MAGA Report Cards — Pennsylvania

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

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

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

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

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

How the spending breaks down

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

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

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

Nearly three-quarters of the money is an attack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the man writing the checks wanted

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

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

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

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

Why this matters where you live

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

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

What the filings show

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

Source

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

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).

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

Stacy Garrity's Company Cut Its Towanda Workforce From About 950 to 500. She Was Helping Run Its Czech Plant at the Time.

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 06:41:36 +0000

Stacy Garrity has built her campaign for Pennsylvania governor on one story: she is not a career politician, she is a businesswoman. Her campaign website walks voters through her climb from accountant at Global Tungsten & Powders to becoming one of the first women ever made vice president there.

It is a good story. It leaves out what happened to the people who worked in the plant.

About 950 jobs in 2012. About 500 in 2019.

Spotlight PA reported in August that while Garrity was a director at Global Tungsten & Powders, the company "cut the workforce at its Towanda plant from around 950 employees in 2012 to roughly 500 in 2019 through multiple rounds of layoffs."

That is roughly half the jobs at one of the biggest employers in Bradford County, gone in seven years.

By 2010, Garrity was named director of sales and marketing. Spotlight PA reports that she "also helped run the company's facility in Bruntál, Czech Republic, though she did not live there," and that the job had her traveling around the world frequently, as recently as 2019.

So the years when Towanda was losing half its jobs are the same years she was helping run the operation overseas. American Journal News reported that the company was expanding its foreign workforce over that period, including at the Czech plant, and that it bought a Finnish facility in 2015 that Garrity says she helped negotiate.

Nobody has produced a document showing Garrity personally ordered a layoff. That is not the point. She is the one telling voters her record at this company qualifies her to run Pennsylvania's economy. If the years count as experience, they count as a record.

The lobbying she did without registering as a lobbyist

Garrity's last title at the company was vice president of government affairs. That job was lobbying, and she was good at it.

WHYY reported in April that she managed hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying for the company. She pushed for a 25% tariff on Chinese tungsten. She helped win a provision in the 2019 defense bill that barred the Pentagon from buying tungsten from China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran. In 2020 the company landed a $4.2 million Defense Department grant. The company also had a registered lobbyist on contract at $10,000 a month starting in 2012.

Garrity never registered as a lobbyist herself. Her campaign spokesman, Matt Beynon, told WHYY she "never crossed the requisite threshold to register as lobbyist on behalf of the company."

Spotlight PA put the incentive plainly: Garrity has downplayed her role in the policy win — arguably her biggest private-sector accomplishment — "to avert the potential negative perception that she did not formally register as a lobbyist."

That is the shape of it. She wants credit for the work when she is describing her résumé and distance from it when someone asks why she never filed the paperwork.

The plant's environmental record

The company Garrity spent 34 years at has an enforcement file.

In 2020, the Towanda plant landed on a list of the country's top 100 "super polluters," a study by the Environmental Integrity Project and the United Church of Christ that ranked facilities by toxic air emissions in populated areas. It came in at number 96, on emissions reported for 2018.

Four years earlier, the EPA had gone after the plant for a chemical release. The federal consent agreement lays out what happened. At 4:30 in the morning on January 26, 2015, a pressure valve lifted and the plant vented an estimated 213 pounds of anhydrous ammonia into the air. Federal law requires a plant to tell the state emergency commission immediately when it releases more than 100 pounds of the stuff, because it is on the government's list of extremely hazardous substances.

The company never told the state. It called the federal hotline about four and a half hours later. EPA assessed a civil penalty of $22,281.

The rest of the pitch

Garrity's business-experience argument has been showing wear all year, and this is not the first crack in it:

The Philadelphia Building and Construction Trades Council endorsed her in 2024 and is now campaigning against her, and her campaign won't say whether she would sign a right-to-work bill.
She spent two years arguing Pennsylvania should cut regulations to attract data centers, then called for a "pause" she won't put a length on.
Her Treasury office rejected a records request that would have shown whether she did a favor for donors.

She still holds a paid seat on the board of ECM, an insurance company — a position The Philadelphia Inquirer reported could pay her six figures on top of her salary as state treasurer.

What the record shows

Stacy Garrity is running for governor on 34 years at Global Tungsten & Powders. During her years as a director there, the company's Towanda plant went from about 950 workers to about 500 while she helped run its facility in the Czech Republic and the company expanded its foreign workforce. She spent years lobbying for the company without ever registering as a lobbyist. And the plant she rose through was fined $22,281 for failing to tell the state it had released 213 pounds of an extremely hazardous gas.

Source

Jesse Valentine, "Garrity helped lead super polluter that offshored jobs", American Journal News, September 2, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/Marc Levy, File.

Rob Bresnahan Traded Stock Hundreds of Times in His First Year. His Own Constituents Put an Insider Trading Ban on Their Ballot.

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:08:35 +0000

On November 3, 2026, voters in Lackawanna and Luzerne counties in northeastern Pennsylvania will find a question on their ballot that residents put there themselves. It asks whether officials should be barred from trading stocks or placing prediction-market bets using nonpublic information they picked up on the job — and whether the county should publish an annual report of ethics complaints and stock trades.

And they were not close to the line.

In Lackawanna County, Action Together NEPA submitted 16,297 signatures against a requirement of 8,894; the county Board of Elections voted 3–0 to put the question on the ballot. In Luzerne County, the group turned in roughly 21,000 signatures against a requirement of 11,615 — the first time in that county's history that citizens have placed a proposed home rule charter amendment on the ballot themselves.

Lackawanna County sits entirely inside Pennsylvania's 8th Congressional District, and so does most of Luzerne — the rest of Luzerne is in the 9th. The congressman for the 8th is Rob Bresnahan.

The record that prompted it

The Keystone reported on August 31, 2026 that Bresnahan's congressional stock trading record is what "inspired" the drive.

We have written that record out in detail before. Within five months of taking office, Business Insider had counted more than 530 trades. Over 2025 he made almost 650 individual stock trades — enough that in November, NBC News reported, he "still ranks as the seventh-biggest trader in Congress by number of trades." The disclosure tracker CapitolTrades logs 653 trades across 320 issuers, worth $8.51 million, across his whole time in office — the issuers including municipal bonds and Treasury notes alongside the stocks. And in one of those trades, he sold stock in Medicaid providers shortly before voting for the bill that cut Medicaid.

He has said his trades are made by a financial advisor without his involvement. His constituents apparently do not find the distinction reassuring.

The ban wouldn't cover him. The disclosure would.

This is a county home rule charter amendment, so the prohibition binds elected county officials and county employees, along with the members and employees of county authorities, boards and commissions. It does not make anything illegal for a member of the United States House.

But the second half of the measure reaches further. It would require the county to publish an annual report of stock trades by county, state and federal officials representing the county. Lackawanna's elections board solicitor, Anthony Lomma, counted 135 elected officials the reporting provision could cover — up to and including, in his reading, the president and vice president along with state and federal representatives and senators.

So the practical effect on Bresnahan is not a ban. It is a hometown scoreboard: his trades, listed once a year, in a document produced by the counties he represents, because voters there decided they wanted to see them.

They wrote it themselves because Congress won't

Congress has not passed a stock-trading ban on itself. Bills get introduced, get cosponsors, and go nowhere.

So residents of two former coal counties went and amended the only charter they could actually amend, and gathered nearly twice the signatures needed to do it.

He introduced a ban himself

Bresnahan is not opposed to a congressional stock trading ban — in public.

He introduced one. In the same month he introduced it, he disclosed roughly 100 stock trades. That is about three a day, in the month he was asking his colleagues to outlaw the practice. His explanation, written as an addendum to his own disclosure filing, was that every investment decision is delegated to professional advisors and that he has "no role in, nor am informed of, specific investment decisions prior to their execution" — a claim that sat awkwardly beside his own earlier description, on Wilkes-Barre radio, of meeting his financial advisor to talk about "what different positions are coming up."

His campaign spokesman later told POLITICO that he had been "referring to 30,000-foot investment strategy and not about stock trades," and compared it to "a routine annual 401(k) meeting."

What the record shows

Voters in the two counties at the core of Rob Bresnahan's district gathered 16,297 signatures in Lackawanna and about 21,000 in Luzerne — nearly double the roughly 20,500 required between them — to put an insider trading ban on their November 3 ballots, in a drive the local newsroom reports was inspired by their own congressman's trading. Bresnahan made almost 650 individual stock trades in 2025 alone, sold Medicaid provider stock before voting to cut Medicaid, and introduced a congressional stock-trading ban in a month he made about 100 trades. The ban itself would only bind county officials. Its reporting provision would put his trades in an annual county report.

Source

Rob Bresnahan's stock trading under scrutiny as thousands of constituents push for insider trading ban — The Keystone, August 31, 2026. Photo: Bill Clark / CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images.

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.

Ryan Mackenzie Has Claimed a Private-Sector Career Since 2012. The Only Thing Behind It Is a License He Held for Two Years While Working in Politics.

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:15:02 +0000

Ryan Mackenzie represents Pennsylvania's 7th District, in the Lehigh Valley. He won the seat in 2024 by one percentage point, and The Guardian calls it a battleground again this November.

On August 27, 2026, The Guardian reported that the private-sector career Mackenzie has been citing for fourteen years appears to consist of a license he held for two years and may never have used.

The problem is not that a license lapsed. It is what the license was being used to claim. Mackenzie has presented himself to voters as a man with a working life outside politics, and the only thing behind that is a credential valid for two years — years he spent drawing a paycheck from a political party committee and a federal agency. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which is the House Democrats' campaign arm and not a neutral observer here, told The Guardian he had "fabricated a career ... that never existed."

The license

Mackenzie got a Pennsylvania real estate salesperson license in 2006. It expired in 2008 and he did not renew it.

During those same years, he was working for the Republican Federal Committee of Pennsylvania and for the U.S. Department of Labor.

His campaign would not tell The Guardian whether he ever used the license, or made a single sale.

What he was claiming

The claim was never just that he once held a license. It was private-sector experience — a working life outside government. That is what his 2012 campaign told Patch.com he had: "private sector experience as a real estate salesperson."

What sits behind it is a license valid for two years, during which his two employers were a party committee and a federal department, and a campaign that will not say he ever used it.

The DCCC's spokesperson, Eli Cousin, told The Guardian that Mackenzie and his allies "embellished his resume and fabricated a career in real estate that never existed," and called him "a career politician who has seemingly never worked a day in his life outside of politics." That is a partisan opponent talking. What is not in dispute is the paper trail: two years of license, and no answer about whether it was ever used.

Where the claim appears

Mackenzie's spokesperson, Arnaud Armstrong, brushed the whole thing off as "passing mentions, mostly from third parties."

Here is where those mentions appear:

His LinkedIn profile, which says he "was a real estate salesperson licensed in PA."
His Pennsylvania state house biography, which lists "licensed real estate sales" under his professional career history.
His congressional webpage biography, which says he "worked on a number of political campaigns and earned his real estate sales license before entering public service."
His own 2012 campaign for state representative, which told Patch.com he had "private sector experience as a real estate salesperson."
Mackenzie himself, in 2012, telling a Pennsylvania news outlet: "I was an employee at the US Department of Labor and also I used to hold my real estate salesperson's license."

All five of those are Mackenzie or his own campaign. The two genuine third parties make the claim bigger, not smaller. A 2025 Harvard Business School event listing said he would "reflect on his career path from the real estate sector to public service." A 2025 voter guide from Boeing's political action committee said flatly: "Mackenzie worked in real estate."

This is the second time

In 2024 it came out that Mackenzie's 2020 Tinder profile listed his age as 29 when he was 37. When more than 100 women in his own district asked him to own it, he told a national TV audience that most of them were Democrat operatives. A reporter checked. They weren't. His office did not deny the age claim then, and did not respond to The Guardian's questions about it now, or about reports that a staffer scrubbed the story from his Wikipedia page.

The words he uses for his opponent

Mackenzie is running against Bob Brooks, who spent twenty years as a firefighter in Bethlehem and led the Pennsylvania Professional Fire Fighters Association, which represents more than 8,000 firefighters and first responders across the state.

Mackenzie has called Brooks a "fraud," a "conman," a "lobbyist," a "dumpster fire candidate" and a "union boss." His campaign manager said Brooks has "all the hallmarks of a common criminal."

At the Carbon County Republican summer picnic on August 25, 2026, Mackenzie went after Brooks for being a labor leader — arguing he would tilt things toward union members rather than keep a level playing field. Union members in the district pushed back in The Keystone.

"He, to me, seems like he's more for the middle-class worker. I wouldn't say he's beholden to unions in any way, shape, or form."

— Shawn Smith, who works at the Mack Trucks plant

Ernest Williams, a shop steward at AmeriCold Logistics, said workers would see in Brooks "somebody who understands their issues, who understands what they're dealing with, what they're going through."

Mackenzie's own record with the workers in his district is on file. In June 2026 he stood with Trump at the Macungie Mack Trucks plant and praised him — at the same plant that had announced layoffs because of Trump's tariffs.

And Associated Builders and Contractors, the anti-union construction lobby, has given his campaign $7,500 this cycle — with business before the Education and Workforce Committee he sits on, where he chairs the Workforce Protections Subcommittee.

What the record shows

Ryan Mackenzie has cited a real estate career in his state house bio, his congressional bio, his LinkedIn, a 2012 campaign statement and his own words to a reporter. The license behind all of it was active from 2006 to 2008, years he spent working for the Republican Federal Committee of Pennsylvania and the U.S. Department of Labor, and his campaign will not say whether he ever made a sale. What voters were sold was a career outside politics. What is documented is a two-year credential and a lifetime inside it. This is the second documented case of him overstating a fact about himself, after the eight years he took off his age on a dating profile. He is calling his opponent — a twenty-year firefighter — a fraud and a conman.

Source

Michael Sainato, The Guardian: "In a Pennsylvania congressional swing district, a Republican incumbent faces allegations over embellishing résumé" (August 27, 2026). Photograph by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images. Union response reporting by Sean Kitchen, The Keystone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The vote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four of them voted for it four separate times

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

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

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

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

Arizona, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin: the promises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Source

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

220,000 Pennsylvanians Have Lost Food Stamps in a Year. Nine Pennsylvania Republicans Voted for the Law Behind Nearly Half of It.

Mon, 24 Aug 2026 07:57:54 +0000

In March 2025, a reporter for the Pennsylvania Capital-Star asked Glenn Thompson — the Pennsylvania congressman who runs the House Agriculture Committee — whether cuts to food stamps were on the table in the Farm Bill he was writing.

Thompson said no. "Absolutely no reductions in the nutritional benefits," he told them. Warnings about SNAP cuts were "a rumor that was started by folks who are anti-farming." They were "just misinformation."

Two months later, Thompson released the budget-bill text that wrote the cuts.

This week the same newspaper went back and counted what happened next.

The number

A year ago, 1.96 million Pennsylvanians were on SNAP — food stamps. Today it is 1.74 million. That is a drop of about 220,000 people, roughly 11 percent of everyone in the program, in a single year.

Pennsylvania's own Department of Human Services estimates that about 98,000 of those losses — just under half — come directly from the new SNAP rules in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Trump's 2025 budget law.

That law did three things to SNAP: it created new work requirements, it limited eligibility for immigrants, and it demanded a lot more paperwork from people signing up or renewing.

The paperwork part is not a footnote. It is how a program sheds people who still qualify.

Who actually voted for it

On July 3, 2025, the House took its final vote on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The roll call is published by the Clerk of the House, name by name.

Nine Pennsylvania Republicans voted yes:

Glenn Thompson (PA-15) — Chairman of the House Agriculture Committee
Rob Bresnahan (PA-8)
John Joyce (PA-13)
Mike Kelly (PA-16)
Ryan Mackenzie (PA-7)
Dan Meuser (PA-9)
Scott Perry (PA-10)
Guy Reschenthaler (PA-14)
Lloyd Smucker (PA-11)

One Pennsylvania Republican, Brian Fitzpatrick, voted no.

Across those nine districts, 427,510 households rely on SNAP, according to the USDA's own congressional district data. Not people — households. The heaviest are Reschenthaler's (60,518 households, about 18% of every household in the district) and Bresnahan's (55,665, also about 18%).

These men did not cut a program that serves someone else's constituents. They cut the one their own districts lean on hardest.

What it looks like at the food bank

Anne Eagan runs the Allentown Area Ecumenical Food Bank, the only daily food bank in Lehigh County — which sits inside Ryan Mackenzie's district. It takes in about 15,000 pounds of food a week and gives out about a million pounds a year.

In the last two months alone, during what is normally the slow season, it has seen a 55% increase in new clients.

"The majority of [new clients] that we've spoken to and asked these questions are people who have had their SNAP either cut or taken away completely," Eagan told the Capital-Star. "Most of them are working, and they just can't make ends meet between their income and the price of gas."

Most of them are working. That is the part worth reading twice, because the law's headline feature was a work requirement.

In the 27 counties served by the Central Pennsylvania Food Bank — a stretch running from Lancaster County, which Lloyd Smucker represents, north to Tioga County on the New York line — about 40,000 fewer people had SNAP this April than a year before.

The food bank's chief strategy officer, Zach Zook, gave the Capital-Star the number that explains why charity can't cover this: the federal SNAP program provides nine meals for every one the Feeding America food bank network provides.

"A loss in SNAP benefits is really a very big deal," Zook said.

Around Pittsburgh, where Guy Reschenthaler's district sits, the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank counts 37,000 fewer people with SNAP access than last July. "Just looking at the numbers in cash value, that's a $5 million loss to our regional economy," said Colleen Young, the food bank's director of government affairs. The food bank ran nearly $2.5 million over budget last year just buying enough food to keep up.

In Philadelphia, the Share Food Program saw about 7,000 new people in January, right after the stricter rules took effect. By July, after roughly 60,000 Philadelphians lost benefits, it was seeing 30,000 new individuals in a month.

Who is on SNAP in Pennsylvania

The state says 35% of Pennsylvania's SNAP recipients are under 18, and 25% are over 55.

So when nine congressmen voted to tighten work requirements on this program, more than a third of the people they were tightening them on were children.

The excuses don't survive contact with the receipts

The Agriculture Department told the Capital-Star that enrollment changes should not be attributed to any one policy change: people "might move to employment, become disinterested in participating, or experience another change in household circumstances."

Pennsylvania's Department of Human Services put a number on it anyway: 98,000. And the food banks are not seeing people who found jobs. They are seeing working people who lost their benefits and now need a food box.

Thompson's own defense is the weakest of all, because he is on record twice. He said in March that SNAP cuts were "misinformation." He released the text of the cuts in May. He voted to pass them in July. And his explanation for what he'd built was that SNAP had "drifted from a bridge to support American households in need to a permanent destination."

He's the Agriculture chairman. He didn't get outvoted. He wrote it.

It is about to get worse

Three things are already scheduled.

Later this year, states have to start paying a bigger share of SNAP's administrative costs — money Pennsylvania will have to find somewhere. Whether it comes out of the state's own nutrition programs, like its farm-to-food-bank initiative, is not yet clear.

Starting in late 2027, Pennsylvania can be penalized if its SNAP error rate isn't below 6%. The rate was 9.21% in 2025. It had already fallen from 16.61% in 2023, but not far enough, and the penalty comes out of the state's pocket either way.

Next year, work requirements arrive for Medicaid. Roughly 750,000 Pennsylvanians are covered under the program's expansion, and starting January 1 those aged 19 to 64 without a child under 14 will have to prove 80 hours a month of work, school or volunteering to keep it. That is the same paperwork machinery, aimed at health coverage. When medical bills go up, food budgets go down.

None of that is a forecast about what Republicans might do. It is a schedule they already voted for.

The part nobody in Washington has to see

"We continue to have to fill the gaps that could be eliminated tomorrow by the federal government," said George Matysik, executive director of the Share Food Program in Philadelphia. His food bank was also facing an $8 million cut in federal support that it said would reduce the food coming into its warehouse by about 20%.

"There should be no reason that food banks like Share Food Program exist in the richest country in the history of the world," Matysik said. "We have enough food, we have enough resources to ensure that the working class doesn't have to starve just because of poor federal policies."

The bottom line

About 220,000 people in Pennsylvania have lost food assistance in a year, and the state's own agency traces just under half of that — about 98,000 — directly to the law these nine Republicans voted for. Those nine represent 427,510 households that rely on SNAP. The one who wrote the cuts had promised, four months earlier, that talk of cutting SNAP was "misinformation."

Source

Ian Karbal, "Food banks across Pennsylvania are struggling to keep up in the face of SNAP cuts, economic pain", Pennsylvania Capital-Star, August 24, 2026. Photo by Ian Karbal / Pennsylvania Capital-Star.

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

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

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

Here is a number worth sitting with.

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

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

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

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

The order

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It's a good way to get shot"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeff Van Drew blames the voters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What replaced it

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

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

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

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

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

One Republican still does it

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

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

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

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

Someone else is holding their town halls

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

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

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

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

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

The part that isn't about town halls

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

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

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

Source

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

Rob Bresnahan's Taxpayer-Funded Video Showed Up in Google's Political Ad Library Under 'Rob for PA.' A Constituent Filed an Ethics Complaint.

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:33:15 +0000

Members of Congress get a budget of your money to talk to you. It is called the franking allowance, and it pays for the mailers, newsletters, and videos that explain what your representative is doing in Washington.

There is one hard rule attached to it. The House's own Communications Standards Manual says official communications "should not be used for political or personal business," and that they may contain "no campaign content or electioneering." Your money pays for the job. It does not pay for the reelection.

A woman in Lackawanna County thinks Rob Bresnahan crossed that line, and she filed a complaint saying so.

What happened

In July 2026, Bresnahan's office put out a promotional video about a bill he introduced — the Local Farmers Feeding Our Communities Act, which is aimed at helping farmers sell and distribute their food. The video linked to his official House website. It carried the disclaimer that House-authorized taxpayer funds paid for it.

That video then appeared in Google's political advertising database, filed under the account "Rob for PA."

That is his campaign.

Google's political ad library exists precisely to let the public see who is paying for election advertising. A taxpayer-funded official communication is not supposed to be in it at all. The video was later moved over to his official congressional accounts.

Adriane Heine, a constituent from Lackawanna County, filed a complaint with the Office of Congressional Conduct, accusing Bresnahan of breaking federal law and House rules by using an official communication as campaign material. NOTUS reporter Avani Kalra broke the story on August 21; Spotlight PA republished it.

"A clerical error"

Bresnahan's office says this was a mistake by someone else — and so, on the record, do the vendors. Molly Vroom of The Franking Group, the firm that handled the official communication, told NOTUS the issue was "the result of an oversight in the advertisement's verification process" and that "this was a clerical reporting error that has absolutely nothing to do with Congressman Bresnahan." Separately, the ad-tracking site AdImpact had also logged Bresnahan's official ads as election ads for Pennsylvania's 8th District; its senior vice president John Link told NOTUS: "Ultimately, this was our clerical error."

His spokesperson, Hannah Pope, said:

"A clerical error by the vendor and Google resulted in an initial mislabeling of the piece as connected to the campaign, which was later rectified."

Pope also called the complaint "politically motivated" and "based on completely inaccurate information." Heine has supported Bresnahan's Democratic opponent, Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti, and given money to her campaign, according to the Federal Election Commission records NOTUS added to its story the next day.

Heine is not buying it:

"It sounds like someone is covering their tracks. They got called out on it, so they had to backpedal."

Two things are worth saying plainly here. First, a vendor error is a possible explanation, and nobody has proven otherwise. Second, The Franking Group works for Bresnahan's office, and "the vendor did it" is not an explanation anyone gets to accept on faith when the vendor is the one saying it. That is what an investigation is for.

The investigation probably won't finish before you vote

The Office of Congressional Conduct is an independent, nonpartisan body. It looks into complaints against House members and can refer what it finds to the House Ethics Committee. It cannot hand down punishments itself.

It also stops taking on new investigations during a 60-day blackout period before an election. That window is closing. So the odds that Pennsylvania's 8th District voters get an answer on this before Election Day are not good.

Bresnahan is in a toss-up race against Cognetti, whose campaign called him a "poster child of corruption."

Why this one lands where it does

Taken alone, a mislabeled video is a small thing. It does not land alone.

Bresnahan ran for Congress promising to clean up exactly this kind of behavior. In a March 2021 op-ed he wrote that lawmakers trading stocks while voting on the companies they trade "is wrong and needs to come to an end immediately." On the 2024 trail he called it "sickening" that politicians make big money while in office.

Then he got to Washington and made 653 trades across 320 issuers, totaling $8.51 million — including dumping Medicaid-linked stock before voting to cut Medicaid. In his first year he ranked as the seventh-biggest trader in all of Congress by number of trades, according to the tracking site Capitol Trades.

He also sells himself as an ordinary guy from Northeastern Pennsylvania who "learned the value of hard work early, sweeping floors, wiring junction boxes" — while chartering a $23,000 private jet and owning a helicopter worth over a million dollars. He is worth roughly $48 million. The median household in his district makes about $68,000.

The pattern is not that Bresnahan breaks big laws. It is that he keeps ending up on the wrong side of the small line between what is his and what is ours.

He is not the only one

Using official money to run something that looks like a campaign ad is a habit across the House Republican conference, and we have documented it repeatedly:

Mike Collins spent $400,000 of taxpayer money on ads that look just like his campaign spots.
Mark Messmer raised $1.4 million in political money and paid for his own ad with yours instead.
Michelle Fischbach spent $51,000 of public money on mail in three months while refusing to hold a town hall or answer a reporter.

There is a reason the rule exists. Incumbents already have enormous advantages over challengers. The franking budget is supposed to buy constituents information, not buy the incumbent name recognition on the constituents' own dime.

When a video paid for out of that budget shows up in Google's political ad library under the campaign's name, the burden is on the congressman to explain it — not on the constituent who noticed.

Adriane Heine noticed. Good for her.

Source

"Rob Bresnahan Blames a 'Clerical Error' for a Video a Constituent Alleges Broke House Rules" — NOTUS, August 21, 2026, by Avani Kalra. Photo: Spotlight PA.

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

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

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

That somebody is usually you, on your electric bill.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Barrett is running on a vote from 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Town Fought a Data Center. Seven Republicans Decided You Might Be Working for China.

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 07:10:18 +0000

Data centers are enormous warehouses full of computers that run AI. They drink electricity and water, and somebody has to build the power plants and power lines that feed them. That somebody is everyone else on the grid.

So people have started showing up at county meetings to say no. Not activists — county commissioners, farmers, retirees, parents worried about a well.

They are not a fringe. Gallup found that 71% of Americans oppose building a data center in their area — far more than the 53% who oppose a nuclear plant nearby. Seven in ten of your neighbors.

Seven Republicans have landed on the same answer to those seven in ten. Not "here's why you're wrong." Not "here's how we'll protect your bill."

They have decided you might be on a foreign payroll — and several of them have asked federal law enforcement to find out.

Tom Cotton asked the Justice Department to investigate the objectors

On June 10, 2026, Tom Cotton sent a two-page letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche asking DOJ to "investigate foreign influence efforts targeting the buildout of American AI infrastructure."

Not the companies building them. The people objecting to them. The specific ask was an investigation under the Foreign Agents Registration Act — the law for people secretly working for foreign governments.

The remarkable part is what's in the middle of his own letter:

"Americans certainly have valid concerns about potential rising energy costs and strains on natural resources related to data centers, and we should implement common sense regulations and legislation to protect communities from adverse effects."

He agrees with them in writing, then asks the federal government's top law enforcement agency to open a file on them anyway.

His evidence names one person and reaches for a professor who appeared on a panel. That's the case.

Bob Latta, Brett Guthrie and John Joyce wrote to the FBI

Six days earlier, on June 4, three House Republicans signed a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel asking what the administration was doing about "foreign influence campaigns" behind the data center backlash.

Bob Latta chairs the Energy Subcommittee. Brett Guthrie chairs the full Energy and Commerce Committee. John Joyce chairs its Oversight Subcommittee. These are the three men in the House with the most direct power to actually do something about an electric bill.

Their press release quotes Guthrie: "Americans deserve to know who is bankrolling the disinformation campaign that seeks to block critical infrastructure investments."

The letter leans on two reports — one from the Bitcoin Policy Institute, one from a group called Power the Future. Neither establishes any link between a foreign government and a township meeting in Ohio or Kentucky.

Latta's problem is the calendar. Thirty-six days before he signed it, he gaveled in his own subcommittee hearing and said this in his opening statement:

"Many question whether AI, and the data centers that power it, will ultimately do more harm than good, particularly when it comes to individual energy costs. These concerns deserve to be taken seriously."

In April the concerns deserved to be taken seriously. In June they were an FBI matter. Nothing changed in between except that the backlash got louder — because the bills got bigger. We laid out the whole timeline on Latta.

Guthrie's problem is his own district. Breckinridge County passed a one-year moratorium. Daviess County passed one too. Meade County killed a project outright after 3,000 people signed a petition. Three county governments in a deep-red Kentucky district, hitting the brakes — and the woman who started the Daviess petition said she'd never engaged with Guthrie's office at all. The chairman of the committee that governs the grid, and his constituents took their grid fight to the county courthouse instead.

Derrick Van Orden and Tim Burchett skipped the paperwork

Derrick Van Orden represents Wisconsin's 3rd District, where a data center is planned in Wisconsin Rapids. Asked about opposition, he said a lot of the information against the project comes "from the Chinese companies" who are "paying people to say this stuff."

Tim Burchett of Tennessee put it at one remove. There is "a lot of misinformation out there," he said, and "there's talk that the Chinese are putting it out because they're the ones that want to be in the business of it."

No letter, no FBI request. Just the theory, aired in public about their own constituents.

Tommy Tuberville called his neighbors' concerns "bull crap"

At least ten Alabama communities — Cullman, Birmingham, Leeds, Homewood, Fort Payne, Bessemer, Pinson, Wilsonville, Fairfield, Mobile — have pushed back on data centers. Cullman's city council voted unanimously for a one-year moratorium.

Tommy Tuberville, the Republican nominee for governor, told the Alabama Sheriffs Association:

"It's going to ruin the climate — bull crap. They are listening to all this nonsense they see on social media that's coming from China because China does not want us to grow."

Then he told them it wouldn't matter what they decided: "You can forget about doing away with it because it's coming."

The things Alabama city councils have actually been debating are water use, noise, electrical demand and landscaping. That's zoning, not a foreign influence campaign.

Somebody actually checked

This is the part that should end the argument.

NPR went looking for the Chinese campaign. Darren Linvill co-leads the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson, which tracks foreign influence operations online. His finding:

"We haven't found much."

His larger point was that the premise doesn't hold together. China runs enormous bot networks, but they're not interested in your county zoning board. As he put it, China "tends to care a lot more about what you think about China and China's economy than they tend to do about what you think about your neighbor and what's happening in your own backyard."

He told NPR he can't rule out that China is quietly paying influencers to oppose data centers. His point is that there would be no need to.

And on the people organizing:

"I think in this case, the people talking about data centers are real people with real passions and real perspectives and real opinions."

There is one real case. OpenAI banned a cluster of likely Chinese accounts generating anti-data-center content — probably a private Chinese firm working for provincial government clients. Read what OpenAI's own threat investigations lead, Ben Nimmo, said about it:

"This was not a case of an influence operation creating a debate. The debate existed already. This was an influence operation from China trying to interfere in it. We didn't see any signs that they succeeded."

The debate existed already. Seventy-one percent.

What this actually is

Strip the national-security language off and look at the structure.

Seven in ten Americans object to something. The politicians who want it built anyway cannot answer the objection on the merits — because the merits are a water table and an electric bill, and those are measurable. So the objection itself gets reclassified as a hostile act.

That move has a cost beyond this one fight. Cotton chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose job is to keep the surveillance apparatus pointed outward and inside the law. Latta, Guthrie and Joyce run the committee that decides what your utility can charge you. Every one of them chose to aim the government at the people asking questions rather than at the problem.

The neighbors in Cullman and Meade County and Wisconsin Rapids did not get a foreign wire transfer. They got a bill.

Sources

Geoff Brumfiel, "The theory taking the rich by storm: China funds data center haters," NPR, June 10, 2026 — Linvill, Nimmo and the OpenAI takedown. Van Orden's and Burchett's quotes are from "The data centers are coming. Is Congress ready?" Roll Call, Aug. 12, 2026. Cotton's request is in his June 10, 2026 letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, reported by Fox News; the Guthrie, Joyce and Latta letter to FBI Director Kash Patel is in their own June 4, 2026 press release. Tuberville's remarks to the Alabama Sheriffs Association were reported by WBRC, July 14, 2026, and by Yellowhammer News, July 14, 2026, which has the "forget about doing away with it" line. The list of Alabama communities is Brian Lyman's in the Alabama Reflector, July 27, 2026. Polling: Gallup, "Americans Oppose Data Centers in Their Area". Photo: protesters at the Utah state Capitol in Salt Lake City on May 23, 2026, opposing the Stratos data center in Box Elder County, by Natalie Behring / Getty Images, via NPR.

The Union That Backed Stacy Garrity in 2024 Is Now Campaigning Against Her. Her Campaign Won't Say If She'd Sign Right-to-Work.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:41:36 +0000

Two years ago, the Philadelphia Building and Construction Trades Council — a coalition of more than 50 unions — endorsed a Republican for Pennsylvania state treasurer. That Republican was Stacy Garrity, and the crossover support helped her win with about 3.5 million votes, the largest statewide total in Pennsylvania history.

This week, the same council's business manager stood at a union training center in North Philadelphia and campaigned against her.

"I wouldn't support her if she ran for dog catcher"

Ryan Boyer runs the council. He said Garrity had promised the building trades she would not run against Gov. Josh Shapiro, whom the council had also endorsed.

She ran anyway.

"We think that Josh Shapiro's a superior governor and for her to break that promise led me to say that I wouldn't support her if she ran for dog catcher."

Boyer explained why they had backed her in the first place. She had made commitments — including pushing for an increase in Pennsylvania's unemployment compensation payments.

"She said the right things. She said that she would support the working men and women of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania."

Boyer was clear that this isn't about party. "I'm not an R or a D," he said. "I'm a J for a job or O for an opportunity."

That's about as direct a verdict as a union leader delivers on a politician he once endorsed: we took her at her word, and the word was no good.

The endorsement she did take

Garrity has not announced the support of a single major traditional labor union in the governor's race. Shapiro has the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO — the state's largest labor federation — and the Pennsylvania State Education Association, its largest teachers union.

What Garrity has is an endorsement from the political arm of the Associated Builders and Contractors, a national construction trade group that supports "right-to-work" laws.

Right-to-work laws bar contracts that require workers covered by a union agreement to join the union or pay dues — even at a workplace where a majority voted to organize. Unions argue they drive wages down, a contention supported by some research, though the size of the effect is debated because right-to-work states differ in other ways too.

Lt. Gov. Austin Davis, appearing with Boyer, drew the line:

"Pennsylvania will never be a right to work state under our watch."

The question Garrity's campaign didn't answer

Here is the part that matters most, and we want to be precise about it.

Garrity has not made right-to-work a central plank of her campaign. No one has caught her promising to sign such a bill.

But WHYY asked her campaign a direct question — would she support right-to-work legislation? — and her spokesperson, Matt Beynon, did not answer it. Instead he said Garrity "will pursue free market policies that empower Pennsylvania workers and businesses," and accused Shapiro of "picking winners and losers."

A candidate who intended to veto a right-to-work bill could say so in four words. Davis managed it in twelve. Garrity's campaign used a paragraph and never got there.

For Pennsylvania's union members, that non-answer is the story. The governor is the last line of defense against a right-to-work bill reaching the statute books — which is exactly why Davis made the pledge he did. Refusing to say where you stand on it is a position.

Her campaign's other argument points the same direction: it has accused Shapiro of being too closely aligned with building-trades unions, and says Pennsylvania needs to expand workforce opportunities beyond traditional union apprenticeship programs. Those are the programs that train the electricians, steamfitters and carpenters Boyer represents.

Beynon's statement was that Garrity would "do what Josh Shapiro has not done — she will fight for Pennsylvania workers and advocate for Pennsylvania businesses."

Why 2024 was different

It would be easy to read this as ordinary partisanship. It isn't — and the 2024 result is the proof.

In 2024, the Philadelphia Building Trades, the Pennsylvania Laborers and other labor groups crossed party lines for Garrity. Those unions are not reflexive Democrats; they endorse whoever they think will deliver.

What changed is what's on the table. A treasurer manages the state's money. A governor signs or vetoes labor law. When the office in play is the one that decides whether a right-to-work bill becomes law, the unions that once vouched for her want an answer she won't give.

Boyer said the building trades remain willing to endorse from either party. He said Garrity forfeited their support by breaking her promise and by aligning with groups hostile to organized labor.

A pattern of not answering

The refusal to answer a straight question is becoming Garrity's signature.

Asked whether Trump lost in 2020, she said she'd "rather look forward" — then said she would "absolutely" be more cooperative with the federal government's request for Pennsylvania's voter rolls.
Asked about ICE converting Berks and Schuylkill County warehouses into detention facilities holding an estimated 9,000 detainees, her campaign would only say they "warrant serious review."
Asked for her communications about a Treasury policy change that observers said benefited the natural gas industry, her office called the records request a "fishing expedition" and refused.
After two years pushing data centers, she discovered she wanted a "pause" once it became a campaign liability — while insisting nothing had changed.

The bigger picture for workers

Garrity isn't an outlier in her party on this. We recently documented the Republicans with the worst records on workers and unions, and the 195 House Republicans who voted to keep a contract-stripping executive order in place after one in every 14 union members in America lost their bargaining agreement.

What makes Garrity's case sharper is that Pennsylvania's building trades gave her a chance, on the record, and are now taking it back in public.

Pennsylvania votes for governor on Tuesday, November 3. Before then, Garrity's campaign could simply answer the question: would she sign a right-to-work bill?

The workers who elected her once are still waiting.

Source

A labor-unions group that once supported Stacy Garrity for Pa. treasurer is campaigning against her bid for governor — Carmen Russell-Sluchansky, WHYY News, August 18, 2026. Photo by Emma Lee/WHYY.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

What the 60 Plus Association actually wants

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who took the award

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

Taking it this year:

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

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

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

The vote that already happened

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

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

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

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

The one who wouldn't answer the question

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

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

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

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

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

This is a pattern, not an accident

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

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

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

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

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One said yes.

The tally

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

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

Husted is the one to look at

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

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

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

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

What Van Orden said

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

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

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

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

The pattern, not the exception

None of this is new behavior around Max Miller.

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

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

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

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

Why it matters where you live

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

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

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the judge did

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

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

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

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

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

What the letter asks for

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

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

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

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

The man who led it sells the products

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

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

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

Who signed

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

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

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

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

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

What registration was actually doing

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

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

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the gloves are

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

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

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

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

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

The warnings come from the company that sells them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congress wrote guardrails. They were about equipment.

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

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

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

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

Two votes made this possible

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

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

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

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

The 201 with report cards on this site

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

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

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

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

Source

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

Lloyd Smucker's Hometown Paper Called Him a Liar. He Sued It for $250,000.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:31:40 +0000

In October 2025, the federal government was heading toward a shutdown. The fight was over whether to extend the health insurance tax credits that were about to expire.

Lloyd Smucker sent his constituents a newsletter about it. In it, he wrote that "Liberals demanded taxpayer-funded free healthcare for illegal immigrants."

On October 8, the editorial board of LNP | LancasterOnline — the daily paper in his own district — published an editorial saying that wasn't true. The headline was blunt: Smucker and other Republicans "are lying about shutdown and Democrats' health care aims." The text was blunter:

"Congressman Smucker is lying to his constituents about the health care battle being fought by Democrats."

It added that Smucker and his fellow Republicans were "playing a cynical game of Twister, stretching and contorting reality to sell a falsehood."

That is a hard thing to read about yourself. A member of Congress has a lot of ways to answer it. He can write a rebuttal. He can demand a correction. He can go on the radio, which Smucker does regularly. He can hold a town hall and take the question in front of the people who read the paper.

He did something else. The next day, his attorney sent LNP a letter demanding an apology and a retraction. The paper declined. On February 2, 2026, Smucker sued LNP Media Group for defamation in Lancaster County Court, seeking more than $250,000.

Who he hired

Smucker's legal team includes Villanova-area attorney Wally Zimolong and Kenneth T. Cuccinelli II — the former attorney general of Virginia, who later ran Trump's immigration agencies and needed special permission to practice in Pennsylvania for this case.

That is not a hometown libel lawyer. That is a national conservative legal figure brought in to sue a Lancaster County newspaper over an editorial.

The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, run by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, logged the suit as a press-freedom incident and placed it in the broader pattern of officials moving to punish outlets that covered them critically.

The thing the editorial said he was wrong about

It's worth stopping on the actual claim, because it's checkable.

Immigrants in the country illegally cannot buy the coverage at issue. The Kaiser Family Foundation's fact sheet on immigrant health coverage states it plainly:

"Undocumented immigrants are not eligible to enroll in federally funded coverage including Medicaid, CHIP, or Medicare or to purchase coverage through the ACA Marketplaces."

They cannot enroll, and they cannot get the subsidies. So "taxpayer-funded free healthcare for illegal immigrants" was not what Democrats were asking for in the shutdown fight. They were asking to extend the enhanced tax credits that lower premiums for people who are eligible.

There is one narrow exception, and it's the hook Smucker's lawyers hung the case on. Emergency Medicaid reimburses hospitals for emergency treatment of people who would qualify for Medicaid except for their immigration status. It pays the hospital. It does not enroll anyone in anything. LNP's own reporting had acknowledged that some federal money therefore reaches the cost of treating noncitizens indirectly — and Smucker's complaint argues that because the paper's newsroom knew that, its editorial board knew "lying" was false when it published the word.

What the paper said

LNP executive editor Tom Murse's response was short and rested entirely on the First Amendment:

"The Oct. 8, 2025 editorial expressed an opinion on a matter of public concern, which is the purpose of editorials. Under the First Amendment, expressing opinions — including characterizing one side's positions as false — is protected speech and does not constitute defamation."

Eric Feder, who leads a team at the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press that helps local newsrooms defend their First Amendment rights, was asked by WITF to assess the case. "It seems exceedingly weak to me," he said. As a public official, Smucker has to prove actual malice — that the paper published something it knew was false or seriously doubted was true. Feder said that standard is "very difficult to establish."

Pennsylvania passed a law about this in 2024

Two years ago Pennsylvania adopted the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act, an anti-SLAPP statute that took effect on July 17, 2024. SLAPP stands for a lawsuit whose real purpose isn't to win — it's to make speaking expensive.

The law lets a defendant sued over speech on a public issue file for early dismissal, freezes the costly discovery process while that motion is pending, and shifts legal fees to the plaintiff when the claim fails at that stage. Attorney Garen Meguerian, writing in the Bucks County Beacon, called Smucker's suit "almost a textbook example" of what the statute was written for: an opinionated editorial, grounded in disclosed reporting, about a federal policy fight, aimed at a sitting congressman.

Where it stands — and this part cuts his way

In early July 2026, the judge denied LNP's motion to dismiss. Smucker's office put out a statement quoting the ruling:

"Smucker's characterization had a substantial factual basis, such that LNP's accusation of 'lying' could be understood as a provably false assertion of intentional dishonesty."

That's a real win for him at this stage, and it deserves to be said straight. A judge found his newsletter claim wasn't baseless enough to make "lying" automatically protected opinion.

It is not a verdict. Denying a motion to dismiss means only that the case may proceed. LNP appealed to the Pennsylvania Superior Court the following Monday. The paper is now spending money on appellate lawyers over one sentence in an editorial.

Which is the point of a suit like this, whoever wins. Smucker's statement closed by saying "a free press plays a vital role in our democracy, and with that role comes a responsibility to report the truth accurately and fairly." The mechanism he chose to enforce that responsibility is a quarter-million-dollar damages claim against a local newsroom in a business that has been shedding reporters for twenty years.

The paper he's suing is the paper that prints him

Here's what makes this one strange.

LNP | LancasterOnline is not a hostile national outlet that parachuted into Lancaster County. It is the paper that publishes Lloyd Smucker's own writing. In February 2025 it ran his column making the case for Elon Musk's DOGE, in which he wrote that "DOGE operates with full transparency" and that Americans "should be applauding DOGE's efforts." The opinion page he is suing gave him 800-odd words to say so.

It's also the paper that has been doing the reporting on him. LNP is where the story of his second-largest individual donor came out — Adam Kidan, whose $21.7 million in restitution to a murdered man's sons Trump erased with a pardon, and whose money Smucker's campaign has not given back. In that same coverage, Smucker accused the editorial board of using "tactics used by tabloids" and said America is a land of second chances "except in the view of LNP | LancasterOnline's editorial board if you happen to be a conservative."

And it's the paper whose editorial board keeps pointing out that he won't face his constituents. Smucker has not held an in-person town hall open to any interested constituent since April 2014, when he was still a state senator. He does tele-town halls where his own staff pick which callers get to ask a question from forms submitted in advance.

Put those together and you get the shape of it. He will not take an unscreened question from a voter. He will not debate the editorial board in the space they offered him. He will sue them.

Not the only one

Smucker isn't alone in reaching for a courtroom. Tennessee's Marsha Blackburn is being sued by a tenured professor who was fired days after she tagged his employer from her government account — a case about an official using her platform against speech. Texas's Lance Gooden is on the receiving end of a defamation suit brought by a Dallas philanthropist who says Gooden and Matt Gaetz branded him a fraudster on television.

The difference here is direction. Smucker is the one who filed, and the defendant is the newspaper his own constituents read to find out what he's doing.

Lancaster County residents can decide for themselves whether "Liberals demanded taxpayer-funded free healthcare for illegal immigrants" was accurate. What they shouldn't have to wonder is whether the paper that covers their congressman can afford to say so next time.

Source

Dan Nephin, "Congressman Lloyd Smucker sues LNP | LancasterOnline claiming editorial defamed him," LNP | LancasterOnline, Feb. 2, 2026, with additional reporting from WITF and the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker. Photo: LNP | LancasterOnline.

Rob Bresnahan Said Washington Shouldn't Decide Abortion. Ninety-Three Days Later He Voted for a Federal Abortion Law.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:03:11 +0000

On July 7, 2026, Rob Bresnahan launched something called the "Women for Rob" Coalition — more than 80 women across the five counties of Pennsylvania's 8th District, organized around his re-election campaign and his record.

One of the co-chairs put the pitch this way: Bresnahan's work on a hospital breast care center "is just one small example of the ways he has been a champion for greater investments in women's health services."

Three and a half weeks later, a teenager from Waverly Township wrote to The Times-Tribune to say she had checked the record.

"As a teenage girl, I don't understand how any woman can trust him to improve the lives of women and families when he voted for legislation that threatens their access to basic health care. Rob is no friend to women, despite what his campaign would like you to believe."

— Sarah Heine, in The Times-Tribune, August 2, 2026

She's right, and the record is worse than her letter has room for. Here it is.

What he told voters in October 2024

Bresnahan and then-Rep. Matt Cartwright met for the district's only debate on October 22, 2024, at King's College in Wilkes-Barre. Asked about abortion, Bresnahan was unambiguous:

"I would not support a federal ban on abortion under any circumstances."

And he explained the principle behind it:

"I don't believe a federal representative in Washington, D.C., should be making those decisions."

"You put it on the ballot, you allow the voters to decide what's best for their state."

That is not a hedge. That is a stated theory of his own job: a member of Congress has no business legislating on this, and the voters of each state should decide.

He beat Cartwright two weeks later.

What he did ninety-three days later

On January 23, 2025 — his third week in office — the House voted on H.R. 21, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. It passed 217 to 204. Every Republican who voted, voted yes. Bresnahan was one of them.

H.R. 21 is a federal law about abortion. That's what it is. It reaches into delivery rooms in all fifty states and threatens doctors with a fine and up to five years in prison over how they handle the most wrenching late-pregnancy cases. We've written in detail about what the bill actually does to a family choosing comfort care for a dying newborn — including that a born-alive infant has been a legal person under federal law since the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002, which H.R. 21 cites by name. The new work this bill does is the treatment mandate and the prison term it lays on physicians.

More than a dozen medical groups, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, called it "a dangerous government intrusion into medical care."

Ninety-three days earlier, in a hall in Wilkes-Barre, Bresnahan had said a federal representative in Washington should not be making those decisions. Then he went to Washington and made one.

Then he closed the Medicaid door at the clinic on North Main Street

The bigger vote came in July.

On July 3, 2025, Bresnahan voted for the "One Big Beautiful Bill," which passed the House 218 to 214. Buried inside it was a provision barring Planned Parenthood from billing Medicaid for a year — as Heine's letter put it, a ban on "federal Medicaid reimbursements for non-abortion health care services."

WVIA reported what those services are at Planned Parenthood Keystone: prenatal care, birth control, breast and cervical cancer screenings, STI testing. Keystone had seen 5,253 Medicaid patients in fiscal 2024, and for the first eight months of the ban it kept treating them unpaid — until, Reed later told the Times Leader, "we just couldn't afford to keep doing that, and so we began referring them out."

Keystone is the affiliate that operates the Wilkes-Barre Health Center at 101 N. Main Street — in Bresnahan's district, and the closest Planned Parenthood clinic for anyone in Luzerne County. Its services list includes birth control, STD testing, prenatal and postpartum care, and wellness and preventive care.

"We will do everything we can to maintain continuity of care and ensure our doors stay open," Keystone's president and CEO, Melissa Reed, said at the time.

Note what the coalition co-chair praised him for in July 2026: investments in women's health, specifically a breast care center. Breast exams are on the list of things his vote stopped Medicaid from paying for at the clinic in his own district.

A year of it, measured

The ban ran until July 3, 2026. The Times Leader reported what a year without Medicaid did nationally, comparing October 2025 through April 2026 with the year before:

Birth control pills dispensed: down about 25%
IUD and other long-acting contraception visits: down 26%
Breast exam visits: down 20%
STI testing: down 10%
Nearly 30 clinics closed

Forty percent of Keystone's patients had been on Medicaid before the ban. It lost $1.2 million in Medicaid and Title X funding. One business day after the ban lapsed, Medicaid patients were back to 20% of its caseload — "that number is just continuing to grow," Reed said. The Wilkes-Barre clinic's own page still carries the notice: Medicaid accepted again starting July 6, 2026.

That is the cost of the vote, and it is not abstract. It happened to specific people in Luzerne and Lackawanna counties who put off a cancer screening because the appointment stopped being covered.

This is a habit, not an accident

The pattern here — say the reassuring thing to a swing district, then vote the other way — is the throughline of Bresnahan's first term.

He campaigned on banning congressional stock trading, then became one of the most active traders in Congress and took a victory lap on a "ban" that wouldn't have touched his own conduct. In February 2025 he pledged that "if a bill is put in front of me that guts the benefits my neighbors rely on, I will not vote for it" — and his own office's numbers said more than 200,000 Medicaid recipients live in the 8th District, over a quarter of its population. He voted for the cuts in May and again in July.

He isn't the only Republican in a tough seat trying to put distance between himself and this record. In Michigan, Bill Huizenga deleted his campaign website's anti-abortion page the day after a poll showed him trailing. Bresnahan's version is to build a coalition instead.

What the coalition doesn't say

Read the "Women for Rob" announcement again. It lists hospital services, working families, "access to quality healthcare." It does not mention H.R. 21. It does not mention the vote that stopped Medicaid at the Wilkes-Barre clinic. It does not mention the debate stage where he promised he wouldn't legislate on this at all.

A campaign gets to choose what it puts in a press release. Voters get to choose what they weigh. A teenager in Waverly Township did the weighing in under 200 words and got it right.

We deserve better than a congressman who says one thing at King's College and votes the other way ninety-three days later.

Sources

This post draws on the "Women for Rob" coalition announcement as published by The River Reporter (July 7, 2026), Sarah Heine's letter in The Times-Tribune (August 2, 2026), and WVIA's coverage of the 2024 debate and of Planned Parenthood Keystone. Photo: Jordan Wilkie / WVIA.

Brian Fitzpatrick Has Announced One Open Town Hall Since 2017. On National TV, He Called Them a "Three-Ring Circus" Funded by Dark Money.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:59:00 +0000

Brian Fitzpatrick does a lot of television. He is a regular on the Sunday shows, and he is good at them — calm, bipartisan-sounding, the co-chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus.

On March 9, 2025, he was on CBS's Face the Nation, and Margaret Brennan asked him a question he does not get asked in Bucks County, because in Bucks County he does not stand in a room where anyone can ask him anything.

Her question, from the transcript:

"Earlier this week, we saw guidance from the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee urging members to hold virtual town halls, suggesting that holding them in person was not a good idea. Will you still hold town halls with your constituents?"

He got out four words — "Yeah, we, we--" — before Brennan cut in to say that some town halls "have gotten quite heated recently." Then he answered:

"Oh, I know. No. I think every member needs to find the best way to communicate with our constituents, and there's a number of ways to do that. I think what Chairman Hudson is referring to are the what's turning out to be a circus, a three-ring circus, where you go to a high school gymnasium. The protesters show up. They hold signs up, and you have legitimate concerns from some other people that are never heard because they're getting shouted down by people that are there to make a spectacle, oftentimes that are funded by some of these dark money groups. So there's- it's about communicating to your constituents in a way that you can get your message out, that you can hear their concerns. And every single district does it different, depending on- on where they're at."

Two things are worth pulling out of that.

One: he never answered the question

Brennan asked whether he will hold town halls. He began to say something, was interrupted, and never came back to it — the Courier Times, watching the same segment, wrote that he "appeared to start saying he would." What he gave instead was a description of why other people's town halls are bad and the observation that every district does it differently. He never said yes, and he never said no.

The next day, the Bucks County Courier Times reported that a search of the press releases on his official website had turned up exactly one announcement for an open, in-person town hall. It was from August 2017. None were scheduled.

He was first sworn in in January 2017. That is one announced open town hall across a career now in its tenth year.

What he does hold are telephone town halls.

Two: the "dark money" claim came with no evidence

"Oftentimes that are funded by some of these dark money groups."

Fitzpatrick named no group, produced no funding record, and offered no example. He said it on national television about people in his own district who want to ask him questions.

This is a familiar move now. In Illinois, Mike Bost told a hometown paper "we know that the protestors are paid — there's not a question," and the evidence he gave was expensive-looking signs and unnamed "United States intelligence". The logic is the same in both cases, and so is the function: once you decide the people objecting are hired, you don't have to answer any of them.

Here is who was actually objecting in Bucks County.

What his constituents did

March 5, 2025 — four days before the Face the Nation appearance — more than 100 volunteers with Indivisible Bucks County went to his Middletown office and delivered 700 letters from constituents, asking him to push back on the administration and to hold a town hall. Some carried signs reading "town hall now."

His office did not respond to the Courier Times' questions about the letters, or about whether he would schedule a town hall.

March 19, 2025 — hundreds of residents packed Doylestown Borough Hall for a town hall his constituents organized themselves, held during congressional district work time. Every chair and much of the floor was full.

One chair was left empty, with his name on it.

Local speakers went through what people had come to ask him about: cuts to Title One school funding, libraries and museums, immigration enforcement in the county, the SAVE Act's voter registration restrictions, cancelled farm programs, Medicaid, federal employees who had been fired, and threats to LGBTQ+ rights.

Nobody shouted anybody down. There was nobody there to shout down.

The part that doesn't add up

Fitzpatrick's whole political identity is that he is the reachable Republican — the one who works across the aisle, who talks to everyone, who co-chairs the caucus whose entire premise is talking to people you disagree with.

He is also, by his own website's record, a congressman who has announced one open town hall since 2017.

He will take a question from Margaret Brennan on a Sunday morning. He will not take one from a retiree in a high school gymnasium in Doylestown.

And the reason he gave for the difference, on that Sunday morning, was that the retiree is probably being paid.

What a town hall is for

There is nothing in the Constitution requiring a member of Congress to stand in a gym and get yelled at. It is not a legal duty.

It is, though, the one setting where anyone who shows up gets to ask, the follow-ups aren't controlled, and the person asking gets to decide what matters. A telephone town hall is a broadcast. A press hit is a broadcast. Only the room is a conversation.

Fitzpatrick represents one of the most closely divided districts in America. Those are precisely the constituents with the most to say to him, and they have been asking to say it in person for years.

Seven hundred letters, an empty chair, and one announced town hall in nine years.

Source

Chris Ullery, "Brian Fitzpatrick: 'dark money groups' turn town halls into 'circus;' no plans to hold one", Bucks County Courier Times, March 10, 2025; the town hall exchange is quoted from the CBS News Face the Nation transcript of March 9, 2025. Photo: Bucks County Beacon.

Brian Fitzpatrick Wrote the ICE Reform Bill Himself. Then He Voted to Fund ICE for Three More Years Without It — by Two Votes.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:56:00 +0000

Most members of Congress who vote to hand a federal agency an unconditional check can at least claim they didn't know what conditions to ask for.

Brian Fitzpatrick can't. He wrote them down himself, two months earlier, in his own bill.

April 2: the bill

Fitzpatrick spent 15 years as an FBI special agent before Congress. He teamed up with Democrat Tom Suozzi of New York, who had overseen the country's 11th largest police department as Nassau County executive, and on April 2, 2026, the two of them introduced the Reforming ICE and Protecting America Act.

Its premise was simple: fully fund the Department of Homeland Security, and in exchange hold ICE to the same rules as every other law enforcement agency in the country.

Here is what the two former law-enforcement officials said ICE needed:

Body cameras, visible identification, standardized uniforms and training — and a limit on masks.
Independent investigations of officer-involved shootings.
Probable-cause and warrant requirements in key enforcement contexts, including protection against the knowing detention of U.S. citizens without probable cause.
Guardrails at sensitive locations — limits on civil immigration enforcement at schools, health care facilities, places of worship, polling places on election day, childcare facilities, and private homes, absent a warrant and outside exigent circumstances.
Enforcement focused on violent offenders and the most serious threats to public safety.

Fitzpatrick's own words announcing it:

"This debate began with a legitimate call for real ICE reform, yet after weeks of political deadlock, no serious solution emerged. The right course was clear from the start: keep the Department of Homeland Security fully funded and confront the problem before us with real reform. That is precisely what this bill does. It is time to do what should have been done from the beginning: govern, reform, and protect."

Nobody made him write that. It is his analysis, from his own experience as a federal agent, of what a law enforcement agency operating without cameras, without identification and without independent review looks like.

June 9: the vote

Sixty-eight days later, the House took up S. 2, the Secure America Act — the funding bill with none of that in it.

The clerk's record of Roll Call 214 shows what happened at 5:23 PM on June 9, 2026:

	Aye	No
Republicans	214	0
Democrats	0	211
Independent	0	1
Total	214	212

It passed by two votes. Not one Republican voted no.

Which means every single Republican yes vote was decisive — and Fitzpatrick, the author of the reform bill, was one of them. Had he voted no, the tally would have been 213–213. A tie fails.

For the second time in just over a year, the bill would have failed without his vote. The first was Trump's budget bill, which passed the House 215–214 with his yes in May 2025 before he voted no on the final version once the outcome was settled.

What he voted to fund

The bill gives ICE $38.5 billion on top of the $75 billion it already had, Customs and Border Protection $22.6 billion, and $5 billion for the Homeland Security Secretary to spend at his own discretion — running through September 30, 2029. As TIME put it, the bill "passed without imposing any new restrictions on how immigration agents should operate."

September 30, 2029 is the part to sit with. That date runs past the end of Trump's term. The reforms Democrats had spent the whole DHS funding fight demanding — body cameras, a limit on masks, warrants before agents enter homes — are the same reforms in Fitzpatrick's own bill. By funding the agency for three more years without them, the House gave up the leverage to demand them at all.

He did not just decline to attach his reforms. He voted to remove the main lever Congress had for insisting on them.

What it looks like without the guardrails

Read Fitzpatrick's list backwards and it tells you what he thinks is wrong right now.

You do not write a provision requiring visible identification and limiting masks unless agents are operating unidentified. You do not write a provision for independent investigations of officer-involved shootings unless the agency is currently investigating its own. You do not write protections against the knowing detention of U.S. citizens without probable cause unless U.S. citizens are being detained. And you do not list schools, hospitals, churches, childcare centers and polling places by name unless enforcement is happening in them.

That is a former FBI agent's assessment of the agency, written by him, in April. In June he voted to fund it through 2029 without changing any of it.

The response from his own district was immediate. The Bucks County Beacon's account of the vote quotes his Democratic opponent saying Fitzpatrick had voted "to give a $70 billion blank check for Trump's ICE with no accountability or safeguards," and the ACLU's Kate Voigt calling it "unconscionable that the House would vote to write yet another blank check for ICE and Border Patrol's campaign of chaos without any reforms."

The article carries no statement from Fitzpatrick explaining the vote.

The pattern

Fitzpatrick's political identity is built on being the reasonable one, and some of it is real: he carries a 76% League of Conservation Voters score for 2025, with a 71% lifetime score — numbers no other House Republican comes close to. His district, Bucks County, is one of the most competitive in America, and the brand is the whole strategy.

But the record shows a specific shape to it. On the votes where his single vote decided the outcome, he has gone with his party. On the votes that were already decided, he has gone the other way and issued a statement.

The ICE vote is the clearest version yet, because this time he didn't just vote the wrong way on someone else's bill. He wrote the right bill, said out loud what needed fixing, and then supplied the vote that made fixing it unnecessary.

Source

Melinda Rizzo, "Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick's Vote Gives Trump $70 Billion to Spend on Mass Deportation Operations Without Any Guardrails", Bucks County Beacon, June 10, 2026. Photo: Bryan Cox/ICE via AP. The bill's provisions are from Fitzpatrick and Suozzi's own announcement, April 2, 2026.

"Absolutely No Reductions." Two Months Later, Glenn Thompson Personally Released the Text That Cut Food Assistance.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:43:54 +0000

On March 12, 2025, a reporter for the Pennsylvania Capital-Star asked the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee a direct question: would cuts to SNAP — food assistance — be on the table in the coming farm bill?

Glenn Thompson did not hedge.

"Absolutely no reductions in the nutritional benefits."

He went further. He said the whole idea was made up, and that the people saying it were acting in bad faith:

"I think that's a rumor that was started by folks who are anti-farming, and anti-Farm Bill... There has never been a situation where we're reducing or cutting benefits. That is just misinformation that some people have heard and others are purposely expressing."

He even described SNAP expansions he said his farm bill would deliver — eligibility for people previously incarcerated on felony drug charges, and a fix so that the wages of 18-to-21-year-olds still in high school wouldn't count against their family's benefits. Of the first he said: "I happen to believe that it's the right thing to do and a righteous thing to do."

That was March. Here is May.

Two months later, he wrote the cuts himself

On May 12, 2025, Thompson's own office put out a press release with the headline "Chairman Thompson Releases Budget Reconciliation Text." The committee print he released was the food-assistance section of what became Trump's budget bill. His statement announcing it read:

"For far too long, the SNAP program has drifted from a bridge to support American households in need to a permanent destination riddled with bureaucratic inefficiencies, misplaced incentives, and limited accountability. This portion of the One Big, Beautiful Bill restores the program's original intent, offering a temporary helping hand while encouraging work, cracking down on loopholes exploited by states, and protecting taxpayer dollars..."

Two of the five documents his office linked in that release were one-pagers on "state accountability" and "prioritizing work in SNAP."

Sixty days earlier, warnings that this was coming were "a rumor" started by "folks who are anti-farming."

This is the part that separates Thompson from every other House Republican who voted for the bill. He didn't just vote for it. He wrote that part of it, released it under his own name, and put out a statement defending it the same day. He is the chairman. It is his committee's text. Then on July 3, 2025, he voted for final passage, which cleared the House 218 to 214.

What actually happened to Pennsylvania

A year on, the Capital-Star went back and checked.

Roughly 98,000 Pennsylvanians no longer receive food benefits because of requirements the law imposed, as the state Department of Human Services estimates it. Total SNAP enrollment in Pennsylvania fell from 1.96 million in July 2025 to 1.74 million in May 2026 — an 11% drop. The department attributes less than half of that decline to the new law, which is how you get to the 98,000 figure.

Pennsylvania had one of the highest SNAP participation rates in the country in 2022, the most recent year measured, meaning nearly every eligible resident was enrolled. More than half of the people on it in the commonwealth are families with children.

What changed for them:

Starting last fall, anyone required to work had to document at least 20 hours a week of work, volunteering or schooling, or lose benefits. Parents with children under 14 and people with certain disabilities were exempt — parents of a 14-year-old were not.
Veterans and former foster youth, who had been exempt from the added requirements, no longer are.
The state cost-shift hasn't even started yet. When it does, Pennsylvania will have to pick up as much as $400 million in administrative costs it doesn't pay today, on top of a share of benefits. Penalties begin next fall.

And in Thompson's own district, 46,392 households — about 15% of all households in PA-15 — rely on SNAP to put food on the table, according to USDA data. That includes 17,190 households with children and 19,052 with someone 60 or older in them.

The expansions he promised

Notice what's missing from the list of things that actually happened.

In March, Thompson said his farm bill would expand SNAP to people leaving prison after drug convictions, and would stop penalizing families whose teenagers work. He described both as matters of basic decency. Neither is why anybody remembers the 2025 SNAP fight.

What passed instead — through his committee, under his name — went the other direction: more paperwork, more conditions, fewer exemptions, and a bill for the states.

"It's not logical"

Anyone in the 15th District who wanted to ask Thompson how "absolutely no reductions" turned into 98,000 people losing benefits has run into the same wall.

He does not hold open, in-person town halls, and has been turning down requests for them since at least 2017. In February 2017, after he turned down repeated requests for one in State College, about 350 constituents held a town hall without him and put their questions to a life-size cutout of his head and shoulders at the podium; his office called the people asking "paid activists" and "political opposition."

In March 2025 — the same month as the "misinformation" interview — more than 200 people rallied outside his Bellefonte office, some holding "missing" posters reading "Last seen: avoiding his constituents." He wasn't there. Constituents have since shown up outside that office nearly every Tuesday, through a record heat wave. Asked in April why he would not attend the town hall the county Democrats had organized, he told the Centre Daily Times it was "not logical."

His office won't release his calendar either. It doesn't have to — neither federal nor state open-records law covers a member of Congress's schedule, as Spotlight PA documented — so there is no way for anyone in PA-15 to check where he actually is.

Why this one is different

Politicians break promises constantly. This is a narrower and worse thing.

Thompson wasn't caught between a promise and a party leadership that overruled him. He was the leadership on this. The gavel of the House Agriculture Committee is the single most powerful position in Congress on SNAP policy, and he was holding it in both March and May. Nobody made him say "absolutely no reductions." Nobody made him call the people warning about cuts anti-farming liars. And nobody made him put his own name on the text sixty days later.

It's the same instinct that shows up in the rest of his record as chairman — writing a farm bill provision shielding pesticide manufacturers from cancer lawsuits that a bipartisan House majority had to strip out 280 to 142, and voting against the law protecting same-sex marriage three days before attending his own gay son's wedding.

Seventeen years in Congress. A gavel over the nation's food policy. And 98,000 Pennsylvanians who were told, on the record, that this wasn't going to happen.

Sources

Q&A: Congressman Glenn Thompson talks tariffs, SNAP, and immigration's impact on agriculture — John Cole, Pennsylvania Capital-Star, March 13, 2025
Chairman Thompson Releases Budget Reconciliation Text — House Agriculture Committee, May 12, 2025
One year after 'One Big Beautiful Bill Act': 98K fewer Pennsylvanians on SNAP — Whitney Downard, Pennsylvania Capital-Star, July 8, 2026

Glenn Thompson Wrote a Farm Bill That Shielded Pesticide Makers From Cancer Lawsuits. Five Days After His Committee Passed It, the Pesticide Lobby Wrote Him a Check.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:39:51 +0000

On April 30, 2026, the House of Representatives did something it almost never does: a big bipartisan majority reached into a bill written by the chairman of the committee and tore a page out of it.

The page protected pesticide companies from being sued by people who say their products gave them cancer. The chairman who put it there is Glenn Thompson, the Republican congressman for Pennsylvania's 15th District and chairman of the House Agriculture Committee.

The vote to strip it out was 280 to 142. Democrats and Republicans, together.

Thompson voted no. He wanted it to stay.

What the language actually did

Section 10205 of Thompson's farm bill barred any state, any subdivision of a state "or a court from directly or indirectly imposing or continuing in effect any requirements for, or penalize or hold liable, any entity for failing to comply with requirements that would require labeling or packaging that is in addition to or different from the labeling or packaging approved by the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency ... including any requirements relating to warnings on such labeling or packaging."

Read that again in plain English. If the EPA's approved label doesn't warn you that a chemical causes cancer, then a jury cannot make the company pay you for not warning you that it causes cancer.

That is not a hypothetical. For years, people have sued Bayer — and Monsanto before Bayer bought it — over Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate, and as CNBC reported the day of the vote, the companies have frequently been found liable for failing to warn of cancer risk. The EPA does not classify glyphosate as a carcinogen and does not require a cancer warning on the label. The World Health Organization's cancer agency reached a different conclusion in 2015, calling glyphosate "probably carcinogenic to humans."

So the fight is precisely about whether the EPA's label is the last word. Thompson's bill said it was.

Bayer certainly knew what it was losing. After the House stripped the language, the company told CNBC the removal was "a missed opportunity for Congress" and that "Congress has turned their backs on U.S. farmers."

Rep. Chellie Pingree of Maine, who was helping lead the push to take it out for Democrats, put it differently on the House floor:

"It preempts states' rights to regulate pesticide usage or labeling [and] provides a liability shield for pesticide manufacturers. Put simply, this language puts chemical company profits over the health of Americans."

Thompson's defense

Thompson told reporters the night before the vote that striking the provision would be "such a blow to the American farmer." He rejected the phrase "liability shield," saying the language would only stop "frivolous lawsuits" and that "bad actors" could still be sued.

Two problems with that.

First, the text doesn't say "frivolous." It says no court can hold "any entity" liable for failing to use a label different from the EPA's. It does carry one exception, and it is a narrow one: the shield lifts only if the company is in "material violation" of three provisions of federal pesticide law — knowingly falsifying a registration application or a required record, falsifying information about a pesticide test, or submitting data it knew was false to get a product registered — and has already been penalized by the EPA for doing it. Short of that, the shield covers the frivolous suits and the ones where a jury heard the evidence and decided the company hid something.

Second, farmers aren't the ones being sued. Bayer is. A provision that stops juries from awarding damages against a chemical manufacturer is worth an enormous amount of money to that chemical manufacturer, and precisely nothing to a farmer in Centre County — who still buys the same product at the same price either way.

The vote tells you which reading Congress found convincing. Thompson lost by 138 votes, in his own bill, with 73 Republicans voting against him.

Who pays him

Thompson's biggest financial backers are the industries his committee governs — crop insurance, the cattlemen, the Farm Credit system he oversees, the rural electric co-ops, and, at the top of the list, CropLife America, the pesticide industry's trade association.

Federal Election Commission records show CropLife America's political action committee has given Thompson's campaign committee, Friends of Glenn Thompson, $20,000 since 2023 — $10,000 in the last election cycle and $10,000 in this one.

Look at the timing of the most recent check.

March 5, 2026 — the House Agriculture Committee, chaired by Thompson, approved the farm bill with the pesticide language intact, on a 34-17 vote.
March 10, 2026 — five days later, CropLife America's PAC cut Friends of Glenn Thompson a check for $4,000. The PAC's own filing dates the disbursement to March 10; Thompson's campaign recorded it as received on March 18.
April 30, 2026 — Thompson voted to keep the language in. The House voted it out anyway.

Nobody has alleged a crime here, and none of this is hidden. It's a disclosure form. That's the point: this is what the ordinary, legal, above-board operation of the House Agriculture Committee looks like, and the industry gets its money's worth in public.

Why the 280-142 vote may not be the end of it

The farm bill passed the House 224 to 200 and went to the Senate. If the Senate passes a different version, the two chambers negotiate a final text — and that is where a committee chairman's power is at its greatest and the public's visibility is at its least. There is no roll call on what gets put back into a bill behind closed doors. There is no amendment anyone can force to the floor. There is a room, and the chairman is in it.

The 138-vote margin was a message. It is not a lock.

Thompson, for his part, celebrated the bill's passage on X, calling it "a win for our farmers, ranchers, foresters, rural communities, and all Americans across our country" — a bill that a bipartisan majority had just had to sanitize before they'd vote for it.

This is the same chairman who wrote the SNAP cuts

The pesticide shield is not a one-off. It is what Thompson does with the gavel.

As chairman he also personally released the committee text that cut food assistance in Trump's budget bill — two months after telling Pennsylvania reporters there would be "absolutely no reductions in the nutritional benefits" and calling warnings about SNAP cuts "just misinformation." In his own district, 46,392 households rely on SNAP to eat.

And if you live in PA-15 and want to ask him about any of it face to face, you can't. Thompson has not held an open, in-person town hall since at least March 2025, and called the idea of attending one organized by county Democrats "not logical."

Seventeen years in Congress. The gavel on the committee that writes the rules for the food you eat and the chemicals sprayed on it. And when a bipartisan majority of the House said one of those rules went too far, the chairman was on the other side of the vote.

Source

House strips MAHA-hated pesticide provisions from farm bill — CNBC, April 30, 2026. Photo: a sign protesting Chairman Glenn Thompson's farm bill in Washington, D.C., April 30, 2026, by Angela Greiling Keane / CNBC.