MAGA Report Cards — South Dakota

Mike Rounds Pays His Senior Adviser More Than $153,000 a Year. Meta and a Tobacco Giant Were Paying Him Too.

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 10:44:00 +0000

The man who runs Senator Mike Rounds's political operation has two employers. One of them is you.

Robert Skjonsberg has worked for Rounds for more than a decade. He managed Rounds's first Senate campaign in 2014, served as his chief of staff from 2015 to 2022, and is now his senior adviser. Rounds's Senate office paid him more than $153,000 in the last 12 months on record.

At the same time, POLITICO reported on September 7, Skjonsberg has been a registered lobbyist in South Dakota — since 2023 — for more than a dozen clients. The list includes Meta, the tobacco company Altria, the conservative Freedom Foundation, the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, the South Dakota Dairy Producers and the South Dakota Pork Producers.

The records POLITICO reviewed had never been reported before.

What the Senate's rules actually say

This is not a gray area the Senate has failed to think about. The Senate Select Committee on Ethics publishes the rule in plain language on its own conflicts of interest page.

Anyone on the Senate payroll earning an annual rate of pay above $25,000, and employed more than 90 days in a calendar year, may not:

Affiliate with a firm, partnership, association, corporation, or other entity for the purpose of providing professional services for compensation;

Permit his or her name to be used by such a firm, partnership, association, corporation, or other entity;

Practice a profession for compensation to any extent during regular office hours in the employing Senate office.

The committee spells out what that leaves: an employee below the higher salary line "may provide professional service for compensation, but only as a solo practitioner, without affiliating with a professional services entity."

Skjonsberg is listed on the website of 605 Strategies, a South Dakota government affairs firm founded in 2012, as a "co-owner" and "founding member." The firm itself does not appear on his lobbying registrations; his own name does. The firm's own site, as the Daily Caller noted, credits him with guiding Rounds to victory in the 2002 governor's race, his 2006 reelection, and his Senate wins in 2014 and 2020.

There is a second, stricter tier for staff paid at or above $151,661 — the 2026 figure — which bars paid professional services entirely. POLITICO reported that Rounds's office paid Skjonsberg more than $153,000 over the last 12 months on record, but that he did not cross that threshold in calendar year 2025.

The bills that followed

The reason the rule exists is that a person cannot separate what they learn in a Senate office from what they sell in a statehouse.

Since Skjonsberg registered to represent Meta last year, Rounds has introduced several bills on artificial intelligence, including one that would create a commission to study what AI does to the American workforce.

Rounds also sits on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture. This year he introduced legislation to open new grazing land for the cattle industry, and legislation to stop people and companies controlled by foreign adversaries from buying American farmland and agricultural businesses. Skjonsberg's client list in Pierre includes the state's dairy producers, its pork producers, and the Association of Equipment Manufacturers.

Nobody has shown that a bill was written to order. That is not the standard. The standard is whether the arrangement creates a conflict, and two ethics watchdogs said it plainly.

"It's wholly inappropriate for somebody who's working as a Senate staffer to be lobbying, [even if] it's only at the state level, because you can't draw this line or wall between all the kinds of information you gain," said Meredith McGehee, an independent congressional ethics expert who used to lead the watchdog group Issue One. "To me, this is pretty much a no-go, and it's an outside employment that should not be permitted."

Craig Holman, a lobbyist for the advocacy group Public Citizen, went further: "It poses the most obvious conflict of interest I can imagine. Serving a public official, you're supposed to be working on the public's behalf, but then simultaneously working as a hired lobbyist, you're now working also on some private special interest's behalf and getting directly paid for it."

What Rounds's office says

Rounds's spokesperson, Dezmond Ward, told POLITICO that the office's general counsel "consulted with the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Ethics, which provided guidance to make certain there was and is no conflict of interest," and that "Senate Ethics guidance continues to be followed today."

The guidance itself is not public, and POLITICO's account does not include it. A senior staffer for the ethics committee did not respond to POLITICO. Skjonsberg did not answer questions about the scope of his work.

Two clients moved to distance themselves. The Association of Equipment Manufacturers said it has not worked with Skjonsberg since March 2026. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said Skjonsberg's contract ended after South Dakota's legislature wrapped its 2026 session that same month. Altria did not respond.

Rounds already takes the money directly

The lobbying arrangement is not the only place Big Tech money reaches Rounds. It reaches him through the front door too.

Rounds sits on the Senate Banking Committee, which writes the rules for banks, payments companies and cryptocurrency. His donors this cycle include $70,100 from the artificial intelligence company Anthropic — $68,600 of it from people who work there and $1,500 from its PAC — $56,400 from people at Alphabet, Google's parent, and $36,000 from people at Andreessen Horowitz. The cryptocurrency industry's super PAC spent $411,748 supporting him while he sat on the committee that writes crypto rules. Counting everything raised since 2020, only 5% of his money came from small grassroots donors, which ranks him 78th out of 100 senators.

His independent challenger, Brian Bengs, put the money at the center of the race last week. "He has taken over $215,000 American dollars from AI data center interests, and is backed with hundreds of thousands more from super PACs that support big tech interests," Bengs told South Dakota Public Broadcasting on September 3, as Dakota Free Press reported.

This keeps happening, and it is always the same shape

A senator's most trusted aide is worth a great deal to the industries that senator regulates — not because the aide will hand over a secret, but because the aide knows what is coming, who is movable, and how a bill gets written.

Ohio's Jon Husted has the same problem. His senior adviser and counsel collected $22,652 from a Columbus lobbying firm while working in Husted's office, which produced a formal complaint asking the Senate to investigate Husted himself.

And Rounds has been here before, at the other end of his career. As governor he privatized South Dakota's EB-5 green card program, handing it to a private company owned in secret by the state employee who gave out the contract. It ended with a bankrupt beef plant, roughly $100 million of foreign investors' money gone, and a cabinet secretary dead six days before a grand jury was set to indict him.

What the record shows

Mike Rounds's Senate office paid Robert Skjonsberg more than $153,000 over the last 12 months on record. During that period Skjonsberg was also a registered South Dakota lobbyist for more than a dozen clients, among them Meta and the tobacco company Altria, and is listed as a co-owner of a South Dakota government affairs firm, though that firm is not named on his registrations. Senate rules bar a staffer at his pay grade from affiliating with such a firm or letting it use his name. Since Skjonsberg registered for Meta, Rounds has introduced multiple AI bills; from his seat on the agriculture spending subcommittee, he has introduced bills touching industries Skjonsberg is paid to represent in Pierre. Rounds's office says the ethics committee cleared it; the guidance itself has not been made public.

Source

Jacob Wendler, with Andrew Howard, Senate aide's lobbying side gig raises ethics questions, POLITICO, September 7, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin.

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

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

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

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

Then a second missile killed them.

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

Congress never voted to authorize any of it.

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

We do not know who most of these people were

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

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

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

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

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

What the Senate actually voted on

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

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

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

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

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

It failed, 48 to 51.

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

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

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

Two of them switching sides would have carried it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The legal case for all this is classified

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The House looked into it for ten days

The Senate is not the only chamber that folded.

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

He told them it had nothing to do with vaccines.

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

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

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

What Kennedy did not tell the senators

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

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

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

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

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

The fourteen votes

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

Fourteen of those yes votes came from Republicans we track:

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

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

What Susan Collins was promised

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

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

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

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

What happened to the promises

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

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

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

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

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

The MMR vaccine is now the target

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who would have to investigate

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Source

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

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.

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.

Mike Rounds Traded a Handshake for His Vote. A Year Later, Most Tribal Radio Stations Say They'll Be Gone Within a Year.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:26:23 +0000

In July 2025, the Senate took up a bill to cancel $1.1 billion Congress had already approved for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. For four tribal radio stations in South Dakota, that money was most of what kept them on the air.

Mike Rounds said he wouldn't vote for it.

Then he did — after getting a promise. Not a law. A promise.

The deal

Rounds had been holding out on Trump's rescissions package. On July 15, 2025, he said he'd vote yes after all, posting on X:

"We wanted to make sure tribal broadcast services in South Dakota continued to operate which provide potentially lifesaving emergency alerts. We worked with the Trump administration to find Green New Deal money that could be reallocated to continue grants to tribal radio stations without interruption."

What he'd negotiated was this: the Trump administration would move $9.4 million out of an Interior Department account to at least two dozen Native American radio stations. It was never written into the bill. Nothing in the law required anyone to send that money. It was, in the word reporters kept using, a handshake.

Two days later, at 2:18 in the morning on July 17, 2025, H.R. 4 passed the Senate 51 to 48. Rounds voted yes. Gone with it: $535 million a year in public broadcasting money Congress had already locked in for fiscal 2026 and 2027.

Four days after that, Trump endorsed him for reelection.

The endorsement

On July 21, 2025, Trump posted that Rounds is an "incredibly strong advocate for the wonderful people of South Dakota" and gave him his "Complete and Total Endorsement." Rounds shared it and thanked him: "I look forward to working with you to make America even better!"

The timing is not in dispute. South Dakota Searchlight's account of it, republished by Sioux Falls Live, ran under a headline that says it plainly — Rounds won the endorsement "after playing deal-making role in rescinding public media funds" — and its opening sentence notes the endorsement came "days after Rounds helped pass Trump's cancellation of previously approved funds for public broadcasting and foreign aid."

It was a shift. Rounds had endorsed Tim Scott, not Trump, in the 2024 primary, and skipped Trump's 2023 Rapid City rally. Trump had once said of him: "I will never endorse this jerk again." Now he had the complete and total endorsement.

The vote and the endorsement are two separate facts sitting four days apart. Readers can decide what to make of that. What isn't a matter of interpretation is what happened to the radio stations.

Somebody told him exactly what would happen

Rounds did not have to guess how this would turn out. The day after he announced his yes vote, the head of America's Public Television Stations put out a statement about the side deal he'd just made. Kate Riley, the group's CEO, said it was

"at best a short-term, half-measure that will still result in cuts and reduced service at the stations it purports to save, while leaving behind all other stations, including many that serve Native populations."

She spelled out why. CPB didn't just write checks — it paid for the infrastructure that lets small stations exist at all: the interconnection and distribution system, emergency relief grants, staff training, and programs built specifically for Native and rural service areas. Take that away and hand a station a one-year grant, Riley said, and you get "station collapse and service disruption, particularly in rural, Tribal and underserved communities."

That was July 16, 2025. Rounds voted yes anyway, at 2:18 the next morning.

The money showed up. Once.

The $9.4 million did get disbursed, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs. By November 2025, the Bureau of Indian Affairs had sent award notices to KILI on the Pine Ridge Reservation, KOYA at Rosebud and KDKO at Yankton, and said an award was expected for KLND, which serves Standing Rock and Cheyenne River. The amounts nearly matched what CPB would have given out, according to station sources.

But it was one-time money for one fiscal year. There is no mechanism behind it. CPB used to distribute funding on a standing basis; CPB dissolved itself in January 2026. Everything now has to be requested again, by hand, every single year, through the appropriations process — and if it isn't, it simply doesn't come.

Rounds said as much himself. Asked in April 2026 what happens next, he said:

"I continue to work with my colleagues on both committees to secure continued funding for tribal radio stations in FY 27. These radio stations are critical for communications in some of the most rural parts of South Dakota and we must make certain they have the funding needed to continue operating."

Read that again. He is describing, as ongoing work, the problem he created by voting yes. He is on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on the Interior and on the Committee on Indian Affairs. He voted to end the standing funding, then took a seat at the table where somebody now has to beg for a replacement every year.

What the stations say happens if he doesn't get it

Native Public Media surveyed the tribal stations hit by the clawback. About 36 stations in its network have been "heavily impacted." The survey's answers:

A majority said they will close within six months to a year without continued federal funding.
Some said they would shutter immediately.
About a third had relied on CPB for 80% to 100% of their operations.
The vast majority said they were considering layoffs.

"We will begin to see a cascade of closures as the years go by, starting out with immediate closures, followed by the next wave," said Loris Taylor, CEO of Native Public Media. "It's going to be a ripple effect happening across Indian Country."

John Miller manages KOYA in rural South Dakota. He's been getting ready for the money to dry up.

"I'm not really looking forward to it, to be honest with you, but just, you know, knowing that it's coming, and that we've got to be really proactive in our efforts to try to keep afloat. It's going to be hard."

"If those folks in Washington can come up with a plan that would better help us, you know, I'm for it. I just hope that when everything is said and done that we're not left to just go away."

These are not entertainment stations. On reservations that are news deserts, they carry emergency alerts, weather warnings, school closings, health advisories and election information — and they broadcast in tribal languages. Rounds knows this. It's the argument he made when he asked for the $9.4 million. He called the alerts "potentially lifesaving."

He then cast the vote that removed the funding that pays for them.

This is a pattern with Rounds, not an accident

Rounds joined the Senate DOGE Caucus in January 2025, saying he was "ready to work with my colleagues in the Senate to do our part in assisting President Trump in cutting spending, eliminating unnecessary programs and streamlining the federal government."

Within weeks, calls to his own office for help tripled as the cuts hit South Dakotans. By mid-March his staff were working 139 separate cases trying to undo the damage. By April his offices had fielded nearly 2,300 calls about DOGE. He admitted the people doing the cutting didn't understand what they were cutting: "They went in, and they basically just started unplugging stuff."

He kept defending the cuts anyway.

It's the same move he made on tariffs. He told an Americans for Prosperity luncheon crowd in Rapid City that Trump's tariffs were "of concern" and that "consumers will pay a part of that" — then voted against every Senate resolution that would have ended the tariff emergencies. State the worry out loud. Vote with Trump. Take credit for the worry.

Rounds has been in the Senate since 2015. He also doesn't hold open, in-person town halls where any South Dakotan can show up and ask him about it — in April 2025, state Democrats had to hold their own in four cities "in the absence of South Dakota's Republican senators and congressman."

What a real fix would have looked like

There was an obvious alternative available to Rounds in July 2025, and it cost nothing: vote no.

The bill passed 51 to 48. And immediately after Rounds announced his support, the Senate advanced it on a procedural vote of 51 to 50. Rounds wasn't one vote among many. He was the vote the thing hinged on, which is exactly why he had the leverage to negotiate in the first place.

He could have used that leverage to demand the tribal radio money be written into the bill. He took a promise instead.

Instead he accepted a promise that expires, on behalf of stations that don't have another source of money, and got an endorsement out of it. Now the stations are counting down and he's issuing statements about how he "continues to work" on it.

South Dakota has nine reservations. Four stations serve five of them. If the FY27 request doesn't land, the emergency alerts Rounds called lifesaving go off the air — and the vote that started it will still be on the record with his name next to it.

We deserve better.

Source

Em Luetkemeyer, "Some Republicans want to reverse GOP cuts to rural and tribal radio stations," Current / NOTUS (April 17, 2026). Photo: Kathryn Squyres / Current.

45 Republicans We Cover Broke the Law That's Supposed to Stop Insider Trading in Congress

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:36:26 +0000

On July 22, 2026, the U.S. House passed a bill called the Stop Insider Trading Act. It passed 232 to 198, and every single Republican who voted — all 218 of them — voted yes.

Watching that, you'd think Congress had finally decided to deal with its stock trading problem.

Congress does have a stock trading problem. But there is already a law on the books meant to handle the most basic part of it, and it has been there since 2012. It asks members of Congress to do one simple thing.

We went through the report cards on this site and counted how many of the Republicans we cover have failed to do that one simple thing.

The answer is 45.

What the STOCK Act actually asks

The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act — the STOCK Act — was signed into law on April 4, 2012 after a national scandal over lawmakers appearing to profit from what they learned on the job. The Brennan Center describes it as closing part of a loophole that had exempted Congress from rules other traders had lived under since 1934.

The core requirement is almost embarrassingly easy. If you, your spouse, or your kids buy or sell a stock, a bond, or crypto worth more than $1,000, you file a form. You have 30 days from when you find out about it, and no more than 45 days from the trade itself.

That's the whole thing. It doesn't stop anyone from trading. It doesn't limit what they can own. It just says: tell us.

And there's a good reason it says that. Members of Congress know things before we do. They know which company is about to win a federal contract, which industry is about to get a tax break, whether the tariffs are real. If we can see what they bought and when they bought it, we can hold their trades up against their votes and decide for ourselves who they're working for.

Disclosure is the only tool voters get. Miss the deadline, and by the time we find out, the vote has happened, the profit is banked, and the election is over.

The roll call

Here's what "breaking a transparency law" looks like in practice. All of these are Republicans with report cards on this site.

The biggest offenders:

Rick Allen (GA) — failed to properly report 136 transactions worth between $3.05 million and $8.56 million. The oldest was a Monsanto purchase from February 2017 that he didn't disclose until August 2023 — roughly six and a half years late.
Diana Harshbarger (TN) — late on more than 700 stock trades worth between $728,000 and $10.9 million.
Julia Letlow (LA) — late on more than 210 stock and bond trades worth $225,000 to $3.3 million, some by more than a year.
Tommy Tuberville (AL) — in his first year in the Senate, disclosed 132 trades late, worth at least $894,000.
John James (MI) — 145 stock trades not disclosed on time, worth up to $2.2 million, the oldest more than eight months late. The campaign finance group End Citizens United filed an ethics complaint over them.
Lisa McClain (MI) — the No. 4 Republican in House leadership broke the law twice in 2025: first on more than 500 transactions, then again months later on $360,000 to $900,000 of her husband's trades, including up to $450,000 of Palantir stock.
Byron Donalds (FL) — months late on up to $1.6 million in trades.
Blake Moore (UT) — broke it more than 70 times in his first six months in office, on trades worth as much as $1.1 million.

The two the ethics office formally looked at. In May 2022 the nonpartisan Office of Congressional Ethics found "substantial reason to believe" that two Republicans had violated the law. Pat Fallon (TX) had failed to timely disclose 122 transactions worth between $9 million and $21 million in 2021 alone. John Rutherford (FL) had 157 late transactions worth $652,000 to $3.5 million, stretching back to the year he was sworn in.

Caught by watchdogs and reporters. A 2021 Campaign Legal Center complaint reported by NPR named three Republicans. Roger Williams (TX) filed no transaction reports for three of his wife's 2019 stock sales — General Electric, Nvidia and Disney. Warren Davidson (OH) sold $50,000 to $100,000 in Workhorse Group stock in 2020 with no disclosure form on file at all. And Lance Gooden (TX) reported a dozen stock purchases worth between $60,019 and $376,000 on his annual disclosure — American Airlines, Delta, Royal Caribbean, Hertz, Marathon Oil and others — without ever filing the transaction reports for them. All three sat on the House Financial Services Committee. What made that complaint unusual, NPR noted, is that these members appeared never to have filed reports at all. NOTUS's August 2025 investigation into late filings named Scott Franklin (FL), Brandon Gill (TX), Tim Moore (NC), Austin Scott (GA) and Dan Meuser (PA). A 2021 Business Insider review flagged Victoria Spartz (IN) and Mike Kelly (PA), whose wife's purchase of Beauty Health Company stock went unreported for more than seven weeks past the deadline.

And the rest. Raw Story's September 2024 investigation into 62 members of Congress who broke the law included Stephanie Bice (OK), Ron Estes (KS), Russ Fulcher (ID), Glenn Grothman (WI), Bill Hagerty (TN), Bill Huizenga (MI), David Joyce (OH), Tom Kean Jr. (NJ), Darin LaHood (IL), Nicole Malliotakis (NY), Maria Elvira Salazar (FL), Adrian Smith (NE), Rob Wittman (VA) and Mike Collins (GA). Add Dan Sullivan (AK), who sold Mowi and Five Below stock in August 2022 and didn't report either sale until November 3; Mike Rounds (SD), more than five months late on a $1 million to $5 million stock sale; Kevin Hern (OK), nearly two dozen trades worth up to $2.7 million; Brian Mast (FL), a year and a half late on an Ideal Power sale; Carol Miller (WV), almost a year late on at least $217,000 of her husband's trades; August Pfluger (TX), late on family trades worth up to $150,000; Juan Ciscomani (AZ), about nine months late on a Treasury bond worth up to $50,000; plus Susan Collins (ME), Roger Marshall (KS), Chuck Fleischmann (TN) and Pete Sessions (TX), whose stories are below.

Not all of these are the same size. Bill Huizenga filed an annual report ten days late. Nicole Malliotakis was late on two transactions in the $1,001-to-$15,000 range. That is nothing like Rick Allen's six and a half years, and we're saying so.

The point isn't that all 45 are equally bad. The point is that 45 of them couldn't clear a bar this low.

"My broker did it"

Read the responses side by side and a script emerges.

Rick Allen's office said his trades are "handled by a financial adviser" and blamed a compliance firm. Harshbarger's chief of staff blamed a financial advisor's "gross oversight." Julia Letlow's spokesman said she was "two layers removed" because Merrill Lynch had discretionary trading authority and "did not consult with the congresswoman." Mike Rounds's office said the sale "happened via a third-party investment firm" and that the senator "does not have direct involvement." Susan Collins's spokesperson blamed "a delay in notification from the third-party advisor." Tom Kean Jr. blamed an attorney and a family trust. Kevin Hern's office said he and his accountant forgot to hit send. Bill Hagerty called it a "clerical error."

Chuck Fleischmann's office went one better. He first reported that "a dependent child had made these trades" — then acknowledged he has no dependent children, and filed an amended disclosure six days later saying it was his financial advisor after all.

This got common enough that NOTUS ran a whole piece on it in August 2025, headlined "Lawmakers' New Botched Stock Disclosure Scapegoat: Financial Advisers." That story quoted the House Ethics Committee's own written guidance, which settles the argument in one sentence:

"You are personally responsible for incomplete and inaccurate information contained in your [financial reports], regardless of who assisted in preparation."

If you hire someone and they don't do the job, it's still your problem. Every one of us knows that from our own lives. A late mortgage payment doesn't get forgiven because the bank's website was confusing.

The penalty is $200

Here's why none of them seem especially worried.

The fine for filing late is $200 — what the Campaign Legal Center calls "a hardly impactful deterrence from the potential millions to be made off the stock market." Blake Moore broke the law more than 70 times and, as we've written before, paid $200 total. Dan Meuser was more than a year late reporting as much as $600,000 in family trades made at the very bottom of the pandemic market crash. He paid $200.

It gets softer than that. A January 2023 House Ethics memo says a report "is late if submitted any time after the due date, but there is a 30-day grace period before late fees are imposed." Chuck Fleischmann's office used exactly that to avoid paying anything at all. And the fees that do get assessed are frequently waived by the ethics committees.

The criminal side is emptier still. No member of Congress has ever been prosecuted for insider trading under the STOCK Act. The Bangor Daily News reported the same thing this June, alongside the long-standing criticism that the law "has no teeth."

So the deal on offer to a member of Congress is this: disclose your trades and let voters judge you, or don't, and risk a $200 fee you can ask to have waived. Forty-five of the Republicans on this site took the second option.

Why the timing is the whole story

A late form sounds like a paperwork problem. It isn't. It matters because of what stays hidden and for how long.

Tim Moore failed to disclose 12 trades made around Trump's April 2025 tariff announcement — the announcement that moved every market in the country.
Ron Estes was about four months late reporting up to $45,000 in Treasury savings bonds. He sits on the Ways and Means Committee, which oversees the nation's bonded debt.
Blake Moore bought up to $60,000 of Raytheon stock while sitting on the House Armed Services Committee, and didn't report it on time.
David Joyce was nearly two years late on trades that included Boeing, Citigroup and TC Energy.
Scott Franklin's late-reported trades included General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin — federal contractors.

None of that is proof anybody traded on inside information. That's exactly the point. The disclosure rule exists so the question can be asked while it still matters. When a member reports a trade two years after making it, nobody can hold it up against the vote he cast that week. The delay isn't a side effect of breaking the rule. The delay is what the rule was written to prevent.

We know what it looks like when the timeline is visible. Mike Kelly's wife bought 5,000 shares of Cleveland-Cliffs the morning after his office learned the Butler steel plant would get the federal help he had been lobbying for, then sold at a $64,476 profit — and the House Ethics Committee voted unanimously to formally reprove him, one of the very few times any of this produced a real consequence. Rob Bresnahan sold six figures of Medicaid company stock a week before voting to cut Medicaid. We only know either of those things because the filings eventually surfaced.

The ones who campaigned on this

The hypocrisy isn't incidental. It's the pattern.

Susan Collins helped write the law. She helped write it in 2012, alongside the late Sen. Joe Lieberman. In February 2026 she disclosed her husband's purchase of a Pfizer corporate bond five days after the deadline — a violation FactCheck.org confirmed even while knocking down a separate Democratic attack ad against her as false. A review of her earlier filings found 24 transactions from 2013 to 2018 reported more than 100 days late, worth up to $395,000. Her campaign notes she has never personally bought or sold an individual stock — her husband's outside advisor makes those calls.

Byron Donalds went on television in March 2022 to demand consequences for members who violate the STOCK Act — "That's when you have to have sanctions and the House has to get real" — and then broke it himself. He is now running for governor of Florida.

Maria Elvira Salazar attacked her Democratic predecessor in April 2020 over financial disclosure problems, writing that Donna Shalala "violates and skirts federal law with her own finances." Then she filed late herself — more than two months past the deadline on a Cano Health transaction worth up to $500,000 — and asked for the $200 penalty to be waived.

Tom Kean Jr. won his seat in 2022 by hammering his opponent over late stock disclosures and promising "the highest level of ethics and transparency." He has violated the STOCK Act repeatedly since.

Roger Marshall hid a dependent child's pandemic-era trades for 17 months — then, in March 2026, put his name on a bill to ban exactly that.

Mike Collins endorsed a ban on congressional stock trading while being one of the busiest crypto traders in Congress. He was also late reporting two Ethereum purchases.

And then there's Pete Sessions, who is at least consistent. He opposes banning congressional stock trading, calling it a "populist move" and saying, "I think we have enough rules and regulations." His argument for leaving things as they are was this: "If you have nothing to hide, then transparency is your friend."

He has been late on his own disclosures twice.

Back to that July vote

Which brings us back to the bill all 218 voting Republicans supported on July 22.

The Stop Insider Trading Act bans members from making new purchases of individual stocks — but lets them keep everything they already own, reinvest the dividends, and sell later. Rep. Pramila Jayapal called it a "so-called stock trading ban that literally does nothing of the sort." Rep. Joe Morelle said it was "so filled with holes, it would make Swiss cheese blush." And the bill carried a second payload most people never heard about: a set of strict new voter ID rules that would bar student IDs and require voters to photocopy their ID to vote by mail.

So the same members who couldn't be bothered to file a form got to vote for a "ban" that grandfathers in everything they already hold — and attached new hurdles for the rest of us to vote, on the way through.

The bottom line

Nobody here is on trial. Most of these are late forms, and late forms are boring.

But a democracy runs on a handful of small, boring obligations, and this is one of them. Congress wrote itself the gentlest possible rule — trade all you want, just tell us within 45 days — attached a $200 fine, waived the fine much of the time, and has never once prosecuted anyone under it. Forty-five of the Republicans we cover still couldn't follow it.

Every time one of them misses that deadline, we lose the only thing the law was ever designed to give us: the ability to look at what they bought, look at how they voted, and draw our own conclusions while it still matters.

They know that. That's why the deadline keeps getting missed.

We deserve better.

A State Had to Sue the Federal Government to Investigate Child Sex Crimes. Three Days Later, 50 Republicans Promoted the Man It Sued.

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 08:23:04 +0000

On Wednesday, August 5, 2026, the state of New Mexico did something states almost never have to do.

It sued the United States Department of Justice.

Not over a regulation. Not over funding. New Mexico sued because it says the federal government is blocking a live criminal investigation into the sexual abuse of women and girls at Jeffrey Epstein's ranch — crimes that happened inside New Mexico's own borders, to New Mexico's own people.

The lawsuit names acting Attorney General Todd Blanche personally.

Three days later, at 4:17 in the morning, fifty Republican senators voted to give Blanche the job permanently.

What New Mexico is asking for

The state's complaint, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., asks a judge to order the Justice Department to hand over unredacted Epstein investigative files.

New Mexico argues the refusal breaks federal law and stomps on the state's basic authority to investigate and prosecute crimes committed on its own soil. That's not a small claim. It's the argument that a state gets to police its own territory.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, a Democrat, put it plainly:

"We asked the Department of Justice to cooperate by providing access to records that may be critical to identifying victims, witnesses, and additional criminal conduct at Zorro Ranch. Their delay is actively hurting our criminal investigation and delaying justice Epstein survivors deserve."

On a call with reporters, Torrez said his office has made ten separate requests for information. Every one has been ignored or denied.

"We have heard repeatedly they will cooperate and what our team has experienced is anything but cooperation."

And:

"Todd Blanche today with a stroke of a pen could grant us the access that he claimed. Instead they have decided to stonewall, to obstruct and to frankly conceal for whatever reason."

This isn't the first time the feds told New Mexico to sit down

Here's the part that should make you angry.

Back in 2019, federal prosecutors asked New Mexico to pause its own investigation. They promised to share what they found when they were done.

They never did.

Former New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas — the man who agreed to that deal — wrote to Torrez in a July 20 letter saying the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York simply failed to honor it.

So the timeline is: the federal government told a state to stand down on a child sex abuse investigation, promised to share the evidence, kept the evidence, and is now refusing to hand it over seven years later.

New Mexico reopened the case in February 2026. Since then, the state — not the FBI, not the Justice Department — conducted the first law enforcement search of Zorro Ranch that has ever been done.

Epstein bought that property in 1993. He died in 2019. Nobody searched it while he was alive.

What they're looking for

A separate bipartisan panel — New Mexico's Truth Commission, a four-person legislative subcommittee with two Democrats and two Republicans on it — released its first report the same day the lawsuit was filed.

The findings so far, reported by FOX 4 and confirmed by the Christian Science Monitor:

Evidence that Epstein abused about five women and girls at Zorro Ranch between 1996 and 2012.
Roughly 30 other people who may have been victims, witnesses, or facilitators — or some combination.
Federal redactions in the released files are actively blocking the commission from verifying what it has.

The commission has issued 20 subpoenas and gotten back more than 100,000 records. Seven of those subpoenas were flat-out ignored — including by the Federal Aviation Administration and by the same U.S. Attorney's Office in New York that told New Mexico to stand down in the first place.

Rep. Andrea Romero, who chairs the commission, described what that silence has cost:

"In the seven years since Jeffrey Epstein died, in the two decades since his crimes first drew attention of law enforcement, no government, federal, state, or local, has ever compiled an account of what he did in New Mexico."

Twenty years. Nobody wrote it down.

The Justice Department's excuse, and what survivors said about it

The Justice Department's answer is that court orders bar it from disclosing "victim-identifying information carte blanche," and that New Mexico hasn't given a lawful reason for such sweeping disclosures. It says protecting victim privacy is a top priority.

Torrez's response was that his office has "provided them with ample legal justifications," and that the department is hiding "behind the Epstein survivors."

The survivors themselves answered that one. In a joint statement to NBC News, some of the women Epstein abused said:

"The DOJ's argument that it won't hand over files in order to protect survivors' identities is laughable, when the DOJ has already revealed their names and personal information. By holding onto these files, Todd Blanche's DOJ is simply continuing to protect abusers."

That is not a partisan talking point. That is the people the policy claims to protect saying the policy is a lie.

It lands harder because the Justice Department's actual record on redactions is a mess. When it began releasing Epstein records in December under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, what came out was largely material that was already public or blacked out so heavily it meant nothing — while accusers' personal details slipped through.

Now: the part that's on Republican senators

New Mexico filed this lawsuit on Wednesday, August 5. It was national news that day and the next.

The Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as attorney general on Saturday, August 8, by a vote of 50 to 49.

Every yes vote was a Republican. The margin was one.

Fourteen of those yes votes came from senators we track: Marsha Blackburn, Shelley Moore Capito, Tom Cotton, Darline Graham, Bill Hagerty, Jon Husted, Cindy Hyde-Smith, Roger Marshall, Ashley Moody, Pete Ricketts, Jim Risch, Mike Rounds, Dan Sullivan, and Tommy Tuberville.

They had the information. A state attorney general had just gone to federal court and accused this man, by name, of obstructing a criminal sex trafficking investigation. Lisa Murkowski, one of only two Republicans who voted no, said the Justice Department's "handling of files" connected to Epstein was part of her reason.

Fifty of her colleagues shrugged and confirmed him before sunrise, then left town for a month of vacation.

They already voted to keep these files sealed once

This is the pattern, and it is on the record.

On September 10, 2025, the Senate voted on an amendment whose stated purpose was, in the Senate's own words, "To direct the Attorney General to make publicly available documents related to Jeffrey Epstein."

Republican leadership moved to table it — the procedural way of killing something without having to vote on it directly. The motion to table passed 51 to 49. Two votes the other way and the files would be public today. Rand Paul and Josh Hawley were the only Republicans who broke ranks.

We pulled the roll call. Every single senator on this list who was in the Senate that day voted to table:

Blackburn. Capito. Cotton. Hagerty. Husted. Hyde-Smith. Marshall. Moody. Ricketts. Risch. Rounds. Sullivan. Tuberville.

Thirteen for thirteen.

The same thirteen then voted to make Todd Blanche deputy attorney general in March 2025, and voted for him again in August 2026 after a state sued him for withholding the very documents they'd voted to keep sealed.

That's three chances. Three times the same answer.

Dan Sullivan's case is the sharpest: he voted to keep the files sealed and then took campaign checks from two men who appear in them. Over in the House, Ashley Hinson refused to sign the petition to force the files open while billionaires named in those files wrote her nearly $90,000 in checks. And Majority Whip Tom Emmer, who never misses a chance to promote his committee's investigations, has stayed conspicuously quiet about the Epstein one — the one his own son runs.

Who this actually hurts

While all of this plays out in Washington, the ranch itself has moved on.

Epstein's estate sold Zorro Ranch in 2023 to the family of Don Huffines, a Texas Republican recently appointed his state's comptroller. Huffines has said the property is being renamed San Rafael Ranch, after a saint associated with healing, and that his family plans to run a Christian retreat there.

A healing retreat, on the property where nobody has finished asking who was hurt.

Meanwhile a New Mexico survivor named Rachel Benavidez sat in a hearing room in Santa Fe last Wednesday and asked, again, for the evidence to be released.

"I use this survivor platform to stand on the right side of every survivor's journey toward truth and justice. I am holding onto faith that real accountability will be achieved."

She is holding onto faith. Her state had to sue the federal government to get a look at the files. And the senators who could have made this a condition of confirming an attorney general — who had the leverage, in a vote decided by one — used it for nothing.

Fourteen of them are on this site. You can look up every one.

We deserve better.

Source

Daniel Miller, "New Mexico sues federal government for release of Epstein files" (FOX 4 Dallas-Fort Worth, August 6, 2026). Additional reporting from NBC News and the Associated Press and Source New Mexico. The Truth Commission's interim report is public. Photo: NBC News.

At 4:17 in the Morning, 50 Republican Senators Handed the Justice Department to Trump's Personal Lawyer

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 22:20:53 +0000

At 4:17 a.m. on Saturday, August 8, 2026, the United States Senate made Todd Blanche the attorney general of the United States.

The vote was 50 to 49. Every one of the 50 yes votes was a Republican. Every Democrat voted no. Two Republicans — Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — voted no with them. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky did not vote.

One vote. That's the whole margin.

Todd Blanche is Donald Trump's personal criminal defense lawyer. Not "was, a long time ago." He was hired in 2023 to defend Trump against criminal charges, he was a lead attorney on Trump's defense team at the hush-money trial in New York, and he defended Trump in the two federal cases brought by the Justice Department he now runs.

Fifty Republican senators looked at that and said: perfect, give him the whole building.

What they actually voted for

This wasn't a close call that turned on some technical dispute. The objections were enormous, they were public for weeks, and several Republicans raised them out loud before folding.

A $1.8 billion fund for Trump's supporters. Trump sued the IRS. Then he settled that lawsuit with his own administration. The settlement created a $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" to pay people who say the criminal justice system mistreated them — and Trump was explicit that he meant the people who attacked the Capitol on January 6. He called them "great American Patriots."

Tax audit immunity for the Trump family. The same settlement shielded Trump, two of his sons, and the Trump Organization from IRS audits and enforcement on past returns. A federal judge who handled the IRS case described Trump's lawsuit as an improper exercise in self-dealing. The union representing IRS workers went to court two days before the vote to try to block the immunity deal.

Prosecuting the president's enemies. Under Blanche, the Justice Department charged former FBI Director James Comey with threatening the president — over a photo of seashells arranged to read "86 47" that Comey posted online. It charged the Southern Poverty Law Center. It opened an investigation into the lawsuits E. Jean Carroll brought and won against Trump for sexual abuse and defamation. Comey's lawyers are asking a judge to throw his case out, accusing the department of misleading judges and withholding key facts.

Blanche's answer to all of this was two letters, written on August 2. One said the order creating the fund "is rescinded and shall have no force or effect." The other narrowed the tax immunity deal.

That was enough for fifty senators.

The letters aren't worth much

Here is the part nobody should skip past.

ABC News reported that the agreement Cornyn and Tillis accepted contains no language preventing the fund from being brought back under a different name or a different method. The Judiciary Committee advanced Blanche anyway on August 4, on a 12–10 vote along party lines.

Brandon DeBot of the Tax Law Center at NYU Law told NPR what the letters were worth:

"These assurances are not worth the paper they're written on. They don't pull back on the attempts to give the president and his affiliates unauthorized immunity from tax audits. And they don't do anything new to stop the president from trying to bring back the fund."

And the president himself spent the week before the vote saying he wanted the fund back. Trump told reporters the fund would have been "very fair," that it could have given "some solace" to Jan. 6 defendants, and: "I view that fund as a positive, and a lot of Republicans do too."

So the deal was: Trump says out loud he still wants it, his own lawyer signs a piece of paper saying it's cancelled, and the Senate calls that a win and goes home for a month.

Thirteen of them had already done this once

This is the fact that should follow every one of these senators around.

On March 5, 2025, the Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as deputy attorney general — the number-two job — by 52 to 46. Everything anyone objected to on Saturday morning happened after that vote, on the job that vote handed him.

Every single Republican we track who was in the Senate in March 2025 voted yes then, too. Blackburn, Capito, Cotton, Hagerty, Husted, Hyde-Smith, Marshall, Moody, Ricketts, Risch, Rounds, Sullivan, Tuberville — all yes, both times.

They didn't get fooled. They got exactly what they voted for, twice.

Susan Collins voted yes in March 2025 as well, and then announced a no vote on August 4 — hours after the two Republicans with real leverage had already given theirs away.

What Blanche did to the Justice Department

Before the vote, more than 1,200 former Justice Department employees — people who served across 14 administrations, including dozens of former U.S. attorneys — signed a letter to the Judiciary Committee urging senators to reject him.

Their director, Stacey Young, put it this way:

"Since his confirmation as Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche has shown time and again that his guiding star is fealty to the President, not the Constitution."

The letter's numbers are the part that should worry anyone who has ever called the FBI or reported a fraud. Under Blanche's watch, over 16,000 employees left the department, including more than a quarter of its attorneys. Agents, analysts, immigration judges and career prosecutors were fired for declining to bring vindictive prosecutions, for refusing to lie in court, or for working assigned cases the president didn't like. Others were pulled off their real work to patrol streets in Washington, D.C.

The letter says the consequences reach far past the Justice Department's own hallways:

"They've meant that much of the department's vital work isn't being done, or isn't being done as well – leaving communities less safe, Americans' rights less protected, and our national security more vulnerable."

That is 1,200 people who spent their careers inside the Justice Department, serving under presidents of both parties, telling the Senate this man should not get the job. Fifty senators voted yes anyway.

The Epstein survivors told them, too

Murkowski, one of the two Republican no votes, said part of her reason was the Justice Department's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. She wasn't alone — Sen. Thom Tillis had pushed Blanche to meet with Epstein survivors, and Blanche finally did in July.

It did not go well. Afterward, survivor Annie Farmer said in a July 16 statement that she found Blanche "abrasive, condescending, and intentionally noncommittal to survivors," and survivors urged senators to block him.

Blanche was the public face of the Epstein files at the Justice Department. He is the official who personally sat down with Ghislaine Maxwell in a Florida courthouse for two days of interviews on July 24 and 25, 2025, after granting her limited immunity so she could talk without fear of being prosecuted over what she said. She told him she never saw Trump act inappropriately. Shortly afterward she was moved from a low-security prison in Florida to a minimum-security camp in Texas. Neither her lawyer nor the Bureau of Prisons has explained why.

Fourteen senators on this site voted to promote him. One of them, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, voted to keep the Epstein files sealed and then took checks from two men named in them.

The fourteen we track

Ashley Moody of Florida spent six years as her state's attorney general before Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed her to the Senate. She knows better than almost anyone in that chamber what it means for a chief law enforcement officer to be independent of the politician above him. She sits on the Judiciary Committee. She voted yes.

Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee also sits on Judiciary, and is running for governor while she does it.

Darline Graham of South Carolina has been a senator since July 14. Nobody elected her — Gov. Henry McMaster appointed her to the seat left vacant by the death of her brother, Lindsey Graham, on Trump's public recommendation. She has never held elected office in her life. She now sits on the Judiciary Committee, and the first bill she put her name on was one that would make it harder for millions of citizens to register to vote. Now she's voted to confirm the president's defense lawyer as attorney general.

Jon Husted of Ohio spent the same week writing a brand-new photo ID bill that the Senate voted on nineteen minutes after it confirmed Blanche. His state lost more Obamacare coverage than any other in the country this year.

Tommy Tuberville of Alabama is running for governor while still holding his Senate seat.

And the rest voted yes without much comment: Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, Jim Risch of Idaho, and Mike Rounds of South Dakota.

The three who talked tough and voted yes anyway

The best part — if you like this sort of thing — is who made the noise.

Cornyn and Tillis spent two weeks holding the nomination hostage. Cornyn accused the Justice Department of having "stonewalled" him and said flatly, "They've simply refused to cooperate." Tillis said the fund was "an insult to the police officers and the people that defended us on January the 6th." Then he said, "It's done. It's been rescinded, and I am satisfied." Both of them voted yes.

Bill Cassidy of Louisiana was the decisive vote. He listed the problems himself — the $1.8 billion fund, the tax immunity deal, the prosecutions of Trump's political opponents — and then said: "This is not a referendum on President Trump. It is a decision regarding Mr. Blanche in very specific circumstances."

Here's what those three men have in common. All of them are on their way out. Cornyn lost his May primary to Ken Paxton after Trump endorsed against him. Tillis isn't running again. Cassidy lost his primary this year to a Trump-backed challenger.

The only Republicans who used any leverage at all were the three with nothing left to lose. And they gave it away for two letters.

That tells you what the other 47 yes votes were really about.

What they did with the night

The Senate pulled an all-nighter to get this done. In the same session it confirmed Blanche, passed a stopgap funding bill, and held a pre-dawn vote on a photo ID requirement for voting. Then everyone went home for a month of recess.

They did not lower anyone's grocery bill. They did not lower anyone's rent, or premiums, or electric bill.

They stayed up until 4:17 in the morning to hand the Justice Department to the president's defense attorney, and then they left town.

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, told them what the moment was before they voted:

"If there is ever a moment in history when we need an Attorney General above reproach, who is clearly dedicated to ending corruption, even at the highest level of our government, it's right now."

Fifty of them heard that and voted for the president's defense attorney anyway.

We deserve better.

Source

Alanna Durkin Richer and Lisa Mascaro, "Todd Blanche narrowly confirmed as Trump's attorney general in overnight vote" (Associated Press via PBS News, August 8, 2026). Additional reporting from the Associated Press, NPR, and The Hill. Roll call from Senate vote #230. Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters.

At 4:36 in the Morning, 52 Republican Senators Voted to Put a New Hurdle Between You and the Ballot Box

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 13:55:00 +0000

The U.S. Senate stayed up all night on Friday. Then, at 4:36 in the morning on Saturday, August 8, 2026, it took a vote on whether Americans should have to show a photo ID to vote in a federal election.

The vote failed, 52 to 46. It needed 60. Every Democrat who was there voted no.

Then the senators went home for a month.

That's the part worth sitting with. The Senate pulled an all-nighter, confirmed a new attorney general, passed a bill to keep the government's lights on — and squeezed in one more vote on making it harder to cast a ballot. Then everyone left for August recess.

The bill was three days old

The measure was S. 5271, and it is about as fresh as legislation gets. According to the official record at Congress.gov, it was introduced on August 5, 2026 — three days before the Senate voted on it. Its full official title is "A bill to amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require voters to provide photo identification."

The sponsor was Jon Husted, the Republican senator from Ohio.

It picked up exactly two cosponsors, both on August 7 — the day before the vote. They were Ashley Moody of Florida and Dan Sullivan of Alaska.

So: a bill written by one senator, signed onto by two more, introduced on a Wednesday, and voted on before dawn on a Saturday. That is not how you pass a law. That is how you stage a vote.

What "show your ID" actually means for millions of people

Here's the thing about a photo ID requirement. It sounds like nothing. Most of us have a driver's license in our wallet right now. So what's the problem?

The problem is the people who don't — and the people whose ID doesn't match.

A national study from the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland found that about 2.6 million U.S. citizens over 18 have no government-issued photo ID of any kind.

And the bigger number is the one nobody talks about. That same study estimated that 34.5 million people don't have a driver's license or state ID card with their current name and address on it.

Think about who that is. Someone who just moved. Someone who got married and changed their name. A college student. A young person who's lived at three addresses in two years. An older widow who never updated her license. None of them committed fraud. All of them could get turned away.

Noncitizens, meanwhile, are already barred from voting in state, federal and almost all local elections. That has been true this whole time.

This is the same fight, wearing a different hat

Husted's photo ID bill isn't a standalone idea. It's a piece broken off from the SAVE America Act — the bigger Republican bill that would require voters to show documentary proof of citizenship when they register and a photo ID when they vote.

We've written about that bill a lot, because Republicans keep bringing it back. The SAVE Act is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist — and the citizenship-document half of it is even harsher than the ID half. The Brennan Center and its partners found that 21.3 million American citizens of voting age don't have ready access to a document proving citizenship.

President Trump has pushed hard for it. He wanted the Senate to skip its recess and stay in Washington until it passed. Republican leaders told him repeatedly that the votes aren't there — and Saturday morning proved them right.

Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, one of the loudest voices for the bill, wasn't discouraged. "This fight's not over," he said afterward. "We're just getting started."

Believe him. Republicans have tried to attach voter restrictions to an affordable housing bill and to a party-line budget bill. When the front door is locked, they try the windows.

The fifteen we track

Fifteen of the Republicans on this site voted yes on Saturday morning. Here they are, with what we already knew about each one.

Jon Husted wrote the bill. This is the same senator whose state lost more Obamacare coverage than any other in America — a man with plenty of real problems back home who chose to spend his August writing a new voting restriction instead.

Ashley Moody and Dan Sullivan put their names on it as cosponsors the day before the vote.

Darline Graham of South Carolina was sworn in only days ago to fill her late brother's seat — and the very first bill she cosponsored was the SAVE Act. Her South Carolina primary is Tuesday, August 11.

Roger Marshall of Kansas spent the week before this vote demanding a floor vote on the SAVE Act on Fox News while describing it to Kansans as a simple "voter ID" bill. It isn't, and this week's separate photo ID vote makes that plain: if the SAVE Act were just voter ID, Husted wouldn't have needed to write a voter ID bill.

Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, now running for governor, has his own history of repeating SAVE Act talking points that don't survive contact with the bill text.

And the rest voted yes without much comment: Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Susan Collins of Maine, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, Jim Risch of Idaho, and Mike Rounds of South Dakota.

Two senators didn't vote at all: Republican Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who is recovering from a health issue, and Democrat Peter Welch of Vermont.

What they didn't do before they left

It's worth naming what else was on the table that week, because it tells you what the Senate treats as urgent.

The Senate did pass a stopgap funding bill, 90 to 6, to keep the government running through December 11 — though the House passed a different version, so that isn't settled. It confirmed Todd Blanche as attorney general, with Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski voting no. It passed a Russia sanctions package, 86 to 11.

What it did not do was lower anyone's grocery bill, or their rent, or their electric bill, or their premiums.

It did find time, at 4:36 a.m., to vote on making people prove who they are at the polls.

Fifty-two Republicans thought that was worth staying up for.

Source

Reporting by Shauneen Miranda for States Newsroom: "US Senate leaves town for recess after passing stopgap spending bill, blocking photo ID for voting" (Michigan Advance, August 7, 2026). Photo by Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom. Roll call details from Senate vote #231.

Mike Rounds Handed South Dakota's Green Card Program to a Private Company. Investors Lost $100 Million, a Cabinet Secretary Died, and He Got to Answer the Legislature in Writing.

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 21:40:00 +0000

On January 22, 2026, Mike Rounds announced he's running for a third term in the U.S. Senate. In his campaign video he listed what he says he's delivered for South Dakota. One item on the list: "stronger border security."

Here's the thing about Mike Rounds and immigration. The biggest immigration program he ever personally ran wasn't at the border. It was in the governor's office in Pierre. It sold green cards to wealthy foreigners for $500,000 apiece. He turned it over to a private company. And it ended with a bankrupt beef plant, a hundred million dollars of other people's money gone, the federal government moving to shut the whole thing down, and a member of his own cabinet dead six days before a grand jury was set to indict him.

South Dakota's report card should include that story. So here it is.

What EB-5 is

EB-5 is a real federal program, invented in 1990. A foreign national who puts $500,000 into a U.S. business gets a visa, and after two years can get a green card — if the investment created at least ten American jobs. The $500,000 price applies in rural areas and places with high unemployment. That's most of South Dakota.

Each state's piece of the program runs through a "regional center." The program is often criticized as an open invitation to corruption. South Dakota is the reason why.

The state employee who hired his own company

The man running South Dakota's regional center was a state employee named Joop Bollen.

At the beginning of 2008, Bollen created a private company called SDRC Inc. A few days later, wearing his state hat, he signed a contract to co-manage South Dakota's EB-5 program with SDRC — without disclosing that he owned SDRC. He signed a deal with himself.

SDRC didn't invest anything. It bundled immigrants' $500,000 checks into funds, took $5,000 off the top of each investor, and charged fees every year after that.

At the end of 2009, that private company became the state's official EB-5 operation. Bollen quit his government job to run it full time. Rounds was governor, and The Nation later reported that his administration used the state Office of Economic Development to effectively privatize the program by handing SDRC a no-bid contract. Courthouse News put it plainly: SDRC "was awarded stewardship of the EB-5 program by then-Gov. Mike Rounds in 2009."

If a public official steering business to a company they own sounds familiar, it should. It's the same shape as the nonprofit Christine Drazan founded that paid $96,000 to a consulting firm she and her husband own. The difference in South Dakota is the scale, and who got hurt.

The beef plant

The biggest thing SDRC ever funded was Northern Beef Packers, a slaughterhouse in Aberdeen.

Foreign investors put roughly $100 million into it. That's up to 200 investor families who handed over their savings and were counting on the plant to get them green cards.

The plant killed its first cows in October 2012. Nine months later it was bankrupt.

No plant, no jobs, no green cards from the project. Years later, 35 Chinese investors who lost millions took the state to the South Dakota Supreme Court — and on June 25, 2020, the court ruled they couldn't sue the state agencies involved at all. Sovereign immunity. Case closed.

The $600,000 loan Rounds signed

Now the part that is about Rounds himself.

His secretary of tourism and state development was Richard Benda. Before Benda left state government at the end of Rounds' term, he agreed to go work for SDRC — monitoring the loans to Northern Beef. Then, while still a state official, he arranged for South Dakota to give Northern Beef a $600,000 loan.

Rounds, as governor, signed off on that loan.

A state audit later said the fault was Benda's, for not disclosing the new job and not stepping aside. But on October 21, 2014 — two weeks before Election Day in his first Senate race — Rounds said he did find out about Benda's new job before he left office, right around the time he signed off on the loan. He signed anyway.

His answer to "what did you know, and when?" changed over time, as South Dakota Public Broadcasting reported that same month.

A dead man takes the blame

Benda never testified.

Investigators had concluded he was directing $550,000 in state grant money toward his future employer to cover his own salary, and double-billing the state for economic development trips. A grand jury was scheduled.

On October 22, 2013, law enforcement responded to Benda's death in Charles Mix County. It was ruled a suicide. Attorney General Marty Jackley later spelled out the timing: that date was "six days prior to the scheduled grand jury". The complaint charging him with embezzlement and grand theft had been authorized. It was never signed.

The investigation his own party ran

South Dakota's legislature did look into it. Sort of.

The committee had eight Republicans and two Democrats. The Republican leadership turned down Democratic requests to use the committee's subpoena power. Instead, the key witnesses — including Rounds and Bollen — were allowed to answer questions by written correspondence. The committee's final report put all the blame on the dead man. Neither Rounds nor Bollen was found officially responsible for anything.

Rounds' position throughout was that he knew nothing improper about Benda, Bollen, or EB-5 until investigators contacted him.

Afterward, Democrats tried to bring back the state Ethics Commission, which South Dakota abolished in 1979. The Republican majority killed it 53–16. During the debate, one Republican lawmaker joked that if an ethics commission could fight corruption, then "I want a Tom Cruise commission to make us all strong and handsome."

That same year, the Center for Public Integrity graded South Dakota an F on government accountability — 56 out of 100, failing in nine of thirteen categories, 47th in the country.

A state whose money went missing decided the answer was no ethics commission. That's not an accident. It's a choice, and it's the same choice we've watched play out in Florida, where $10 million meant for poor kids' Medicaid ended up funding political ads and the attorney general who signed off never answered a single question about it.

The federal government shut the whole thing down

On September 28, 2015, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services told South Dakota it could no longer participate in EB-5 at all. Citing corruption and administrative blunders, the federal government moved to shut the state's program down.

That federal notice said $5 million in EB-5 money was still unaccounted for, that $1.7 million had been transferred to a holding firm in Cyprus that owns Russian railway companies, and that $3.3 million had been improperly spent.

Bollen eventually pleaded guilty — to exactly one felony count, after four others were dropped. On February 1, 2017, he got two years of probation and a $2,000 fine. No jail. A month later, his company settled with the state: $546,250 up front and $81,250 more in 2019, bringing the state's total recovery to about $1.5 million against allegations he had diverted more than $1.2 million.

The foreign families who lost $100 million got none of that.

He's still the EB-5 guy

Most politicians would never say those two letters again.

Not Rounds. On November 5, 2019, as a United States Senator, he introduced S. 2778, the Immigrant Investor Program Reform Act — 87 pages to rewrite the EB-5 program and extend it for years. He was the lead sponsor. The Rapid City Journal's headline was "Rounds doubles down on EB-5." The bill died without a vote.

Meanwhile, his Senate website says: "We must limit chain migration and develop a better, merit-based system that prioritizes granting visas to individuals who have skills that our country needs." The same page says there must be consequences for people who overstay a visa.

Set that next to what he actually built. In Rounds' program, the qualification wasn't a skill. It was a $500,000 check. The people who wrote those checks weren't screened for skills. They were handed to a company secretly owned by the state employee who signed its contract, and pointed at a beef plant that went under in nine months.

What this is really about

None of this stopped him. Rounds won the Senate seat in 2014 while the scandal was still unfolding, and he's asking for a third term now.

That's the pattern, and a recent poll found MAGA voters say they'd forgive almost any scandal you can name. Politicians read those numbers too. It's why Rounds can put "stronger border security" in a campaign video and expect nobody to bring up the years he spent selling green cards for cash.

We should bring it up.

He privatized a federal immigration program. His development secretary walked out of state government into a job at the private company and took a $600,000 state loan with him, and Rounds signed it knowing where Benda was headed. Up to 200 families lost everything. The feds shut the program down. And when the legislature finally asked him about it, he got to reply in writing.

We deserve better than that.

Sources

This immigration scandal drove a state official to suicide — and could give Dems the Senate — Vox, updated October 22, 2014
South Dakota gets F grade in 2015 State Integrity Investigation — Center for Public Integrity
Feds Kill South Dakota's Investor Visa Program — Courthouse News Service, October 21, 2015
Revealed: A New Ethics Scandal Involving the GOP's South Dakota Senate Candidate — The Nation
AG: Benda Suicide Came Days Prior To Possible Indictment — KELOLAND

South Dakota Locks Up More of Its People Than Any Democracy on Earth. Mike Rounds Voted Against the Prison Reform Law Trump Signed.

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 21:15:00 +0000

On April 22, 2026, state officials in Sioux Falls picked up ceremonial shovels and broke ground on the most expensive state-funded building project in South Dakota history — a 1,500-bed men's prison with a $650 million price tag.

The men in charge of it spent the ceremony making an argument that would have sounded radical in the state a few years ago. Corrections Secretary Nick Lamb told the crowd the old penitentiary was built for an era when inmates were "warehoused, not helped to readjust to society," and that the new one had to be different.

"We have to do better" in South Dakota. "We have to get better at rehabilitation, and this facility will help us do that."

That is the whole idea behind the First Step Act — the federal prison and sentencing law that passed Congress in December 2018 and that President Trump signed into law. Give people in prison programs that work, let them earn their way to an earlier release, and fewer of them come back.

Mike Rounds voted against it.

One of twelve

The First Step Act cleared the Senate on December 18, 2018 by a vote of 87 to 12. Eighty-seven senators from both parties said yes. Twelve said no.

Rounds was one of the twelve. So were Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, John Barrasso, Ben Sasse and Richard Shelby. That is the entire company he kept on a bill the sitting Republican president had personally pushed and would sign days later.

What he said at the time

The day after the vote, Rounds put out a statement explaining himself. The language is worth reading closely, because almost every piece of it has since been tested against reality.

"I support the intent of criminal justice reform, particularly for nonviolent offenders, but the First Step Act fails to adequately protect South Dakota families from violent criminals who should remain behind bars."

"We can't be soft on crime when we're facing a serious drug epidemic across our state and nation."

"Without the support of our attorney general and local law enforcement officials — who will be the ones dealing with dangerous criminals released early from the federal prison system — I could not in good conscience vote in favor of legislation that poses a threat to public safety."

Three claims: the law would free violent criminals, it was soft on drugs, and law enforcement was against it.

The law does not do what he said it does

Start with the violent criminals. The Bureau of Prisons — the agency that actually runs the program — spells out who can and cannot earn time credits under the First Step Act. People convicted of violent offenses, terrorism, sex crimes, trafficking, high-level drug trafficking, and firearm possession as a repeat felon are not eligible. The exclusion list was written into the bill. It is not a loophole somebody found later; it is the design.

Now the law enforcement part. Rounds said he couldn't vote yes "without the support of ... local law enforcement officials." Some police groups did oppose the bill. But the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents more than 330,000 officers, endorsed it — and so did the National District Attorneys Association. FOP national president Chuck Canterbury said the bill would "make our streets and neighborhoods safer".

Rounds didn't lack law enforcement support. He picked the law enforcement groups that agreed with the vote he was going to cast anyway.

And then the results came in

The Council on Criminal Justice went back and checked what happened to the people released under the law. Roughly 30,000 people came home under its provisions between 2020 and 2022. Their recidivism rate was 12.4% — compared to an estimated 19.8% for people in similar situations released before the law existed. That is roughly a third fewer people coming back.

Fewer crimes. Fewer victims. Fewer prison beds needed. That is the bill Rounds said "poses a threat to public safety."

Meanwhile, in South Dakota

Here is why this is not an old vote about a distant federal agency.

South Dakota incarcerates 812 people out of every 100,000 — a higher share of its own residents than any independent democratic country on earth. Roughly 8,200 South Dakotans are behind bars.

And the state is losing ground. In December 2025, the Department of Corrections released its annual report: half of everyone released from a South Dakota prison is back within three years. That is the highest rate in at least eight years, and seven points worse than the year before. Among Native Americans it's 59%. Among Native American women it's 66%. Native people make up 39% of the state prison population.

That is the population the new $650 million building is being sized for.

The $2.7 million South Dakota wouldn't spend

The new prison came with a promise. To win over skeptical legislators, Gov. Larry Rhoden created a Correctional Rehabilitation Task Force. Sioux Falls Mayor Paul TenHaken agreed to host the prison in his city only after pleading with the state to fund rehabilitation programs alongside it.

Then the 2026 legislative session happened. House Bill 1086 would have given the Department of Corrections $2.7 million over five years for leadership training aimed at cutting repeat offenses. It got through the Joint Committee on Appropriations 10-6. It died on the House floor 42-23, short of the two-thirds needed for spending bills. Lawmakers cited cost and doubts about whether it would work.

At the groundbreaking, TenHaken said lawmakers "unfortunately" shot the money down, and repeated what he hears inside the penitentiary walls:

"They talk less about the building — and I know we need the facility — but we talk a lot about the need for programs."

$650 million for the building. Not $2.7 million for the programs. That is the same instinct Rounds acted on in 2018, scaled down to a state legislature.

About that drug epidemic

Rounds' loudest line was the drug one — we can't be soft on crime "when we're facing a serious drug epidemic."

In 2024, 91% of male inmates and 97% of female inmates in South Dakota prisons had a substance abuse problem. Treatment is the drug policy. Everything else is storage.

So look at what Rounds has actually done about paying for that treatment. Medicaid is the single largest payer of behavioral health services in the country, and 21% of Medicaid enrollees have a substance use disorder. Rounds voted for Trump's budget bill in July 2025 — every Senate Republican did except Susan Collins, Rand Paul and Thom Tillis — and KFF projects that about 13,000 South Dakotans will lose Medicaid by 2034 as a result, with the state losing $931 million in federal funding for the program.

You cannot call addiction an emergency and then vote to take away the thing that pays to treat it.

Tough on crime, depending on the crime

There's a pattern here that goes well beyond one senator. Republicans in Congress have been perfectly willing to write new prison time into law — when the defendant is the right kind of defendant. Jason Smith, who chairs the House's tax committee, buried a provision doubling the maximum prison sentence to 10 years for leaking someone's tax return on page 1,081 of Trump's budget bill. That's the punishment reserved for exposing what billionaires pay in taxes.

And at the other end, the mercy has been flowing freely — to the connected. A convicted fraudster from the Jack Abramoff scandal gave $2,600 to a Republican congressman's PAC and was pardoned by Trump three days later.

Harsher sentences for leaking a tax return. Pardons for donors. And a no vote on the one law that measurably reduced the number of people cycling back into federal prison.

He's on the ballot

Rounds won his primary on June 2, 2026 and faces voters again on November 3, running for a third term.

South Dakota now has a $650 million prison going up, the highest recidivism rate it has recorded in at least eight years, and a corrections secretary standing in a construction site saying "we have to do better." Eight years ago, Rounds had the chance to vote for a law that did better — a bipartisan one, endorsed by the country's largest police union, signed by the Republican president whose agenda he votes for.

Eighty-seven senators figured it out. He was one of twelve who didn't.

Source

Cost savings and improved outcomes emphasized at men's prison groundbreaking — South Dakota Searchlight, April 22, 2026. Photo by John Hult/South Dakota Searchlight.

ICE Is Reading Your Posts. Congress Paid for It.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:30:00 +0000

Somebody on Reddit used the handle Tired_Thumb. Over two months, they left three comments that mentioned ICE. Two of them included the letters "ACAB" — an old protest slogan that stands for "all cops are bastards." One of them shared a phone number for an agent, pulled off a public records website, with the link to that website pasted right underneath.

For that, the federal government has spent six months trying to learn their name.

First the Department of Homeland Security sent Reddit an administrative subpoena asking for the poster's name, address and billing records. It didn't say what law had been broken. When a legal nonprofit fought back, the government dropped that subpoena — and came back with a grand jury subpoena, which carries more weight, asking for another month of the person's activity.

Nobody has been charged with anything. The government just wants to know who they are.

That story comes from a Wall Street Journal investigation published August 3, 2026, by Hannah Critchfield and Shane Shifflett. And Tired_Thumb, as the Journal put it, is far from alone.

A round-the-clock dragnet

Here is what the Journal found.

ICE now runs a nonstop digital operation that scans the public internet — Facebook, Instagram, X, and close to 20 platforms in all, including Reddit, Discord, Snapchat and LinkedIn — looking for speech the agency decides is dangerous to its mission. Not just threats to agents. Also, in the government's own contracting language, "activities that could disrupt ICE's operations."

Private contractors do the work. They write daily reports and build files on people. Those files can include a person's name, location, date of birth, workplace, Social Security number, vehicle registration and criminal history.

The money grew fast. ICE spending on surveillance technology and consultants hit $258 million during President Trump's first full year back in office — a 57% jump from the year before, according to the Journal's analysis of federal budget data. The agency has signed at least six contracts to scan public records for "threats," paying out nearly $50 million since 2020, with more than half of that money committed since last January.

One of those contracts went to a small Virginia software firm called Amivero — more than $8 million to monitor social media. Amivero handed the actual work to Guidehouse, a big consulting company that also works on defense and intelligence. Neither company would talk to the Journal.

The government's shopping list for this program asks contractors to pull DMV records and police reports, map out who a flagged user knows, and use machine learning for something called "anticipatory threat intelligence" — software that guesses at threats before anything happens.

To find out who anonymous critics are, DHS has sent hundreds of subpoenas to social media companies.

Reddit said no. The government kept going.

Between July and December of last year, DHS sent Reddit administrative subpoenas for the information behind 11 accounts that had posted "content critical of federal actions."

Reddit looked at them and concluded these users were doing something the First Amendment protects. The company objected to every single one. DHS eventually withdrew all of them.

"Privacy is central to how Reddit operates," said Ben Lee, the company's chief legal officer, adding that Reddit routinely objects to government requests that are "overbroad or threaten users' privacy or civil rights, including their First Amendment rights."

So the government switched tools. It started using grand jury subpoenas instead, which are harder to fight.

The Journal identified 10 people — nine Americans and one Canadian — who tried to stop the government from unmasking them. Judges upheld four of the grand jury subpoenas. The government gave up on three cases. Three are still going.

No charges have been filed in any of them.

That pattern is the whole story. As civil-rights attorney Lauren Regan told the Journal:

"They're not actually filing any criminal charges where we can challenge the vagueness, the overreach and the abuse of that statute. If they just want to use this as an intimidation tactic, it's not even a fair fight."

What actually counts as "doxxing"

The administration has been rewriting a word.

In September 2025, President Trump signed a national security memo called NSPM-7. It lists "organized doxing campaigns" alongside swatting, rioting, looting, trespass and assault as the kinds of acts that can get a group labeled a domestic terrorist organization. It specifically names ICE agents in Los Angeles as an example.

Congress never voted on any of that. It's a presidential memo. As Government Executive reported, the structure "allows the president to direct law enforcement and national security agencies, with little opportunity for congressional oversight." Thirty-one members of Congress wrote to Trump in October 2025 warning of "serious constitutional, statutory and civil liberties risks." Nothing changed.

The ACLU called the memo "a fever dream of conspiracies, outright falsehoods," and warned that it "stitches together a few disparate, serious acts of actual or attempted criminal conduct with First Amendment-protected beliefs and protests against the president and his policies."

From there, the definition kept stretching. DHS has argued that filming law enforcement doing their job in public and posting the video counts as doxxing.

It even applied that logic to a newspaper. When the Minnesota Star Tribune named Jonathan Ross as the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good — a 37-year-old U.S. citizen and mother of three — in Minneapolis on January 7, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin responded with this:

"The Star Tribune should be absolutely ashamed of themselves for their reckless behavior, and they should delete their story immediately."

Ross has not been charged. The Star Tribune did not delete the story.

Here's the thing about all of this: the Supreme Court drew this line back in 1969. In Watts v. United States, the Court threw out a conviction and wrote that "the language of the political arena, like the language used in labor disputes, is often vituperative, abusive, and inexact." Real threats aren't protected. Angry political talk is. That's not a new or controversial idea. It's 57 years old.

Two agents, a printed screenshot, and a form to sign

On Election Day in New York — June 23, 2026 — a poll worker named Paigelynne Gonyea was working at the Central Library in Syracuse when she got a voicemail from a man who said he was a Homeland Security special agent.

He said agents had just been by her apartment. He said they were calling about a post "where you doxxed an ICE agent back in January."

Then two agents with ICE badges walked into the polling place. They carried a file on her with her name, address, date of birth, height, weight and eye color, plus printed screenshots of her posts. They asked her to sign a notice from ICE's Office of Professional Responsibility. It said, in capital letters at the top, "YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW," and directed her to "promptly remove and/or discontinue the aforementioned behavior."

What had she posted? On January 8, the day after Renee Good was killed, she wrote this:

"The ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good in broad daylight has been identified as Jonathan Ross by the Minnesota Star Tribune. I think today is a great day for Jonathan to be indicted!"

That's it. A newspaper's reporting, repeated, plus an opinion that a man should face a grand jury.

Gonyea refused to sign. She refused to delete the post. DHS later told NPR she had published an ICE officer's address online — but has not produced any evidence of that, and Gonyea says she has looked through her own accounts and can't find any address.

A local Republican election commissioner confirmed to NPR that the badges were real. He called the whole thing "a comedy of errors" and said it was "a mistake" for agents to enter a polling site at all. Federal law bars armed federal officers from polling places — NPR notes it's unclear whether these two were armed — and New York has a state law barring immigration agents from voting sites, period.

Perry Grossman of the New York Civil Liberties Union put it plainly:

"If this is the kind of speech that the administration, that DHS wants to go after, then they are trying to fundamentally redefine the First Amendment and the scope of permissible public debate. And that is wrong. That is ridiculous."

According to the Journal, the agents who visited Gonyea delivered that same letter to several other people that day. One recipient sued. A special agent tracked down David Streever while he was on vacation — five months after Streever emailed then-acting ICE director Todd Lyons following the killing of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse shot by federal agents in Minneapolis on January 24, and called Lyons "a monstrous human being." Streever says DHS is retaliating against protected speech and that it will chill the public.

The number they won't show you

DHS's whole defense rests on a statistic: an 8,000% increase in death threats against ICE officers since Trump took office.

Go read the press release it comes from. It's dated January 26, 2026. It contains one voicemail transcript and the number. No counts. No baseline. No time period. No methodology. Nothing you could check.

We've been here before with this agency. A September 2025 executive order claimed assaults on ICE agents were up "more than 1,000 percent." NPR and Colorado Public Radio went and pulled five years of federal court records to check. Comparing charges for assaulting a federal officer through mid-September 2025 against the same stretch a year earlier, they found about a 25% rise — not 1,000%.

When reporters asked DHS to show its work, the department "repeatedly declined to provide any justification." It sent back links to its own earlier press releases repeating the same number.

Bob Pence, a 30-year FBI veteran, told NPR why that matters:

"There are a number of ramifications, if the public can't believe what law enforcement is saying then law enforcement probably can't depend on the cooperation of citizens to report information to them accurately."

By January 2026, the same DHS press release that carried the 8,000% figure had bumped the assault claim up to "more than 1,300%."

Congress wrote the check

None of this built itself. It runs on money, and money comes from Congress.

In June, Senate Republicans passed S. 2 — the "Secure America Act" — at 4:42 in the morning by a vote of 52 to 47, handing ICE and Border Patrol nearly $70 billion. Combined with the mass-deportation money approved the year before, that's close to a quarter of a trillion dollars.

They moved it through a fast-track budget process that needed only a simple majority, which let them strip out the guardrails that normally ride along with funding bills — required oversight of detention conditions, transparency rules forcing ICE to report basic data to the public, and civil-rights protections in enforcement. Those protections aren't in the law. That was a choice, and you can read the full breakdown in our post on the senators who voted yes.

Be clear about the timeline, because it matters. This vote did not create the dragnet — the Amivero contract was signed in September 2025, and attorneys started seeing the subpoena spike that same month. The surveillance operation was already running.

What these senators did was vote, on June 5, 2026, to pour another $70 billion into the agency running it — five months after federal immigration agents killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, and Alex Pretti weeks after her — and to do it in a way that left out the transparency requirements that would make a program like this visible to the public in the first place.

The Senate: 52 to 47

Fourteen of the senators who voted yes have report cards on this site:

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

The House: 214 to 212

Four days later, on June 9, 2026, the House passed the same bill by 214 to 212 and sent it to the president, who signed it the next day as Public Law 119-98.

Look closely at that roll call, because the margin hides something. It was two votes — but not because Republicans were split. Every single Republican who cast a vote voted yes. Not one voted no. Three didn't vote at all: Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey, and Nancy Mace and Ralph Norman of South Carolina. The 212 no votes came from 211 Democrats and one independent.

It was close because it was unanimous on one side and near-unanimous on the other.

A hundred and ninety of the House members who voted yes have report cards here:

Alabama — Robert Aderholt, 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, 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 — Jeff Van Drew, Chris Smith
New York — Andrew Garbarino, Nick LaLota, Nick Langworthy, Mike Lawler, Nicole Malliotakis, 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, 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, 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, Derrick Van Orden, Bryan Steil, Tom Tiffany, Tony Wied
Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

One name is missing from that list on purpose. Kevin Kiley of California, who the clerk's roll call lists as an independent rather than a Republican, voted no. He is the only member tracked on this site outside the Democratic caucus who did.

Twenty-four other House Republicans voted yes and don't have pages here yet.

Not one of the 204 members listed above made the money conditional on ICE telling the public what it collects, or on whom.

So who is watching the surveillance program? On paper, the ICE Privacy Office, in consultation with the DHS Privacy Office. The Journal reports the ICE Privacy Office is down to two full-time staffers.

Two people. Overseeing a $258-million-a-year surveillance operation with hundreds of subpoenas and files on American citizens.

And when members of Congress did go looking, it was one party doing the asking. Rep. Maxwell Frost and 11 other Democrats wrote to DHS in February asking what data the department collects on protesters. Lyons wrote back on April 21. He denied ICE keeps a database of protesters — but acknowledged that ICE collects "essential biographic and biometric information and situational details" on people it believes may be interfering with its operations, and keeps those records even when nobody is arrested.

ACLU attorney Scarlet Kim noticed what the letter left out: "He did not deny that, essentially, that information would not be placed in other existing databases."

The Republicans who control both chambers wrote the checks and stripped the guardrails. The questions about what ICE is collecting on Americans came from the minority.

Why this should bother you even if you never post about ICE

You might think none of this touches you. Look at the actual conduct that drew federal attention here.

A Reddit comment with the letters "ACAB" in it. An Instagram post saying an agent should be indicted, quoting a newspaper. An angry email to an agency head. Filming officers in public.

That is the ordinary stuff of American political argument. It is exactly what the Supreme Court described as "vituperative, abusive, and inexact" — and protected.

Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Virginia who studies privacy and cyberstalking, pointed out the part that ties it all together:

"We're seeing the weaponization of privacy in ways that privilege the powerful, and in particular, law enforcement. Law enforcement who are serving the public, they're hiding their names. They're hiding their faces. If they had their names on badges and they weren't wearing masks, you might see less of this activity."

That's the trade being made. Agents get anonymity. You get a file.

And notice how little the government has to do to win. It doesn't need convictions. It doesn't even need charges. It needs you to see two agents walk into your workplace holding a printout of your Instagram, and decide it isn't worth posting again.

Some of what the government is looking at is genuinely ugly. One woman the Journal spoke to had compared ICE officers to Nazis on X in January and written that "All ICE Agents need to be put down like the dogs they are." That's a vile thing to write, and nobody has to defend it.

But look at what happened next. Roughly four months later, plainclothes ICE agents showed up at her home, told her not to post like that again, and left. She was never charged. She has curbed what she says online.

If the government believed that post was a real threat, there is a courtroom for that. It went to her doorstep instead. And that tells you which outcome it was after.

That's not law enforcement. That's a warning system, paid for with public money, aimed at the public.

Source

Hannah Critchfield and Shane Shifflett, "How ICE Is Weaponizing Social Media Against Its Critics", The Wall Street Journal, August 3, 2026.
Photo: federal agents inside the Syracuse polling place where Paigelynne Gonyea was working, June 23, 2026. Video by Gracious Golden via Facebook; screenshot by NPR.

14 Republican Senators Just Voted to Let Your Child Care Bill Go Up

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 11:06:01 +0000

Child care is one of the biggest bills a working family pays. It now runs more than $13,000 a year per child, and it went up another 5% between August 2024 and August 2025.

On Thursday, July 30, 2026, the Senate had a simple, direct chance to stop that bill from going up even more for about a million low-income families. It voted 47 to 52 not to.

What the rule did — and what Trump's HHS did to it

There's a federal program called the Child Care and Development Fund. It helps roughly 994,000 low-income families pay for child care so parents can work, go to school, or train for a job.

In 2024, the government set some basic ground rules for it. The most important one: a family's copayment couldn't exceed 7% of their household income. That's the federally recognized benchmark for what "affordable" child care actually means. Two other rules made providers more stable — states had to pay them up front and based on enrollment rather than daily attendance, and had to use grants and contracts to build up child care supply in places the market wasn't serving.

In May 2026, Trump's Department of Health and Human Services published a rule called "Restoring Flexibility in the Child Care and Development Fund" that wiped out all three. It took effect July 13.

Note what HHS did not do: it didn't replace the 7% cap with a different affordability standard. It didn't propose a cheaper path. It just removed the ceiling and left nothing in its place. As the Southern Education Foundation noted in its analysis, before the 2024 rule several Southern states were charging families well above the benchmark — Alabama 10%, Florida 9%, North Carolina 10%, Missouri 14%. With the cap gone, those rates can come right back.

Ohio families lose the most

The Center for American Progress ran the numbers in April. Ten states still hadn't reached the 7% benchmark, with maximum copayments running from 7.8% of income in Wisconsin all the way up to 27% of income in Ohio. Families in those states stood to save between $440 and more than $15,000 a year once the cap kicked in.

Ohio was the worst case in the country. An Ohio family at the top of the eligibility range could have saved as much as $15,482 a year — a figure reported by Common Dreams from that CAP analysis. That's not a rounding error. For a family scraping by on the kind of income that qualifies for child care assistance, $15,000 is the difference between making rent and not.

Ohio Senator Jon Husted voted to keep that money out of his own constituents' pockets.

Maine is on that list too — it was operating under a waiver from the cap as of December 2024, meaning Maine families hadn't seen the savings yet either. Susan Collins voted no as well.

The 2024 rule required states to work toward the 7% threshold, with waivers for states that needed more time. Scrapping it means states are no longer obligated to get there at all. Families in those states now have no path to relief — not a slower path, no path.

It was a one-page vote

This wasn't a complicated bill with tradeoffs buried in the fine print. Senator Patty Murray brought it under the Congressional Review Act, which exists precisely so Congress can cancel an executive branch rule it disagrees with. A simple majority would have done it.

Murray was blunt about the stakes on the floor: "If Trump had simply done nothing, and left the seven percent cap in place, some of these families would have ended up saving as much as $15,000 a year for their family. This is really a slap in the face to moms and dads all over the country."

She also named the tradeoff these same senators keep making. "How about instead of a $1.5 trillion war budget, we make sure every working family in America can afford child care?" she asked — pointing out that Trump's tariffs already tax diapers, formula, and car seats before you even get to the child care bill.

Every Republican in the chamber voted against it except Mitch McConnell, who was absent.

The senators who voted no

Fourteen of them have report cards on this site. Each one cast a Nay:

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

Two of them — Tuberville in Alabama and Moody in Florida — represent states that were already charging families above the 7% benchmark before the cap existed.

The part that should stick

These are the same senators who talk constantly about the cost of living and about supporting families. Here was a vote where those two things were the entire question. No amendments, no procedural fog, no partisan poison pill. Just: should a working parent have to hand over more than 7% of their paycheck for child care?

They said yes, she should. And the program only reaches 13% of eligible families in the first place — so this was a vote to make an already-thin lifeline thinner.

How they voted

The record is public and permanent: the official Senate roll call for vote 215 on S.J.Res. 199, July 30, 2026.

The Senate Has Now Voted 13 Times on Ending the Iran War. These 13 Republicans Voted No Every Time It Mattered.

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 11:06:00 +0000

The war with Iran began in February. Congress has never voted to authorize it. Nearly six months later, it is still going — and getting worse.

On Thursday, July 30, 2026, the Senate voted 49 to 50 on a motion to pull Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand's war powers resolution out of the Foreign Relations Committee so the full chamber could actually vote on it. The motion failed by a single vote.

That was the 13th time the Senate has voted on a resolution to end this war, according to Roll Call. Thirteen votes. Democrats have forced these to the floor nearly every week since the fighting started. In all that time, exactly one nonbinding resolution has made it through Congress.

They couldn't even agree to talk about it

This is worth being precise about, because it's the part that gets lost.

The July 30 vote was not a vote on whether to end the war. It was a vote on whether the Senate would be allowed to consider whether to end the war. The resolution was sitting in committee. The motion would have freed it for a floor debate and an up-or-down vote.

Fifty senators said no. Not "we disagree" — just "we're not going to discuss it."

And they said it one week after the other chamber of Congress had already spoken. On July 23, the House voted 214 to 208 to order U.S. forces out of the fighting. So the House of Representatives went on record telling the president to stop, and the Senate's response was to refuse to put the question on its own calendar.

Meanwhile, the war is escalating

The timing here is grim. In the days right before this vote, a ceasefire collapsed and the fighting intensified sharply. Iranian forces fired multiple ballistic missiles at U.S. troops in the Middle East on Tuesday — all were intercepted. Trump responded by vowing the U.S. would, in his words, "beat the f—-ing s— out of" Iran. By Wednesday, American forces had launched a heavy wave of strikes on dozens of Iranian military sites.

So on the very day the Senate declined to debate whether this war should continue, American service members were being shot at in a conflict their own Congress has never approved.

Gillibrand put it plainly on the floor: "Under the Constitution, we have the power to end this war today. Let's use it."

Fifty senators decided not to.

Who voted to keep it going

These 13 senators we track all voted Nay — the vote that kept the resolution bottled up in committee:

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

It didn't have to go that way, and three of their Republican colleagues proved it. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska all voted to advance the resolution. (One Democrat, John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, voted against it. Mitch McConnell, who is in a rehabilitation facility, did not vote.)

Three Republicans found a way to vote yes. The margin was one vote. Any single senator on the list above could have changed the outcome.

Why this keeps happening

There's a reason a war nobody in Congress authorized has survived 13 attempts to end it.

Voting to keep a war going costs a senator nothing in Washington. Voting to end one means crossing a president who went after Republicans by name the last time they tried it in June — and it means crossing the pro-war money that flows through Senate campaigns. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee and allied donors are among the largest spenders in American politics, and several of the senators listed above count them among their biggest backers.

The founders gave the power to declare war to Congress specifically so that one person couldn't march the country into a fight alone. Thirteen times now, the Senate has had the chance to reclaim that power. Thirteen times, these senators have handed it back.

The cost isn't abstract. It's paid by the troops in the missile's path, and it's paid out of the same budget these senators say is too tight to cover health care or child care back home.

How they voted

The record is public and permanent: the official Senate roll call for vote 216 on S.J.Res. 181, July 30, 2026.

52 Republican Senators Just Voted to Hand ICE Nearly $70 Billion

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 20:47:12 +0000

At 4:42 in the morning on June 5, 2026, the Senate did something with your money that most people were asleep for. By a vote of 52 to 47, Republicans passed S. 2 — the so-called "Secure America Act" — a bill that hands nearly $70 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol. The House followed a few days later, and President Trump signed it into law.

That's not a typo. Seventy billion dollars — on top of the mass-deportation money Congress already approved less than a year ago. Combined, the two laws commit nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars to arrests, detention, and deportations. It's roughly eight years of ICE funding, dumped in all at once.

Where the money goes

The breakdown is staggering:

$38 billion to ICE to expand arrests, detention, deportation operations, and partnerships with state and local police.
$26 billion to Customs and Border Protection to hire agents and expand surveillance and enforcement.
$5 billion to the Department of Homeland Security for more deportation and detention work.

ICE now has more money than most militaries around the world. And this money doesn't just keep the agency running at its old size — it's designed to scale enforcement up nationwide and lock in mass-deportation spending through the end of the current administration.

No guardrails — on purpose

Here's the part that should worry everyone, no matter how you feel about immigration. Republicans didn't pass this through the normal, bipartisan appropriations process. They used a fast-track budget process — one that needs only a simple majority instead of the usual 60 votes — to jam it through on party lines, which let them strip out the basic guardrails that come with regular funding bills: required oversight of detention conditions, transparency rules forcing ICE to report basic data to the public, and civil-rights protections in enforcement.

This law includes none of those. It's tens of billions of dollars with no strings attached, handed to an agency at a moment when, in the same year, two American citizens were killed by ICE, multiple people have died in the agency's custody this year — and detainees are holding hunger strikes over the conditions they face.

A slush fund for political payback

Hours before the first Senate vote, Republicans quietly added Section 202(9): $350 million set aside for ICE to carry out enforcement in cities and states that DHS decides are "non-cooperating" — places that decline to sign 287(g) agreements or don't meet vague, shifting federal "compliance" standards.

In plain English, Congress just funded immigration enforcement as a tool of political retaliation, aimed at communities based on their local politics. The provision also expands who ICE can target with the money — including people once charged with unauthorized entry even after the charges were dropped, and people flagged for almost any minor offense. That's a machine that can sweep up longtime residents, asylum seekers, and even U.S. citizens wrongly identified as noncitizens.

The senators who voted yes

Fifty-two Republican senators voted for this. All but one of the chamber's Republicans went along with it. Fourteen of them have report cards on this site:

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

Every one of them cast a Yea on final passage. Not one demanded the oversight, transparency, or civil-rights protections that normal funding bills carry. They voted to write a blank check.

And they're not done. Even with this law barely on the books, House Republicans are already drafting tens of billions more for ICE and CBP in the next spending bill. The $70 billion isn't a one-time deal — it's the new baseline.

Meanwhile, families across the country are struggling to afford health care, food, and housing. Congress had a choice about where to put a quarter-trillion dollars. These senators chose this.

How they voted

The record is public and permanent: the official Senate roll call for vote 163 on S. 2, June 5, 2026.

13 Republican Senators Just Voted to Keep Us in Trump's Iran War

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0000

The Constitution is clear about one thing: Congress, not the president, decides whether the country goes to war. Last week the Senate had a chance to stand up for that rule. Most Republicans chose Trump instead.

On the night of June 24, 2026, the Senate voted 47 to 50 to block a war powers resolution that would have ordered U.S. forces out of unauthorized hostilities with Iran. The motion failed, and the war kept going — with no vote of Congress ever authorizing it.

What makes this worse is what happened the day before.

A 24-hour flip

On Tuesday, June 23, the Senate actually did the right thing. It passed a war powers resolution, 50 to 48, directing the president to remove U.S. troops from the fight with Iran unless Congress voted to approve it. Four Republicans crossed party lines to support it.

Then President Trump got angry. He went after the Republicans who voted to rein him in. And almost overnight, the Senate caved and reversed itself. On Wednesday, with a couple of senators flipping under pressure, the chamber blocked a nearly identical measure and handed Trump a win.

So in the span of one day, the Senate went from telling the president to stand down to telling him to carry on. The deciding factor wasn't new facts about Iran. It was pressure from Trump.

Who voted to keep us in the war

These senators we track all voted against reining in the war — voting the way that keeps American troops in a conflict Congress never approved:

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

Every one of them had a simple choice: defend the Senate's own power to decide on war, or hand that power to Trump and the war hawks. They picked Trump.

It's worth noting the contrast. Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine voted for ending the war both times. It can be done. These 13 just chose not to.

This isn't a small thing

Going to war is the most serious decision a government can make. American lives are on the line. So is a huge amount of money — money that comes out of the same budget these same senators say they want to cut when it's time to fund health care or food assistance back home.

The founders worried about exactly this. They didn't want one person to be able to drag the whole country into a war on his own. That's why they gave the power to declare war to Congress. When senators refuse to even vote on whether a war should continue, they're not being humble — they're dodging the single most important job they have.

And dodging is the theme here. Instead of holding a real debate about whether fighting Iran is in America's interest, these senators voted to make the question go away. No debate, no authorization, no accountability — just a green light handed to the White House.

Following the money

It's fair to ask why so many senators are this eager to keep a war going.

One answer is the money. The pro-war lobby spends heavily in Senate races, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — which pushes hard for U.S. military backing of Israel's wars, including against Iran — is one of the biggest spenders in American politics. Several of the senators on this list count AIPAC and its allied donors among their largest backers. When your biggest donors want a war, voting to end that war gets a lot harder.

That's the quiet part. These votes aren't just about Iran policy. They're about who these senators actually answer to — and too often, it isn't the people back home who'll pay the bills and bury the dead.

The bottom line

For one day, the Senate remembered that Congress is supposed to decide on war. Then Trump pushed back, and most Republicans folded.

The 13 senators above had the power to demand a real vote and a real debate before more Americans are sent to fight. They used that power to do the opposite — to keep the war going and keep themselves out of the way. When the next bill for this war comes due, in dollars or in lives, remember that they had the chance to stop it and chose not to.

We deserve senators who answer to us, not to a president's temper or a lobby's checkbook.

How they voted

This post is based on the official U.S. Senate roll call for Vote 192 (S.J.Res. 185), June 24, 2026, with reporting from NPR, CNN, and UPI.

197 Republicans Voted to Spike Your Health Insurance Premiums

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

If you buy your own health insurance, your bill is about to jump. The extra help that millions of families use to afford their plans — the enhanced premium tax credits — expired at the end of 2025. Congress could have stopped that. Republicans had two chances. They blew both on purpose.

Here's what happened, and here's every Republican we track who made it happen.

Two votes, one result

First, the Senate. On December 11, 2025, the Senate took up a bill (S. 3385) to extend the very tax credits that keep insurance affordable. Republicans filibustered it. The motion to move forward failed 51–48 — it needed 60 votes — so the bill died without ever getting an up-or-down vote.

Then, the House. On December 17, 2025, House Republicans passed their own health bill, H.R. 6703, and gave it a friendly name: the "Lower Health Care Premiums for All Americans Act." There was just one problem. It does not extend the expiring tax credits — the one thing that would actually keep premiums down for next year. The Congressional Budget Office found it would leave about 100,000 more people uninsured.

So one chamber blocked the fix, and the other passed a fake one. Same outcome: your costs go up.

What it costs you

This isn't a small change. If the tax credits go away, the amount families actually pay out of pocket for the same plan would more than double — about a 114% jump on average.

On top of that, insurance companies are raising their sticker prices about 26% for 2026. Put those together and a lot of people simply can't afford to stay covered. Enrollment is projected to fall from 22.3 million people in 2025 to around 17.5 million in 2026 — millions of Americans priced out of their own health insurance.

These are the people who get hit: small-business owners, farmers, early retirees, gig workers, and anyone who doesn't get insurance through a big employer. In other words, a huge share of the working families these members were elected to represent.

The "alternative" that wasn't

When you block the real fix, you need something to point to. That's what H.R. 6703 is for. It loosens the rules on "association health plans" — cheaper plans that don't have to cover all the benefits a normal plan does. It lets members go home and say they "voted to lower premiums." But the bill leaves the actual price hike in place, and the CBO says it covers fewer people, not more. It's a press release, not a solution.

The Senators who blocked the fix

These Republican senators we track voted to filibuster the extension and let your premiums climb:

Tommy Tuberville (Alabama)
Tom Cotton (Arkansas)
Ashley Moody (Florida)
Jim Risch (Idaho)
Roger Marshall (Kansas)
Cindy Hyde-Smith (Mississippi)
Pete Ricketts (Nebraska)
Jon Husted (Ohio)
Mike Rounds (South Dakota)
Bill Hagerty (Tennessee)
Shelley Moore Capito (West Virginia)

The Representatives who voted for the fake fix

185 Republican House members we track voted to pass H.R. 6703 — the bill that slaps a "lower premiums" label on a plan that doesn't lower premiums:

Alabama: Dale Strong, 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
California: David Valadao, Jay Obernolte, 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, Byron Donalds, Carlos Gimenez, Cory Mills, Greg Steube, Gus Bilirakis, Jimmy Patronis, John Rutherford, Kat Cammack, Laurel Lee, Maria Elvira Salazar, Mario Diaz-Balart, Mike Haridopolos, Randy Fine
Georgia: Andrew Clyde, Brian Jack, Mike Collins, Rich McCormick, Rick Allen
Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher
Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mary Miller, 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, 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, Russell Fry, Sheri Biggs, William Timmons
Tennessee: Andy Ogles, 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

The bottom line

Every one of these members will tell you they care about the cost of living. But when a bill landed on their desk that would have kept health insurance affordable for millions of their own constituents, they killed it — and then voted for a knockoff designed to give them cover. The price hike is real. The "alternative" is not. And in 2026, the people paying double for their insurance get to remember exactly who chose that for them.

How they voted

Senate — S. 3385, Roll Call Vote 644 (Dec 11, 2025)
House — H.R. 6703, Roll Call Vote 349 (Dec 17, 2025)