MAGA Report Cards — Oklahoma

ICE Opened a Tip Line Asking Americans to Report Truck Drivers They Suspect Are Undocumented. At the Hearing Josh Brecheen Chaired, the Government's Own Count Was 17 Fatal Crashes Out of About 4,000 a Year.

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:59:09 +0000

On Wednesday, September 9, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin launched a new federal tip line. It is run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and it asks Americans to report any truck driver they suspect of being in the country illegally.

Not a driver they saw driving dangerously. A driver they suspect.

Mullin's justification was this:

"Too many American lives have been lost or permanently changed because illegal aliens who have no business being on our roads have been granted CDLs."

The federal government's own data does not support that. As The Washington Sun reported, federal figures do not show that noncitizen commercial drivers cause a disproportionate share of fatal crashes, and the Transportation Department has said outright that there is not enough data to establish a relationship between immigrant truckers and fatal crashes.

The count at the hearing he chaired

On March 4, 2026, Josh Brecheen of Oklahoma chaired a House Homeland Security subcommittee hearing called "Highway Safety Under Threat: Examining Non-Domiciled CDL Issuance to Illegal Aliens."

His opening statement carried the number the administration has leaned on ever since: "In 2025 alone, at least 17 fatal crashes resulting in 30 deaths were caused by illegal aliens driving commercial vehicles with CDLs."

Seventeen. That is the federal count, and it is worth knowing how the government reached it. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration went through the fatal truck crashes of 2025 one at a time, checked each driver against state licensing agencies, and asked Homeland Security about each one's immigration category. Wendy Liu, an attorney with the Public Citizen Litigation Group, described the result to the subcommittee: the agency "perused a list of thousands of fatal crashes involving trucks in 2025, and identified only 17 with a 'substantial likelihood' of involving a driver with a non-domiciled commercial driver's license."

Then she supplied the denominator Brecheen's statement did not. "The most recent publicly-available statistics show that there were approximately 4,000 fatal large truck and bus crashes involving drivers with commercial driver's licenses in 2023," her written testimony reads. "So, the 17 crashes that FMCSA has identified comprises less than 1 percent of crashes involving people with commercial driver's licenses."

Out loud, she turned it around: "over 99 percent of fatal crashes are caused by U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents according to the Department of Transportation's own data."

That answer was given at Brecheen's own hearing, on the record, in front of him. The crackdown went ahead anyway, and six months later it produced a tip line — pointed at immigration status, which is not where the other 99 percent is.

Liu also disputed the premise the tip line rests on. "Under current law, no undocumented person, no illegal alien can hold a commercial driver's license," she testified. "Every DACA recipient, asylee, asylum seeker, person with temporary protected status, or refugee who holds a non-domiciled commercial driver's license has been issued a work permit by the Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services authorizing that person to work in the United States."

Brecheen's use of numbers has come up here before. He told a town hall that the Tax Foundation said his constituents were "$1,700 per year better off," when the Tax Foundation's actual finding was that Trump's tariffs cost the average household $840 a year.

What has already happened to 200,000 drivers

The tip line is not the beginning of this. It is the enforcement arm of something that already cost people their jobs.

In March, roughly 200,000 truck drivers began losing their commercial licenses after the Department of Homeland Security announced that asylum seekers, refugees and recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program would no longer be eligible to get or renew a commercial driver's license. A CDL is what you need to drive a semi, a tractor-trailer or a bus.

These are people who passed the test, held the license, and were driving legally in the United States. The rule change did not find them unsafe. It found them ineligible.

The administration has been working this angle from more than one direction. It also shut down 110 truck driving schools over an English-language rule — training programs, closed, in an industry that has spent years saying it cannot find enough drivers.

Who is objecting

The groups pushing back against the crackdown are civil rights organizations, several of them representing communities that will absorb the suspicion this tip line invites. A coalition that filed in court in July included the Sikh Coalition, the Asian Law Caucus, United Sikhs, Stop AAPI Hate and Truckers Movement for Justice.

Their objection is specific. The administration is using immigration status as a stand-in for safety, and the policy has exposed immigrant drivers to more commercial-vehicle inspections, which they called "a pretext for immigration arrests." A tip line asking the public to report drivers they suspect points the same mechanism at the general public.

That is the mechanism. A tip line has no way to check whether a report is accurate before it becomes a stop.

Why this reaches your grocery bill

Almost everything in an American store arrived on a truck. Pulling 200,000 licensed drivers off the road, closing the schools that would replace them, and making the remaining drivers a target for anonymous reports is not a plan that lowers the cost of anything.

The safety case for it, in the government's own count, is 17 crashes against roughly 4,000 fatal large truck and bus crashes a year — less than 1 percent.

The short version

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin opened an ICE tip line on September 9 asking Americans to report truck drivers they suspect of being undocumented, though the Transportation Department says there is not enough data to link immigrant truckers to fatal crashes. At the March 4 hearing Rep. Josh Brecheen chaired, he put the federal count at "at least 17 fatal crashes resulting in 30 deaths" in 2025; a Public Citizen attorney testified at the same hearing that this is less than 1 percent of the roughly 4,000 fatal large truck and bus crashes involving licensed commercial drivers in a year. Some 200,000 drivers already began losing their commercial licenses in March under a separate eligibility change, and 110 truck driving schools have been shut down.

Sources

The Washington Sun, ICE Opens a Tip Line to Report Undocumented Truck Drivers, by Gavin J. Quinton, September 9, 2026. Photo: Yuki Iwamura/AP.

House Committee on Homeland Security, Highway Safety Under Threat: Examining Non-Domiciled CDL Issuance to Illegal Aliens — hearing transcript, March 4, 2026, including the written and oral testimony of Wendy Liu of the Public Citizen Litigation Group.

Rep. Josh Brecheen, "This Tragedy Should Never Have Happened": opening statement, House Committee on Homeland Security, March 4, 2026.

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).

Four Republicans Filed a Bill to Ban the Government From Preferring Contractors Who Pay Union Wages. Trump's Own Budget Office Kept That Rule in Place.

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 05:51:55 +0000

On September 3, 2026, Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma introduced a bill with a mild-sounding name and one blunt sentence in it.

The bill is called the No Preference Act. Here is what it would add to federal contracting law:

"The head of an executive agency may not require or give preference to an offeror on the basis of whether the offeror will use workers subject to a collective bargaining agreement."

Then it says the same thing again for the Pentagon.

That is the whole bill. Two sentences. It would make it illegal for any federal agency to treat a contractor better because that contractor's workers have a union contract.

Steve Womack of Arkansas signed on the same day as an original cosponsor. John Rutherford of Florida and Jack Bergman of Michigan added their names the next day.

What the rule they're trying to kill actually does

Big federal construction jobs — anything costing $35 million or more — currently have to use something called a project labor agreement, unless the agency can justify an exception. It is a contract, negotiated before the first shovel goes in the ground, that sets the pay and benefits for everybody who works on the site.

The Economic Policy Institute describes what those agreements contain: they "specify workers' wages and fringe benefits," they can set up a process for settling disputes on the job, and they typically bar strikes for the length of the project while also barring the employer from locking workers out.

In other words, the deal cuts both ways. The workers get a wage floor and benefits in writing. The government gets a job site that doesn't shut down.

Take the preference away and the wage floor goes with it. As EPI put it about a Pentagon attempt to do exactly this, workers on those projects "will no longer have the guarantee of negotiating PLAs that include higher pay."

Trump's own administration looked at this and said no

This is the part that ought to end the argument.

In February 2025 the Defense Department tried to stop using these agreements on its large construction projects. A federal judge blocked it in May. And on June 12, 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget — Trump's own budget office, run by Russell Vought — issued a memo saying the requirement stays.

The memo called some agencies' moves to scrap the agreements "overly broad" and stated plainly that further attempts to prohibit them across the board "are precluded."

So the sitting Republican administration reviewed this exact policy and kept it. Bice, Womack, Rutherford and Bergman want Congress to override that.

What they say it's about

Bice frames it as fairness between states:

"Every qualified contractor deserves a fair opportunity to compete for federal projects. The government should not favor one individual over another simply because their workers are part of a union. This legislation ensures that right-to-work states, like Oklahoma, have an equal footing when competing for contracts."

Womack frames it as thrift:

"The playing field shouldn't be skewed toward contractors who choose to use union labor."

Neither of them mentions what the agreements guarantee the workers. That is the thing being removed, and it does not appear in either quote.

Who asked for this

The bill is backed by Associated Builders & Contractors and the Association of Oklahoma General Contractors.

Associated Builders and Contractors is the national trade group for non-union construction companies. Fighting project labor agreements is one of the things it exists to do. This is not a bill a contractor who lost a bid asked for. It is a bill the industry association whose members would collect the work is pushing.

The people on the other side of that transaction are the ones who currently have their wages written into the contract before they show up.

This keeps happening

The four names on this bill are not the only Republicans on this site pushing the same direction. Tom Tiffany has signed on to take right-to-work national, and he was the only member of the entire House who missed the vote on workers' right to organize. In Pennsylvania, the building trades council that endorsed Stacy Garrity in 2024 is now campaigning against her, and her campaign won't say whether she'd sign a right-to-work bill.

The No Preference Act is the federal-contracting version of the same fight. It doesn't ban unions. It just makes sure the government can never prefer the contractor who pays union scale — on a Pentagon base, a courthouse, a dam, or anything else the public is paying for.

What the bill says

Stephanie Bice wrote a two-sentence bill that would bar every federal agency, including the Defense Department, from giving any preference to a contractor whose workers have a union contract. Steve Womack, John Rutherford and Jack Bergman cosponsored it. It is backed by the national trade association for non-union builders. And it targets a rule that Trump's own Office of Management and Budget reviewed in June 2025 and expressly kept in force.

Sources

Bice, Womack seek to eliminate union labor preferences in federal contracts, Ripon Advance (September 4, 2026).
H.R. 10250, the No Preference Act — full text and cosponsor list, 119th Congress.
Department of Defense orders end to project labor agreements, Economic Policy Institute Federal Policy Watch.

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

Stephanie Bice Told a Room of Republican Students That Trump Is Costing Her Party Votes. When It Leaked, Her Campaign Said She Was Taken Out of Context.

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:06:29 +0000

On Thursday, August 27, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario "Lake America" in the middle of an escalating trade war with Canada.

The same day, Oklahoma congresswoman Stephanie Bice stood in front of a gathering of Republican students at Oklahoma State University and said this:

"We're not helping ourselves today when we decide to rename Lake Ontario 'Lake America.' I mean, yeah, these are not—this does not help the case, right?"

She was speaking privately. The Bulwark obtained the audio, and it went further than the lake.

What else is on the tape

Bice told the students about a conversation from a board meeting the day before:

"I was at a board meeting yesterday with a group, and one of the execs said to me, 'I'm a Republican. I've been a Republican for a long time, but I have Trump fatigue.' It's a fair statement, you know?"

And she said what she is actually worried about heading into November:

"The challenge that we have is that we have to get over the narrative that 'I don't like this guy, so I'm going to vote for the Democrat,' because I'm telling you right now, I'm hearing it already."

"And what happens is that'll impact me because … two things will either happen. They're going to vote for the Democrat and they may split [the] ticket and vote for me and a few others, or—this is my bigger fear right now—people don't go vote."

That is a sitting Republican member of Congress telling a room of her own party's college students that the President of her own party is depressing her party's turnout, that a longtime Republican executive told her so to her face, and that she thinks the complaint is fair.

Four days later, a colleague put the lake in a bill

The thing Bice said "does not help the case" did not stop. On August 31, 2026, Florida congressman Jimmy Patronis introduced H.R. 10196, whose entire official title is "To rename Lake Ontario as 'Lake America'" — a statute to do by law what Trump had done by executive order. It was referred to the House Committee on Natural Resources the same day. Its text has not been published yet.

Bice said the renaming was hurting Republicans on a Thursday. By the following Monday, a member of her conference had introduced legislation to write it into law.

Her campaign's answer was that she didn't mean it

Once the recording surfaced, Bice's campaign issued a statement:

"The characterization of Congresswoman Bice's remarks is inaccurate. She was relaying a comment made by someone else and discussing the importance of Republicans turning out and voting for the entire ticket. Any suggestion otherwise takes her comments out of context."

She was relaying someone else's line about Trump fatigue — that part is true, and the recording bears it out. But "It's a fair statement" is her own. So is "We're not helping ourselves." So is "I'm hearing it already."

The campaign's position is not that she was misquoted. It is that she was misunderstood.

Publicly, she is exactly where she has always been

None of this has produced a public word of criticism.

Trump endorsed Bice's reelection in March 2026, calling her a "Highly Respected America First Congresswoman." She voted against impeaching him after January 6. Nothing in her public record reflects the concerns she voiced to those students, and she has not repeated them on the record since.

It is worth noting where her constituents fit in this. Bice chairs the House Administration subcommittee on modernizing Congress, the panel whose stated purpose is to improve "how Congress works for the American People" — and she will not hold an in-person town hall with her own constituents in Oklahoma's 5th District.

So the voters she represents did not get this candor. A room of Republican students did, and the rest of us only because the audio leaked.

The short version

Speaking to Republican students at Oklahoma State University on the day Trump renamed Lake Ontario, Stephanie Bice said the move "does not help the case," repeated a Republican executive's admission of "Trump fatigue" and called it "a fair statement," and said her bigger fear is Republicans staying home in November. Four days later a fellow House Republican introduced a bill to write the renaming into law. When the audio leaked, her campaign said she had been taken out of context — and she has said none of it publicly in the days since.

Sources

House GOPer in Private Meeting: Trump's Exhausting Our Voters — The Bulwark, August 28, 2026, by Joe Perticone.

'Trump fatigue': U.S. Rep. Stephanie Bice addresses leaked audio — KFOR, August 31, 2026.

Leaked Audio Reveals MAGA Rep Venting About Trump's Bizarre Priorities — The Daily Beast, August 29, 2026, by Josh Fiallo.

Josh Brecheen Said 'I Don't Know Your Facts' When a Constituent Raised the 45 Oklahoma Hospitals at Risk of Closing. Oklahoma Ranks Third Worst in the Country.

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 12:10:18 +0000

On Wednesday, August 26, 2026, Josh Brecheen held a town hall at the Donald W. Reynolds Community Center in Poteau, Oklahoma. He came to talk about the national debt, and that is where he put most of his focus.

His constituents wanted to talk about hospitals.

One of them raised a number: 45 hospitals in Oklahoma are at risk of closing. That is not a rumor from the internet. It is the finding of a report from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, released weeks earlier, which found 45 Oklahoma rural hospitals at risk of closure and 18 at immediate risk. Oklahoma ranks third worst in the country, behind only Texas and Kansas.

Here is how the congressman answered.

"I don't know your facts. All I can tell you is Medicaid spending was going to increase year over year. The curve was crazy. It was like the system was being built."

"I don't know your facts" is a remarkable thing for a member of Congress to say about the hospitals in his own district. The report had been public for weeks and had been covered in Oklahoma news. He voted for the Medicaid cuts that the state's hospital association calls the biggest challenge facing those hospitals.

The facts he said he didn't know

Rich Rasmussen, who runs the Oklahoma Hospital Association, has laid out why Oklahoma's hospitals are in trouble: Medicare pays less than care costs, Medicaid rates are low, Medicare Advantage plans delay payments and deny care — and the Medicaid cuts Congress approved are, in his words, the biggest challenge of all.

More than 90 Oklahoma hospitals already lose money treating patients. They stay open because of supplemental Medicaid payments that make up part of the gap.

Which brings us to what happened in July. The Oklahoma Health Care Authority filed a $218 million cut with the federal government — a 20 percent reduction to the Supplemental Hospital Offset Payment Program. That is the exact money keeping those 90 hospitals open. The filing came days after the agency had endorsed a flat budget, and it caught the Oklahoma Hospital Association by surprise.

The town hall was in Poteau, and Poteau has a hospital: Eastern Oklahoma Medical Center. EOMC is not on the at-risk list. But the proposed $218 million cut means a 52 percent reduction in what it receives — $750,000 a quarter, $3 million a year. Its CEO, Tiffany Griffis, said on August 18 that would be tough to deal with.

So the hospital in the town where Brecheen was standing stands to lose more than half of a payment stream, and the congressman's answer to a question about hospitals at risk was that he didn't know the facts.

The rescue fund, and the man from the hospital who was in the room

Brecheen did have an answer ready. He pointed to the $50 billion for rural health care that states got in last year's budget bill — $10 billion a year for five years — and said Oklahoma's share is $248 million, through something called the Rural Health Transformation Program.

That is the standard Republican answer to this question, and we have heard it in a lot of districts. It has a hole in it. The $50 billion fund was created by the same budget bill that cut $911 billion from Medicaid, including $137 billion from rural areas — so the fund covers roughly a third of the rural damage the same law caused, and the law does not require the money to reach rural hospitals at all.

This time, someone in the room could answer him directly.

Logan Hayes, the chief operating officer of Eastern Oklahoma Medical Center, told Brecheen that his hospital has applied for every Rural Health Transformation grant available so far — and that only about 10 percent of hospitals have been awarded anything.

That is the rescue fund, described by a person whose job is to apply to it.

"Hospitals are states' responsibility"

Brecheen's response was to move the problem. He said hospitals are the states' responsibility, and that he had tried to find solutions for hospitals back when he was a state senator. He started to make the constitutional case:

"There's nothing in those 18 enumerated powers of the Constitution — tax regulation, coining money, counterfeit enforcement, piracy, post…"

Set aside the constitutional theory for a moment and look at the timing.

Brecheen is telling Oklahomans that hospitals belong to the state — weeks after the state's own Medicaid agency filed to cut $218 million out of hospital payments. The state is not picking this up. The state is moving to cut too. And Brecheen's own answer to what the federal government has done is a grant program that the hospital in that same town has applied to repeatedly without success.

There is also the matter of what the federal government did to Oklahoma on his watch. An estimated 174,000 Oklahomans are at risk of losing SoonerCare coverage under the budget bill — the bill Brecheen voted for and then toured his district promoting. When a hospital loses insured patients, it does not stop treating them. It treats them for free and absorbs the loss. That is how a hospital gets onto a list like the one his constituent was reading from.

He was a state senator in Oklahoma, where he says he looked for hospital solutions. He has been in Congress since 2023, where he voted for the cuts. In both jobs the answer points somewhere else.

What the record shows

A constituent at Josh Brecheen's August 26 town hall in Poteau cited a report finding 45 Oklahoma hospitals at risk of closing and 18 at immediate risk — figures that put Oklahoma third worst in the nation. Brecheen replied, "I don't know your facts," argued that hospitals are the states' responsibility, and pointed to a $50 billion rural fund created by the same budget bill that cut $911 billion from Medicaid. The chief operating officer of the hospital in that town told him they had applied for every one of those grants and that only about 10 percent of hospitals have received anything. In July, Oklahoma's Medicaid agency had filed to cut $218 million from the supplemental payments that keep more than 90 money-losing Oklahoma hospitals open — a 52 percent cut for the Poteau hospital alone.

Source

"Brecheen on hospitals at risk: 'We've got it backwards;' says they're states' responsibility" — Tom Firme, Poteau Daily News, August 29, 2026. Brecheen's remarks on tariffs at the same town hall are covered here. Photo: official congressional portrait, 118th Congress.

Josh Brecheen Told His Town Hall the Tax Foundation Says They're '$1,700 Per Year Better Off.' The Tax Foundation Says Trump's Tariffs Cost the Average Household $840 a Year.

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:50:24 +0000

On Wednesday, August 26, 2026, Josh Brecheen stood in front of constituents at the Donald W. Reynolds Community Center in Poteau, Oklahoma, and defended President Trump's tariffs.

Brecheen acknowledged that some people say the tariffs are hurting them. He said he had checked.

"I went to the National Tax Foundation and asked them if the tariff I'm paying per tax filers or the boost that I got from the tax relief — you know, you were going to have a 22 percent tax increase if not for the One Big Beautiful Bill, what they did in 2017 wasn't permanent. He said you are $1,700 per year better off."

That is the whole answer to "the tariffs are hurting me": a number, attributed to a think tank, that says you are actually ahead.

Six days before Brecheen said that, the Tax Foundation updated the tracker where it publishes its actual tariff numbers. Here is what it says.

The Tax Foundation's own numbers

The Tax Foundation's running analysis of Trump's tariffs, last updated August 20, 2026, estimates that the tariffs amount to an average tax increase of:

$1,000 per U.S. household in 2025
$840 per U.S. household in 2026

The same analysis estimates the tariffs will reduce long-run GDP by 0.4 percent and cut hours worked by the equivalent of 345,000 full-time jobs.

Now go looking for the number Brecheen says he was handed. The Tax Foundation keeps the two sides of that ledger apart. Its Oklahoma estimate for the One Big Beautiful Bill is an average tax cut of $3,106 per filer in 2026 — a gross figure, with no tariff taken out of it. Its tariff estimate is the $840 above. Neither number is $1,700, and neither document nets one against the other. And that is before anyone in Poteau counts a lost job, a higher grocery bill, or a farm input that costs more than it did.

Brecheen presented the $1,700 as the answer after the tariff was accounted for — "the tariff I'm paying" versus "the boost that I got," and the boost wins by $1,700. The Tax Foundation's published figures do not support that.

What is actually happening to Oklahoma right now

Four days before that town hall, on August 22, the 50 percent tariffs Trump had ordered in July on about $20 billion of Canadian goods took effect. Canada answered the same morning: Mark Carney said his government would match them "dollar for dollar", with tariffs on U.S. steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper and electronics starting September 8.

Oklahoma's second district is farm and ranch country. Dairy and agricultural equipment are on Carney's list, and Oklahoma producers have already spent a year and a half absorbing the cost of the last round.

Brecheen also told the room, "I don't believe in protectionism for protectionism's sake," and said he believes in tariffs because "what tariffs do is when you don't have subsidies, they keep you onshoring manufacturing." That is the argument. It is a real argument, and reasonable people make it. But it is an argument about a benefit that arrives later, paid for with a cost that arrives now — and the person paying is the family asking why things cost more.

Congress has barely voted on any of it

The most revealing exchange at the town hall was not about the money. Someone asked Brecheen what votes Congress has actually taken on the tariffs.

He could recall one, from last year. "I wasn't with Tom McClintock on that," he said — McClintock being the California Republican who has opposed the tariffs.

Then he said he did not know of any House votes on tariffs coming up.

That is the state of it. The tariffs are a tax increase the Tax Foundation ranks among the 20 largest as a share of GDP since 1940, they were imposed by executive action rather than by Congress, and the member of Congress they elected to write tax law says there is nothing on the schedule. Republicans in the House have used procedural votes to keep tariff resolutions from reaching the floor at all — and Colorado's Gabe Evans toured businesses hurt by tariffs and then cast the 216–214 procedural vote that stopped the House from voting on them.

Brecheen has a habit of this shape. In July he drew a public red line and then voted two days later for the exact thing he had called worthless.

Who in his district is already squeezed

About 694,200 Oklahomans rely on SNAP every month — roughly 16.8 percent of the state, one of the highest rates in the country. A June 2025 Kaiser Family Foundation estimate, cited by the Oklahoma Institute for Child Advocacy, put 174,000 Oklahomans at risk of losing SoonerCare coverage under the budget bill Brecheen invoked at that town hall.

These are the households for whom $840 a year is not a rounding error. Brecheen told them a number that made the problem disappear.

What the numbers show

At an August 26 town hall in Poteau, Josh Brecheen acknowledged that some people say tariffs are hurting them, then said the Tax Foundation had told him they were "$1,700 per year better off." The Tax Foundation's published analysis, updated six days earlier, says Trump's tariffs are a tax increase averaging $840 per household in 2026 and $1,000 in 2025, and will cut hours worked by the equivalent of 345,000 full-time jobs. No Tax Foundation figure matches the $1,700: its Oklahoma estimate for the tax law is an average cut of $3,106 per filer in 2026, gross of tariffs, and it nets nothing against the tariff bill. Asked what Congress has voted on tariffs, he named one vote from last year and said he knew of nothing coming.

Source

Brecheen gives support for tariffs, but votes are scarce on tariffs — Tom Firme, Poteau Daily News, August 29, 2026. Photo: Josh Brecheen at the Poteau town hall, August 26, 2026 (Tom Firme / Poteau Daily News).

Kevin Hern Called Tulsa City Councilors to Warn Them Off a Human Rights Ordinance. A Year Later, It Still Isn't Law.

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 12:22:11 +0000

In June 2025, the Tulsa City Council took up a change to the city's human rights ordinances. It did three things.

The first was housekeeping — cleaning up gender-specific language, swapping "he" for "the contractor," adding a seat on the Human Rights Commission for the new Asian Affairs Commission, and updating the Tulsa Women's Commission's name.

The second added veterans to the city's list of protected classes.

The third took protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity — which Tulsa already applied to housing — and extended them to public accommodations.

Its sponsors said it overrode no state or federal law and altered no employment standards. Fifteen people signed up to speak in favor at the June meeting. Nobody signed up to speak against it. Mayor Monroe Nichols said he'd sign it as soon as it reached his desk.

The council tabled it 7–2 and set a vote for September 10. Three councilors — Anthony Archie, Carol Bush and Karen Gilbert — asked for more time with the language. Some councilors also raised a worry that the federal government might pull money from Tulsa if it passed. The sponsor, Councilor Laura Bellis, disputed that.

Then Kevin Hern started calling them.

What the councilors say he said

Hern was then, and still is, Oklahoma's First District congressman, representing Tulsa. Multiple councilors told the Tulsa World in August 2025 that he had phoned them about the ordinance.

Councilor Anthony Archie described the call this way:

"He has been receiving a lot of feedback from folks at the state level and some folks at the federal level about the ordinance, and he's concerned that it may hamper his ability to bring resources back to the state of Oklahoma."

Archie was careful about what he had and hadn't been told. He said he did not come away thinking passage would mean a "one-for-one" loss of any particular federal funding source. What he came away with was this:

"But I came away with the idea that the White House was watching, and folks in the executive and the legislative branch federally were watching, and that the decisions we make here in Tulsa affects his ability to navigate his role as a representative for Oklahoma."

Councilor Karen Gilbert said Hern called her too, and put it more bluntly: "The call was to inform of concerns from the federal executive branch how our federal funding could be cut."

Councilor Carol Bush said Hern raised the same concerns she had already raised herself: "It was (about) the unintended consequences when we do things. Does this, you know, shine a light on us that maybe we don't need? Does it jeopardize federal funding?"

Council Chairman Phil Lakin declined to say whether he got a call.

Hern's office did not respond to several requests for comment from the Tulsa World.

It worked

The day before that story ran, Bellis and Councilor Lori Decter Wright abruptly halted discussion of the ordinance. In a joint statement read to their colleagues, they said "the highest levels of the current federal administration are actively spreading misinformation about the ordinance" in order to spread fear and make it fail.

"The malicious misinformation campaign undermines the hard work of many in our community who simply want to make certain Tulsa is a city that welcomes, supports, and protects everyone who calls it home, works here, or comes to visit."

Asked directly, Wright and Bellis confirmed that Hern was one of the people they were talking about.

The context made the threat legible without anyone having to spell it out. The Trump administration had been explicit about withholding money from entities running diversity programs, and within the previous month city councils in Dallas and Fort Worth had ended their cities' DEI programs to head off the loss of millions in federal funds. Tulsa's councilors did not need a specific grant named to understand the shape of the thing.

Look at where that leaves the ordinance today. Tulsa's own city government still lists the protected classes for public accommodations as "race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, sex, age, or disability." Sexual orientation and gender identity are not among them. Neither is veteran status. A full year later, the law reads exactly as it did before.

Not his job

Hern does not represent the City of Tulsa on the City Council. He holds a seat in the U.S. House. The Tulsa World's editorial board made that point with a list, published September 7, 2025, of seven things he could have been doing instead of calling city councilors.

Number one on the list: host a town hall where the public is invited and people can ask him questions directly.

That one lands, because our own research on Hern found that the last time he is known to have taken open questions from a room of Oklahoma constituents was February 2025 — at a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Glenpool where he was pressed hard about Elon Musk and mass federal layoffs. Weeks later a public lunch with him was canceled after more than 100 activists signed up. When a Tulsa station asked all five Oklahoma House members whether they'd keep meeting constituents, two said yes and Hern didn't respond. In April 2025, constituents held a town hall for him anyway and asked their questions to an empty chair, while he was in El Salvador touring the CECOT mega-prison and promoting the trip on Newsmax.

The editorial's other suggestions included getting Ryan Walters to release federal education money still undelivered to Oklahoma schools almost two months into the fiscal year, and working to stop the clawbacks of money he and his colleagues had already voted for. It closed on the asymmetry:

"We bet Congress made a city councilor or two wince a time or three with the belief that federal decisions would hurt Tulsa. But they didn't bother representatives. They are too busy working with other leaders trying to run a city that's progressing into the future."

The same lever, used elsewhere

Threatening a smaller government's funding to make it drop a policy is not a Hern invention; it is the standard play of this era, and it usually works.

The Education Department opened a case against Ann Arbor's schools over a policy on not outing transgender students to their parents, with the district's federal funding as the enforcement mechanism. Greg Abbott threatened two Texas airports' funding over a foot-washing sink, and DFW folded the same day.

What distinguishes Hern's version is how little had to be said. He never had to name a grant. Archie's account is that no specific dollar was ever put on the table — just the information that Washington was watching, delivered by the congressman whose job is to bring Washington's money home. That was sufficient.

Hern is now running for the U.S. Senate.

What the record shows

Tulsa's City Council was set to vote on September 10, 2025, on adding veterans as a protected class and extending the city's existing LGBTQ discrimination protections from housing to public accommodations. Nobody had signed up to speak against it; fifteen people spoke for it; the mayor said he would sign it. Then Kevin Hern, the area's congressman, phoned councilors to say he was worried the ordinance could hamper his ability to bring federal resources to Oklahoma and that the White House was watching. Three councilors — Archie, Gilbert and Bush — described those calls on the record. The sponsors pulled the ordinance, naming Hern as one of the people pressuring them. Hern's office would not comment. Today, Tulsa's public accommodations ordinance still does not cover sexual orientation, gender identity or veteran status.

Sources

Hern called to raise concerns about proposed human rights ordinance, city councilors say — Kevin Canfield, Tulsa World, August 28, 2025, and Editorial: 7 things Rep. Kevin Hern could do rather than bother the Tulsa City Council — Tulsa World Editorial Board, September 7, 2025. Current protected classes verified against the City of Tulsa's own human rights page. Photo: Daniel Shular / Tulsa World.

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.

Five Republicans Took the AI Industry's Money or Bought Its Stock. One of Them Wrote the Bill That Would End Your Town's Say.

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:40:22 +0000

All over the country right now, ordinary people are showing up at city council meetings to ask the same three questions about the data center somebody wants to build near them.

How much of our water will it drink? What happens to our electric bill? And who decided this?

In Luther, Oklahoma, so many people came to that meeting it needed armed security and metal detectors. The town voted for a six-month moratorium. So did Oklahoma City, Edmond and Broken Arrow. California passed the country's first frontier AI safety law. Oklahoma passed a law making the giant power users pay for their own infrastructure instead of putting it on everyone's rates.

That is democracy working exactly the way it's supposed to. People noticed something, went to a meeting, and got a rule written.

The industry's biggest political spender has decided to make those rules impossible.

Its main political vehicle, a super PAC called Leading the Future, raised $125 million in 2025 and opened 2026 with $70 million on hand, CNBC reported. Its funders are Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, SV Angel founder Ron Conway and the AI company Perplexity. Its purpose, as CNBC described it, is backing candidates who support national AI regulations rather than state-by-state rules.

Strip the phrasing out and that means: one set of rules, written in Washington, that cancels the ones Luther and Edmond and Sacramento just wrote.

There is a second AI network in this election, and it wants the opposite thing. Public First Action — a nonprofit the AI company Anthropic gave a self-reported $20 million — bankrolls super PACs whose stated priorities include preserving state authority over AI rather than preempting it. It has spent millions of its own on congressional races. Both networks run their money through blandly named vehicles, and both are writing checks to Republicans. The industry is split on what the rules should say and united on paying the people who will write them.

Here are five Republicans on the receiving end of that money — or holding the stock.

Jay Obernolte wrote the bill that does the preempting

Jay Obernolte of California is the most powerful voice on AI in the House. He chairs the Science Committee's research and technology subcommittee, chaired the House AI Task Force, sits on Energy and Commerce, and is now chair of the House Republican Policy Committee.

On July 23, 2026 he introduced the FRONTIER Act. Section 9 says no state "may adopt or enforce any law, regulation, order, or other requirement that imposes new substantive obligations on artificial intelligence developers" in the covered areas — risk transparency, outside auditing, and incident reporting. There is no sunset date. As written, it is permanent.

Two of those three are things California's own SB 53 requires. The congressman from California wrote a bill that would preempt the core of the AI safety law his own state just passed.

And in October 2025, an AI conference company and a venture fund tapped Obernolte to launch a nonprofit called the AI Coalition, which sells early-stage AI companies — in its own words — "meaningful access to policymakers and influence over the regulations." Membership runs $1,750 to $3,500 a month. We laid out that arrangement in full in August.

At the top of his own contributor list: employees of the AI company Anthropic, at $71,862 on OpenSecrets' current count, with Andreessen Horowitz third.

Kevin Hern got $850,000 in a race he had already won

On June 2, 2026, Leading the Future told the Washington Reporter it would spend $850,000 backing Kevin Hern in his Oklahoma Senate race.

The Reporter's own words for that race: Hern "is on a glide path to the Senate." He had Trump's endorsement, in a state where the Republican nominee wins. He did not need the money.

That is what makes it worth looking at. In a close race, money is trying to win. In a race nobody can lose, money is buying something else — and Hern will spend six years voting on exactly the question Leading the Future was formed to settle. He sits on Ways and Means, which writes the tax treatment that decides how profitable a data center is to build.

Meanwhile four Oklahoma cities were pausing data centers and Gov. Kevin Stitt was signing a law to keep the industry's power costs off residential bills. Only 1% of Hern's money comes from small grassroots donors, ranking him #434 out of 440 House members.

Carlos De La Cruz was outspent by his own backers

Carlos De La Cruz has never held office. He's an Air Force veteran running in Texas's 35th District, a seat the Legislature redrew in 2025 to make winnable for a Republican.

His campaign has raised about $1.05 million. Outside groups have spent about $2.35 million on his behalf — per the FEC's own independent expenditure records. The two biggest: $1,492,321 from an AI-industry super PAC and $615,885 from a crypto one.

The AI group is called Defending Our Values PAC — a name that tells a voter nothing. That is deliberate. The Texas Tribune found AI-linked super PACs behind at least seven Texas congressional candidates, going by "generic-sounding names" and running ads that don't mention the technology — because polling shows most voters don't want data centers near them.

But this is the industry's other side. FEC records show that almost every dollar Defending Our Values has raised this cycle — about $8.2 million — came from Public First Action, the Anthropic-backed nonprofit that wants state AI authority kept, not cancelled. De La Cruz is not being carried by the preemption campaign. He is being carried by the people fighting it — and if he wins in November, he arrives owing them just the same.

Defending Our Values also put $808,341 behind Kevin Hern, who is already getting Leading the Future's money. Both AI camps, the same Oklahoma Republican. We traced the whole $2.1 million in De La Cruz's race in August.

Julia Letlow signed a gag order with Meta, then bought Meta stock

Julia Letlow of Louisiana signed a nondisclosure agreement on June 29, 2024 with Laidley LLC — a shell company belonging to Meta. It gave her confidential details of a $50 billion data center in her own district.

The agreement barred her from even acknowledging that the agreement existed. A member of Congress signed a contract legally preventing her from telling her constituents she was discussing a $50 billion project on their land.

Then, as WWNO and the Gulf States Newsroom reported, she started buying Meta stock — and Nvidia, whose chips run Meta's data centers. Her broker notified her on August 11, 2025, more than a month after she sold her last Meta shares. She did not disclose the trades until January 13, 2026, in the report that carried 210 late-filed trades from the previous two years — 100 of them, the Meta and Nvidia stock included, more than a year late, worth between $225,000 and $3.19 million. The penalty for that is $200, and it is often waived. Her office says she doesn't direct her own trades. We walked through the full record in August.

She is now her party's nominee for the U.S. Senate.

Lisa McClain's family bought into xAI a week before the Pentagon wired it into the military

Lisa McClain of Michigan is the No. 4 Republican in the House. On December 15, 2025 her husband bought between $100,001 and $250,000 of private stock in Elon Musk's AI company, xAI.

Seven days later, the Pentagon announced it was integrating xAI's Grok into its platform for military personnel. Three weeks after that it expanded the deal to classified defense networks. Musk later folded xAI into SpaceX, and when SpaceX went public in June, CNBC reported the family could be sitting on a paper gain of as much as $150,000.

There is no evidence she knew what the Pentagon was planning. What there is: a household with 1,443 trades in three years, two separate late-disclosure violations in a single year, and a seat on the Financial Services Committee. The details are here.

What it looks like where you live

None of this stays in Washington.

In southwest Missouri, hundreds of residents packed meetings to oppose a data center on the west side of Joplin, and most of the letters their city council received said no. One letter said yes. It came from their congressman, Eric Burlison, who told a forum in Carthage that "what the business is doing doesn't matter" and suggested the people asking about the water table were afraid of the unknown.

In Pennsylvania, all ten of the state's Republicans in the U.S. House voted for a ten-year ban on states enforcing their own AI rules, while their constituents absorbed the electricity costs.

And this week, Trump's EPA moved to scrap the federal rule requiring states to tell the public when a facility applies for an air pollution permit at all — so you may not learn a data center is coming until the permit is approved or the concrete is poured.

Every one of those is the same move at a different altitude: take the decision away from the people who live there.

What the money shows

An AI super PAC funded by Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI's president and Palantir's co-founder raised $125 million to elect candidates who will replace state and local AI rules with a single federal one. It committed $850,000 to Kevin Hern in a race he had already won. The industry's rival network — the one that wants states to keep their AI authority — put $1.5 million of the $2.35 million behind first-time candidate Carlos De La Cruz, more than twice what his own campaign raised, and another $808,341 behind Hern. Jay Obernolte, who wrote the bill that would permanently preempt state AI laws, helped launch a nonprofit charging AI startups up to $3,500 a month for "influence over the regulations." Julia Letlow signed a secrecy agreement with Meta and then bought Meta and Nvidia stock she disclosed over a year late, and Lisa McClain's family bought a private stake in xAI a week before the Pentagon wired its product into military systems.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brad Finstad chairs the subcommittee that writes SNAP policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't believe in welfare."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eight weeks. That is the gap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Cole called it "an extraordinary piece of legislation"

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

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

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

Extraordinary is one word for it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

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

Joe Wilson wrote it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ohio said no in 2011. Jim Jordan signed anyway.

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

Jim Jordan is Ohio's signature on this bill.

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

Pennsylvania sent five signatures on a law it never wanted

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

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

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

What it costs a paycheck

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

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

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

This is not a one-off

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

Greg Steube's Birthright Bill Would Deny an American Newborn a Social Security Number Until the Parents Pay for a DNA Test

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:42:55 +0000

On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court settled the question. In Trump v. Barbara, the Court struck down the executive order ending birthright citizenship by a vote of 6–3. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, and stated the holding about children born in this country to parents here unlawfully or temporarily plainly:

"Under the Constitution, they are citizens at birth."

Fourteen days later, Greg Steube filed a bill to get around it.

What H.R. 9662 actually does

Steube's bill is called the Birthright Citizenship Limits for Aliens and Illegal Migrants Act — the Birthright CLAIM Act. It was introduced on July 14, 2026 and referred to the House Judiciary Committee, where it has sat ever since.

Three colleagues signed on as cosponsors: Stephanie Bice of Oklahoma, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, and Tim Burchett of Tennessee.

The text of the bill does three separate things, and only the first has gotten any attention.

1. It strips citizenship from babies born to legal visa holders

Everyone expects a birthright bill to target the children of people here illegally. This one goes further than that.

Under Steube's language, a baby born on American soil is denied citizenship if both parents are non-citizens and at least one of them is either here unlawfully or here legally in any status short of a green card.

Read that second half again. "Present in a lawful status other than lawful permanent residency" covers:

A student on an F-1 visa
An engineer on an H-1B
A doctor on a J-1
A refugee or someone with temporary protected status
A tourist

These are people who followed the rules, got the paperwork, and are here legally. Their American-born children would not be Americans.

2. It makes it harder for U.S. citizens living abroad to pass on citizenship

This part has gotten almost no coverage, and it hits American families directly.

Right now, if you're a U.S. citizen married to a non-citizen and you have a child overseas, you can pass your citizenship to that child if you were physically present in the United States for a total of five years, two of them after you turned 14.

Steube's bill doubles it: ten years total, four of them after age 14, and three of them in the five years right before the child is born.

That last clause is the one that bites. A missionary. An engineer on a three-year posting. A teacher. If they've been out of the country for the five years before their baby arrives, their child is not automatically an American — no matter how long they lived here before that. (Service in the U.S. armed forces or work for the U.S. government abroad still counts as time at home; the bill leaves that carve-out alone.)

3. It requires a DNA test before a newborn gets anything

This is the part worth sitting with.

If a baby is born in the United States to a mother who is not lawfully present, and the claim to citizenship runs through the father — a U.S. national or green-card holder — then under Section 3 of Steube's bill that baby is not a citizen until DNA testing proves the father is the father.

Who pays? The bill answers plainly: the cost "shall be born by the parents or legal guardians."

And until that test comes back, no federal agency may issue that child a passport, certificate of citizenship, Social Security number, or any other document based on their citizenship.

So: an American father. A baby born in an American hospital. And no Social Security number for that child until the family finds an approved laboratory and pays the bill.

A Social Security number is not a nicety. It's how you get a child covered by health insurance. It's how you claim them on your taxes. It's how a hospital bills. Steube's bill turns it into something a family has to buy.

Why now: they think Kavanaugh left a door open

Steube's own framing is that he's answering a call from President Trump and Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Here's what that refers to. In Trump v. Barbara, Kavanaugh agreed the executive order was invalid — but he got there on statutory grounds rather than constitutional ones. Roberts's majority said the Constitution decides it. Kavanaugh said the current immigration statute decides it.

If Kavanaugh is right and Roberts is wrong, then Congress could change the statute and get the result the executive order couldn't. That is exactly what H.R. 9662 tries to do — it amends the Immigration and Nationality Act, not the Constitution.

But a majority of the Supreme Court did not agree with Kavanaugh. The five justices who joined Roberts's opinion — Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett and Jackson signed on — said the Constitution answers this, and pointed to United States v. Wong Kim Ark, decided in 1898, which held that "the Citizenship Clause incorporated the common law and granted citizenship to nearly all children born in the United States." We wrote about that ruling when it came down.

Steube is legislating on the concurrence and ignoring the majority.

Where it stands, and what it says about the four of them

H.R. 9662 was referred to the Judiciary Committee on July 14 and has not moved since. It has three cosponsors out of the other 434 seats in the House.

That's a familiar picture. Morgan Griffith's bill to end citizenship for babies born in Guam has zero cosponsors. Brian Babin wrote the original House bill to end birthright citizenship. Marsha Blackburn kept looking for a workaround after the Court ruled.

These bills mostly don't pass. That is not the point of them. The point is the press release, the cable hit, the fundraising email.

But four members of Congress did put their names on this specific text. Not a resolution. Not a message bill about the border. A bill that says an American baby doesn't get a Social Security number until the parents pay a lab.

Greg Steube wrote it. Stephanie Bice, Ralph Norman and Tim Burchett signed it.

Their constituents should ask them about section 3.

Sources

H.R. 9662, Birthright CLAIM Act of 2026 — Congress.gov
Full text of H.R. 9662 as introduced — Government Publishing Office
Rep. Steube Introduces Birthright CLAIM Act — Steube's office
Trump v. Barbara, 609 U.S. ___ (2026), slip opinion — Supreme Court of the United States

2.6 Million Americans Have Already Lost Their Health Insurance. These Republicans Voted to Let It Happen.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 12:09:54 +0000

For four years, people who buy their own health insurance got enhanced tax credits that held their premiums down. Those credits expired at the end of 2025. Congress could have extended them. It didn't.

We now know exactly what that cost.

Nationally, the number of people actually enrolled and paying for ACA coverage fell from 21,776,626 to 19,169,147 — a loss of 2,607,479 people, or 12%, in a single year. That's the first drop in seven years, and it's KFF's own July 28 analysis of federal data, not a projection.

What enrollees actually paid — premiums net of tax credits — rose an average of 58%. Enrollment fell in 49 of 50 states. The only exception was New Mexico, which spent state money to fill the gap.

Here is what it cost the twelve states represented by the Republicans below:

State	Lost coverage	Drop
Ohio	161,385	−32%
Oklahoma	85,557	−32%
Arizona	107,183	−30%
South Carolina	159,190	−29%
Indiana	78,096	−28%
Michigan	130,789	−27%
Mississippi	68,658	−26%
Missouri	86,425	−25%
North Carolina	164,682	−21%
Kansas	36,040	−20%
Florida	442,785	−10%
Texas	146,345	−4%

Two votes decided this. On December 11, 2025, Senate Republicans blocked S. 3385, which would have extended the credits — the motion to even begin debate got 51 of the 60 votes it needed. Six days later, on December 17, the House passed H.R. 6703, 216–211, a bill titled the "Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act" that contains no extension of the credits at all.

Ten of those twelve states lost a bigger share of their coverage than the country did, and Ohio and Oklahoma lost the biggest shares in America. These are the members who represent them — and who voted for it anyway.

Jim Jordan — Ohio, −32%

No state lost a larger share of its coverage than Ohio — 32.4%, just ahead of Oklahoma's 32.3%. That is 161,385 Ohioans, nearly a third of the state's marketplace, gone in a single year. Only Florida and North Carolina lost more people outright, and both are far bigger states.

Jim Jordan voted yes on the House bill.

Ohio's own numbers were not a surprise to anyone in its delegation. An estimated 356,000 Ohio residents are projected to lose health coverage under the Trump spending law — a projection that comes on top of the 161,385 Ohioans above, who had already lost marketplace coverage when the tax credits were allowed to expire. The state also stands to lose an estimated $33 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade.

Jordan is not a backbencher who got rolled by leadership. He is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, a founder of the Freedom Caucus, and one of the handful of members who can genuinely move House Republicans when he wants to. When Jordan decides something matters, the conference hears about it.

He has been in Congress since 2007 — nineteen years — and in that time has never sponsored a single bill that became law. Not one.

That is the record he brings to the worst-hit state in the country: maximum leverage, and nothing built with it.

Stephanie Bice — Oklahoma, −32%

Stephanie Bice voted yes on the House bill. Oklahoma lost 85,557 people, tied for the steepest percentage drop in the country.

Bice went to Congress saying she would fight for affordable health care. She then voted against capping insulin at $35 a month and against letting Medicare negotiate lower drug prices — in a state where 13.2% of adults have been told they have diabetes.

But the case that captures this best is a household the Oklahoma Policy Institute modeled. A 60-year-old Oklahoma couple earning $85,000 would pay $30,784 a year without the enhanced credits, against $7,225 with them.

That is not a rate increase. That is a family being priced out of the insurance market. And $85,000 for a couple is precisely the income the enhanced credits were designed to reach — people who earn too much for the old subsidy cliff and nowhere near enough to absorb a $30,000 premium.

Oklahoma hospital leaders also warn that the budget bill Bice voted for will cut reimbursements to Oklahoma hospitals by $8.7 billion over the next decade and eliminate nearly 15,000 jobs. Ten Oklahoma hospitals have closed since 2005, one of those hospital leaders noted, and he expects the cuts to bring more.

Juan Ciscomani — Arizona, −30%

Juan Ciscomani voted yes. Arizona lost 107,183 people, a 30% collapse.

Ciscomani represents a swing district and has spent two years insisting he's a moderate on health care. The arithmetic doesn't care about positioning. Arizona's marketplace shed nearly a third of its enrollment in twelve months — 107,183 people who were paying for coverage in 2025 and are not in 2026.

That is the part that gets missed about the subsidy expiration. When 107,000 people lose insurance, they don't stop getting sick. They show up at an emergency room uninsured, and the hospital absorbs the bill. In rural Arizona there isn't much hospital left to absorb it.

It also fits his pattern. Six weeks after 700 people in Casa Grande lost their jobs, Ciscomani brought the Speaker of the House there to celebrate. The announcement and the aftermath keep pointing in opposite directions.

Sheri Biggs — South Carolina, −29%

Sheri Biggs voted yes. South Carolina lost 159,190 people — the fourth-largest raw loss in the country, from a state of five million.

Biggs is a nurse practitioner. She has spent a career in exam rooms with patients who couldn't afford care.

In her own district, an estimated 27,623 people in SC-03 are projected to lose health coverage — 24,900 of them losing ACA marketplace coverage, 2,723 losing Medicaid, according to the Joint Economic Committee's House Minority staff.

She, more than almost anyone who cast this vote, knows exactly what happens to a person who stops being able to afford their medication. She voted for it anyway.

Victoria Spartz — Indiana, −28%

Indiana lost 78,096 people, more than a quarter of its marketplace. Victoria Spartz voted yes.

On top of that, an estimated 650,000 Hoosiers on Medicaid expansion are at risk of losing coverage under the budget bill — a number that would devastate hospitals and rural communities across the state.

What separates Spartz from most of this list is that she actually showed up to hear about it.

In late March 2025, after Republican leaders advised members against holding town halls at all, Spartz held two anyway on back-to-back days, in Westfield and Muncie. Credit where it's due; most of her colleagues hid.

Then she stood there while her constituents chanted "Do your job!" and protested outside.

Showing up is the first step. It isn't the whole job. Spartz heard directly from Hoosiers about what these cuts would do, in a room, to her face — and nearly nine months later voted for the bill that let their premiums jump anyway.

Lisa McClain — Michigan, −27%

Michigan lost 130,789 people. Lisa McClain voted yes.

McClain is not a rank-and-file member. She serves as House Republican Conference Chair — the fourth-highest position in House Republican leadership. She is in the room where the conference decides what it will and won't bring to the floor.

Michigan was already exposed. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer estimated 200,000 Michiganders could lose Medicaid coverage under the budget bill, and a report from the state Senate warned it could blow a $2 billion hole in the state budget — because 70% of Michigan's Medicaid spending comes from federal dollars.

Stack that on 130,789 people already out of the marketplace, and Michigan is absorbing losses from two directions at once. The member of its delegation with the most influence over what House Republicans do next is the one who helped set the agenda that produced it.

Michael Guest — Mississippi, −26%

Michael Guest voted yes. Mississippi lost 68,658 people — in the state that can least afford it.

Mississippi already runs on Medicaid: 714,600 people, or 24.2% of the entire state population, were covered by it in FY 2024. It is also one of the ten states that never expanded Medicaid, so working-age adults who lose marketplace coverage there usually have nowhere else to go.

Guest has form on this. He spent his August recess promoting $206 million for Mississippi's rural hospitals — after voting for the law projected to take billions out of the state's Medicaid funding. The pattern repeats: vote for the cut, announce the crumb.

Jason Smith — Missouri, −25%

Missouri lost 86,425 people. Jason Smith voted yes — and he is the single member on this list with the clearest jurisdiction over the thing that expired.

Smith chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, the most powerful tax committee in Congress. He writes the nation's tax laws.

The enhanced ACA premium tax credits are, literally, a tax credit. They live in the tax code. Extending them is a Ways and Means matter. When people ask which committee could have moved an extension through the House, the answer is his — and he has held the gavel since 2023.

Missouri's own reporting matches the federal numbers almost exactly: more than 86,000 Missourians dropped ACA marketplace coverage between February 2025 and February 2026 — a nearly 25% decline, among the steepest in the country — explicitly attributed to the expiration of the enhanced credits. That reporting draws on the same CMS release, so it is the federal number seen up close rather than a second one.

And the forecast was published before the vote. An estimated 160,000 more Missourians are projected to be uninsured by 2034 under the budget bill — rising to 230,000 if the enhanced ACA premium tax credits were also allowed to expire.

They were allowed to expire. The chairman of the committee that writes tax law voted for the bill that didn't extend them.

Virginia Foxx — North Carolina, −21%

North Carolina lost 164,682 people — the largest raw loss of any state in this group, and second nationally only to Florida.

Virginia Foxx voted yes. And of everyone on this list, she is the one who most directly controlled whether the House got to vote on anything else.

Foxx chairs the House Rules Committee. That is the panel that decides what reaches the floor and which amendments may even be offered — Speaker Johnson appointed her to it. Nothing gets a vote in the House of Representatives without going through her committee first.

So consider what the House actually voted on in December. Not an extension of the expiring credits. A substitute bill that doesn't extend them, brought to the floor under a rule.

Foxx has been in Congress since 2005 — twenty-one years — and is the former chair of the Education and the Workforce Committee, which writes the rules for employer health plans. She is not a member who lacks the standing or the procedural knowledge to force a health care vote. She is the member who decides which ones happen.

Meanwhile North Carolina stands to lose an estimated $49.9 billion in federal Medicaid funds over the next decade, with up to another 195,000 residents at risk of losing coverage on top of the 164,682 already gone.

Roger Marshall — Kansas, −20%

Roger Marshall is the one who said the quiet part out loud, and he's a doctor.

Marshall is an OB-GYN who sits on the Senate's health committee. He voted to block the extension. Kansas lost 36,040 people, a 20% drop.

Asked about the expiring subsidies in December 2025, he shrugged: some people's premiums, he said, "are going to go up some."

What people pay went up 58% on average. For the Oklahoma couple in OK Policy's model, it is 326%.

This is the same senator who once explained the uninsured this way: "There is a group of people that just don't want health care and aren't going to take care of themselves."

A physician is allowed to hold conservative views about how health care should be financed. What's harder to defend is a physician who describes a 58% premium spike as going up "some," and who ascribes the resulting uninsurance to people not wanting coverage.

Florida — 442,785 people, the biggest loss in America

Florida's −10% looks mild next to Ohio's −32%. Don't be fooled by the percentage. Florida's marketplace is enormous — 4.3 million people were enrolled and paying in February 2025, more than in any other state — so a 10% drop means 442,785 Floridians lost coverage, nearly three times as many as any other state on this list.

No state has more people on this coverage than Florida. That is why the two Florida members below matter more than their percentage suggests.

Ashley Moody

Ashley Moody was one of the senators who blocked the extension. On December 11, 2025, she voted against even taking up a three-year extension of the ACA premium tax credits. The motion drew 51 votes — nine short of the 60 needed to advance.

She cast that vote knowing more of her own constituents rely on this coverage than in any other state.

It isn't a new position for her. As Florida's Attorney General, Moody kept the state in the lawsuit seeking to strike down the entire Affordable Care Act — a position she maintained in May 2020, in the middle of the COVID pandemic, with more than a million Floridians having filed unemployment claims since mid-March.

First she tried to have the law struck down in court. Then, in the Senate, she voted to let the part holding premiums down expire. The method changed; the outcome she was working toward did not.

Gus Bilirakis

Gus Bilirakis voted yes on the House bill. He has been in Congress 19 years, chairs the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade, and sits on that committee's Health Subcommittee — the panel with jurisdiction over much of federal health policy.

His donor list is where this gets uncomfortable. GuideWell, the parent company of Florida Blue, has given his campaign $22,500 — and Florida Blue is the dominant insurer on the very ACA marketplace that just shed 442,785 customers. BioMarin Pharmaceutical has given $47,500, from a drugmaker whose approvals and pricing run through his Health Subcommittee.

The Florida Policy Institute, working from KFF's projections, puts the combined effect of the budget bill and the ACA marketplace changes at 1.5 million Floridians losing their health insurance — an estimated range of 1.1 million to 1.9 million — of which 1.4 million, 93%, is down to the marketplace changes rather than the Medicaid cuts. Florida's uninsured rate is projected to go from a historic low of 10.7% in 2023 to 16.7% starting in 2026.

A member on the Health Subcommittee, funded by the health industry, representing the state with the most to lose, voted for it.

Texas — the thinnest safety net in America, cut anyway

Texas lost 146,345 people — a 4% drop that sounds small and isn't, because of where it landed.

Texas already had the highest uninsured rate in the United States: 19.2% among people under 65, nearly double the national rate of 9.8%, according to KFF's read of 2024 Census data. The Texas Tribune counts nearly 5 million children and adults under 65 there without coverage. Texas is also one of the ten states that never expanded Medicaid.

That combination is what makes a "mild" percentage brutal. In a state with expanded Medicaid, some people who lose marketplace coverage land somewhere. In Texas, most of them land nowhere.

And the forecast was ugly before this vote: KFF projects 480,000 more uninsured Texans by 2034 because of the budget bill, with Texas set to lose $27.9 billion in federal Medicaid funding over ten years.

Every Texas Republican in the House voted for H.R. 6703. Two of them stand out.

Monica De La Cruz

Monica De La Cruz represents TX-15 in South Texas, and she sits on the Ways and Means Committee — the same committee Jason Smith chairs, the one with jurisdiction over the tax credits that expired.

Her own district is among the hardest hit in the country. An estimated 65,193 people in TX-15 are projected to lose health coverage, per the same Joint Economic Committee minority analysis — and note the split: 61,700 of them losing ACA marketplace coverage, against 3,493 losing Medicaid.

This is not a Medicaid story in her district. It is almost entirely a marketplace story — which is to say, it is almost entirely about the credits her own committee could have extended.

Ronny Jackson

Ronny Jackson is a doctor. He served as White House physician to three presidents before taking TX-13 in 2021.

He is the third clinician on this list, after a nurse practitioner in South Carolina and an OB-GYN in Kansas. All three voted the same way.

There is no version of a medical career that leaves you unaware of what happens when a patient's coverage lapses. You see it directly: the delayed scan, the rationed insulin, the condition that was manageable in March and is not in September. Jackson spent decades close enough to that to know.

He voted yes.

The through-line

Look at the vote counts again. The Senate blocked the extension by nine votes short of cloture. The House passed its substitute 216–211. Neither outcome was inevitable; a handful of members in either chamber could have changed it.

Then look at who these fourteen people are. This is not a list of backbenchers who got steamrolled:

Jason Smith chairs Ways and Means, the committee that writes tax law — and these were tax credits. Monica De La Cruz sits on it too.
Virginia Foxx chairs Rules, the committee that decides what reaches the floor at all.
Lisa McClain is Conference Chair, fourth in House Republican leadership.
Jim Jordan chairs Judiciary and founded the Freedom Caucus.
Gus Bilirakis sits on the Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee.
Roger Marshall is a physician on the Senate health committee, and Ronny Jackson was White House physician to three presidents.
Sheri Biggs is a nurse practitioner.

Four of them held the gavels or the leadership posts that control what the House votes on. Two sit on the committee that writes tax law, and two more on the health panels themselves. Three of them treat patients for a living. If any group in Congress had both the power and the knowledge to force a different result, it was these fourteen — and their own states include the two that lost the biggest share of their coverage in America, and the one that lost the most people outright.

And notice what the House actually passed. Not a repeal. A bill named "Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act," which loosens rules on association health plans and does nothing about the credits whose expiration was about to raise what enrollees pay by 58%. It exists so that members can say they voted to lower premiums.

Every member above can now go home and say exactly that. The 2.6 million people who lost coverage this year are the reason it isn't true.

We've documented what this looks like on the ground in Alabama, Wisconsin, Arkansas and Ohio, and the full national tally of both votes is here.

The credits are gone. The people are uninsured. The votes are on the record with names attached — and in 2026, so are the members who cast them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frank Lucas — he wrote it, then voted against it

Start with the most extraordinary one.

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

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

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

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

"This has been an exemplary bipartisan process."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Risch — the press release that credits his own legislation

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

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

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

So the CHIPS is his. The Act is not.

Andy Biggs — $8.5 billion, and an empty chair

Andy Biggs took a different approach: silence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the pattern actually is

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is actually being taken away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And TSA screeners got the same treatment

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

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

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

The House had a bill to end it permanently

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

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

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

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

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

The 20 Republicans who voted yes

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

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

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

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

The 195 who voted no

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

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

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

Colorado — Lauren Boebert, Jeff Crank, Jeff Hurd

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

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

Idaho — Russ Fulcher, Mike Simpson

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mary Miller

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

Iowa — Ashley Hinson

Kansas — Ron Estes, Tracey Mann, Derek Schmidt

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

Minnesota — Tom Emmer, Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach

Mississippi — Mike Ezell, Michael Guest, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Mike Flood, Adrian Smith

New York — Nick Langworthy, Claudia Tenney

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Mike Kennedy, Celeste Maloy, Blake Moore

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

The Senate has done nothing for eight months

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

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

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

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

This is not a fringe position they're protecting

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

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

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

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

We deserve better.

How they voted

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two of them were sworn in before Reagan was inaugurated

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

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

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

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

Here is the part that should end the argument.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why they don't leave: eleven of thirteen gavels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ones who won't even stand in a room

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

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

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

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

And then there's Grassley

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

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

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

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

This was supposed to be a job you leave

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

Every House Republican Voted to Ban Congressional Stock Trading. Seven of Them Kept Trading Anyway.

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:25:19 +0000

On July 22, 2026, the House of Representatives passed the Stop Insider Trading Act. The official roll call records H.R. 7008 passing 232 to 198, and every single Republican who voted, voted yes.

It was a good day for press releases. Members went home and told constituents they had finally done something about the thing everybody hates: politicians getting rich on information the rest of us don't have.

Then they went back to trading.

The gap nobody mentions

Passing the House is not becoming law. As of August 6, 2026, H.R. 7008 had been read a second time in the Senate and parked on the Legislative Calendar as General Orders Calendar No. 548. That's where it sits.

Which means that in the weeks after that vote, nothing changed. Members who had just voted to ban the practice were free to keep doing it, and a number of them did.

And here's the part that makes the whole thing worse: even if the bill became law tomorrow, it wouldn't stop most of this. The Stop Insider Trading Act bans members from making new purchases of individual stocks — but lets them keep everything they already own, reinvest the dividends, and sell what they hold after giving a week's public notice. Rep. Pramila Jayapal called it a "so-called stock trading ban that literally does nothing of the sort." Rep. Joe Morelle said it was "so filled with holes, it would make Swiss cheese blush." It also carried a second payload most people never heard about — strict new voter ID rules that would bar student IDs and require voters to photocopy their ID to vote by mail.

So: a ban that doesn't ban much, that hasn't taken effect, attached to voter restrictions. Below are the Republicans on this site who voted for it and whose own disclosure filings show trades dated on or after that same July 22.

Every trade date below comes from members' own filings, compiled by Capitol Trades. Every vote below is confirmed against the House Clerk's roll call.

Max Miller — traded the same day he voted

Max Miller voted yes on July 22. His most recent reported trade is dated July 22 — the same day.

Miller has 58 reported trades across 15 companies in the last three years, worth about $570,000 in total volume.

He is also, at the moment, the Republican his own colleagues are trying not to talk about. His ex-wife has accused him of assaulting her and their young child; he denies it. He refused to leave his race before Ohio's ballot deadline. And of the 16 Republicans his leadership PAC has funded this cycle, only one has returned the money.

Michael Rulli — still trading in August

Michael Rulli voted yes. His most recent reported trade is dated August 6, 2026 — 15 days later. Thirty-two trades across 18 companies, about $256,000 in volume.

This is the same congressman who, on August 11, was found by NOTUS to have been months late disclosing 22 stock trades — Palantir, Pfizer, Nvidia, Meta and more, worth up to $330,000 — while sitting on the committee with jurisdiction over drug safety and telecom. His office wouldn't say whether he paid the fine.

He voted to ban the practice, kept trading, and hadn't finished disclosing the last batch.

Kevin Hern — $34 million in volume

Kevin Hern voted yes. His most recent reported trade is dated August 5, 2026.

Hern's disclosures over the last three years show 194 trades across 78 different companies, with a total volume of about $34.16 million — far and away the largest of anyone on this list.

Hern sits on the Ways and Means Committee, which writes the federal tax code, including the tax provisions of Trump's budget bill. He was also nearly two dozen trades late under the existing disclosure law, on trades worth up to $2.7 million.

Maria Elvira Salazar — she writes the rules for the stock market

Maria Elvira Salazar voted yes. Her most recent reported trade is dated July 28, 2026. Eighty-five trades, 39 companies, roughly $6.95 million in volume.

Salazar sits on the House Financial Services Committee — and specifically on its Subcommittee on Capital Markets, the panel with jurisdiction over the securities markets and the Securities and Exchange Commission. We went through her own periodic transaction reports and counted 67 trades between March and July of this year alone.

The member who helps write the rules for the stock market is one of the most active traders in it.

Diana Harshbarger — 700 late trades, and still going

Diana Harshbarger voted yes. Her most recent reported trade is dated July 27, 2026. Sixty trades, 32 companies, about $4.32 million.

Harshbarger has the largest count of late-filed trades among the Republicans we cover: she was late on more than 700 stock trades worth between $728,000 and $10.9 million.

She's a pharmacist who vice-chairs the Energy and Commerce Health Subcommittee — the panel that writes the reimbursement rules for the pharmacy industry she came from.

David Taylor — 210 trades in a first term

David Taylor voted yes. His most recent reported trade is dated July 24, 2026 — two days after. Two hundred and ten trades across 30 companies, about $1.88 million.

Taylor is a freshman. Within a month of being sworn in he sold Visa and JPMorgan Chase, and by March 2026 Signal Statewide had already clocked him as the 43rd biggest trader by volume in the entire Congress — the top 8% of the House and Senate, in his first year.

Asked whether members of Congress should be allowed to trade individual stocks at all, he wouldn't say. He voted yes on a bill saying they shouldn't, then kept trading.

John McGuire — the one who already showed us how this works

John McGuire voted yes. His most recent reported trade is dated July 31, 2026.

McGuire's file is the clearest illustration of why any of this matters. In 2026 he voted for a bill targeting BlackRock, then the BlackRock stock in his spouse's retirement account was sold two weeks later — four days before the bill became law.

That's the whole argument for a ban, executed by a man who then voted for one.

What the vote was actually for

There is a version of this story where seven members simply hadn't gotten around to unwinding their portfolios yet. That would be fair, if the bill were law and the clock were running.

It isn't. The bill is on a Senate calendar. Nothing obliges any of them to stop, and the bill wouldn't make them sell what they already hold even if it passed.

That's what makes the July 22 vote so useful to the people who cast it. It generates the headline — voted to ban congressional stock trading — without generating a single consequence. Forty-five of the Republicans on this site have already broken the disclosure law that's been on the books since 2012, a law whose late-filing fee is $200 and is often waived.

They passed a new law about the old law they don't follow, and it hasn't taken effect, and they're still trading.

The next time one of them tells you they voted to clean up Congress, ask what they bought that week.

Sources

House Clerk Roll Call 280 (H.R. 7008, On Passage, July 22, 2026) for every vote cited. Congress.gov for the bill's Senate status. Trade dates, counts and volumes from members' own disclosure filings as compiled by Capitol Trades; its data covers the past three years.

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

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

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

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

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

What the judge did

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

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

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

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

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

What the letter asks for

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

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

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

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

The man who led it sells the products

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

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

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

Who signed

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

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

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

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

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

What registration was actually doing

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

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

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the gloves are

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

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

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

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

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

The warnings come from the company that sells them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congress wrote guardrails. They were about equipment.

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

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

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

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

Two votes made this possible

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

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

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

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

The 201 with report cards on this site

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

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

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

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

Source

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

Stephanie Bice Chairs the Subcommittee on Talking to Constituents. She Won't Stand in a Room With Hers.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:08:43 +0000

There is a subcommittee in the U.S. House whose job is figuring out how members of Congress should talk to the people who elected them. It is called the Subcommittee on Modernization and Innovation, and Stephanie Bice is its chairwoman.

Right now, through the end of this month, that subcommittee is asking the public for ideas. The August 3 announcement says Bice and Ranking Member Norma Torres are "seeking actionable ideas to modernize how the House and the Legislative Branch, generally, work on behalf of the American People," and are "particularly interested in bold, creative ideas." Submissions close August 31.

Here's a bold, creative idea for the chairwoman: stand in a room in Oklahoma City and answer questions from the people who live there.

She has been asked that, on the record. Her answer was that the phone reaches more people.

What she told a constituent who asked

On a telephone town hall in late July 2025, a caller got through — by the caller's own account, only by pretending to ask about something else — and put it to her directly. Oklahoma Watch's Em Luetkemeyer reported the exchange:

"Without dodging my question or giving me the okey doke, can you tell me why you are not holding in-person town halls, where you can look your constituents in the face, eye-to-eye, and answer tough questions?"

"These town halls, telephone town halls, are a joke, and are screened, carefully screened. I had to pretend to be asking another question. I would have never gotten this question in."

Bice did not say she would consider it. She defended the phone line, and the reason she led with was arithmetic:

"Let me make this very clear: I can reach several thousand constituents when I dial out for these telephone town halls. I am never going to get that kind of engagement if I'm doing in-person town halls. I am lucky to get a couple hundred, and that's on a great day," Bice said. "I do not dodge my constituents."

She said it was her 30th telephone town hall, and, later in the call: "I do these because they are effective, and I will continue to do them."

Note the argument. It is a volume argument: thousands beats hundreds, so the format that reaches thousands wins. She offered two more reasons on that call — that the phone lets committee chairmen dial in to help answer questions, and that seniors can listen from home instead of driving somewhere on a winter night. Not one of the three is a reason she cannot also stand in a room.

Her own witness testified that the volume argument is wrong

On December 17, 2025, Bice gaveled in a hearing in room 1310 of the Longworth Building. Its title: "The Future of Constituent Engagement with Congress."

In her opening statement, she said this:

"Communicating with our constituents is absolutely essential for doing our jobs, the jobs we were elected to do. Assisting with casework, responding to questions, and explaining our positions on the issues of the day requires interacting with our constituents in effective and meaningful ways."

And this:

"Rather than assume that they will read our letters and emails, we should figure out how to meet our constituents where they are at today, tomorrow, and into the future."

Then she introduced her first witness. She read his credentials into the record herself: Dr. Michael Neblo of Ohio State University, who — in her own words from the dais — "has designed 'Deliberative Town Halls' for the U.S. Congress, the Chilean Constitutional Convention, and the Australian, Nigerian, and U.K. legislatures."

Neblo's testimony was about exactly the thing Bice had told a caller, months earlier, was not worth her time. He told her subcommittee that at best only one in five constituents contacted their member last year, that just 13% of citizens trust Congress, and that the silence isn't apathy:

"They are frustrated because they believe Congress does not care what people like them think and only listens to organized interests and party activists, so they see no reason to engage."

Then the numbers that answer Bice's volume argument directly. Only 9% of surveyed citizens said they wouldn't engage if invited to a forum they believed was authentic and consequential. When his team runs deliberative town halls, he testified, "previously disengaged citizens prepare, show up, and contribute more than those who already call your office," and 94% call the experience "very valuable for our democracy."

And on which channels people actually respect:

"Citizens rated such forums as the most legitimate and effective way to communicate. Mass emails and social media scored lower."

Neblo also drew the distinction that sits at the center of this whole story:

"Lobbyists might be clients of Congress, but citizens want to be partners in self-government."

That went into the record of Bice's own hearing, from the witness she invited. Then she went back to dialing out.

Four months later, she got money for it

On April 17, 2026, Bice and Torres announced that funding had been approved for a "first-of-its-kind Constituent Engagement Innovation Project" — a plan to let members pick from a wider range of vendors for the software that handles constituent mail.

Bice's quote in the release:

"This project represents a major breakthrough in improving how lawmakers engage with constituents. Having easy access to the latest tools and services for connecting with constituents can dramatically improve our district outreach efforts and ensure we are engaging constituents where they are."

Where her constituents are is Oklahoma City. A software procurement reform is a fine thing to do. It is not a substitute for being in the room, and Neblo told her committee why: an office can have "stellar customer service and constituents will still find that problematic," because "citizens want to be partners in self-government," not customers.

The one in-person event she scheduled was in the wrong district

A few weeks after that phone call, an in-person "Coffee with Congresswoman Bice" turned up on the calendar for September 26, hosted by the WesTen District.

Her Democratic opponent, 2020 Oklahoma Teacher of the Year Jena Nelson, posted a map. As Raw Story reported, the venue was outside Oklahoma's 5th District.

"Well, folks, I was going to acknowledge that my opponent finally scheduled an in-person forum event in CD-5 after four long years, but it turns out the venue isn't even in CD-5," Nelson wrote. "Apparently, she can't remember what she gerrymandered out of her own district."

The event came off the host's website. Nelson later posted an email from the venue: "WesTen District has cancelled the September 26 Coffee with Congresswoman Bice due to scheduling conflicts."

By Nelson's count, that was the first in-person forum Bice had put on the calendar in four years. It was in the wrong district, and then it was gone.

Why this is worse than an ordinary dodge

Plenty of members hide from their constituents. We've written about Jim Baird, who skipped the town hall 250 people held for him, and about Kevin Hern, whose office wouldn't say where he was while he toured a foreign mega-prison. Bice's colleagues in Oklahoma are not a high bar.

What makes Bice different is the gavel. She is not a backbencher avoiding a hard room. She holds the chair of the one subcommittee in the House whose stated purpose is improving how Congress connects with the American people. She convened the hearing. She picked the witness. She wrote the press release about engaging constituents "where they are." She is, this month, publicly inviting the country to send her ideas about it.

And the answer she has already given to the most basic idea anyone could send her — look your constituents in the face — is that the numbers are better on the phone.

What Oklahomans wanted to ask about

It's worth remembering what the questions were. That July 2025 call was mostly about the budget bill Republicans had just passed. Oklahoma hospital leaders were warning it could cut federal reimbursements to Oklahoma hospitals by $8.7 billion over the next decade and eliminate nearly 15,000 jobs. Oklahoma Watch reported the same bill put 131,000 Oklahomans at risk of losing SNAP benefits.

Those are the questions the caller said had to be disguised to get asked at all. Meanwhile Bice's other signature project has been a resolution declaring the national anthem should only be sung in English, which has sat untouched in committee for over a year.

We deserve a representative who will stand in a room in her own district and take the question she doesn't want.

Sources

The Subcommittee on Modernization and Innovation Seeks Input on the Future of Congressional Modernization, Committee on House Administration, August 3, 2026; the official transcript of the December 17, 2025 hearing "The Future of Constituent Engagement with Congress"; and Em Luetkemeyer's reporting for Oklahoma Watch, published by KOSU on August 4, 2025. Photo: official congressional portrait.

Josh Brecheen Drew a Red Line on Monday. On Wednesday He Voted for the Exact Thing He Said Was Worthless.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:31:06 +0000

Josh Brecheen has built his whole political identity on one word: offsets. He doesn't vote for new spending unless somebody says where the money is coming from. He was an original cosponsor of the Make DOGE Permanent Act. He pushed the Senate to swallow the DOGE cuts without changing a comma — "It's an easy list. I don't understand the opposition."

On Monday, July 20, 2026, he drew a line. On Wednesday, July 22, he stepped over it.

Monday: the red line

House Republican leaders were assembling a fast-track budget package — a bill written to pass the Senate with a simple majority instead of the usual 60 votes — to pour billions into the Iran war and to push states toward requiring photo ID and proof of citizenship to vote.

Brecheen told The Washington Times he was out unless the package carried the real SAVE America Act — the actual mandate, not a watered-down version.

"I'm not willing to make that investment of deficit spending if they send us back garbage."

Speaker Mike Johnson had floated a compromise: a grant program that would pay states to adopt voter ID and proof-of-citizenship rules voluntarily. Brecheen was asked whether that would be good enough to earn his vote for unpaid-for military spending.

His answer was "not at all." He explained exactly why:

"The grant program is only going to be for states that want to do it. What do you get out of that?" he said. "The reality is, people in the Democrat-leaning states, they don't want to change the system. … Throwing some carrots at them will do nothing."

He wanted Senate Republicans to overrule the Senate parliamentarian — the chamber's referee on what can ride along on a fast-track bill — so the full mandate could pass with 51 votes. And he said that without the real SAVE America Act, he'd join the conservatives refusing to back new spending without offsets.

Clear enough. Two conditions: the real mandate, or the money gets paid for.

Wednesday: he got neither, and voted yes anyway

The budget blueprint the House took up on July 22 authorized up to $95 billion. Per The Washington Times' account of the vote, that broke down as up to $73 billion for Trump's Iran war request, up to $12 billion in farm aid, and up to $10 billion instructed to the House Administration Committee for the election requirements.

That $10 billion is the grant program. It is the carrots.

There were no offsets. That was the single loudest objection in the room — Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio voted no over exactly that, and Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky called the defense money a "slush fund" for the war.

The resolution passed 216 to 214. Only two Republicans and one independent voted against it. The Clerk of the House records the roll call.

Brecheen voted Yea.

A two-vote margin means every single yes was decisive. His was one of them.

The best he could manage was a hope, delivered to the same paper he'd drawn the line to two days earlier:

"It better accomplish something. It can't be lipstick on the hog, and we're pretending it's something that it's not."

That is not a red line. That is a wish.

What changed in 48 hours

Not the bill. The bill contained the grant program he'd called worthless and the deficit spending he'd said he wouldn't make.

What changed was the pressure. Trump warned that he was "watching the vote very closely." Vice President JD Vance worked the phones personally, calling members to reassure them the White House was serious about the full SAVE America Act later — not the optional version actually written into the blueprint. The Daily Signal, a conservative outlet, reported that Vance's calls are how skeptical conservatives were brought on board.

So the promise Brecheen accepted, in exchange for voting for a bill he'd said was garbage, was a phone call about what might be in a future bill.

The same afternoon, on the same floor

Here is the part that makes this more than an ordinary flip.

Twenty minutes before the budget vote, the House passed the annual defense authorization bill. Brecheen voted no on that one — one of seven Republicans to do it, breaking with his own leadership and with every other member of Oklahoma's delegation, in a 216-212 squeaker that only cleared because six Democrats crossed over.

He put out a statement the same day explaining himself, which News On 6 published in full:

"While I support providing for a robust national defense, I could not in good conscience vote for this legislation as it authorizes a $263.4 billion (29.6%) increase over the authorized level for the previous fiscal year. … We are currently facing the largest national debt in our country's history, owing over $39.5 trillion, and we simply cannot bear the cost of additional, unpaid-for spending."

He has an argument for why the two votes aren't identical, and it deserves a fair hearing: the defense bill raises the annual baseline forever, while the fast-track package is a one-time expenditure. He said so in the same statement.

But read the next sentence of it. His own proposed fix was that "in the current Reconciliation 3.0 or in a future reconciliation package," Congress should "find meaningful offsets."

Reconciliation 3.0 is the blueprint he voted for twenty minutes later. It has no offsets in it.

At 4:37 in the afternoon he could not in good conscience vote for unpaid-for spending. At 4:57 he authorized up to $95 billion of it.

Who this actually costs

Oklahoma's 2nd District is not a wealthy place, and Brecheen's own voting record has already taken a lot out of it.

An estimated 41,415 people in OK-02 are projected to lose health insurance from the Republican cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act in last year's budget law — 23,615 of them off Medicaid, the other 17,800 off ACA coverage. That is the largest projected loss of any Oklahoma district. His district also leans on food assistance more than any other in the state: 55,436 households, 17.6% of every household in the district, including 26,140 households with children.

Those cuts were sold as fiscal discipline. The offsets were the whole justification.

Then $95 billion in war and farm money showed up with no offsets at all, and the man who cosponsored the bill to make DOGE permanent voted for it in exchange for a promise.

And the thing he traded it for

Don't lose track of what the $10 billion is actually for. It is public money spent to push states to make voting harder — proof-of-citizenship paperwork to register, photo ID at the polls. We've written about what that paperwork does to real people: the SAVE Act leans on birth certificates and passports as proof, and as many as 69 million American women don't have a birth certificate with their current married name on it. About half of Americans don't have a passport at all.

Brecheen's objection to the grant program was never that it made voting harder. It was that it wouldn't make voting harder in blue states. His complaint, in his own words, was that "people in the Democrat-leaning states, they don't want to change the system."

He wanted a federal mandate to force them. He settled for $10 billion in carrots, plus a phone call.

Brecheen has represented OK-02 since 2023. He won his Republican primary on June 16, 2026 and is on the ballot again in November.

We deserve better.

Source

George Caldwell, "House Republican draws red line; won't back Iran war supplemental without SAVE America Act or offset", The Washington Times, July 20, 2026, and Lindsey McPherson's July 22 report on the vote. Brecheen's NDAA statement via Alex Cameron, News On 6. Roll call data from the Office of the Clerk of the House. (Photo: AP Photo/Rebecca Slezak, via The Washington Times)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the money is for

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

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

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

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

The only limits Congress wrote were about equipment

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

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

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

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

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

Why the margin matters more than the bill

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

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

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

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

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

The 187 with report cards

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

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

How they voted

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

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

Congress Holds the Purse Strings. Tom Cole's Plan Was to Ask Elon Musk Nicely Over Bourbon.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:50:58 +0000

On March 20, 2025, Tom Cole held a town hall for his constituents in Oklahoma's 4th District. It was on the telephone.

Most of the hour went to one subject. NOTUS reporter Em Luetkemeyer, who listened in, wrote that the majority of questions Cole faced were about DOGE — Elon Musk's operation, which was then tearing through federal agencies and cancelling contracts and leases across the country. Callers asked about Social Security. They asked about the Indian Health Service. They asked about federal offices closing in Oklahoma and people losing their jobs.

One caller asked the question that actually matters:

"I'm very concerned about Congress's constitutional duties, that those are being taken over by DOGE. I would like to know what steps you're willing to take to make sure that the constitutional duties of Congress remain with Congress, and not with the executive branch."

Cole is the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. Deciding how federal money gets spent is, quite literally, his job. The Constitution gives that power to Congress, and inside Congress it runs through his committee.

Here is his answer:

"I try to do it by pretty aggressively defending congressional power. I think there's a lot of things out there that you hear that may or may not be true."

Elsewhere on the same call, he described what defending congressional power looked like in practice.

The method: call DOGE and complain

Cole told the callers that when DOGE went after something in his district, his office picked up the phone.

"We've found, at least, if you work it just like you would any other government agency, they can be pretty responsive."

His example was a Social Security office in Lawton, Oklahoma, that had shown up on a list of terminated contracts. His staff flagged it. DOGE reversed it.

"We think this is a bad decision. And [DOGE] relooked at it and they agreed so. But this is where members have to be pretty aggressive and engaged."

That is the chairman of the Appropriations Committee describing his relationship with an unelected outfit that was cancelling spending Congress had approved: he asks, and sometimes they say yes.

NOTUS also noted that The Atlantic had reported that week that Cole met with Elon Musk over cigars and bourbon, and advised him to consult lawmakers before making cuts. Cole's read on how that went, as he told the magazine:

"So far, I've found them to be good to their word."

He also urged constituents to "have confidence in the country's institutions."

What actually happened in his district

Confidence would have been easier if the cuts had stopped.

In February 2025, several employees at the National Weather Center in Norman — inside Cole's district — were fired as part of the mass federal layoffs. On March 3, DOGE listed for termination the lease on one of the four buildings used by the Radar Operations Center, the hub where technicians and researchers maintain and improve the country's weather radar. Those are the facilities that keep tornado warnings working in a state that gets a lot of tornadoes.

Cole assured the callers on his March 20 telephone town hall that DOGE could be talked round — his example was a Social Security office in Lawton, not either of these. Then, through the summer, he kept promising. At a Norman chamber of commerce event, he said of the National Weather Service offices in Norman: "You're going to be fine in our bill. We're going to protect it." He said the National Weather Center "is not going anywhere, and it's going to be fully staffed and maintained."

But in the same reporting, Cole acknowledged the limit of his own promise: control of the grants lies with the executive branch. The spending plan the appropriations subcommittee produced still cut $380 million from NOAA. NOAA supplies roughly 20% of the University of Oklahoma's research funding and supports more than 900 jobs in the area.

So the chairman's answer to an agency being dismantled was to negotiate with the people dismantling it, one project at a time, and hope the rest held.

And he wouldn't show up

Meanwhile, his constituents were trying to get in the same room with him.

A group in Norman called Women in Action for All held a rally outside Cole's office. "We had about a hundred women there, and we had signs and that sort of thing," chair Rhonda Stock said. They delivered a letter, written by a retired OU history professor, asking Cole to hold a town hall.

When that didn't work, they organized one without him: a "Non Cole Town Hall" at the Moore Public Library on April 9, 2025, where former Oklahoma Gov. David Walters and former Senate president pro tempore Cal Hobson would take the questions people wanted to ask their congressman.

Cole's communications director, Olivia Porcaro, explained his absence: "Due to the congressman's busy schedule, he will not be in attendance at the event."

Stock said the group's biggest worry was the National Weather Center. "Oklahoma needs it desperately," she said. "People just need warnings about the weather."

Cole's official website still lists exactly one kind of town hall: telephone town halls. On the phone, staff choose which callers get through. Nobody gets to follow up. Nobody gets to look him in the eye.

He did face people in person that year. On July 30, 2025, he met constituents at Sonny's Cafe in Purcell — where, as The Oklahoman documented in a photo gallery, a handful of people held a small demonstration about half a mile away.

The thing he could have done

There was a straightforward option available to the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee: refuse to move the cuts.

He did the opposite. In June and July 2025, Cole cosponsored the Rescissions Act of 2025 and voted for it twice — the bill that cancelled spending Congress had already approved, $9.4 billion of it in the version the House passed in June. His own office called it a vote "in Favor of Rescinding Wasteful Spending." That bill did not ask DOGE nicely to reverse anything. It wrote DOGE's cuts into law.

You cannot spend the spring telling constituents you are "aggressively defending congressional power" and spend the summer voting to hand that power away.

Ohio's Troy Balderson tried a version of the same two-step and got caught doing it in the space of a single day. Cole took a few months. The result was the same.

Twenty-three years in Congress. The most powerful spending gavel in the House. And when the people of Norman wanted to ask him about the weather center in their own backyard, he sent word that he was busy — while telling reporters that Elon Musk had been good to his word.

Source

The town hall quotes come from Em Luetkemeyer's March 20, 2025 report for NOTUS, Rep. Tom Cole Says DOGE Is 'Pretty Responsive' to His Concerns, produced in partnership with Oklahoma Watch. Photo: J. Scott Applewhite / AP.

Tom Cole Won an Award for Saving Public Broadcasting. Then He Helped Kill It — Including His Own Tribe's Radio Station.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:49:57 +0000

In February 2016, America's Public Television Stations handed Tom Cole its Champion of Public Broadcasting Award.

The citation was not vague. APTS president Patrick Butler said Cole's "extraordinary leadership" was "instrumental" in getting $445 million in level funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting into the House spending bill — "the first time in five years the House has proposed anything but a zero for public broadcasting."

And Butler singled out one specific thing Cole protected:

"Chairman Cole helped ensure critical funding for the public broadcasting interconnection system that makes it possible for public television to serve everyone, everywhere, every day, for free, including the Native American nations of Oklahoma."

Cole accepted the award and said he looked forward to "helping them continue to serve, inform and edify communities in every city and state across the nation."

Nine years later, he helped shut the whole thing down.

What happened in 2025

In June 2025, the White House sent Congress a package asking it to cancel $9.4 billion it had already approved and promised. The bill became the Rescissions Act of 2025. Buried in it was $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — two full years of funding for public television and radio stations, money Congress had already voted for and stations had already built budgets around.

By then, Cole was chairman of the entire House Appropriations Committee, and the bill was referred there the day it was introduced. His committee never marked it up. Five days later the Rules Committee sent it straight to the floor instead, and the House voted to take it up 213–207 — every Republican but one, Cole included.

Then the full House passed it, 214–212, and passed it again in final form, 216–213. Cole's own office put out a release headlined "Cole Votes in Favor of Rescinding Wasteful Spending." The Appropriations Committee he chairs issued another one celebrating the bill's passage.

Trump signed it on July 24, 2025. Eight days later, on August 1, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced it was shutting down.

He was asked about it directly

A week before the committee vote, Deadline's Ted Johnson asked Cole whether his past support for public media had changed. Cole's answer:

"No, but I have an up-and-down vote. So, I mean, there's always going to be things in here that you prefer not be, but they are. And so, again, we are going to look at the package and vote accordingly."

That is a striking thing for the chairman of the Appropriations Committee to say. Cole is not a backbencher stuck with somebody else's bill. He runs the committee that writes the spending bills. He was a cosponsor of this one. "I have an up-and-down vote" describes the position of a person with no power over what's in the package — and that is not Tom Cole's position.

It is also a reversal of what he used to say. Seven years earlier, when Trump's first administration tried to zero out CPB and Cole led the subcommittee that funded it, he told Variety — as Deadline recounted — that he came from "probably the reddest state in the union," and that given "the range of services it provides, the quality of programming and the points of view it expresses," the money paid for itself. He called going after public broadcasting "nickel and dime-ing things" when it came to the deficit.

Then he voted for the nickel-and-diming.

Who actually lost the money

Cole's home-state group Friends of OETA had urged him and the rest of the Oklahoma delegation to oppose the package, calling it "absolutely the wrong policy tool at the wrong time" and warning it would "throw the PBS system into chaos by reneging on commitments already made."

Here's what it cost Oklahoma. More than $6 million in public broadcasting money for the state was at risk, with more than $1 million of that going to Oklahoma's NPR stations: KGOU in Norman, KOSU in Oklahoma City, KWGS in Tulsa, KCCU in Lawton, KUCO in Edmond — and KCNP in Ada, which is owned by the Chickasaw Nation.

Tom Cole is an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation. He is the longest-serving Native American in the history of the U.S. House.

The damage was real and it was fast. KOSU executive director Rachel Hubbard told Mvskoke Media the cut landed 23 days into her station's fiscal year: "In terms of cash money, it's specifically $311,000." She estimated the real annual hit closer to $500,000 once you count things CPB used to buy for the whole system, like music licensing. KGOU said it lost about $215,000 — roughly one-seventh of its budget. KGOU general manager Dick Pryor said replacing everything CPB provided, including the satellite links, would run his station more than $295,000 a year.

Those satellite links are not a nice-to-have. Pryor described what they do:

"It's so important for us to be able to maintain service and capability to provide news, information, emergency alerts, severe weather warnings, any kind of emergency notifications from the President... because many of those rural counties, cities, live in news deserts where there isn't really any other source of information."

Rural Oklahoma. Severe weather warnings. That is the audience.

The tribal stations

The part APTS praised Cole for in 2016 — service to the Native American nations — is exactly the part that got hit hardest.

The Associated Press reported that 59 tribal radio stations receive CPB funding, and that Native Public Media expected about three dozen of them to be the first to go dark. Those stations reach more than 1.5 million people.

Loris Taylor, CEO of Native Public Media, has written that for many of those communities the station "may be the only source of locally relevant news, emergency alerts, public safety announcements, language preservation, health information and election coverage."

Francene Blythe-Lewis, CEO of Vision Maker Media, put the numbers plainly: "For Indian Country in general, 80% of the communities are rural, and their only access to national news, native story sharing, community news, whatever it is, is through PBS stations or public radio." Her estimate if the money went away: "a good 90% of those stations will cease to exist."

Hubbard, at KOSU, pointed out that the loss reaches stations far past the ones with an NPR logo: "There are fees associated with satellite systems that a lot of really rural tribal stations and stations that have transmitters in rural areas like Nowata County... The Cherokee Nation is an example because they are dependent on the public radio satellite system."

The bigger pattern

Cole is not the only Republican who cast this vote and then went quiet about who it hit. Michigan's John Moolenaar called defunding public radio a "win for the American people" — while the station in his own district lost 19% of its budget. Ohio's Troy Balderson told business leaders that "Not the president, not Elon Musk. Congress decides." and then voted for the same package.

What sets Cole apart is that he had the gavel. He chaired the committee. He had spent years telling anyone who asked that this money was worth keeping, and he had a plaque on the wall saying so.

When the moment came, he described himself as a man with nothing but an up-or-down vote — and the Chickasaw Nation's radio station lost its funding along with everyone else's.

Source

The award citation quoted here is APTS's own February 23, 2016 press release, APTS Presents Champion of Public Broadcasting Award To Oklahoma Congressman Tom Cole. Photo via Getty Images, from the Associated Press report on tribal radio stations.

Tom Cole's Social Security Bill Has Two Words That Should Worry You: 'Amendments Prohibited'

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:47:22 +0000

On June 8, 2026, Tom Cole introduced H.R. 9187, the Bipartisan Social Security Commission Act of 2026. He is the lead sponsor. Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York signed on as the first cosponsor, which is where the word "bipartisan" in the title comes from.

Cole has been pushing this same idea for a long time. His own office says he has led or co-led it for seven Congresses — fourteen years of trying.

Here's how he described it:

"I am going to tell you the truth that many of my fellow politicians in Washington refuse to acknowledge: the solvency of Social Security is at a critical point... doing nothing on Social Security is not an option."

That sounds reasonable. Social Security really does have a money problem. The 2026 trustees report projects the trust fund that pays retirees, their spouses, and survivors may run out in late 2032. At that point, benefits get cut across the board.

So the problem is real. The question is who gets to fix it, and whether you get any say.

Read the bill and you find out the answer is no.

What the bill actually does

Cole's bill creates a 13-person group called the Commission on Long-Term Social Security Solvency. Nobody elects them. Every single one is appointed:

1 by the President, who also chairs it
2 each by the Speaker, the House minority leader, the Senate majority leader, and the Senate minority leader
1 each by the chair and top Democrat of the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee

Only two of the thirteen are required to be experts from outside government. The rest can be politicians.

Within one year, those 13 people have to hand Congress a plan to keep Social Security solvent for 75 years — plus the actual bill text to do it. Nine of the thirteen have to sign off.

The bill requires the commission to hold at least one public hearing — one, in the whole year, is all it has to do. It "may hold such other hearings" as it "considers appropriate," which means whether there is a second one is up to the 13 of them. Everything else can happen behind a closed door.

Then comes the part that matters.

"Amendments prohibited"

Normally, when Congress writes a law that touches your retirement, the process is slow on purpose. Committees hold hearings. Members offer amendments. Bad ideas get stripped out. Good ideas get added. You get time to call your representative.

Section 9 of Cole's bill throws all of that out. Here is the language, word for word from the bill:

"Amendments prohibited.—No amendment to, or motion to strike a provision from, an approval bill considered under this section shall be in order in either the Senate or the House of Representatives."

That is not a summary. That is the text.

The rest of Section 9 is just as tight:

Any committee the bill is sent to must report it "without amendment" within three legislative days — and if it doesn't, the committee is automatically discharged and the bill goes to the floor anyway.
House debate is capped at four hours, split between one supporter and one opponent.
"All points of order against the approval bill and against its consideration are waived."
In the Senate, debate is capped at 30 hours. A motion to recommit is not allowed. That cap means no filibuster — the 60-vote threshold that normally protects a program like this simply doesn't apply.

So: 13 appointed people write a plan in private. Nine of them approve it. Congress gets four hours in the House to talk about it, cannot change a comma, and then votes yes or no.

If you don't like one piece of it — say, the piece that raises your retirement age — there is no mechanism to take that piece out. It's the whole package or nothing.

The model Cole picked actually proves the opposite

Cole's own press release says the bill is "Modeled after the 1983 Social Security Commission." That's the Greenspan Commission, the one everybody in Washington points to as the time this worked.

Here's the problem with that comparison: the 1983 commission didn't finish the job. Congress did — by amending it.

Rudolph Penner, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, walked through what happened in a paper for the Urban Institute. The commission, he wrote, "was rather cautious," and "its proposals did not solve Social Security's financial problems for the entire 75 year period."

What closed the gap was an amendment offered on the House floor:

"During the House debate Congressman J. J. Pickle, Chairman of the Ways and Means Subcommittee that dealt with Social Security, added a provision that would very gradually raise the normal retirement age (NRA) from 65 to 67... This provision did more to improve the financial health of Social Security than any single recommendation of the Commission."

Penner's conclusion: "It took courageous actions by the Congress to enhance the report and make it much more meaningful."

Two things follow from that.

First, the single biggest change to come out of 1983 was a benefit cut. Raising the retirement age from 65 to 67 means people work longer for the same check. Everyone born in 1960 or later lives under it.

Second — and this is the part Cole doesn't mention — that amendment would be illegal under his own bill. Pickle's provision was added during floor debate. Section 9 of H.R. 9187 says no amendment "shall be in order in either the Senate or the House of Representatives." The one move that made the 1983 deal work is the exact move Cole's bill bans.

So the precedent he's invoking is a case where open debate mattered. His bill would prevent it from happening again — while leaving the door open for the same kind of cut, just written by people you never voted for.

Cole also listed who is cheering the bill on. His press release names the Peterson Solutions Fund, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the American Action Forum, and the American Enterprise Institute among the groups praising it. These are the organizations that have spent decades arguing that the answer to Social Security is spending less on it.

They are not going to be the ones locked out of that room.

Who is against it

This isn't a fringe objection. The people whose entire job is watching out for retirees have been saying the same thing for years about bills like this one.

In January 2024, Reps. John Larson and Jan Schakowsky led 116 House Democrats in a letter opposing fast-track commissions. Their words:

"The goal of these commissions would be to produce legislation that cuts benefits and calls for an up or down vote without hearings, and that is unamendable. This is not a simple debate over process."

The next month, the AFL-CIO, the Teamsters, AFGE, the AFT, the NEA, the Alliance for Retired Americans and other unions stood at the Capitol to oppose a similar commission bill. AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler called it "a power grab that is trying to bypass the regular democratic process by hiding behind closed doors."

AARP has taken the same position on fast-tracking. In a July 21, 2026 letter about a different Senate fast-track bill, AARP's chief advocacy officer Nancy LeaMond wrote:

"We strongly object to fast-tracking Social Security changes through Congress... If regular order is the gold standard for routine legislative matters, it certainly should be the standard for something as important as Social Security."

And on August 5, 2026, at a Senate Finance Committee hearing on exactly this idea, Sen. Ron Wyden put it bluntly:

"Republican members of this panel will claim they have the solution: an unaccountable 'commission' that will rubber stamp benefit cuts like increasing the retirement age."

He added that such commissions "are designed to smuggle in benefit cut plans with minimal public scrutiny or debate."

The part Cole leaves out

Cole says the crisis means "doing nothing is not an option." He does not mention that he helped make the crisis worse.

Cole voted for Trump's 2025 budget bill. According to the Social Security actuary's own numbers, cited by Wyden, that bill "plundered Social Security to the tune of $168 billion" — and moved the trust fund's exhaustion date up a year, from 2033 to 2032.

So the sequence is: vote for a bill that drains Social Security faster, then point at the faster deadline as the reason Congress must hand the program to a commission that answers to nobody, on terms that forbid Congress from changing a word.

There is another way to do this, and it isn't complicated. Members could introduce bills, hold hearings, take amendments, and vote in public where their constituents can see them. That is what Congress is for. It's the same argument Ohio Rep. Troy Balderson made about spending before walking it back and voting the other way — Congress decides, or it doesn't. It's what Cole gets paid to do — and he has been getting paid to do it for 23 years.

He chairs the House Appropriations Committee, the most powerful spending gavel in Congress. If anyone in the building has the standing to run a real, open debate on Social Security, it's him.

Instead, the bill he keeps reintroducing would hand the job to 13 appointees and tell the rest of Congress — and you — to take it or leave it.

Social Security pays out to more than 71 million Americans every month, and plenty of them live in Oklahoma's 4th District. They deserve to know what's in a plan before it becomes law — and they deserve a representative who will fight for the right to change it.

Source

The bill text quoted here is H.R. 9187, the Bipartisan Social Security Commission Act of 2026, as introduced in the House on June 8, 2026.

Kevin Hern's Office Wouldn't Say Where He Was. He Was Touring a Foreign Mega-Prison — and Skipped the Town Hall His Constituents Held for Him That Week.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:19:26 +0000

On Tuesday, April 15, 2025, seven House Republicans toured CECOT — the Salvadoran mega-prison where the Trump administration was sending people deported from the United States, some of them without a hearing.

Two of them posted photos of themselves in front of the caged men. One gave a thumbs-up.

Kevin Hern didn't post anything. A photo from the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador put him there. When a reporter asked his office to confirm, it wrote back with a single sentence:

"We cannot confirm or comment on the Congressman's location for security purposes."

He was a sitting member of Congress on an official trip, photographed by his own government's embassy, as The Handbasket documented. The other members on the trip were telling everyone where they were. His office treated the question as classified.

What he said once he was home

Three days later, on Friday, April 18, Hern went on Newsmax and was considerably less shy.

The subject was Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Salvadoran national who had come to the U.S. illegally as a teenager, held protected status, and whose deportation was therefore improper. Hern's answer, as Public Radio Tulsa reported:

"He will not be released. They have prisons… These folks will never see the light of day."

Read that again with the facts attached. A federal district judge had found the administration had done "nothing of substance" to get him back. Eight days before Hern went on the air, the U.S. Supreme Court had ordered the government to "facilitate" Abrego Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador and to handle his case as it would have been handled had he never been sent there. And a member of Congress who had just walked through the prison went on television to say the man would never get out.

He also offered the trip's justification: "The reality is President Trump is going to make our nation safer, because without a safe nation, you have no nation."

That is a member of the legislative branch — the branch that is supposed to check the executive — announcing that a court's order doesn't matter, about a man his own government admits it should never have sent there.

What he was skipping while he was there

Here is the part that makes this a story about Oklahoma and not just about El Salvador.

On April 17, 2025 — while Hern was on that trip — Indivisible Tulsa held a town hall at All Souls Unitarian Church. They had hand-delivered invitations to Hern, Sen. James Lankford and Sen. Markwayne Mullin.

None of the three showed up. Constituents asked their questions to three empty seats.

So in the same week: Hern had time to fly to Central America and tour a prison, and time to go on national cable to talk about it. He did not have time — and has not made time since — to stand in a room in Tulsa and be asked anything.

That wasn't a scheduling accident. It's the whole pattern:

February 2025: At a Chamber of Commerce meeting in Glenpool, constituents pressed him about Elon Musk and the mass firing of federal workers. One asked whether he would "call Elon Musk in to under oath explain what he's doing?" Another said "nobody is stopping him." Hern said he didn't know how many federal employees had been laid off in Oklahoma, never criticized the cuts, and pivoted to getting "our fiscal house in order."
March 7, 2025: A scheduled public lunch with Hern in Tulsa, hosted by the Koch-founded Americans for Prosperity, was canceled after "more than 100 activists" signed up to attend. AFP said the event was "rescheduled and reworked," and would not be open to press.
That same day: After Speaker Mike Johnson urged Republicans to stop holding in-person town halls, a Tulsa station asked every Oklahoma member whether they'd keep meeting constituents. Rep. Stephanie Bice's office said she'd continue her monthly town halls; Rep. Josh Brecheen said he was "committed to doing town halls." Hern "did not respond to our several attempts to reach" him.
April 17, 2025: The empty chair.

The February meeting in Glenpool is the last time he is known to have taken open questions from a room of Oklahomans. That was a year and a half ago.

The two policies side by side

Put Hern's April 2025 next to itself and you get the clearest statement of his priorities anyone could write for him.

Location, when constituents ask: cannot be confirmed, for security purposes.

Location, when Newsmax asks: standing in CECOT, and happy to describe it.

Questions from a church hall in Tulsa: unanswered, from an empty chair.

Questions from a cable host about men in a foreign prison: answered immediately, with certainty about a case in which the Supreme Court had just ordered the government to get the man back.

There's a version of the CECOT trip that would have been legitimate oversight. Congress has every right to inspect a facility where its own government is sending people. Oversight would have meant asking hard questions about who was in there, on what evidence, and under what legal authority — including about the constituent-adjacent case of a man the administration admitted it had deported by mistake.

That is not what happened. The delegation posed for photographs, and Hern came home and said the men would never get out.

Where this fits in his record

Hern has never been shy about which side of a power imbalance he stands on. He voted to fund ICE and CBP and put out a press release about it. He was one of 39 House Republicans who signed a letter to Attorney General Bill Barr four days after the 2020 election asking the Justice Department to investigate the results, one of the 126 who signed the Texas v. Pennsylvania amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to throw out four states' results, and — hours after the Capitol was attacked — voted to reject the electoral votes of Arizona and Pennsylvania. He voted against impeaching Trump for inciting the mob and against an independent commission to investigate it.

In each case the pattern is the same: when a court, a commission, or a voter stands between this administration and what it wants, Hern's instinct is that the obstacle is the problem.

He won Oklahoma's Republican Senate primary on June 16, 2026. If he wins in November, he gets six years of it, and a vote on every judge.

Oklahomans might want to ask him about that. Getting the chance is the hard part.

Source

Elizabeth Caldwell, "'He will not be released': Hern says wrongfully deported man will 'never see the light of day,'" Public Radio Tulsa, April 22, 2025, and Marisa Kabas, "GOP photos at El Salvador prison evoke Abu Ghraib—and worse," The Handbasket, April 17, 2025.