger. We laid out the whole timeline on Latta.

Guthrie's problem is his own district. Breckinridge County passed a one-year moratorium. Daviess County passed one too. Meade County killed a project outright after 3,000 people signed a petition. Three county governments in a deep-red Kentucky district, hitting the brakes — and the woman who started the Daviess petition said she'd never engaged with Guthrie's office at all. The chairman of the committee that governs the grid, and his constituents took their grid fight to the county courthouse instead.

Derrick Van Orden and Tim Burchett skipped the paperwork

Derrick Van Orden represents Wisconsin's 3rd District, where a data center is planned in Wisconsin Rapids. Asked about opposition, he said a lot of the information against the project comes "from the Chinese companies" who are "paying people to say this stuff."

Tim Burchett of Tennessee put it at one remove. There is "a lot of misinformation out there," he said, and "there's talk that the Chinese are putting it out because they're the ones that want to be in the business of it."

No letter, no FBI request. Just the theory, aired in public about their own constituents.

Tommy Tuberville called his neighbors' concerns "bull crap"

At least ten Alabama communities — Cullman, Birmingham, Leeds, Homewood, Fort Payne, Bessemer, Pinson, Wilsonville, Fairfield, Mobile — have pushed back on data centers. Cullman's city council voted unanimously for a one-year moratorium.

Tommy Tuberville, the Republican nominee for governor, told the Alabama Sheriffs Association:

"It's going to ruin the climate — bull crap. They are listening to all this nonsense they see on social media that's coming from China because China does not want us to grow."

Then he told them it wouldn't matter what they decided: "You can forget about doing away with it because it's coming."

The things Alabama city councils have actually been debating are water use, noise, electrical demand and landscaping. That's zoning, not a foreign influence campaign.

Somebody actually checked

This is the part that should end the argument.

NPR went looking for the Chinese campaign. Darren Linvill co-leads the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson, which tracks foreign influence operations online. His finding:

"We haven't found much."

His larger point was that the premise doesn't hold together. China runs enormous bot networks, but they're not interested in your county zoning board. As he put it, China "tends to care a lot more about what you think about China and China's economy than they tend to do about what you think about your neighbor and what's happening in your own backyard."

He told NPR he can't rule out that China is quietly paying influencers to oppose data centers. His point is that there would be no need to.

And on the people organizing:

"I think in this case, the people talking about data centers are real people with real passions and real perspectives and real opinions."

There is one real case. OpenAI banned a cluster of likely Chinese accounts generating anti-data-center content — probably a private Chinese firm working for provincial government clients. Read what OpenAI's own threat investigations lead, Ben Nimmo, said about it:

"This was not a case of an influence operation creating a debate. The debate existed already. This was an influence operation from China trying to interfere in it. We didn't see any signs that they succeeded."

The debate existed already. Seventy-one percent.

What this actually is

Strip the national-security language off and look at the structure.

Seven in ten Americans object to something. The politicians who want it built anyway cannot answer the objection on the merits — because the merits are a water table and an electric bill, and those are measurable. So the objection itself gets reclassified as a hostile act.

That move has a cost beyond this one fight. Cotton chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose job is to keep the surveillance apparatus pointed outward and inside the law. Latta, Guthrie and Joyce run the committee that decides what your utility can charge you. Every one of them chose to aim the government at the people asking questions rather than at the problem.

The neighbors in Cullman and Meade County and Wisconsin Rapids did not get a foreign wire transfer. They got a bill.

Sources

Geoff Brumfiel, "The theory taking the rich by storm: China funds data center haters," NPR, June 10, 2026 — Linvill, Nimmo and the OpenAI takedown. Van Orden's and Burchett's quotes are from "The data centers are coming. Is Congress ready?" Roll Call, Aug. 12, 2026. Cotton's request is in his June 10, 2026 letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, reported by Fox News; the Guthrie, Joyce and Latta letter to FBI Director Kash Patel is in their own June 4, 2026 press release. Tuberville's remarks to the Alabama Sheriffs Association were reported by WBRC, July 14, 2026, and by Yellowhammer News, July 14, 2026, which has the "forget about doing away with it" line. The list of Alabama communities is Brian Lyman's in the Alabama Reflector, July 27, 2026. Polling: Gallup, "Americans Oppose Data Centers in Their Area". Photo: protesters at the Utah state Capitol in Salt Lake City on May 23, 2026, opposing the Stratos data center in Box Elder County, by Natalie Behring / Getty Images, via NPR.