MAGA Report Cards — South Carolina

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

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.

In Her Victory Speech, Darline Graham Called Government Health Care 'Bad Idea After Bad Idea.' 235,000 South Carolinians Have Already Lost Their Coverage.

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:36:48 +0000

Darline Graham won South Carolina's Republican Senate runoff on Tuesday, August 25, 2026. What she chose to talk about that night was health care.

"Government run health care…. bad idea after bad idea," she told the crowd, naming her Democratic opponent. "Annie Andrews backs it all."

Then she explained why she felt that way, using her own family. Her parents ran the Sanitary Cafe in Central, South Carolina — a bar, pool hall and liquor store; she and her brother grew up in a single room behind it. There were no vacations.

"If they were sick, they had to get up and go to work, because if the doors weren't open, we weren't making money."

She followed it with this: "My mother passed away when I was 11, and my father just over a year later."

She told that as a story about grit. Common Dreams' Julia Conley reported it on August 26. What it actually describes is two people who could not afford to stop working when they were sick, and who did not live long.

Andrews — who is a pediatrician — answered: "No family should have to suffer simply because generations before them did."

What is happening in South Carolina right now

Graham is not describing a hypothetical future under a plan nobody has passed. She is a sitting senator, appointed in July to the seat her late brother Lindsey Graham held, and the health care in her state is already coming apart.

The advocacy group Protect Our Care put together a fact sheet for every state, and South Carolina's numbers are these:

235,000 people have lost their ACA subsidies or their coverage under Medicaid or the Children's Health Insurance Program.
Premiums have doubled for more than 587,000 South Carolinians in the past year.
14 hospitals, clinics and nursing homes have shut down or are on the verge of it.
Health care facilities in the state face a $1.5 billion loss in funding.
Hospitals and clinics are facing a 26.9% spike in demand for uncompensated care — treatment nobody pays them for.

That last one is worth pausing on. A 26.9% spike in demand for uncompensated care means more people walking into an emergency room with no coverage at all — the most expensive way in the world to get sick, and the bill lands on everyone else's premiums.

None of this is the result of "government run health care." It followed the Republican health care cuts, on both tracks Protect Our Care counts: 74,940 South Carolinians pushed off Medicaid or CHIP, and 159,190 who dropped their ACA coverage after premiums skyrocketed. Nationally, 2.6 million Americans have already lost their health insurance as marketplace enrollment fell 12%.

What she did with her first month

Graham's remarks aren't just rhetoric she is stuck with. She has a voting record now, and it is short enough to read in full.

Two days into the job, on July 16, 2026, the Senate voted on whether to take up a resolution overturning the administration's WISeR model, which brings prior authorization into traditional Medicare for a set of services. Prior authorization is the step where an insurance company decides whether you get the care your doctor already ordered. The motion failed 46–50. Graham voted no.

We laid out that vote and the others in her first weeks in a look at how her Senate record compares to her career — and the comparison is the strange part. Graham spent 12 years at South Carolina's Vocational Rehabilitation Department as its business services and communications director, and since 2019 has led the state's Commission for the Blind. In 2022 she was part of the bipartisan South Carolina effort to end subminimum wage for workers with disabilities. Disability advocates in the state speak well of her.

Then she got to Washington and voted to leave insurance-company gatekeeping inside Medicare — a program that is, definitionally, government-run health care.

Which raises the obvious question about "bad idea after bad idea." Medicare is government-run. So is Medicaid. So is the VA, and so is the CHIP coverage sitting right there on the list of things 235,000 South Carolinians just lost. The phrase does a lot of work precisely because it never has to name any of them.

The argument she is actually making

Strip the applause line away and Graham's runoff-night speech contains a real claim: that going to work sick because the doors have to stay open is how it's supposed to be, and that anything designed to spare people that is a bad idea.

Journalist Ahmed Baba summarized what that sounds like from the outside: "'Government-provided healthcare is a bad idea. I'd rather Americans work long, hard hours, not receive sick leave, and die young' is one hell of a message."

Her parents didn't have a choice. That's the part of her story that's true and that nobody should make light of. The choice is the one in front of her now — she holds a Senate seat, 235,000 people in her state have lost coverage, and 14 facilities have closed or are close to it. She can vote to change that. So far she has voted the other way, and campaigned on it.

What the record shows

Protect Our Care counts 235,000 South Carolinians who have lost their ACA subsidies or their Medicaid and CHIP coverage, premiums doubled for more than 587,000 others, 14 hospitals, clinics and nursing homes shut down or on the verge of it, $1.5 billion in funding lost, and a 26.9% spike in demand for uncompensated care. Darline Graham used her runoff victory speech to call government-run health care "bad idea after bad idea," offering her parents' inability to take a sick day as the reason. She has been a U.S. senator since July. Two days into the job she voted against overturning a rule that puts insurance-company prior authorization into traditional Medicare.

Source

Julia Conley, "Trump-Backed Darline Graham Bashes 'Government-Run Healthcare,' Glorifies Working While Sick", Common Dreams, August 26, 2026. Photo via Common Dreams: Graham gives her election victory speech in Columbia, South Carolina, on August 25, 2026 (Megan Varner/Getty Images).

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

Asked Whether America Has an Interest in Taiwan, Sen. Darline Graham Said 'National Security Is Not My Thing.' She Has Been in the Senate Since July.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:03:08 +0000

South Carolina has two U.S. Senate seats. One of them is currently held by a woman nobody elected, who was handed the job in July, and who was asked on a debate stage this week whether the United States has a national security interest in Taiwan and the South China Sea.

She asked the moderator to repeat the question. Then she answered it.

"I'm just going to be honest here. I'm not that informed on national security, so — but I do support our military."

She added that national security "is not my thing, not my area of expertise."

Darline Graham has been a United States Senator since July 14. The runoff that decides whether she is on the November ballot is Tuesday, August 25.

How she got there

Graham was not elected to anything. Governor Henry McMaster appointed her to the seat left vacant by the death of her brother, Lindsey Graham, on July 11 — on President Trump's public recommendation. She had never held elected office and had never run for anything. Six days after being sworn in, she announced she was running for the full six-year term.

The debate in Newberry on August 18, co-moderated by Greta Van Susteren, was the only one scheduled before the runoff. Her opponent is U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman.

Why the Taiwan question isn't a gotcha

It's worth being precise about what she was asked, because "national security" can sound like a trick topic full of classified detail. It isn't what happened here.

Whether the United States has an interest in Taiwan and the South China Sea has been the stated position of every administration of both parties for decades. Taiwan makes most of the world's advanced computer chips. There is no version of this question that a senator gets to be surprised by.

Norman, standing next to her, answered it in a sentence: "What the president is doing right is he's enabling Taiwan to defend themselves against China, but it's peace through strength that he's showing." Agree with it or don't — he had an answer.

And this is not a hypothetical part of the job. A senator votes on arms sales, on defense authorization, on sanctions, on whether to keep funding a war. Graham has had a vote on every one of those since July 14.

What she has found time to be informed about

Graham says national security isn't her area. Here is what has been.

Her first bill was the SAVE Act — legislation that would make it harder for millions of American citizens to vote by requiring documentary proof of citizenship. She cosponsored it within days of arriving.

Her first big procedural move was to say she'd blow up the filibuster to pass it — the opposite of her late brother's long-held position, in the seat she was appointed to honor his legacy in.

Her first votes cut against the community she spent her career serving. Graham led South Carolina's Commission for the Blind and worked in state disability and workforce services. Then she got to the Senate and voted the other way on disability programs.

And within two weeks of launching her campaign, it had taken $24,000 more than federal law allows — the FEC told her so on August 17. She has also inherited her brother's leadership PAC along with his seat.

So the areas of expertise developed quickly. Voting restrictions: within days. Campaign money: within two weeks. Taiwan: not her thing.

The honest part is the problem

Give Graham this much — she did not bluff. Plenty of politicians would have produced forty seconds of "peace through strength" and moved on. She said out loud that she didn't know.

But a senator is not a candidate for a job she might grow into. She already has the job. She has had a vote on the Senate floor since July 14, and she will keep having one through January whatever happens on Tuesday. Saying "that's not my area" is a thing a nominee says at a hearing. It is not available to someone already casting the votes.

South Carolina Republicans go to the polls Tuesday, August 25. Trump held a rally for her in Myrtle Beach, Gov. McMaster endorsed her, and former Gov. Mark Sanford endorsed Norman instead.

Sources

Darline Graham says she's "not that informed on national security" at debate — CBS News. Photo: AP.
Graham, Norman clash in only scheduled debate before Senate primary runoff — WIS-TV
Sen. Darline Graham avoids giving direct answer to national security question in S.C. debate: 'Not my thing' — PBS News

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

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

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

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

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

What H.R. 9662 actually does

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the part worth sitting with.

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

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

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

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

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

Why now: they think Kavanaugh left a door open

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

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

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

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

Steube is legislating on the concurrence and ignoring the majority.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their constituents should ask them about section 3.

Sources

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

Darline Graham Had Been a Senator for Three Weeks. The FEC Says Her Campaign Already Took $24,000 More Than the Law Allows.

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:34:32 +0000

Darline Graham was sworn into her late brother's Senate seat on July 14, 2026. She announced she would run for a full term on July 23.

Over the next two weeks, the money came in fast — from chief executives, lobbyists and longtime Republican donors who had never given her a dollar before, because two weeks earlier she had never been a senator.

Some of it came in too fast, and too big.

On Monday, August 17, the Federal Election Commission sent Graham's campaign a formal letter saying her most recent report shows contributions that "appear to exceed the limits set forth in the Act." The letter is public. NOTUS reporter Mark Alfred first wrote about it.

The total: more than $24,000 over the legal limit, in the eleven days between July 26 and August 5.

What the limit is, and who blew past it

Federal law is not complicated on this point. An individual can give a federal candidate $3,500 per election — and a primary, a runoff and a general each count as their own election. A political action committee that has qualified as a multi-candidate committee can give $5,000 per election.

The letter names fourteen individuals and one committee. Among them:

Charles Schwab, the chair and founder of the brokerage giant that carries his name — $7,000 on July 31, exactly double the limit
Stephen and Christine Schwarzman — $7,000 each, both on August 4
Barry and Esther Zyskind — $3,615.70 each, both on August 3
Scott T. and Dede Ford — $3,643.56 each, on July 29 and July 30
John J. McGovern Jr. and Kirk Rostron — $7,231.40 each, more than twice what one person may give
Sen. Lisa Murkowski's Denali Leadership PAC — $10,000, twice what a qualified multi-candidate committee may give

NOTUS, which first reported the letter, describes the flagged donors as including the leaders of Blackstone, AmTrust, Micco Corporation, Westrock Capital Partners and NRx Defense Systems.

Look at that list again. The founder of a brokerage house. A private-equity chief. A defense contractor's boss. Three married couples writing matching checks on the same day. These are not South Carolinians writing $50 checks because they like her. This is the Washington money machine finding the newest senator and pointing a hose at her.

What has to happen now

The FEC letter spells out her options. Excessive money can be kept only if, within 60 days of getting it, the campaign properly redesignates it to a different election or reattributes it to another person. Normally that takes signed, written authorization from the donor. The campaign can also act by presumption in narrow circumstances, but then the treasurer must notify the donor in writing inside the same 60 days and offer a refund — and the letter is explicit that Murkowski's PAC money cannot be presumptively redesignated at all. If none of that happens, the letter says plainly: "the excessive amount must be refunded."

That is real money for a campaign this young. Graham's campaign reported more than $251,000 cash on hand as of August 5. The over-the-limit money is roughly 10% of everything she had in the bank.

The FEC calls this a Request for Additional Information. It is routine paperwork in the sense that many campaigns get one. It is not routine in what it says about a campaign that has existed for a month and has already had to be told the contribution limits.

The seat she was handed

Graham did not win this office. She was appointed to it after her brother, Sen. Lindsey Graham, died on July 11, 2026.

Everything she has done since has followed the same pattern: she inherited the institution, and she has been using it fast.

Her first big move as a senator was to cosponsor the SAVE Act — a bill that would require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote, which millions of eligible Americans cannot easily produce. By her own account it was the first bill she put her name on. She had been in the Senate for days.

She also took over her brother's leadership PAC, inheriting the political money operation along with the seat.

And she spent her career working with disabled South Carolinians before her first Senate votes went the other way.

Now federal regulators have told her campaign it has taken money it is not allowed to keep.

Why this matters to South Carolina

There is a version of this story where it's just an accounting error — a treasurer who hadn't set up the software right, a batch of checks that came in during the confusion of a sudden appointment. That version is plausible, and the campaign will get its chance to say so.

But the thing an accounting error can't explain away is who was writing the checks.

Graham won the August 25 Republican runoff against Rep. Ralph Norman, 52.5% to 47.5%, carrying President Trump's endorsement, and is now the party's nominee for the November 3 general election. She has the fundraising list of a senator who spent more than two decades in Washington. And inside her first month in the seat, fourteen people and Lisa Murkowski's PAC had all sent her more money than the law lets them send.

They didn't do that because they know her. They did it because they know what a Senate vote is worth.

South Carolinians should ask what they think they're buying — and whether Graham intends to give it to them.

Source

Darline Graham's Campaign Must Give Back Megadonor Money — NOTUS, August 19, 2026, by Mark Alfred. Photo: Meg Kinnard/AP.

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

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

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

We now know exactly what that cost.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Jordan — Ohio, −32%

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

Jim Jordan voted yes on the House bill.

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

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

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

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

Stephanie Bice — Oklahoma, −32%

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

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

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

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

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

Juan Ciscomani — Arizona, −30%

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

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

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

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

Sheri Biggs — South Carolina, −29%

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

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

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

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

Victoria Spartz — Indiana, −28%

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lisa McClain — Michigan, −27%

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

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

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

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

Michael Guest — Mississippi, −26%

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

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

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

Jason Smith — Missouri, −25%

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia Foxx — North Carolina, −21%

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roger Marshall — Kansas, −20%

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ashley Moody

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

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

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

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

Gus Bilirakis

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

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

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

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

Texas — the thinnest safety net in America, cut anyway

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

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

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

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

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

Monica De La Cruz

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

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

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

Ronny Jackson

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

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

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

He voted yes.

The through-line

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8 Million Americans Have Lost Their Health Coverage. Here Are More of the Republicans Who Did It.

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 11:03:19 +0000

The advocacy group Protect Our Care released state-by-state fact sheets this week putting a number on what the past year of Republican health policy has actually done.

Roughly $900 billion in cuts to Medicaid, plus the decision to let the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expire at the end of 2025, has meant "stripping insurance coverage from around 8 million Americans total."

Eight million is a hard number to feel. So here is what it looks like at the level of the people who voted for it — seven Republicans, none of whom we featured the last time we did this.

They fall into four groups, and the groups are the story.

They wrote the rules: Aaron Bean and Ashley Hinson

The Medicaid work requirement — 80 hours a month or you lose coverage — didn't appear out of nowhere in the budget bill.

Aaron Bean filed it first, in December 2024, and again in February 2025, months before it became law. His version was broader than the one that ultimately passed.

Ashley Hinson defended the policy at the Plymouth County Fair with the line that always gets applause: "If you're going to take a taxpayer benefit, you should be working." She also suggested people here illegally are getting benefits — which federal law already bars.

Here is the number that makes both of these arguments collapse: 92% of the adults under 65 on Medicaid, setting aside those already on federal disability benefits, are working, caregiving, sick, disabled, or in school.

Work requirements don't move people into jobs they already have. They add paperwork, and people lose coverage when the paperwork fails. That is not a side effect. It's the mechanism.

He promised in writing: Jeff Hurd

In April 2025, Jeff Hurd signed a letter vowing he could not and would not support any bill that cut Medicaid coverage for vulnerable people.

Five weeks later he voted for it. Then he voted for it again.

More than 32,000 people in his district are projected to lose coverage.

A politician who never made the promise can at least claim you knew what you were getting. Hurd put it in writing, in a letter designed to reassure exactly the people who are now losing their insurance.

He told them they shouldn't have it: Russell Fry

At an April 2025 telephone town hall, Russell Fry called Medicaid vital, then said a lot of people on it "quite frankly shouldn't be."

Then he voted for the bill. 37,124 people in his district are projected to lose coverage — 33,500 off Affordable Care Act plans, 3,624 off Medicaid.

South Carolina's 7th District is projected to lose more health coverage than any other district in the state. Average marketplace premiums in the state are up 235% since 2025, by Protect Our Care's count.

Fry is not confused about what the bill does. He told his own constituents, on a call they had phoned in to, that too many of them were on it.

They voted for the damage, then backed bills to fix it: Mark Alford and Shelley Moore Capito

This is the pattern that shows up most, and it is the most cynical one.

Mark Alford voted in July 2025 for the budget law. In his own district, 27,243 people are projected to lose coverage — 14,043 off Medicaid, 13,200 off Affordable Care Act plans. Nearly eight months later, in February 2026, he introduced a bill to keep rural hospitals open. "It's very important that we keep our rural hospitals open for business," he told Missourinet a couple of weeks later.

That rescue bill has three cosponsors and has never moved.

Shelley Moore Capito cast one of the 50 votes for the budget bill — a 50–50 vote, meaning she personally could have stopped it. The head of the West Virginia Hospital Association says the state's hospitals will lose more than $1 billion a year once the law is fully in effect, and seven West Virginia rural hospitals are named most at risk of closing.

On July 29, 2026, she cosponsored legislation to prevent rural hospital closures.

Both of them are running the same play: cast the vote that does the damage, wait for the local coverage about hospitals closing, then sponsor the fix and issue the press release. The vote was binding. The rescue bill is optional, and it isn't moving.

He let the subsidies lapse: Jon Husted

Ohio just lost a bigger share of its Affordable Care Act enrollment than any state in America — nearly a third of its enrollees gone.

Jon Husted and Ohio's other senator let the enhanced health subsidies expire and voted for the budget bill.

The subsidy expiration is the quiet half of the 8 million. Medicaid cuts get argued about. Letting a tax credit lapse requires no vote at all in the public's mind — you just don't renew it, premiums jump, and people quietly stop paying for a plan they can no longer afford. Nobody has to stand up and say "I'm taking your insurance."

The pattern

Read those seven together and the defense falls apart.

They knew what the work requirements would do, because two of them wrote them. They were warned what the vote would do to districts like their own before they cast it — Hurd signed a letter saying so, five weeks out. And several of them knew immediately afterward, because they started filing rural hospital rescue bills that go nowhere.

Not one of these is a story about a member who was misled. It's a story about members who did the arithmetic, voted anyway, and then went looking for something to put in the newsletter.

Eight million people. Both bills to fix it are still sitting in committee.

Every State Has a Squad That Catches People Who Abuse Nursing Home Patients. Thirteen Republicans Want Them Investigating You Instead.

Tue, 18 Aug 2026 11:32:57 +0000

Every state has a small team of investigators whose job is catching people who steal from Medicaid.

They do two things. They go after the companies, clinics and caregivers who bill Medicaid for care they never gave. And they build criminal cases against people who beat, starve or neglect patients in nursing homes.

That second part is not a footnote. Last year those teams won 329 convictions for abusing or neglecting patients.

There is now a bill in Congress to give those same investigators a new target: the people who apply for Medicaid.

The Bill Is Three Phrases Long

The law that created these teams points them at "providers of" Medicaid services — the doctors, the clinics, the home care companies.

The bill inserts six words after that phrase, in every place it appears:

", and individuals applying for or receiving,"

Two more insertions do the same work on "the provision of," adding "application for" and "receipt of" — one in the same section, one in a conforming change alongside it. A start date 180 days after signing is the rest of it.

But those six words change who the investigators work on. Today they investigate the providers who take Medicaid money. Under this bill they would also investigate the people who sign up for it.

Right now they mostly can't: Arkansas has limited authority to prosecute Medicaid beneficiaries unless they are working with providers to commit fraud. Attorney General Tim Griffin said so at a press conference on August 14: "We cannot, and we know that, right? We can't go after them alone."

That limit is exactly what the bill removes.

These Teams Are Already Very Good at the Job They Have

Here's the part that makes the case for the bill hard to follow.

Last year, these investigators nationwide won 1,185 convictions and brought back nearly $2 billion. Running them cost about $424 million in federal and state money combined.

The government's own math: $4.64 comes back for every $1 spent.

That money comes from the provider side, because providers are the only side these units are allowed to work. The biggest single group convicted of fraud was home care attendants, at 326 cases.

The bill does not give these teams a single extra dollar. It just adds everyone who applies for or receives Medicaid to their workload.

So something has to give. Every hour spent going through somebody's Medicaid application is an hour not spent on a nursing home abuse case.

Who's Behind It

Ashley Moody of Florida filed the Senate version on March 24. Tom Cotton announced on August 14 that he would sign on as a cosponsor; he had not been added to the official list yet when this was written.

Derek Schmidt of Kansas filed the House version. Nine members signed on, and these are Republicans we track:

Russell Fry (South Carolina)
Tracey Mann (Kansas)
Ben Cline (Virginia)
Joe Wilson (South Carolina)
Brian Jack (Georgia)
Mike Haridopolos (Florida)
David Taylor (Ohio)
Tim Moore (North Carolina)
David Rouzer (North Carolina)

Governor Sarah Sanders stood with Cotton and Griffin at that August 14 press conference to back it.

Their Argument, and the Numbers Under It

Sanders put it this way: "When we have bad actors that cheat the system, it leaves less funding for those who really need that critical support."

Cotton added: "That's $2 billion that wouldn't have, or that should have gone to those needy individuals or rural hospitals and doctors."

Now look at what Arkansas actually found. Sanders said the state's Medicaid investigations team turned up $8 million in overpayments last year. Griffin's office reported 130 arrests, 114 convictions, more than $2.5 million paid back in criminal cases and more than $7.8 million recovered in civil ones.

Those are real numbers, and they were found under the rules we already have, by investigators already doing the work.

Now Put That Next to What They Did to Medicaid

Two days after that press conference, we wrote about the 200,000 Arkansans who could lose the coverage they have. The Trump administration refused to renew the deal that lets Arkansas run its Medicaid program the way it does, using power it got from the 2025 budget bill.

Every Arkansas Republican in Congress voted for that bill. Cotton voted for it, and two weeks after the rejection he came home to call Medicaid "an important program for sick children, pregnant women, the elderly, and the poor".

So hold the two numbers side by side:


Medicaid overpayments Arkansas found last year	$8 million
Arkansans who could lose coverage from the budget bill	200,000

The worry, they say, is that cheating "leaves less funding for those who really need that critical support."

But the budget bill is what put that support on a countdown clock — for 200,000 people nobody accused of anything.

One of those problems is getting new investigators. The other one they did on purpose.

What It Would Feel Like to You

Forget the bill for a second. Here is what changes for a regular person.

Today, if you apply for Medicaid and get something wrong on the form — the wrong month's income, an old address, the wrong number of people in your house because your grown kid moved back in — that's a paperwork problem. The state Medicaid office sorts it out. You fix it, or you pay it back.

Under this bill, that same form can land on the desk of a criminal fraud investigator. The same one who works nursing home abuse cases.

Nobody has to be charged for that to change how it feels to ask for help. And thirteen Republicans are asking for it at the same moment their own votes are taking coverage away from people who did nothing wrong at all.

Sources

The bill's full text (S. 4176, filed March 24, 2026) and the House version's cosponsor list — Congress.gov
Medicaid Fraud Control Units Annual Report: Fiscal Year 2025 — U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Inspector General
Arkansas leaders back bill to expand Medicaid fraud investigations — KATV, August 14, 2026

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.

"It's the SAVE Act, SAVE Act, SAVE Act": Ralph Norman Says Making It Harder to Register Is His Whole Agenda

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 07:49:20 +0000

South Carolina votes again on August 25. It's a runoff for the Republican nomination to the U.S. Senate seat that opened when Lindsey Graham died in July, and Ralph Norman is one of the two people on the ballot.

On Saturday he went on Breitbart News Saturday and was asked, in effect, what he'd do with the job. He gave a straight answer:

"I'll be a loud voice for one, the constitution, and two, I'm asked all the time, what's my agenda It's the SAVE Act, SAVE Act, SAVE Act. If we don't have safe and secure elections we don't have a republic."

Not grocery prices. Not the hospitals. Not flooding. His agenda, said three times in one breath, is a bill that would require every American to produce a passport or a birth certificate, in person, just to register to vote or update a registration.

He's entitled to run on that. Voters are entitled to know two things about it.

He has already told us what he thinks saving the republic requires

"If we don't have safe and secure elections we don't have a republic" is a strange sentence coming from Ralph Norman.

On January 17, 2021 — eleven days after the Capitol was attacked, three days before the inauguration — Norman texted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows:

"Mark, in seeing what's happening so quickly, and reading about the Dominion law suits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation we are at a point of – no return – in saving our Republic !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!"

He meant martial law — the military replacing civilian government — to stop the transfer of power after an election he had publicly said he accepted. Five days before he sent that text, he had told his own constituents on official letterhead that the country "should place our focus on ensuring a peaceful transition."

Asked years later on CNN whether he regretted it, he said the only thing he regrets is the spelling.

So when Norman says elections have to be secure or we lose the republic, he has a documented record of what he does when an election's outcome is one he doesn't like. He asked for troops.

That is the man now offering himself as the Senate's leading champion of election integrity.

What the SAVE Act actually does

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act — the SAVE America Act, the version Norman and his opponent both name — passed the House in February 2026. It requires documentary proof of citizenship — a passport or a birth certificate — presented in person, to register to vote or to update an existing registration.

An ordinary driver's license doesn't satisfy it. Neither does a Social Security card, a utility bill, or a voter ID card. We've laid out the full picture before; here is the short version.

More than 21 million Americans of voting age don't have ready access to documentary proof of citizenship.
84% of women who marry change their surname. Their birth certificate no longer matches their legal name, so it can no longer serve as their proof of citizenship.
Everything happens in person, during business hours. That's a trip and a day's pay for people who work hourly, don't drive, or live an hour from the county office.

And the problem it claims to solve — noncitizens voting in federal elections — is already a federal crime, and already vanishingly rare. When the Brennan Center surveyed election administrators who together counted 23.5 million votes in 2016, they had referred about 30 suspected incidents of noncitizen voting for investigation. That is 0.0001 percent. Forty of the 42 jurisdictions studied reported none at all.

The bill doesn't remove a single fraudulent vote that isn't already illegal. What it does is add a paperwork requirement that lands hardest on married women, rural voters, seniors, and working people.

Norman calls that "safe and secure elections." It is a fee and a bureaucratic errand attached to a right.

His agenda is a bill his opponent already cosponsored

Here is the part that makes the whole pitch collapse.

Norman's runoff opponent is Senator Darline Graham Nordone, appointed to the seat after her brother's death. And the SAVE Act is the first bill she cosponsored — she said so in a Fox News op-ed, and offered to cancel the Senate's August recess to get it passed.

So Norman's entire stated agenda is a bill the person he's running against already put her name on, days into the job, and volunteered to give up her vacation for.

There is no policy disagreement here. Norman is not offering South Carolina a different position on voting. He is arguing that he would fight harder for the identical bill — which is why the interview kept coming back to endorsements and ratings rather than to anything he'd actually do differently.

He listed his backers: Rick Scott, Mike Lee, Jim DeMint, Mark Meadows. A 100 percent Heritage Action rating this term, 98 percent lifetime. Then he named the disqualifying endorsement on the other side:

"she's got Lisa Murkowski, who I'm sorry, is the first Republican who opposed the SAVE Act."

That's the tell. Not a disagreement about the debt or health care or trade. The one Republican name Norman brought up as damning is a senator who declined to vote to make registration harder.

What he didn't put on the list

Norman did name one other problem facing the country in that interview: "a socialist/communist crisis coming our way." He also said the country has "a financial crisis" and that nobody's talking about the debt.

He didn't mention that his own companies took four pandemic loans worth $608,500 that the government forgave — before he signed a letter calling student debt relief "an act of highway robbery," and told a fact-checker it takes "a special kind of idiocy" to compare the two. Debt is a crisis when other people owe it.

For a candidate whose closing argument is "my record is my resume," it's worth noticing which parts of the resume come up unprompted and which don't.

The stakes on August 25

President Trump has endorsed Graham Nordone and reiterated it on Friday, telling voters she has his "complete and total endorsement." Representative Russell Fry, who finished third in Tuesday's primary, endorsed her too.

So this runoff is not a fight over whether the Republican nominee will push the SAVE Act. Both of them will. That is already decided.

The question voters get to answer is narrower and worse: whether the nomination goes to a man who, the last time an election didn't go his way, wrote to the White House that the military was the country's last hope — and who, five years on, will tell you the only thing he'd change is a typo.

Norman opened his pitch by saying he'd be "a loud voice for one, the constitution." The constitution he has already once asked the President to suspend.

Source

Breitbart News, "Exclusive — Ralph Norman: South Carolina Senate Runoff About Who Will Fight for SAVE America Act" by Matt Mercer (August 15, 2026)

Republicans Are Coming for IVF and Surrogacy. Twenty-Five of the Ones We Track Signed the Bill.

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:31:40 +0000

For years, the political line on in vitro fertilization was simple. Everybody said they were for it. It is one of the most popular things in American medicine — this March, the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology reported that for the first time, more than 100,000 babies were born in a single year with the help of IVF. Even Donald Trump has talked about making it cheaper.

That line is breaking. And you can watch it break in two places at once: in state Republican party platforms, and in a bill sitting in Congress right now with a long list of Republican names on it.

What the state parties wrote down

In June, the Texas Republican Party adopted a 2026 platform that opposes public funding for IVF and calls for regulating the whole assisted-reproduction industry, including mandatory reporting on how embryos are created and stored. One section says the Texas Legislature must "protect fetal life from destructive practices, such as IVF and commercial surrogacy."

Another section goes after surrogacy directly:

"We support a ban on contract surrogacy involving foreign nationals, which may involve a form of trafficking and may lead to claims of citizenship. We also support prohibiting third-party egg and sperm donations and the commercialization of human reproduction in Texas; and support policies that promote the welfare of children, medical transparency, and the protection of biological parents."

The Idaho Republican Party added language to its own 2026 platform opposing "the destruction of human embryos." Republicans in Missouri, North Carolina and Oklahoma adopted similar language in 2024 and 2025. That is five states in two years.

Party platforms are not law. But they tell you where a party is heading. As Sean Tipton of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine put it to Stateline, "Party platforms are mostly about intraparty politics and jockeying for position, but at the same time, you have to pay attention, because that symbolism matters."

The bill below is what happens when the symbolism grows teeth.

The SAFE KIDS Act

On November 4, 2025, Sen. Rick Scott of Florida introduced S. 3101, the SAFE KIDS Act. On January 13, 2026, Rep. Blake Moore of Utah introduced the House version, H.R. 7040.

Here is what it does, in the sponsors' own words: it "invalidates commercial surrogacy agreements with citizens of foreign adversary countries, such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, and creates a misdemeanor for brokers — not surrogates — who knowingly facilitate these agreements."

Read that again. A surrogacy contract — the document that protects the surrogate, the intended parents, and the child — becomes legally void if one of the parties holds the wrong passport. The people who signed it in good faith are left with nothing to enforce.

The bill is pitched almost entirely as a national security measure. John Moolenaar of Michigan, who chairs the House Select Committee on China, said Chinese nationals "are exploiting gaps in US law to buy children from America," and that "this legislation will ensure accountability and protect innocent children from nationals of foreign adversary countries who want to buy American babies."

Blake Moore said the "espionage risks that could emerge from China and Russia bringing children with U.S. passports into their countries should be further cause for alarm."

Rich McCormick of Georgia was blunter about which door this actually opens:

"The SAFE KIDS Act closes a dangerous loophole that allows foreign adversaries to exploit our 14th Amendment through surrogate pregnancies. This bill protects vulnerable women and children while preventing hostile regimes from abusing U.S. birthright citizenship."

That is the tell. The 14th Amendment "loophole" McCormick is describing is birthright citizenship — the rule that people born here are citizens, in place since 1868. The Supreme Court upheld it on June 30, 2026, rejecting Trump's order trying to end it. Republicans have been hunting for a way around that ruling ever since, and subpoenaing maternity clinics while they look. Surrogacy is the newest angle of attack.

Robert Aderholt of Alabama, Jen Kiggans of Virginia, Nathaniel Moran of Texas, Mike Kennedy of Utah, Addison McDowell of North Carolina, John McGuire of Virginia and Jefferson Shreve of Indiana all supplied supporting statements for the same announcement.

Who signed it

These are the cosponsors who have report cards on this site. In the House, alongside Moore and Moolenaar:

Robert Aderholt
Jen Kiggans
Nathaniel Moran
Paul Gosar
Diana Harshbarger
Rich McCormick
Michael Rulli
Addison McDowell
Mike Kennedy
John McGuire
Pete Sessions
Jefferson Shreve
John Rose
Ben Cline
Harriet Hageman
Andy Harris
Chuck Fleischmann
Sheri Biggs

And in the Senate, on Rick Scott's version: Dan Sullivan, Pete Ricketts, Ashley Moody, Marsha Blackburn and Mike Rounds.

Neither bill has passed. The Senate version was referred to the Judiciary Committee the day it was introduced and has not moved since. But 25 sitting members of Congress decided this was worth attaching their name to.

The part they don't put in the press release

Here is the thing about the "we support IVF, we just want guardrails" position: four of the senators on that list already had a chance to vote on protecting IVF, and did not take it.

On September 17, 2024, the Senate voted on whether to take up the Right to IVF Act, which would have written a federal right to fertility treatment into law. Sen. Tammy Duckworth rewrote an earlier version of it after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in February 2024 that discarded embryos were children under state law — a ruling that prompted doctors in that state to halt IVF procedures.

The motion needed 60 votes to advance and failed 51–44. Two Republicans voted to advance it: Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. Sen. John Thune told reporters that week, "Republicans support IVF full stop," and called the vote an attempt "to create a political issue where there isn't one."

The roll call says otherwise. Dan Sullivan voted no. Marsha Blackburn voted no. Pete Ricketts voted no. Mike Rounds did not vote at all.

Rick Scott — who would introduce the surrogacy bill fourteen months later — spent that week floating his own IVF proposal to expand health savings accounts, and noted that his own daughter was undergoing IVF. Duckworth's answer to him at the time reads differently now: "you can't support a fertilized egg being a human being — this personhood stuff which Rick Scott has said he supported — and also say you support IVF. The two are contradictory."

This is the same pattern at the state level. In Nevada, a bill writing a right to IVF into state law passed the state Senate with Republican votes — and Joe Lombardo vetoed it anyway, while saying he supports making IVF more accessible.

Saying you support IVF costs nothing. Voting for it costs something.

Why surrogacy, and why now

The people pushing this are not shy about the reasoning. Emma Waters, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation — the group behind Project 2025 — calls surrogacy "baby selling," and says people from countries hostile to the U.S. can hire a surrogate to obtain citizenship. She has said that by age 35, a surrogate-born child from China could run for president.

Waters also thinks couples turn to IVF too early without exploring the underlying causes of infertility, an idea tied to a conservative philosophy called restorative reproductive medicine that also discourages birth control. In a blog post last month, she said that over the past six months she has received more requests for help drafting surrogacy legislation than on any other topic.

Tipton, of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, thinks the appeal is broader than national security. "For groups like Heritage, (surrogacy) is a nice synergy that allows them to be xenophobic, homophobic and anti-choice all at once," he said.

There is a reason he says homophobic. Many same-sex couples build their families through IVF and surrogacy. There is no other route.

The numbers do not support a crisis. Babies born through surrogacy made up about 14 out of every 100,000 deliveries between 2017 and 2020, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. A study found about 32% of surrogate pregnancies between 2014 and 2020 were for international couples, and about 41% of those were from China — where surrogacy is illegal, which is why people leave.

Meanwhile, as of June, lawmakers in at least 17 states had introduced 36 bills this year to give embryos or fetuses legal personhood, according to a Guttmacher Institute count reported by Stateline. Those are the bills that actually threaten IVF, because a clinic that discards an embryo is suddenly exposed. Opponents beat them back by arguing that they might limit IVF — which remains broadly popular.

What this costs real people

Ashley Kirk-Robertson, an Idaho woman who has carried four surrogate pregnancies, described what these arrangements actually look like. Her first was for a single father from Spain, where surrogacy is illegal. The second was for a husband and wife from Israel. The third was for a same-sex couple from Israel. The fourth was for Brooke Green, a Democratic Idaho state representative who could not carry a second child because she was diagnosed with a hormone-fueled breast cancer weeks before her last embryo was to be implanted.

"They truly are just here because coming here for the surrogacy is cheaper or because in their country it's not allowed," Kirk-Robertson said.

None of Kirk-Robertson's four contracts would be touched by the SAFE KIDS Act. It reaches only prospective parents who are citizens or permanent residents of the four countries the defense code calls foreign entities of concern — North Korea, China, Russia and Iran — and Spain and Israel are not among them. But look at where the bill draws its line. Not at whether anyone was harmed. At a passport.

Twenty-five Republicans on this site's report cards signed their names to that.

Source

Kelcie Moseley-Morris, Stateline: "More GOP party platforms include anti-IVF language. Is surrogacy next?" Cosponsor lists from congress.gov; sponsor statements from Rep. Blake Moore's office.

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.

South Carolina Is Voting Today for a Senator Who Asked the White House to Impose Martial Law. He Says He Wouldn't Take It Back.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 18:01:34 +0000

Polls in South Carolina are open until 7 p.m. today. Ten Republicans are on the ballot in the special primary to replace the late Senator Lindsey Graham, and nobody is expected to clear 50%, so the top two go to a runoff on August 25.

One of the men who could be in that runoff is Ralph Norman, who has represented South Carolina's 5th District since 2017.

Five years ago, Norman asked the White House to have the President use the United States military to stop the transfer of power to the winner of a presidential election. He put it in writing. When a reporter asked him three years later whether he regretted it, he said the only thing he regrets is that he spelled a word wrong.

That is not an exaggeration. Here is the record.

What he wrote in private

On January 17, 2021 — eleven days after the Capitol was attacked, three days before Joe Biden was sworn in — Norman texted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows:

"Mark, in seeing what's happening so quickly, and reading about the Dominion law suits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation we are at a point of – no return – in saving our Republic !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!"

He meant martial law. Martial law means the military takes over from civilian government. A sitting member of Congress was telling the President's chief of staff that ordering troops into American streets to stop an inauguration was the country's last hope.

The message only became public on December 12, 2022, when Talking Points Memo reported it out of the trove of texts Meadows turned over to the House January 6 committee. That was more than a month after Norman had been comfortably re-elected. Nobody in South Carolina got to weigh it before voting.

What he said in public, five days earlier

This is the part that should decide how you read the text.

On January 12, 2021 — five days before he sent it — Norman put out an official statement on his congressional website explaining why he opposed impeaching Donald Trump. Here is what he told his constituents, in his own words, on his own letterhead:

"With the inauguration of Joe Biden just a few short days away, we should place our focus on ensuring a peaceful transition. These Articles will not do that."

Peaceful transition. That is what he said in public on January 12. On January 17 he privately asked for the military.

And it wasn't the first time the public version and the private version didn't match. On November 7, 2020, the day the networks called the race, Norman texted Meadows:

"Bottom line, it's time we FIGHT FOR THE ONE PERSON WHO HAS CHANGED THIS COUNTRY!! WAY TOO SOON TO GIVE IN NOW!!"

He asked for a conference call and "concrete plans of action." Three days later, on November 10, 2020, at a news conference in the South Carolina Statehouse lobby, a reporter asked Norman whether he accepted the results of the 2020 election.

"Oh absolutely," he said. "I do not hate Joe Biden. I do not like his policies. But that being said, yes we will accept."

He said "yes we will accept" in front of cameras three days after writing "WAY TOO SOON TO GIVE IN NOW" in a text nobody was supposed to see.

He had a chance to walk it back. Twice.

December 2022. When the texts came out, Norman's office put out a statement saying: "Obviously, Martial Law was never warranted. That text message came from a source of frustration." The York County Democratic Party called on him to resign. Its chairman said Norman was "a traitor to our highest ideals." Norman's office declined to comment on the resignation calls, and did not answer the Post and Courier's follow-up question about whether his concerns over the 2020 results had been resolved.

January 2024. CNN's Kaitlan Collins put it to him directly on The Source. She noted that the text went out three days before the inauguration and that "you were urging the White House to use the U.S. military to prevent the peaceful transfer of power," then asked whether he regretted it.

Norman's answer:

"The only thing I regret, I misspelled martial law. I misspelled that. No, I didn't– I didn't– Look, everything happened so quick in that election."

Collins pressed him on what questions still lingered, noting that in CNN's exit polls half of Republican voters didn't believe Joe Biden legitimately won — which he did. Norman went further:

"The bottom line is we've got to have secure elections and whatever that takes. There are a lot of questions that still exist. You know, you've seen the lawsuits that were there. But no, I wouldn't take it back. I misspelled it, I should have taken the time– I was in a hurry, but no, I would not– I don't regret that."

Collins told him plainly that the lawsuits were thrown out and none of them amounted to anything, and that the one recount that found a miscount found more votes for Biden. Then she closed the segment: "Congressman, it is striking to hear you say that you stand by asking for martial law to be declared."

That was 2024. He has not said anything different since.

"Questions that still exist" — after five years and nothing

Norman's whole defense, then and now, is that there were questions. So look at what happened when other Republicans who voted the same way were asked to name the evidence.

In Mississippi, Michael Guest — an eleven-year district attorney — voted to throw out Arizona's and Pennsylvania's electoral votes, and then told a Jackson TV station a month later that no one ever showed him evidence substantial enough to overturn anything. That's the honest version of Norman's position, said out loud by someone who had the same information.

Norman had the same information too. He signed the November 6, 2020 letter from 39 Republicans to Attorney General Bill Barr claiming "widespread reports of irregularities." He signed a second letter to Barr on December 1 demanding subpoenas and the impounding of voting machines. He put his name to the Supreme Court brief signed by 126 House Republicans asking the Court to throw out the results in four states he doesn't represent. Every one of those channels came up empty — as Collins put it to him on air, the lawsuits "were all thrown out; none of them amounted to anything."

Five years on, the questions are still "lingering" because nothing was ever found. That's not an open question. That's a closed one he won't accept the answer to.

Then he voted against every attempt to find out what happened

If Norman genuinely wanted answers, there were votes for that. He took the other side of all of them.

Voted against impeaching Trump for inciting the insurrection.
Voted against the independent, bipartisan commission to investigate January 6.
Voted against creating the House Select Committee on January 6 after the commission was blocked.
Voted against awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to the police officers who defended the Capitol — one of only 21 members of the entire House to do so.

That last one is worth sitting with. The Capitol Police held the building on January 6. Norman was inside it. He voted against giving them a medal.

This is the pattern we documented on his impeachment record: in 2021 he put his name on five separate resolutions to impeach four Biden officials in 45 days, including one against Kamala Harris that drew only two cosponsors in the whole House. Aimed at the other party, his appetite for accountability was bottomless. Aimed at his own, it disappeared.

What the job actually is

Norman is asking for a six-year term in the United States Senate. The Senate is the chamber that certifies presidential electoral votes alongside the House. It is the chamber that would vote on the confirmation of a Defense Secretary. It is the chamber that holds impeachment trials.

He is not hiding what he thinks. He said it on national television, unprompted, with a chance to take it back: no, I wouldn't take it back.

He has real support in this race. His endorsers include Rep. Nancy Mace, state Freedom Caucus legislators, and former Senator Jim DeMint. He's running against an appointed senator with Trump's endorsement, against Russell Fry, who filed for the Senate seat and his House seat at the same time, and against former Governor Mark Sanford.

Whatever you think of the rest of that field, this much is documented, in his own words, on his own website and in his own text messages: Ralph Norman told the public he wanted a peaceful transition, and five days later privately asked the White House to send in the military instead. He says he wouldn't take it back.

A man who asked for a military takeover when his side lost an election should not be handed six years in the United States Senate. We deserve better.

Sources

1 month after Lindsey Graham's death, voters go to the polls to choose his replacement — Seanna Adcox, SC Daily Gazette, August 11, 2026. Photo of Rep. Ralph Norman at the U.S. Senate Stump Stop in Lexington, S.C., August 1, 2026, by Jessica Holdman/SC Daily Gazette.
SC's Ralph Norman faces calls to resign over martial law text message to Mark Meadows — Caitlin Byrd, The Post and Courier, December 13, 2022.
Leaked 2021 text from SC Rep. Ralph Norman calls for martial law — South Carolina Public Radio, December 13, 2022.
Statement on Articles of Impeachment — norman.house.gov, January 12, 2021.

Russell Fry's Whole Career Started by Firing the Republican Who Voted to Impeach Trump. Tomorrow He Asks South Carolina for a Promotion.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:25:33 +0000

Tomorrow, August 11, 2026, South Carolina Republicans pick a nominee for the U.S. Senate seat Lindsey Graham held until his death in July. Russell Fry is on that ballot.

It's worth remembering how he got to Congress in the first place, because it is the single most important fact about him — and it is not a policy position. It's a job he was hired to do.

The seat he took

Tom Rice represented South Carolina's 7th District for five terms. He was, by his own account and by his voting record, a conservative who backed Trump's agenda.

On January 13, 2021, he was one of ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump over January 6.

Rice never took it back. He explained it this way:

"I'm all about Trump's policy. But absolute pledge of loyalty, to a man that is willing to sack the Capitol to keep his hold on power is more than I can stomach."

And, on the eve of the primary that ended his career, more simply: "Republicans are supposed to protect the Constitution. We take an oath to protect the Constitution, not a man."

The job Fry was hired for

On February 1, 2022, Trump endorsed Fry with a statement that named the assignment out loud:

"Congressman Tom Rice…the coward who abandoned his constituents by caving to Nancy Pelosi and the Radical Left, and who actually voted against me on Impeachment Hoax #2, must be thrown out of office ASAP."

Fry's response was not "here is my agenda for the Pee Dee." It was:

"Radical Leftists, enabled by RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) like Tom Rice, are trying to erase President Trump's legacy and move America towards socialism."

He was also candid about what the race was actually about. He told Fox News: "the impeachment is the big elephant in the room and the voters are incredibly frustrated by that."

He was right about that. On June 14, 2022, Fry beat Rice 51% to 24% — clearing the field outright, no runoff needed. He won every precinct in the district.

Fry became the first Trump-endorsed challenger of that cycle to unseat a Republican incumbent who had crossed him.

Trump took the credit himself, posting that Fry "beat Impeach Master Tom Rice with a Vote of more than 51%, therefore WINNING OUTRIGHT with no need for a run-off." Matt Moore, a former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party who was a senior adviser to the Fry campaign, agreed: "Donald Trump powered Russell Fry to victory. There was no doubt about it."

Dr. David White, a political scientist at Francis Marion University, watched the returns and summarized the race in a sentence: "So, this was about Donald Trump and Tom Rice."

Rice's own last word on it, on election night: "I know I did the right thing," he said. "I know I defended the Constitution."

Why it still matters four years later

Congress works on a simple incentive. A member decides whether to check a president partly by asking what happens to members who do.

Tom Rice is the answer everyone in the House Republican conference learned. He voted his oath, said so out loud, refused to walk it back, and was removed by his own party's voters with a 27-point margin in a race his replacement openly described as being about the impeachment.

Russell Fry is not a bystander to that lesson. He is the instrument of it. His seat in Congress is the reward for administering it.

That's not an inference — it's the campaign he ran and the endorsement he sought.

What he does with the seat

The record since is what you'd expect from someone who got the job that way.

He voted for the budget blueprint ordering $880 billion in cuts from the committee that runs Medicaid, and then for final passage of the bill that made them law — which the Joint Economic Committee's House Democrats project will cost 37,124 people in his own district their health insurance by 2034, counting both the law's Medicaid cuts and the Affordable Care Act tax credits Republicans then let lapse. That is the most of any district in South Carolina. He then told constituents on a telephone town hall that "there are a lot of people who are on it who quite frankly shouldn't be."

He voted twice to cancel spending Congress had already approved, at the president's request — in June 2025, when the $9.4 billion package passed by two votes, and again in July, when the Senate's trimmed version came back.

He would not attend a constituent-organized town hall in Myrtle Beach, his office telling the local ABC station it was a "sham 'town hall'" run by "a partisan, liberal organization." When constituents heckled him at a March 2025 wildfire press conference, he accused them of being funded by George Soros.

And this summer he filed for the Senate while also filing to keep his House seat — an arrangement under which he cannot lose his job, and his district could lose its congressman until May.

He is not the only one

The party spent four years turning those ten votes into a cautionary tale — and the accounting for January 6 got buried along with them.

In Florida, Scott Franklin said a week after the attack that Trump bore "some responsibility" and called for a bipartisan investigation, then voted against creating one four months later. In Alabama, Robert Aderholt voted to throw out two states' electoral votes hours after the Capitol was cleared, and then voted twice against investigating why it was attacked.

Those are members who moved with the current. Fry is something else: a candidate recruited to punish the man who didn't.

Tom Rice is out of Congress. Russell Fry is running for the Senate.

Tomorrow

Fry goes into the primary in third place. An Emerson College poll taken July 28–29 had Ralph Norman at 22%, interim Sen. Darline Graham at 19%, and Fry at 12%, with a quarter of voters undecided.

Whatever happens, the record stands. Four years ago, South Carolina's 7th District had a congressman who said an oath outranked a man. It replaced him with one whose entire path to Washington ran through proving otherwise.

We deserve better.

Source

Split decision for Trump in high profile South Carolina GOP congressional primaries — Fox News, June 2022; Tom Rice's impeachment vote draws Trump-endorsed primary challenger — Ballotpedia News, May 24, 2022; and "This was about Donald Trump and Tom Rice": Professor says Fry won from Trump endorsement — Emma Parkhouse, WPDE ABC 15, June 15, 2022, republished on ABC News 4. Photo: ABC News 4.

Russell Fry Told His District a Lot of People on Medicaid "Quite Frankly Shouldn't Be." His Is the South Carolina District Projected to Lose the Most Health Coverage.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:21:00 +0000

On April 16, 2025, Russell Fry held a telephone town hall for South Carolina's 7th District — most of the Pee Dee plus Horry and Georgetown counties. For nearly an hour he took questions from callers, on a call that was closed for media questions.

Constituents asked about Medicare and Medicaid. Fry acknowledged the programs matter, then said this about the people on them:

"There are a lot of people who are on it who quite frankly shouldn't be."

Two months earlier, on February 25, 2025, he had already voted Yea on the budget blueprint ordering the committee that oversees Medicaid to cut $880 billion — it passed 217 to 215.

On July 3, 2025, he voted Aye on final passage of Trump's budget bill, which made the cuts law. That one went 218 to 214.

What that did to the district he was speaking to

The Joint Economic Committee's House minority staff ran the Congressional Budget Office's numbers by congressional district, counting the Medicaid cuts and the losses on the Affordable Care Act exchanges together. For SC-07:

37,124 people are projected to lose health coverage — 33,500 losing ACA marketplace coverage and 3,624 losing Medicaid.

That is the most of any congressional district in South Carolina.

Not the most of the Republican-held ones. The most, period. The district whose congressman said too many people are on Medicaid is the district losing the most coverage in the state.

The bigger of those two numbers is ACA marketplace coverage, not Medicaid. The committee counts both under one heading, the way the Congressional Budget Office scored them.

Statewide, it's already happening

This is no longer a projection. The results are in.

A report by the advocacy group Protect Our Care, covered by the Charleston City Paper, found that in the year after the bill was signed, more than 100,000 South Carolinians lost health insurance — over 70,000 off Medicaid and roughly 45,000 out of subsidized ACA plans. By the same group's count, average marketplace premiums in the state are up 235% since 2025. Its illustration: a 60-year-old couple earning $85,000 whose annual premium went from about $7,000 to about $29,000.

Sue Berkowitz, policy director at the South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center, had a blunt answer to the argument Fry was making on that phone line:

"This whole waste, fraud and abuse crap, excuse my language, is just an excuse to try to justify what they're doing to kick people off the rolls."

And the hospitals

South Carolina's rural hospitals were already thin. Six have closed since 2010.

South Carolina Public Radio reported what the law does to the rest. Beginning in January 2028, state-directed Medicaid payments get cut 10% a year for ten years. KFF calculates that South Carolina could lose as much as $5 billion and have as many as 60,000 fewer Medicaid enrollees over that stretch. Protect Our Care puts another $5.4 billion in added uncompensated care costs on South Carolina hospitals through 2034, with five rural Upstate hospitals already at risk of closing.

Allendale County Hospital is one of the last independent hospitals in the state. Its profit margins are near zero. Three out of four of its patients are on Medicaid or paying out of pocket. It has no surgery, no maternity — it is essentially an emergency room holding a county together.

Its CEO on what the cuts mean: "Small, rural hospitals operate on very thin margins anyway…there's just no way to sustain a hospital like that."

Thornton Kirby, who runs the state hospital association, said hospitals "are moving back into the survival mindset."

Here is what Fry's framing misses. When someone loses Medicaid, they do not stop getting sick. They show up at the emergency room without coverage, and the hospital eats the cost. "People who shouldn't be on it" become uncompensated care — which is exactly the $5.4 billion line item that closes rural hospitals.

The people Fry says shouldn't have coverage and the hospitals he says he wants to save are the same math problem.

Where SC-07 already stands

The 7th District is not a wealthy place that can absorb this.

38,652 households in SC-07 — about 12% of every household in the district — rely on SNAP, including 19,787 with children and 15,645 with someone 60 or older. That's the highest SNAP reliance of any Republican-held district in South Carolina.

Those are the same households on Medicaid. They are the ones whose coverage the JEC counted.

Now he wants a promotion

Fry is on tomorrow's ballot in the Republican primary for the Senate seat Lindsey Graham held until his death in July — while also running for re-election to the House seat, so his district could go without a congressman until May if he wins both races.

The pitch he made statewide, announcing the run, was that "we need a conservative fighter in the Senate who delivers real results."

The result he has actually delivered to his own district is the largest projected coverage loss in the state.

He's not the first to run this play

In Mississippi, Cindy Hyde-Smith told her state "Medicaid is not going anywhere," voted for the cuts, and then began filing rural hospital rescue bills — three in five months — while 24 Mississippi rural hospitals were rated vulnerable to closure. In Arkansas, 14,441 people lost ACA coverage in a single year after Congress let the subsidies expire, and the state's all-Republican delegation had the votes to stop it. We keep a running list of the Republicans with the worst records on health care, and the entry pattern never changes: cast the vote, then tell the district the cut isn't real, or that the people losing coverage didn't deserve it.

Fry chose the second version. On a phone line, in one sentence, with the press unable to ask a follow-up.

We deserve better.

Source

Congressman Fry defends tariffs, applauds Trump in telephone town hall — WPDE ABC 15, April 2025. District coverage-loss figures from the Joint Economic Committee. Statewide figures from the Charleston City Paper and South Carolina Public Radio. Photo: official congressional portrait.

Russell Fry Is Asking Horry County to Vote for Him Twice. If He Wins the Senate Seat, His District May Have No Congressman Until May.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:18:07 +0000

South Carolina votes tomorrow, August 11, 2026, in the Republican primary for the Senate seat left open when Lindsey Graham died in July.

Russell Fry is on that ballot. He is also on the ballot to keep his House seat in South Carolina's 7th District.

Same man. Two offices. Same election year.

He is not withdrawing the House bid, his spokesman Luke Byars told the S.C. Daily Gazette, in a story his hometown paper carried — "meaning Fry could be on the ballot twice in November."

What happens to SC-07 if he wins

This isn't a technicality. It's a hole in the district's representation.

If Fry wins both races in November, he has to give one up — and the House seat can't be filled quickly. Fellow South Carolina Republican Ralph Norman, running in the same Senate primary, put a date on it:

"I respect Russell Fry and I have enjoyed serving with him in the House, but the reality is, his candidacy could leave his seat vacant until May 18th. This would leave his constituents unrepresented, jeopardize President Trump's agenda, and put the House at risk of being led by a Speaker Hakeem Jeffries."

Fry's Democratic opponent for the House seat, John Vincent, made the same arithmetic to WMBF — that the district would be without representation until next May, because there isn't time to run a special election before the new session starts.

Norman is a rival with an obvious motive to say it. Vincent is an opponent with the same motive. That's worth knowing. It's also worth noting that neither of them is disputed on the facts, and that Fry, offered the chance to answer, did not respond to WMBF by publication.

The Grand Strand and the counties around it would spend the opening months of the next Congress with nobody voting their name on the House floor.

What Fry says about it

Asked to explain the double candidacy, Fry's answer was about the calendar and the math of Senate control:

"The circumstances of what happened are weird. You have a nominee who passed away after the primary, and we don't have one selected for November."

And: "Who can win in November? Who can make sure the Senate stays in Republican control?"

Notice what isn't in either sentence. There is no version of the answer that is about the 7th District. The case for running twice is a case about the Senate math and about which Republican is most electable statewide.

Vincent put the obvious question plainly:

"He's literally asking people to vote for him twice. For two different seats." And: "By definition, he has to be thinking, which one am I gonna drop?"

His summary of what SC-07 is owed: constituents "deserve a congressman who actually wants this job, not one holding onto it as a consolation prize."

A Republican colleague said the quiet part

The sharpest line about this didn't come from a Democrat.

South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace, who has endorsed Norman in the Senate race, said this:

"If you're running for two offices at once, you've already told us who you are. That's not about politics anymore — that's about power."

She has her own reasons to say it. She's also right about the structure of the thing. A person who files for two offices in the same cycle has arranged matters so that he cannot lose his job, whatever the voters decide. The one thing that is at risk is the district's seat at the table.

Where he stands going in

Fry is not the favorite. An Emerson College poll taken July 28–29 put Norman at 22%, interim Sen. Darline Graham at 19%, and Fry at 12% — fourth place is Mark Sanford at 11%, with a quarter of voters still undecided. Graham holds the seat because Gov. McMaster appointed her to it after her brother died.

That's the context for the campaign he's run. A "Judge Him" ad from the pro-Fry Palmetto Leadership Fund, reported August 3, went after Norman over a 2006 Charlotte Observer report that Norman's development sites hadn't required contractors to verify workers' legal status, and that three contract employees told the paper they were in the country illegally — a twenty-year-old story, deployed on behalf of a candidate running third.

Meanwhile, the appointed senator he's chasing has been busy consolidating what she inherited: federal records now list Darline Graham as the sponsor of her brother's leadership PAC, a sibling-to-sibling handoff campaign finance experts say has almost no precedent.

This is what the race looks like from the outside: a seat treated as property, and a sitting congressman holding two ballot lines so he lands somewhere no matter what.

The district he might be leaving

It matters who SC-07 would be without a voice for.

By the Joint Economic Committee's estimate, 37,124 people in SC-07 are projected to lose health coverage from the Medicaid and ACA cuts — the most of any district in South Carolina. And 38,652 households in the district — about 12% of them — rely on SNAP, including 19,787 with children and 15,645 with someone 60 or older. That's the highest SNAP reliance of any Republican-held district in the state.

Those are people who will need a congressman's office next spring — for a Medicaid renewal gone wrong, a benefit cut off by a paperwork error, a hospital that closed.

If Fry wins tomorrow and then wins both races in November, per Norman's own timeline they may not have one until May 18.

He has been hard to reach already

None of this is a departure for him.

When constituents organized their own in-person town hall in Myrtle Beach in April 2025, Fry's office told the local ABC station he would not attend the "sham 'town hall'" because it was "organized by a partisan, liberal organization." He held a telephone town hall two days later that was closed to media questions. And when constituents heckled him at a March 2025 press conference about the Myrtle Beach wildfires, he accused the protesters of being funded by George Soros.

A congressman who won't stand in a room with his district is now asking it to elect him to a different job while re-electing him to this one.

We deserve better.

Source

Two South Carolina congressmen launch bids for US Senate, Darline Graham says "I'm in" — Skylar Laird, S.C. Daily Gazette, via MyHorryNews, July 20, 2026, and Rep. Fry announces dual run for House seat and Senate special election — WMBF News, July 21, 2026. Norman's statement via Roll Call, July 20, 2026. Photo: MyHorryNews.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the money is for

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

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

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

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

The only limits Congress wrote were about equipment

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

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

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

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

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

Why the margin matters more than the bill

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

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

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

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

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

The 187 with report cards

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

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

How they voted

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

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

Lauren Boebert's New Bill Would Repeal the 78-Year-Old Law That Keeps Handguns Out of the Mail

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 07:36:00 +0000

On July 30, 2026, Lauren Boebert introduced a bill with a friendly name and a very specific effect.

H.R. 9979, the "Freedom to Ship Act," runs five pages. Most of it is about shipping companies. The last line is the part worth reading. Section 2(c) of the bill says:

"Section 1715 of chapter 83 of title 18, United States Code (and the item relating to such section in the analysis of such chapter), is repealed."

That is a citation, not an argument, so here is what it means.

18 U.S.C. § 1715 is titled "Firearms as nonmailable; regulations." It says: "Pistols, revolvers, and other firearms capable of being concealed on the person are nonmailable and shall not be deposited in or carried by the mails or delivered by any officer or employee of the Postal Service." It carves out exceptions for police, the military, government watchmen, and gun manufacturers and dealers shipping to one another. And it says anyone who knowingly puts a handgun in the mail "shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."

That section has been on the books since 1948, and the ban it carried forward dates to 1927 — Boebert's own press release puts it at "nearly 100 years." Her bill deletes it — the ban and the penalty both.

She said so herself. Announcing the bill on X, Boebert wrote that her legislation "protects privacy, holds companies accountable and restores the ability to mail handguns through USPS."

Three other Republicans put their names on it as original cosponsors: Sheri Biggs of South Carolina, Michael Cloud of Texas, and Clay Higgins of Louisiana.

The other half: making it illegal for UPS to say no

The rest of the bill is aimed at private shipping companies.

It adds a new section to federal transportation law, "Interference with lawful transportation of arms." Under it, a motor carrier — UPS, FedEx, a freight company — may not "interfere" with a gun shipment, and the bill gives four specific examples of what that includes:

Declining to carry it. A carrier that says "we don't ship firearms" is in violation.
Imposing conditions beyond what federal gun law already requires, where they restrict the owner's ability to transfer or dispose of the gun.
Charging more for a gun than for another package of similar size, weight and hazard class.
Requiring the shipper's consent to disclose information as a condition of taking the shipment.

A fifth item sweeps in "any other like conduct" with the same effect.

The penalty is civil: $10,000 to the federal government for every violation, plus a private lawsuit from the shipper for "all compensatory and consequential damages."

Sit with that for a second. This is a bill that tells private companies they are legally forbidden from declining a category of business, on pain of a $10,000 federal fine per package and open-ended civil liability. From the party that says the federal government should not tell businesses what to sell or who to serve.

The rationale Boebert gave is that under the Biden administration, some carriers made licensed gun dealers sign take-it-or-leave-it contracts. Her remedy is not to give dealers more bargaining power. It is to remove the companies' ability to decide at all.

What Boebert is not working on

Colorado has about 15.3 gun deaths per 100,000 people — 19.5% higher than the national average. Roughly 1,000 Coloradans die from gun violence every year. That is a plane crash a month, in her own state.

Boebert has been in Congress since 2021. Here is her record when the House actually voted on gun policy:

She voted against the Bipartisan Background Checks Act, which would have required a background check on nearly all gun sales.
She voted against the Enhanced Background Checks Act, which would have closed the loophole that let the Charleston church shooter buy his gun.
She voted against the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — the first significant federal gun safety law in nearly 30 years, passed after Uvalde.

Against all three. And the bill she chose to write herself, in the summer of an election year, makes it easier to put a handgun in a mailbox.

This is not an isolated priority. It is what this group of Republicans does with their legislative time. Rep. Andrew Clyde, who owns two gun stores, spent this month demanding the ATF destroy the firearm transaction records police use to trace guns found at crime scenes. Rep. Barry Moore wrote a bill to make the AR-15 the national gun of the United States.

"Criminals still shipped guns through the mail"

The gun-media coverage of Boebert's bill is worth quoting, because it makes the argument more plainly than she does.

Writing at Bearing Arms, Tom Knighton argued the ban never worked anyway: "criminals still shipped guns through the mail if they wanted to. They just lied about what they were shipping, and there's no way the USPS can check every single box."

That is the case for repeal: the law is broken because people break it. It is not an argument anyone makes about laws they like.

Knighton also framed the timing honestly. He wrote that "Having a Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate allows pro-freedom lawmakers the leeway to introduce Second Amendment-friendly legislation that will actually be considered and likely voted on."

In other words: this is not a message bill. They think it can pass.

Where it stands

H.R. 9979 was referred to the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the House Judiciary Committee on the day it was introduced. It has four Republican names on it and no Democrats.

Boebert co-chairs the Congressional Second Amendment Caucus. Repealing the mail ban is the kind of thing that caucus exists to do. The question for voters in Colorado's 4th District — and in the districts represented by Biggs, Cloud and Higgins — is whether that is what they sent someone to Washington for.

Source

Boebert Introduces Bill to Protect Right to Ship Guns — Bearing Arms, August 8, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/David Zalubowski.
Bill text and cosponsors: H.R. 9979 as introduced, 119th Congress.

Sheri Biggs Says South Carolina's 'Values' Mean Zero Democratic Seats. Four Out of Ten Voters There Disagree.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 22:07:55 +0000

In May 2026, at President Trump's urging, South Carolina's governor called a special session of the legislature to redraw the state's congressional map. The target was not a secret. It was the 6th District — a majority-minority district where Black residents are the largest group, held by Rep. Jim Clyburn since 1993, and the only Democratic-held congressional seat in South Carolina.

Sheri Biggs went on Newsmax to explain why the state should have none.

"South Carolina is very red. We're very strong in our beliefs and I think our map should reflect that."

And then, more plainly:

"Right now, we have one congressman that's Democrat. And I think a 7 and 0 would definitely reflect our values."

HuffPost's Kelby Vera reported the remarks on May 28, 2026.

"Our values"

Start with the phrase, because it's the whole argument.

Biggs isn't saying the current map is drawn wrong, or that the district lines split a county, or that the 6th is malapportioned. She's saying that a state whose people mostly vote Republican should have a delegation that is entirely Republican — that any seat held by the other party is a mismatch with what South Carolina believes.

That's not how representation works. It's how a one-party state works.

South Carolina is a red state. It is not a unanimous one. In 2024, Trump carried South Carolina with 58.2% — and 40.4% of the state voted for Kamala Harris. In three of the state's seven congressional districts that same night, the Democratic candidate took between 37% and 42% of the vote.

Under Biggs's standard, all of those voters should end up with zero representatives in Washington, on the grounds that their views are not the state's "values."

The people whose votes she's describing as un-South-Carolinian are, disproportionately, the Black voters who are the largest group in the 6th District.

What the plan would have done

The redistricting push came after a Supreme Court ruling weakening Voting Rights Act protections for minority districts, and Trump pressed for it directly, as the Associated Press reported on May 18, 2026. Gov. Henry McMaster's stated reason was to maximize Republican seats so Democrats couldn't take the House and try to impeach Trump.

Clyburn's response:

"It ain't about Jim Clyburn's district ... This is about turning the clock back to Jim Crow 2.0."

Republicans in her own state killed it

Here is the part that puts Biggs's position in relief.

The plan failed — and it failed because South Carolina Republicans wouldn't do it.

On May 26, 2026, state senators declined to advance the map, NPR's Sam Gringlas reported. It was the first day of early voting for the June primary. State Sen. Richard Cash, a Republican, gave his reason:

"Neither my conscience or common sense is going to let me stop an election that is already underway."

Clyburn's read on it: "A critical number of Republicans did not believe in putting a man over the law."

So the line Biggs drew — that a 7-0 map would "reflect our values" — was rejected by Republican legislators in her own state, with conscience one of the reasons they gave. Cash's state Senate district is in Anderson County, inside the congressional district Biggs represents.

It's a pattern, not a soundbite

A month after the map died, Biggs went further in the same direction.

On June 25, 2026, she became one of eight original cosponsors of a constitutional amendment to repeal the 17th Amendment — the amendment that lets voters elect their own U.S. senators. Under that resolution, South Carolinians would never cast a Senate ballot again; state legislators would choose.

She is also an original cosponsor of the SAVE Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship — a passport, or a birth certificate presented together with a photo ID — handed over in person, just to register to vote.

Erase the opposition's one seat. End direct election of senators. Add a paperwork barrier to registering.

Every one of those moves takes a decision away from voters and gives it to people already holding power. When Biggs says a 7-0 map would reflect South Carolina's values, she is being straightforward about which values she means.

The thing about safe seats

There's a practical argument here too, and it should land with Republicans.

Biggs's own seat is already about as safe as a seat gets: she won SC-03 in 2024 with 71.8% of the vote. A 7-0 map doesn't just silence Democrats — it makes every Republican in the delegation answerable to a primary electorate and to nobody else, permanently.

That is a system where the only voters a member has to worry about are the ones who already agree with her. It is also a system in which a member never has much reason to hold an in-person town hall. Biggs takes constituent questions by telephone — her first such call ran about 50 minutes, with an estimated 30,000 people on the line.

The map she wanted would have made that the whole state's arrangement.

Source

Kelby Vera, "Rep. Says South Carolina 'Values' Should Mean 0 Dem Seats," HuffPost, May 28, 2026. Photo: official congressional portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

South Carolinians Vote in a Senate Primary on Tuesday. Sheri Biggs Signed On to a Plan to Take That Vote Away.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 22:06:01 +0000

On Tuesday, August 11, South Carolina Republicans go to the polls in a special primary to choose a nominee for the full six-year Senate term that starts in January — the seat Lindsey Graham held until he died in July.

More than six weeks before that, Sheri Biggs put her name on a resolution that would make elections like that one illegal.

On June 25, 2026, Biggs became one of eight original cosponsors of H.J. Res. 198, introduced by Rep. Keith Self of Texas. Its stated purpose is one sentence: "Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to repeal the seventeenth article of amendment."

The 17th Amendment is the one that lets you vote for your senator.

What the 17th Amendment did

Before 1913, U.S. senators were not elected by the people. State legislatures picked them.

By the Senate's own official history, that system broke down over and over. Nine bribery cases came before the Senate between 1866 and 1906. Forty-five deadlocks happened in 20 states between 1891 and 1905, delaying the seating of senators. In one case, problems electing a senator in Delaware were so bad that the state legislature sent nobody to Washington for four years.

Reformers pushed for decades, and in 1913 the states ratified the 17th Amendment, which says senators shall be "elected by the people thereof."

H.J. Res. 198 would undo that. Senators would once again be chosen by state legislators, and voters would have no direct say.

The other original cosponsors are Eric Burlison, Andrew Clyde, Paul Gosar, Andy Harris, Scott Perry, Clay Higgins, and Michael Cloud. Victoria Spartz signed on four days later.

The timing, in South Carolina, is remarkable

Consider where Biggs's state actually is right now.

Lindsey Graham won the June 9 Republican primary and died on July 11. Gov. Henry McMaster appointed Graham's sister, Darline Graham, to hold the seat until January 2027. No South Carolina voter chose her. In her first opinion piece as a senator she wrote that "the first bill I co-sponsored was the SAVE America Act" — a bill that would make registering to vote harder.

So South Carolina at this moment has one senator that nobody elected — and a special primary on Tuesday to fill the seat properly.

Biggs's answer to that situation is a constitutional amendment that would make being chosen by politicians the permanent way it works. Under H.J. Res. 198, South Carolinians would never again cast a ballot for a U.S. senator. The choice would belong to the members of the South Carolina General Assembly.

Who this actually empowers

The argument for repeal is that it restores federalism — that senators would answer to their states rather than to national donors.

Look at what it does in practice.

Right now, to win a Senate seat in South Carolina you have to persuade a statewide electorate. Under H.J. Res. 198, you'd have to persuade a majority of South Carolina's 170 state legislators — people who run in districts drawn by their own colleagues, and many of whom face no serious general-election competition at all.

That is not a transfer of power from Washington to the people. It's a transfer from the people to the smallest, most gerrymandered, most lobbyable body in state government — the one where a handful of well-placed donors can reach every decision-maker in a single afternoon.

The historical record on this is not ambiguous. It is the reason the 17th Amendment exists.

It fits her record

This isn't an isolated signature. Biggs's approach to who gets to vote, and whose votes count, is consistent.

She is an original cosponsor of the SAVE Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship — a passport or a birth certificate, presented in person — just to register to vote or update a registration. A driver's license doesn't count.

And in May 2026, appearing on Newsmax, Biggs argued South Carolina's congressional map should be redrawn to erase the state's only Democratic-held seat: "I think a 7 and 0 would definitely reflect our values."

Proof-of-citizenship to register. A map with no seats for the other side. And a constitutional amendment ending the direct election of senators.

Each one moves in the same direction: fewer people deciding, and the deciding done further from the voter.

Will it pass?

No. Repealing a constitutional amendment takes two-thirds of both chambers of Congress and ratification by 38 states. H.J. Res. 198 has nine cosponsors and sits in the House Judiciary Committee.

But a member of Congress doesn't become an original cosponsor of a constitutional amendment by accident. It's a deliberate, public statement of what she thinks the country should look like.

Sheri Biggs thinks South Carolinians should not get to vote for their senators.

South Carolinians get to vote on Tuesday. It's worth knowing what she'd do with that if she could.

Source

The resolution's official record, H.J. Res. 198 (119th Congress), introduced June 25, 2026 by Rep. Keith Self, with Rep. Sheri Biggs listed as an original cosponsor in the Library of Congress bill status record. Photo: official congressional portrait via Wikimedia Commons.

Sheri Biggs Was Weeks or Months Late Disclosing 170 Trades Worth Up to $13.6 Million — Dozens of Them on One March Day

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 22:04:57 +0000

The rule is simple and it is 14 years old. If you serve in Congress, and you, your spouse, or a dependent child buys or sells a stock, a bond, a Treasury bill, or a cryptocurrency, you have 45 days to tell the public. That's the STOCK Act, passed in 2012.

Sheri Biggs blew past that deadline on more than 170 trades.

NOTUS reporter Dave Levinthal documented it in October 2025. The trades were made by her husband, Bill Biggs. Their combined value: somewhere between $4.14 million and $13.62 million. The disclosures came in weeks or months late.

The March 18 problem

Most of the story is about paperwork. This part isn't.

Dozens of those undisclosed trades were stock sales executed on March 18, 2025 — the same day Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was providing key details about President Trump's "Liberation Day" tariff announcement set for April 2.

When those tariffs landed on April 2, financial markets fell hard.

To be clear about what is and isn't established here: NOTUS did not report that Biggs had inside information, and there is no finding that she did. What is established is that a large batch of sales left her household's portfolio on that specific day, and that the public was not told about them within the window the law requires — which is precisely the window that exists so voters can check the timing for themselves.

Donald Sherman, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told NOTUS:

"She chose to be a public servant, so it's perfectly reasonable for her constituents to question these trades, particularly since they were not disclosed consistent with existing federal law."

What was in the account

The holdings NOTUS listed are worth reading, because a few of them sit oddly next to Biggs's own committee seats and public positions.

Among them: Apple, Comcast, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Norfolk Southern, Progressive Insurance, Starbucks, UPS — and:

Northrop Grumman, a major defense contractor, with up to $50,000 sold on March 19, 2025.
Altria Group and Philip Morris International, the tobacco companies. Biggs is a nurse practitioner.
Alibaba Group, China Construction Bank, and China Merchants Bank — Chinese companies, held by a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee who sits on its East Asia and the Pacific subcommittee.
Up to $250,000 in the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF, plus structured investment products from Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and the Bank of Nova Scotia.

Biggs described most of the trades in her disclosure as falling within a "professionally managed account."

That is a real thing, and it may well mean she did not personally pick the individual trades. But it is not a defense to the late filing. The House Committee on Ethics financial disclosure instruction guide says members are "personally responsible for incomplete and inaccurate information" regardless of who prepared the filing.

The penalty

The standard first-time penalty for a late STOCK Act disclosure is $200. The Ethics Committee can waive even that.

Two hundred dollars, against a portfolio reported at up to $13.6 million.

This is not unique to Biggs — it's the design of the law, and it's why the disclosure deadline gets missed so routinely. Utah's Blake Moore broke the same rule 70 times in his first six months and paid the same $200. Georgia's Mike Collins bought Ether nine days before voting on a bill that moved its price.

The fine is a rounding error. The disclosure is the whole enforcement mechanism — and Biggs didn't make it on time, 170 times.

Why her constituents in particular should care

Almost none of Biggs's campaign money comes from small donors. Per FEC filings compiled by Who Bought My Rep, just 1% of her fundraising came from small grassroots donors, ranking her 416th out of 440 House members.

Meanwhile, in SC-03, 28,928 households — about 9% of all households in the district — rely on SNAP to buy groceries, including 15,213 households with children. An estimated 27,623 people in her district are projected to lose health coverage by 2034 — 2,723 of them from the Medicaid cuts in the budget law she voted for, and 24,900 from Affordable Care Act coverage.

At her April 2025 telephone town hall, an Anderson man on a fixed retirement income said rising food prices were making it harder for retirees like him to afford necessities. Biggs defended the tariffs, saying the long-term goal was to prioritize American interests and jobs, and expressed confidence they would lead to a stronger economy.

Roughly a month earlier, dozens of stock sales had gone out of her household's account on the day the Treasury secretary was briefing on those tariffs. Her constituents wouldn't learn about it for months.

Her office had nothing to say

NOTUS called and emailed Biggs's office repeatedly. Her office acknowledged the request for comment and then did not respond.

That is consistent. Biggs holds her town halls by telephone, a format she defended by saying virtual events allow better access and let more voices be heard.

So there is no town hall a constituent can walk into to ask about the March 18 trades, and no answer coming from the office if they call a reporter instead.

Source

Dave Levinthal, "Republican Congresswoman Failed to Properly Disclose 170 Trades Worth Up to $13.6M," NOTUS, October 8, 2025. Photo: Tom Williams/AP, via NOTUS.

William Timmons Called Mass Federal Firings "Freeing the Bureaucrats" and Said It Was "Just Fantastic." A Year Later, Many of Them Still Can't Find Work.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 10:44:43 +0000

In April 2025, three southern Republican congressmen got on the Republican Study Committee's Right to the Point podcast to talk about the Masters. It was Masters Week. They picked their golfers — Rick Allen took Rory McIlroy, Mike Collins took Scottie Scheffler — and in between, they talked about what was happening to the federal workforce.

South Carolina's William Timmons put it this way:

"We're freeing the bureaucrats to go and be productive members of the economy. It's just fantastic."

That's from the transcript the Washington Reporter published on April 10, 2025. The "bureaucrats" he was talking about are people with jobs, mortgages, and kids. They were being fired.

A year later

On April 22, 2026, NBC News went and found some of them.

Reporters Fiona Glisson and Gary Grumbach talked to 13 people who lost federal jobs or took the "Fork in the Road" buyout. A year on:

Seven were still unemployed.
Two were re-employed and making far less than before.
Two were getting by on side hustles.
Four had moved to find work.

One of them, John Burg, had spent decades working for the U.S. Agency for International Development, on assignments in Thailand, Kosovo, and El Salvador. He was laid off in January 2025. He applied to his 599th job and stopped counting. He now does carpentry in his Maryland neighborhood — changing lightbulbs for elderly neighbors, building a porch — and makes about 15% of his old salary.

"I feel more connected to my local community than ever. More disconnected from my financial goals," he told NBC.

David Harbourt ran safety and occupational health at the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine. He now commutes from Maryland to Kansas two weeks a month as a consultant while his wife works full time and raises their two kids alone half the month.

"The job market, particularly in Maryland, is unforgiving now. ... There's a stigma being a former fed. And that affects your marketability."

Bree Danner found out she'd lost her job at the CDC — in overdose prevention — while she was on her way to say goodbye to her dying grandmother. She has since spent her savings and her severance and run up credit card debt.

WellFed, a group that supports laid-off federal workers, estimates only about 25% of its members have found new jobs. OneAID, a group of former USAID staff and partners, estimates at least half of its members are still unemployed.

That is what "freeing the bureaucrats" looked like a year out. Not a fantastic outcome. A long-term unemployment problem.

He wasn't a bystander. He was on the oversight committee.

This is the part that separates Timmons from a random member giving a hot take.

In January 2025, he was appointed to the House Oversight subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency — the congressional panel created to oversee DOGE, chaired by Marjorie Taylor Greene. He celebrated it:

"I am deeply honored by Congresswoman Greene's confidence in my leadership and dedication to ensuring a more efficient, effective, and accountable federal government."

He spoke at the subcommittee's very first hearing, which the committee itself branded a "war on waste."

Oversight means asking hard questions of the thing you're overseeing. On the podcast, Timmons was not asking questions. He was selling:

"A private company could never get away with what this federal government's getting away with. They'd be fired by the board immediately. We've got these agency headquarters that are 25 percent occupied. It's costing taxpayers ten billion a year."

He described a hearing at the Voice of America building and the plan to sell it: "I bet it'll sell for tens of millions of dollars, and they're going to put up, probably, apartments there... And that's the kind of stuff that we're talking about those subcommittee and it is exciting."

Exciting. Fantastic. Those are the words of a booster, not an auditor.

The numbers he was cheering turned out not to hold up

On August 6, 2026, the Government Accountability Office — the nonpartisan watchdog that works for Congress — published its review of DOGE's public savings list.

CBS News reported the findings: DOGE "did not provide sufficient information to verify the method used to calculate 96 percent" of its claimed grant savings. Of the 264 leases DOGE claimed credit for terminating, 108 were already in the process of being eliminated before DOGE existed. And DOGE "did not respond to GAO's request for information or interviews."

Real property — the very thing Timmons was most excited about — is where the GAO found some of the clearest overstatement.

This is the same pattern we've documented with other Republicans who talked up DOGE instead of checking its work: Alabama's Gary Palmer, who said DOGE had done better oversight in six weeks than Congress had in 40 years, and Texas's Beth Van Duyne, who called it the golden age of DOGE. DOGE itself expired on July 4, 2026 without ever filing a final report.

What it means back home

South Carolina is unusually exposed to this. Nearly a third of the state's $13.6 billion budget comes from federal funds, which is why the Legislature was warned it couldn't just ignore DOGE cuts. The state lost close to $700 million in federal money that had been set aside for broadband expansion and home energy rebates.

Broadband is rural internet — the kind of thing the Upstate's smaller towns had been waiting on for years. Home energy rebates are money that helps people pay to insulate a house or replace a broken heat pump.

Timmons has never had to explain any of that in a room full of his own constituents. He hasn't held an in-person town hall in years, and in January 2026 he told a chamber of commerce crowd he's "very excited to be done with it."

The tell

Read the "freeing the bureaucrats" line one more time and notice what it assumes: that these people's jobs weren't real work, that private employers were waiting for them, and that a firing is a favor.

None of the three turned out to be true. The one thing that was true is that it made for a good line on a golf podcast.

Sources

Washington Reporter, "EXCLUSIVE: Reps. Mike Collins, William Timmons, and Rick Allen talk DOGE, SCOTUS, and golf ahead of Master's Week" — April 10, 2025.

Fiona Glisson and Gary Grumbach, "A year after DOGE, former federal employees are still looking for work" — NBC News, April 22, 2026.