MAGA Report Cards — Tennessee

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

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

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

The argument they signed is the part worth reading twice.

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

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

What the brief actually argues

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

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

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

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

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

Who signed it

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

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

Some of these names carry their own history

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why the argument matters beyond this case

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

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

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

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

What the filing shows

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

Nobody is doing the thing the bill bans

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

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

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

This is control, not freedom

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

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

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

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

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

Two Republicans said no

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

The bill now goes to the Senate.

The choice they made

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

Every Republican we track who voted yes

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

Iowa: Ashley Hinson, Zach Nunn

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

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

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the SAVE America Act would actually do to voters

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

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

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

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

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

The emergency the resolution describes

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

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

It cites a federal investigation that charged four people.

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

What was actually in front of them that week

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

Outside the chamber:

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

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

In their own words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 189 who voted yes

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

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho — Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas — Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi — Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey — Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

The number nine is not in the Constitution

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

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

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

What they were actually voting on

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

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

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

The timing

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

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

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

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

Who pushed it

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who voted to freeze the Court

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey: Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

Then a second missile killed them.

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

Congress never voted to authorize any of it.

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

We do not know who most of these people were

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

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

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

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

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

What the Senate actually voted on

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

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

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

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

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

It failed, 48 to 51.

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

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

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

Two of them switching sides would have carried it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The legal case for all this is classified

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The House looked into it for ten days

The Senate is not the only chamber that folded.

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

Source

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

208 House Republicans Just Voted to Lock In the Food-Safety Layoffs. Complaints About Contaminated Meat Had Risen 40%.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:51:48 +0000

Last year, complaints to the federal government about contaminated meat, poultry and egg products rose by nearly 40% — from 1,443 to 2,016 — according to the USDA's own Food Safety and Inspection Service.

That happened because the people who do the inspecting had been leaving in numbers. Since the start of 2025, the FDA has laid off nearly 4,300 employees, and the Food Safety and Inspection Service — the branch that puts inspectors physically inside slaughterhouses and processing plants — has lost roughly 900 positions, about 9% of its workforce in six months.

On June 4, 2026, the House had a chance to decide what to do about that. It voted, 213 to 210, to leave it alone.

What the bill actually does

Be precise here, because Republicans dispute the word "cut," and on one point they have a case.

H.R. 8646 is the agriculture and Food and Drug Administration spending bill for 2027. By the Appropriations Committee's own summary, it:

provides $26.27 billion in total — $380 million, or 1.4%, below the level enacted for 2026;
gives the FDA $7.1 billion; and
claims to increase money for the Food Safety and Inspection Service "to fund frontline meat and poultry inspectors and bolster support for state inspection programs."

So this is not a bill that zeroes out food safety, and anyone telling you it is has skipped the document.

Here is the line that matters instead. It sits in the committee's own list of the bill's accomplishments, under "Safeguards American taxpayer dollars":

"Reducing salaries and expenses where appropriate to account for staffing reductions and shrinking grant programs that housed canceled grants."

Read that in plain English. Thousands of federal food-safety staff were fired. Congress's response was not to fund those jobs back. It was to lower the budget line to match the emptier building — and to call that a saving.

That is what 213 members voted for. The staffing losses stop being an emergency and become the new baseline.

The man who quit over this said so at the time

None of this was a surprise to anyone in the building.

Jim Jones, who ran the FDA's food division, resigned in February 2025. His resignation letter named the number: "The indiscriminate firing of 89 staff in the Human Foods Program is beyond short sighted." He wrote that the people fired "represent the future of the agency," and that staying on would be "fruitless" given the administration's "disdain for the very people necessary to implement" its own agenda.

Scott Faber of the Environmental Working Group called his departure "a huge step backward for the FDA and the safety of our food."

The consequences reached specific places. On April 21, 2025, the FDA's Division of Dairy Safety suspended its proficiency testing program for Grade A raw milk and finished dairy products, because its Moffett Center laboratory was "no longer able to provide laboratory support for proficiency testing and data analysis." Grade A milk kept being tested. What stopped was the federal government's annual check that the labs doing the testing are getting it right — the same staffing problem, one more thing the government stopped doing.

The 188 who voted yes

Everyone below has a page on this site and is recorded voting Yea on H.R. 8646. All but one are Republicans — the clerk records Kevin Kiley of California as an independent. Grouped by state:

Alabama (5) — Barry Moore, Dale Strong, Gary Palmer, Mike Rogers, Robert Aderholt
Alaska (1) — Nick Begich
Arizona (6) — Abraham Hamadeh, Andy Biggs, David Schweikert, Eli Crane, Juan Ciscomani, Paul Gosar
Arkansas (4) — Bruce Westerman, French Hill, Rick Crawford, Steve Womack
California (6) — David Valadao, Jay Obernolte, Ken Calvert, Kevin Kiley, Vince Fong, Young Kim
Colorado (4) — Gabe Evans, Jeff Crank, Jeff Hurd, Lauren Boebert
Florida (16) — Aaron Bean, Anna Paulina Luna, Brian Mast, Byron Donalds, Carlos Gimenez, Cory Mills, Gus Bilirakis, Jimmy Patronis, John Rutherford, Kat Cammack, Laurel Lee, Maria Elvira Salazar, Mario Diaz-Balart, Mike Haridopolos, Randy Fine, Scott Franklin
Georgia (7) — Andrew Clyde, Austin Scott, Brian Jack, Clay Fuller, Mike Collins, Rich McCormick, Rick Allen
Idaho (2) — Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher
Illinois (3) — Darin LaHood, Mary Miller, Mike Bost
Indiana (7) — Erin Houchin, Jefferson Shreve, Jim Baird, Mark Messmer, Marlin Stutzman, Rudy Yakym, Victoria Spartz
Iowa (3) — Ashley Hinson, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Zach Nunn
Kansas (3) — Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann
Kentucky (4) — Andy Barr, Brett Guthrie, Hal Rogers, James Comer
Louisiana (4) — Clay Higgins, Julia Letlow, Mike Johnson, Steve Scalise
Maryland (1) — Andy Harris
Michigan (7) — Bill Huizenga, Jack Bergman, John James, John Moolenaar, Lisa McClain, Tim Walberg, Tom Barrett
Minnesota (4) — Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach, Pete Stauber, Tom Emmer
Mississippi (3) — Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly
Missouri (5) — Ann Wagner, Bob Onder, Eric Burlison, Jason Smith, Mark Alford
Montana (1) — Troy Downing
Nebraska (2) — Adrian Smith, Mike Flood
New Jersey (2) — Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew
New York (6) — Andrew Garbarino, Claudia Tenney, Mike Lawler, Nick LaLota, Nick Langworthy, Nicole Malliotakis
North Carolina (10) — Addison McDowell, Brad Knott, Chuck Edwards, David Rouzer, Greg Murphy, Mark Harris, Pat Harrigan, Richard Hudson, Tim Moore, Virginia Foxx
North Dakota (1) — Julie Fedorchak
Ohio (10) — Bob Latta, David Joyce, David Taylor, Jim Jordan, Max Miller, Michael Rulli, Mike Carey, Mike Turner, Troy Balderson, Warren Davidson
Oklahoma (5) — Frank Lucas, Josh Brecheen, Kevin Hern, Stephanie Bice, Tom Cole
Oregon (1) — Cliff Bentz
Pennsylvania (8) — Dan Meuser, Glenn Thompson, Guy Reschenthaler, John Joyce, Lloyd Smucker, Mike Kelly, Ryan Mackenzie, Scott Perry
South Carolina (4) — Joe Wilson, Russell Fry, Sheri Biggs, William Timmons
Tennessee (8) — Andy Ogles, Chuck Fleischmann, David Kustoff, Diana Harshbarger, John Rose, Matt Van Epps, Scott DesJarlais, Tim Burchett
Texas (17) — August Pfluger, Beth Van Duyne, Brandon Gill, Brian Babin, Craig Goldman, Jake Ellzey, John Carter, Keith Self, Lance Gooden, Michael Cloud, Monica De La Cruz, Nathaniel Moran, Pat Fallon, Pete Sessions, Randy Weber, Roger Williams, Ronny Jackson
Utah (3) — Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy
Virginia (5) — Ben Cline, Jen Kiggans, John McGuire, Morgan Griffith, Rob Wittman
Washington (1) — Michael Baumgartner
West Virginia (2) — Carol Miller, Riley Moore
Wisconsin (6) — Bryan Steil, Derrick Van Orden, Glenn Grothman, Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Tiffany, Tony Wied
Wyoming (1) — Harriet Hageman

The four who voted no

Only five House Republicans in the entire chamber voted against this bill. Four of them have pages here, and they deserve to be named for it:

Brian Fitzpatrick (Pennsylvania)
Rob Bresnahan (Pennsylvania)
Tom McClintock (California)
Greg Steube (Florida)

The fifth was Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who has no page on this site. Their reasons were not identical and several are fiscal conservatives who vote against spending bills as a matter of course — but on this roll call, they are the Republicans who did not vote to bank the losses.

Four more Republicans did not vote at all: Dusty Johnson of South Dakota, Tom Kean of New Jersey, Ralph Norman of South Carolina, and Chip Roy of Texas. Not voting is not a no, and none of them are on either list above.

What the record shows

Complaints about contaminated meat, poultry and eggs climbed nearly 40% in one year, to 2,016, after the FDA shed nearly 4,300 employees and the federal meat inspection service about 900. On June 4, 2026, the House passed a spending bill that comes in $380 million under last year and, by the Appropriations Committee's own description, trims salaries and expenses "to account for staffing reductions" rather than restoring them. It passed 213-210. Two hundred and eight Republicans voted for it, 187 of them people we track — 188 counting Kevin Kiley of California, whom the clerk records as an independent. Five Republicans voted no.

How they voted

The official record: Roll Call 205, H.R. 8646, 119th Congress, 2nd Session, June 4, 2026 — On Passage, Passed 213-210. Bill details from the House Appropriations Committee. Staffing figures from UpNorthNews.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

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

Joe Wilson wrote it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ohio said no in 2011. Jim Jordan signed anyway.

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

Jim Jordan is Ohio's signature on this bill.

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

Pennsylvania sent five signatures on a law it never wanted

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

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

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

What it costs a paycheck

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

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

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

This is not a one-off

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

Marsha Blackburn and Tommy Tuberville Signed a Bill to Ban Federal Money for Studying Trans Kids' Care. Two Weeks Later, Trump's Medicare Agency Moved to End the Coverage.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:01:17 +0000

On July 30, seven Republican senators put their names on a bill called the Protecting Our Kids from Harmful Research Act. Two of them were Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

Read the name again, because the name is the whole story. Not harmful care. Harmful research.

S. 5202 does not ban a treatment. It bans finding out about one. In Blackburn's own words, the bill would "prohibit the use of federal funds for any research or study on gender transition surgeries for minors." Sen. Mike Lee of Utah is the sponsor; Blackburn, Tuberville, Ted Cruz, Steve Daines, Cynthia Lummis and James Lankford signed on. It was read twice and sent to the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, where it sits.

The timing tells you what this is

They went after the research first.

Two weeks after this bill was filed, Trump's Medicare agency published a rule barring state Medicaid and CHIP plans from covering puberty blockers, hormones or surgery for minors. It hit the Federal Register on August 13 and takes effect October 13. Kids already on hormone therapy get six more months of federal money, and then it stops.

So the order is the reverse of what you would guess. The bill to keep the federal government from ever funding a study of what happens to these kids was filed and referred to committee before the coverage was taken away — not after, as a tidy-up. Whatever these senators knew was coming, the study went on the chopping block first.

That is not a policy that protects anyone. You cannot protect children from a treatment by refusing to learn its outcomes. If the treatment is as dangerous as these senators say it is, research is the thing that would prove it. A ban on research is only useful if you would rather not know.

What they said about it

The three senators quoted in Blackburn's announcement did not make a scientific argument. They made a rhetorical one.

Lee: "Why is the federal bureaucracy in the child mutilation business?" And: "President Trump rightly halted this attack on America's kids."

Lankford: "For too long, taxpayers have been forced to fund sex-rejecting studies on kids."

Blackburn: taxpayers "should not be spending a penny on research done by those who want to push harmful gender transition surgeries and radical gender ideology on our kids."

Notice what's missing from all three. No study is named. No finding is disputed. No researcher is accused of anything specific. The case against the research is that the people doing it are assumed to want the wrong answer.

Federal health research funding does not work that way, and these senators know it. A grant is reviewed, the methods are public, and the results are published whether or not anyone likes them. Cutting the funding doesn't correct a bias. It just ends the record.

Two senators running for governor, spending their Senate time here

Here is the part their own voters should weigh.

Blackburn's Senate term runs to 2031 and she is running for governor of Tennessee anyway — if she wins, she gets to name her own replacement in the Senate. Tuberville's term ends in January, and he is running for governor of Alabama. Both are asking their states to hand them the job of managing hospitals, schools, budgets and rural health systems.

The bill these two chose to put their names on while running for those jobs does nothing for either state. It removes federal research dollars from a field that affects a very small number of children, in a country where the Medicaid money for that care is already being taken away.

This is the same lane Tennessee's congressional delegation keeps working. Rep. Diana Harshbarger celebrated the Medicaid cutoff and then said she "will not rest" until Congress bans the care outright, with $100,000 penalties per violation. And it's the same playbook as the surrogacy bill twenty-five Republicans we track have signed — a bill about a handful of families, aimed at a much larger audience.

The pattern is the point

Ban the research. Ban the coverage. Ban the care.

Each step is defended with the others as evidence — the treatment must be dangerous, look how much of it we've prohibited. And the step Blackburn and Tuberville put their names on is the one that makes sure nobody can check.

Tennessee and Alabama both vote November 3.

Sources

Blackburn, Colleagues Introduce Bill to End Federal Funding for Harmful Gender Transition Research on Minors — Office of Sen. Marsha Blackburn, August 21, 2026
S. 5202 — Protecting Our Kids from Harmful Research Act — sponsor and cosponsor list, introduced July 30, 2026
Medicaid Program; Prohibition on Federal Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program Funding for Sex-Rejecting Procedures Furnished to Children — Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services final rule, published August 13, 2026, effective October 13, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

What H.R. 9662 actually does

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the part worth sitting with.

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

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

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

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

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

Why now: they think Kavanaugh left a door open

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

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

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

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

Steube is legislating on the concurrence and ignoring the majority.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their constituents should ask them about section 3.

Sources

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

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

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

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

That somebody is usually you, on your electric bill.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Barrett is running on a vote from 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump Promised to Wipe Out the $19 Trillion Debt in Eight Years. This Week It Passed $40 Trillion.

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 12:04:11 +0000

On Wednesday, the national debt passed $40 trillion for the first time.

That is about $117,000 for every person in this country. About $297,000 for every household. It is roughly the size of the economies of China, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and India put together.

When Donald Trump was sworn in the first time in January 2017, the number was $19.95 trillion. It has doubled since.

He said he would pay it off

Ten years ago this spring, Trump told the country he was going to erase the whole thing.

Reason magazine went back and checked the tape on the tenth anniversary. In a March 31, 2016 interview with The Washington Post, Trump said this:

"We're not a rich country. We're a debtor nation. We've got to get rid of the $19 trillion in debt."

The Post's Bob Woodward asked him how long that would take. "Fairly quickly," Trump said. Pressed for a real answer, he gave one:

"Well, I would say over a period of eight years."

Eight years came and went. The debt did not go down. It doubled.

What the second term has actually done

Since Trump took office again in January 2025, the debt has grown by $3.8 trillion — in nineteen months. Across both of his terms it has grown by $11.6 trillion. (For the record, it grew $8.4 trillion under Joe Biden, who never promised to erase it.)

The yearly numbers are worse than the totals suggest:

The government ran a $1.8 trillion deficit in the budget year that ended last September. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a watchdog group that yells at both parties, put it plainly: "The federal government continues to borrow $5 billion per day."
This year is worse. Ten months in, we have already borrowed more than we borrowed in all of last year. The Congressional Budget Office now expects a $2.1 trillion deficit — $200 billion more than it thought in February.
July alone was a $432 billion hole. That is the fourth-worst single month in American history.
The group's president, Maya MacGuineas, updated her math this month: we are now borrowing "nearly $6 billion per day."

Interest on all that borrowing now costs more than $1 trillion a year. It is the second-biggest line in the entire federal budget — bigger than Medicare, bigger than the Pentagon. About a fifth of every tax dollar collected now goes to paying interest on money we already spent.

They were told the price. They voted for it anyway.

None of this was a surprise. The bill that did most of the damage was scored before anyone voted on it.

On July 3, 2025, House Republicans passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act 218 to 214. Trump signed it the next day. It extended his 2017 tax cuts, paid for part of them by cutting Medicaid and food aid, and raised the debt ceiling by $5 trillion — the largest increase in American history.

The Congressional Budget Office scored it at $3.4 trillion in new debt over ten years, or $4.1 trillion once the interest on that borrowing was counted. Republican leaders spent the spring telling everyone CBO was wrong.

While the bill was still moving, Speaker Mike Johnson went on CNN and called the deficit projections "dramatically overstated." He said the economy would grow fast enough to make them wrong. His exact words: "we're not buying it."

CBO has now run the numbers again — this time including the faster growth Johnson was counting on. The bill costs $4.7 trillion through 2035, or $4.2 trillion over the same ten-year window it first scored.

The estimate did not come down. Counting the growth added about $125 billion to the cost, because the bill's effect on interest rates outweighed its effect on the economy.

We have seen this exact movie twice before

Here is the part that gets left out of the story most people have in their heads.

In 2017, when Republicans were selling the last round of tax cuts, they said the same thing they said in 2025. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told the country, "Not only will this tax plan pay for itself, but it will pay down debt." Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the plan would "be revenue neutral for the government if not a revenue generator." Speaker Paul Ryan said they were "right there in the sweet spot."

The year after it passed, the deficit jumped 17 percent to $779 billion. Corporate tax collections fell 31 percent. CBO later figured the 2017 cuts would add about $1.8 trillion to deficits through 2028, before counting a dime of interest. The watchdog group's conclusion was seven words long: "Tax cuts do not pay for themselves."

And it had all happened before that. As CNBC noted at the time, deficits also rose after the tax cuts under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Three Republican presidents, three big tax cuts, three sets of promises that the cuts would pay for themselves, three explosions of debt.

"The party of fiscal responsibility"

Republicans have run on being the careful ones with money for forty years. They spent the Obama years, as CNBC put it, relentlessly attacking him over deficits and debt. The actual record runs the other way, and it isn't close.

The A-Mark Foundation, a nonpartisan research group, lined up every president since 1981 and compared the deficit for their first budget to the deficit for their last one. Its finding, in its own words:

"The four Republican presidents since 1981 (Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump—who served one term) increased the federal deficit by 94%, 67%, 1,204% and 317%, respectively."

"In the two completed Democratic presidencies since 1981 (Bill Clinton, Barack Obama), the federal deficit decreased by 150% and 53%, respectively."

Four for four one way. Two for two the other.

PolitiFact checked a version of this claim in 2019 and rated it Mostly True, with a fair caveat: presidents don't control the economy, recessions land on whoever happens to be in office, and a new president inherits the last one's budget.

That caveat is real. So look at the thing presidents do control — the bills they sign. There, the pattern is even cleaner. Reagan cut taxes and deficits rose. Bush cut taxes and deficits rose. Trump cut taxes twice and deficits rose both times.

One more fact worth sitting with: the last time this country ran a surplus was 2001. It was Bill Clinton's last budget.

DOGE was supposed to fix this

Trump's answer to the debt in his second term was DOGE, a cost-cutting operation he handed the job of slashing the federal workforce.

Almost all of what it went after was "discretionary" spending — the smallest slice of the budget. Around 60 percent of the roughly $7 trillion the government spends each year is locked into mandatory programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans' care among them — that grow on their own to keep pace with the cost of living. Another $1.1 trillion is interest.

The debt went up $3.8 trillion anyway.

What this costs you, personally

This is not an abstraction about a big number in Washington. It shows up in what you pay to borrow money.

The Budget Lab at Yale ran the math in March. Federal borrowing since 2015 has pushed long-term interest rates up about 97 basis points. For a family taking out a 30-year mortgage at today's median home price, that is about $2,500 more a year — roughly $76,000 over the life of the loan. A typical car loan costs about $120 more a year. A typical small business loan costs about $770 more.

Margaret Spellings, who runs the Bipartisan Policy Center, said it this way as the $40 trillion mark approached: "Federal debt is already raising the cost of living and choking out other spending and investment."

The debt hawks who voted for the debt

The tell isn't that Republicans borrowed money. Everybody borrows money. The tell is that they campaigned against borrowing right up until the vote.

Aaron Bean founded the House DOGE Caucus in November 2024 because the debt had hit $36 trillion. He called it "a wakeup call." Then he voted for the bill. The caucus stopped meeting, DOGE expired, and the debt went up $4 trillion.
Keith Self tells his constituents the national debt is "an existential threat to our Republic." He voted for the $3.4 trillion bill, then introduced a bill to stop bills like it.
Steve Womack is Arkansas's designated grown-up on the debt — a former Budget Committee chairman who just introduced a bipartisan fix. His press release celebrating the $3.4 trillion bill runs about five hundred words and never mentions the deficit once.
Tim Burchett said he'd probably vote no if the bill added to the deficit. The Senate sent back a version that added about $1 trillion more. He went to the White House, got a souvenir signed by Trump, and voted yes the next day.

There is a name for a party that runs on cutting the debt and then doubles it, twice, using the same promise both times. It isn't fiscal responsibility.

Sources

Al Jazeera and Reuters, "US national debt passes record $40 trillion," August 19, 2026. Photo: AFP.
Eric Boehm, Reason, "10 Years Ago Today, Trump Promised To Eliminate the National Debt. Instead, It Has Doubled," March 31, 2026.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Cotton asked the Justice Department to investigate the objectors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Derrick Van Orden and Tim Burchett skipped the paperwork

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

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

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

Tommy Tuberville called his neighbors' concerns "bull crap"

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

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

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

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

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

Somebody actually checked

This is the part that should end the argument.

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

"We haven't found much."

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

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

And on the people organizing:

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

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

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

The debate existed already. Seventy-one percent.

What this actually is

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is actually being taken away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And TSA screeners got the same treatment

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

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

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

The House had a bill to end it permanently

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

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

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

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

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

The 20 Republicans who voted yes

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

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

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

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

The 195 who voted no

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

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

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

Colorado — Lauren Boebert, Jeff Crank, Jeff Hurd

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

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

Idaho — Russ Fulcher, Mike Simpson

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mary Miller

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

Iowa — Ashley Hinson

Kansas — Ron Estes, Tracey Mann, Derek Schmidt

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

Minnesota — Tom Emmer, Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach

Mississippi — Mike Ezell, Michael Guest, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Mike Flood, Adrian Smith

New York — Nick Langworthy, Claudia Tenney

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Mike Kennedy, Celeste Maloy, Blake Moore

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

The Senate has done nothing for eight months

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

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

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

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

This is not a fringe position they're protecting

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

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

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

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

We deserve better.

How they voted

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two of them were sworn in before Reagan was inaugurated

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

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

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

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

Here is the part that should end the argument.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why they don't leave: eleven of thirteen gavels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ones who won't even stand in a room

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

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

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

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

And then there's Grassley

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

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

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

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

This was supposed to be a job you leave

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

Medicaid Is About to Stop Paying for Trans Kids' Care. Diana Harshbarger Says She 'Will Not Rest' Until She Goes Further.

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:42:44 +0000

On August 14, 2026, Diana Harshbarger put out a statement celebrating a federal rule that takes health coverage away from poor children.

She did not describe it that way. She described it as protecting kids. But that is what the rule does, and it is worth being precise about who it reaches.

What she was celebrating

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services finalized a rule barring state Medicaid plans and the Children's Health Insurance Program from covering puberty blockers, hormones or surgery for minors — and barring federal dollars from paying for any of it. It takes effect October 13, 2026, with a tapering-off period of up to six months for children already on hormone therapy.

Medicaid and CHIP are the coverage of last resort. They exist for families who cannot pay for care any other way. So the children this rule reaches are, by definition, the poorest ones — kids whose doctor, parents and therapist agreed on a treatment plan that is now going to stop because of a rule written in Washington.

Harshbarger's reaction:

"I am grateful CMS is finally cutting off every taxpayer dollar that funded this abuse, and I will not rest until Congress passes my STOP Act and TRUTH in Coverage Act so this industry can never prey on another child again."

That last clause is the news. She is telling you the rule is not the finish line.

What "I will not rest" means in bill text

Harshbarger has two bills, and they are considerably more aggressive than a Medicaid coverage rule.

The STOP Act — Safeguarding the Overall Protection of Minors — which she introduced in April alongside Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas, would:

Ban gender transition procedures on minors outright, not just decline to pay for them
Impose civil penalties of at least $100,000 per violation, collectible by the Attorney General
Create a private right of action so patients or their families can sue doctors for damages in federal court
Route the penalty money into a "Victims of Gender Transition Procedures Compensation Fund" in the U.S. Treasury

The TRUTH in Coverage Act, introduced in July, requires insurers that cover this care to also cover "restorative care" on the same terms.

Read the STOP Act's structure again. A $100,000-minimum federal penalty plus an open invitation to sue is not a coverage policy. It is a mechanism designed to make it too legally dangerous for any doctor in the country to provide this care to a minor — including in states where it is legal, and including for families paying entirely out of pocket.

The CMS rule takes away the money. Harshbarger's bill takes away the option.

The medical consensus she is legislating against

Harshbarger is a pharmacist by training. Her statement rests on an HHS report titled "Wolves in White Coats," which alleges hospitals billed nearly $120 million for care on minors since 2019 — including nearly $50 million in puberty-blocker claims it says were filed under vague or inaccurate diagnosis codes. Those are the administration's own findings, produced by the same administration that then referred hospitals to the Justice Department and to HHS's own inspector general — not an independent audit.

Set against that: the American Academy of Pediatrics' policy statement, "Ensuring Comprehensive Care and Support for Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children and Adolescents," recommends "providing youth with access to comprehensive gender-affirming and developmentally appropriate health care," supporting insurance coverage for those interventions where appropriate, and having pediatricians advocate for policies that "promote acceptance of all children."

That is the professional body of American pediatricians. Harshbarger's bill would fine its members $100,000 a time for following its guidance.

The Texas piece she left out

Harshbarger's release points to Texas Children's Hospital, which paid a $10 million settlement with the Texas Attorney General and the Justice Department over fraud allegations, and agreed to open the nation's first "Detransition Clinic."

Here is what the release doesn't mention. That settlement was Ken Paxton's, and part of the deal permanently stripped five doctors of their hospital privileges. A Stanford pediatrician described the result as a clinic built by legal intimidation — a facility ordered into existence by a prosecutor, with the physicians who understood the underlying medicine barred from working in it.

Cited as a success story, it is really a preview of the STOP Act's enforcement model.

This is not a one-off for her

Harshbarger's interest in this subject has not always arrived in the language of patient safety.

In an interview, she said of the Biden White House, "I never saw so many fairies in the White House, dancing around." In the same interview she called a 77-year-old Black congressman "boy" — and when he explained why that word is a slur, she tweeted "BOY oh boy."

A year later she was writing federal legislation about transgender people.

She also signed on as a cosponsor of the SAFE KIDS Act, which would void surrogacy contracts based on the nationality of the intended parents — part of the same broader push against the ways LGBTQ families and infertile couples actually have children.

What this costs in Tennessee's 1st District

Tennessee already bans this care for minors. Its law was the one the Supreme Court upheld 6–3 on June 18, 2025 in United States v. Skrmetti, ruling it classifies by age and medical diagnosis rather than sex. As KFF counted at the time, 25 states' bans were left standing.

So the practical effect on Harshbarger's own constituents is narrower than the rhetoric implies. The care is already unavailable to them.

What her bills would do is reach past Tennessee. A $100,000 federal penalty and a private right of action apply in Illinois and California and Massachusetts too. That is the point of writing it as federal law rather than state law.

Harshbarger is not asking for the ability to set policy for her district. She has that. She is asking to set it for everyone else's.

Source

Rep. Diana Harshbarger's office: "Harshbarger Applauds Recent HHS Crackdown on Sex-Rejecting Procedures for Children," August 14, 2026.

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

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

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

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

What the state parties wrote down

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

Another section goes after surrogacy directly:

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

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

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

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

The SAFE KIDS Act

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who signed it

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

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

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

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

The part they don't put in the press release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why surrogacy, and why now

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

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

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

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

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

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

What this costs real people

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

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

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

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

Source

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

71% of Americans Don't Want a Data Center Next Door. Derrick Van Orden and Tim Burchett Blame China.

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 11:09:09 +0000

A Gallup poll found that 71% of Americans somewhat or strongly oppose building data centers in their communities.

That is not a fringe. That is roughly seven out of every ten of your neighbors.

Two Republicans in Congress have landed on an explanation for it: China.

What they actually said

Derrick Van Orden represents Wisconsin's 3rd District, a sprawling seat where a data center is planned in Wisconsin Rapids. He told Roll Call that a lot of the information opposing the project is "from the Chinese companies" who are "paying people to say this stuff."

He is in a toss-up race this fall against Democrat Rebecca Cooke, who has released an ad accusing him of "selling out" to AI companies and who has separately backed a data center moratorium. Van Orden called the ad a lie.

Tim Burchett of Tennessee reached for a version of the same idea. The data center companies are "totally off their game," he told Roll Call, pointing to "a lot of misinformation out there" — and adding that "there's talk that the Chinese are putting it out because they're the ones that want to be in the business of it."

So: the constituents showing up at county meetings, signing petitions and asking about their electric bills are, in Van Orden's telling, on a foreign payroll.

Somebody actually checked

This theory did not start in Congress. It started with people who own data centers.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told an audience at an event called "Harnessing American Power" that local opposition "is not organic and local, some of this is foreign-sourced dark money." On the tech podcast All-In, fund manager Gavin Baker said "it is starting to feel or seem like there might be a CCP-funded campaign."

NPR went looking for the evidence. Here is what it found.

Darren Linvill, co-lead of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University, which tracks foreign influence campaigns online:

"We haven't found much."

Linvill's point is not just that the evidence is thin — it's that the premise doesn't make sense. China runs armies of social media bots, but they aren't talking much about this. Chinese state media is far more interested in promoting Chinese data centers. As he put it:

"China tends to care a lot more about what you think about China and China's economy than they tend to do about what you think about your neighbor and what's happening in your own backyard here in the United States."

And on the people actually organizing against these projects:

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

What the one real case actually showed

There is a grain of something. OpenAI banned a cluster of likely Chinese accounts that used ChatGPT to generate anti-data-center content over the winter — probably a private Chinese tech firm working for "provincial-level government clients," posing as Americans on social media.

But read what OpenAI itself said about the effect. Ben Nimmo, who leads threat investigations there:

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

The debate existed already. Seventy-one percent.

What happens when someone names names

The clearest look at where this theory leads comes from Utah, where Shark Tank investor Kevin O'Leary is behind a data center called Stratos — originally about twice the size of Manhattan.

After local opposition slowed the project, O'Leary said on Fox News that he'd had "my guys" dig into IP addresses and found "two cells inside of Utah." He named a nonprofit, Alliance for a Better Utah, and a consultancy, Elevate Strategies, as operating on behalf of the Chinese government — and named individual current and former employees.

Those are real people, publicly accused of working for a foreign government by a man on national television.

Gabi Finlayson of Elevate Strategies told NPR: "We are certainly not a Chinese cell. Nobody pays us to make any content, let alone any foreign government."

Elizabeth Hutchings of Alliance for a Better Utah said O'Leary named people who don't even work there anymore, and claimed millions were being funneled from the Chinese Communist Party. NPR checked the group's tax filings: revenue of about $200,000 in 2024, in line with its last decade.

"You know, it was such an outrageous claim we laughed."

O'Leary did not respond to NPR's requests for comment. He has since agreed to shrink the project to a quarter of its original size, after the president of the Utah Senate raised concerns.

The Bitcoin Policy Institute published a report claiming "three vectors of influence" behind the anti-AI campaign, offering little direct evidence; groups named in it denied any Chinese involvement to the Washington Post.

Why this particular smear is useful

Notice what the China explanation accomplishes for a member of Congress.

If your constituents oppose a project and you agree with them, you have to fight the developer. If you oppose them, you have to explain to voters why their electric bill and their farmland matter less than a data center.

But if their opposition isn't real — if it's a foreign operation wearing their neighbors' faces — you don't have to answer any of it. You get to be tough on China instead of accountable to Wisconsin.

That's the trade. Van Orden made it in the middle of a competitive race.

It's spreading in Washington, too. Brett Guthrie, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, wrote to FBI Director Kash Patel asking for a briefing on whether the government sees any evidence of Chinese influence in the data center debate — while three counties in his own district were voting to slow projects down, one of them after 3,000 people signed a petition.

The people they're talking about

The residents of Box Elder County, Utah who sued saying they weren't adequately consulted. The 3,000 Kentuckians who signed that petition. The Wisconsinites asking what a data center does to their power bill and their farmland.

Van Orden has said he won't back data centers without local community input and protections for agricultural land. That's a reasonable position. It is also flatly incompatible with telling voters that the local community input is a Chinese operation.

You cannot promise to listen to people and simultaneously insist they're being paid to talk.

Source

"The data centers are coming. Is Congress ready?" Roll Call, Aug. 12, 2026; and Geoff Brumfiel, "The theory taking the rich by storm: China funds data center haters," NPR, June 10, 2026. Photo: Ulysse Bellier/AFP via Getty Images.

Marsha Blackburn Demanded the Epstein Files From the FBI and the IRS. A Senate Report Says She Turned Down the Chance to Subpoena His Banks.

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 07:53:15 +0000

There are two ways to be for transparency. One is to write letters demanding it. The other is to cast the vote that actually gets it.

Marsha Blackburn has done a great deal of the first. A new Senate report says that when she had the chance to do the second, she passed.

The report

On August 4, 2026, Senate Finance Committee ranking member Ron Wyden released "Looking the Other Way," the product of a four-year investigation into how Jeffrey Epstein moved his money.

Its finding is that JPMorganChase, Bank of America and Deutsche Bank saw suspicious Epstein transactions as far back as 2002 and, in most cases, did not alert the Treasury Department until after his 2019 arrest on sex-trafficking charges. More than a dozen bankers knew.

"I said from the start that if you want to get to the bottom of the Jeffrey Epstein cover-up, you had to follow the money," Wyden said. "This report is a ready-made roadmap for prosecutors, investigators and members of Congress to finally start holding the Epstein class accountable."

Buried inside that report is a section about Tennessee's senior senator.

What the report says Blackburn did

Wyden says that from 2024 to 2025 he went to Blackburn's staff repeatedly, asking for her help as a Republican member of the Finance Committee to subpoena Epstein's bank records.

He went to her specifically, the report says, because Blackburn had long been an outspoken proponent of transparency on Epstein.

Her office declined.

In December 2025, Wyden asked her to co-sponsor the Produce Epstein Treasury Records Act — a bill that would require the Treasury Department to hand Epstein's financial records over to the committee. She didn't. The bill still has 10 cosponsors, every one of them a Democrat.

The Senate Finance Committee is where the bank records live. Suspicious Activity Reports go to Treasury, and Treasury answers to Finance. A subpoena from that committee is the mechanism. It is not a symbolic gesture, and it is not something a senator can do by writing a letter to somebody else.

What she said publicly instead

Here is the part that is hard to square.

In February 2025, Blackburn posted on social media that her "efforts to crack the Epstein trafficking ring wide open have been stonewalled by Democrats at every turn."

That same day, she wrote to newly appointed FBI Director Kash Patel, calling it "paramount that the FBI provide full transparency to the American people and immediately release the complete, unredacted records in this case." She asked specifically for the flight logs from Epstein's plane and helicopter, the names of associates including Ghislaine Maxwell's "little black book," footage from Epstein's Florida home, and any other records related to the Epstein and Maxwell matters.

Also that same day, she wrote to the IRS, asking it to release materials revealing the names of everyone who had a financial relationship with Epstein or Maxwell.

So on a single day, Blackburn asked two federal agencies she does not control to release Epstein's financial records — and said Democrats were blocking her — while, according to Wyden, sitting on the one request from a Democrat that would have used her own committee's subpoena power to get bank records directly.

Neither her campaign nor her Senate office answered the Nashville Banner's questions about the report or the subpoenas.

The rest of her Epstein positioning

Blackburn is not a bystander on this issue. She is the Republican nominee for governor of Tennessee, and she has made punishment of sex offenders a centerpiece of that campaign.

Asked by the Banner whether she would continue executions as governor, she said yes — and went further:

"As governor, I will work to bring back the electric chair so that victims' families can get the closure they deserve. If you rape or molest our babies in Tennessee, you should get a death sentence."

That is a maximal position on punishing sex crimes. It sits next to a report saying she wouldn't sign a subpoena for the banks that processed a sex trafficker's money for seventeen years.

If she wins in November, Blackburn leaves the Senate in January — and with it, any role in the Epstein records fight. She has also told the Banner she'll stay in her Senate seat until she's sworn in as governor, which would let her appoint her own replacement.

This is the pattern, not the exception

Blackburn is not alone in this. The gap between what Republicans say about the Epstein files in public and what they do with the powers they hold has been the defining feature of this story.

James Comer chairs the House committee investigating the files. He spent two years subpoenaing the Bidens — then let Attorney General Pam Bondi sit for an interview that was neither sworn nor videotaped, stopped holding formal hearings, and said he wouldn't call JD Vance or Susie Wiles.

Tom Emmer, the House majority whip, promotes the Oversight Committee's other investigations constantly and says nothing about its Epstein one — the one his own son runs.

And when the House finally voted on releasing the files, the tally was 427 to 1. That vote is what a real position looks like: it is recorded, and you can't take it back.

Blackburn's letters are recorded too. So, now, is what she did when a subpoena needed one Republican signature.

She has a straightforward way to answer this. She could say whether Wyden's account is accurate, and if it is, why she said no. As of publication, her office hasn't.

Source

Report alleges Blackburn refused to help with Epstein probe — Sarah Grace Taylor, Nashville Banner, August 13, 2026. Photo: Nashville Banner.

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

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

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

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

Then they went back to trading.

The gap nobody mentions

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

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

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

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

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

Max Miller — traded the same day he voted

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

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

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

Michael Rulli — still trading in August

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

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

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

Kevin Hern — $34 million in volume

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diana Harshbarger — 700 late trades, and still going

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

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

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

David Taylor — 210 trades in a first term

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the vote was actually for

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the judge did

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

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

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

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

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

What the letter asks for

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

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

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

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

The man who led it sells the products

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

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

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

Who signed

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

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

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

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

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

What registration was actually doing

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

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

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the gloves are

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

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

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

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

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

The warnings come from the company that sells them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congress wrote guardrails. They were about equipment.

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

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

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

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

Two votes made this possible

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

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

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

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

The 201 with report cards on this site

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

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

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

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

Source

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

In March, Scott DesJarlais Signed On to a Bill Banning Abortion From the Moment of Fertilization. He Once Urged His Own Patient to Have One.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:29:07 +0000

On March 4, 2026, Scott DesJarlais added his name to H.R. 722, the Life at Conception Act.

It is a fetal personhood bill, and by August it had 116 House cosponsors. It declares that the terms "human person" and "human being" cover "each and every member of the species homo sapiens at all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization." That's it. There is no exception for rape. None for incest. None for the health of the pregnant woman. The only carve-out in the entire bill is a line saying a woman herself can't be prosecuted for the death of her own unborn child.

Five months later, on August 6, DesJarlais won his primary in a redrawn 4th District, beating three challengers to secure the Republican nomination for a ninth term.

So it's worth going back over what this particular congressman did before he started writing other people's reproductive rules.

The phone call

In September 2000, DesJarlais was a doctor in Jasper, Tennessee, and chief of staff at Grandview Medical Center. He was also having an affair with one of his patients, and she believed she was pregnant.

He got on the phone with her. The call was recorded. Twelve years later, during his 2012 reelection campaign, the transcript came out.

"You told me you'd have an abortion, and now we're getting too far along without one."

"Well, we've got to do something soon."

Those are his words, as published from the transcript by Roll Call and The Huffington Post in October 2012. His campaign's response at the time did not deny the call happened or that the transcript was accurate. It called the story "gutter politics."

DesJarlais publicly insisted he had not made the recording himself — that he had been "recorded unknowingly and without my consent."

Then the divorce transcript came out.

What he said under oath

On November 15, 2012, nine days after DesJarlais won reelection, the Chattanooga Times Free Press obtained the full transcript of his 2001 divorce trial. In it, under oath, he admitted:

Sexual relationships with at least six people he encountered through his job as a hospital chief of staff — among them two patients, three coworkers, and a pharmaceutical sales representative.
That his ex-wife had two abortions, which he supported. He testified that "things were not going well between us and it was a mutual decision," and called it "a very difficult and poor choice."
That he and his then-wife had, in fact, decided together to record the phone call — directly contradicting what he had told his own supporters a month earlier.

The state medical board reprimanded him. It cost him $500.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a complaint with Tennessee's medical regulators. In May 2013 the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners formally reprimanded DesJarlais for unprofessional conduct — sleeping with two of his own patients — and fined him $500, plus $1,000 in investigation costs. He did not contest the findings. His spokesman said simply, "He accepts the ruling of the board."

The board calculated the fine at $250 per patient.

Melanie Sloan of CREW told the Times Free Press what that was worth:

"There are more expensive speeding tickets. Tennessee authorities apparently believe sexual exploitation of women is less serious than speeding."

In 2014, Politico ran a profile of him headlined "The Biggest Hypocrite in Congress?"

Why this matters in 2026 and not just in 2012

It would be easy to file this under old news. DesJarlais would prefer that. On November 30, 2012, three weeks after the election, he told Nashville talk host Ralph Bristol that God had "forgiven me" and asked "fellow Christians" and constituents "to consider doing the same."

Forgiveness is between him and whoever he's asking. It has nothing to do with the bill he signed in March.

Because here is the actual situation. A man who used his position as a physician to sleep with his own patients, who pressed one of them to end a pregnancy, and who supported his wife's two abortions, is now cosponsoring legislation that would give a fertilized egg the full protection of the 14th Amendment — for everybody else. Under that bill, a rape victim in Tennessee's 4th District would have fewer options than the women in Scott DesJarlais's own life did.

He is not alone. We've written before about the Republicans with the worst records on abortion, several of whom have cosponsored the same fertilization-onward bill. What sets DesJarlais apart is not the vote. It's that his own sworn testimony is the counterexample.

The opponent

The Democrat he'll face in November is Victoria Broderick, who won her primary the same night. The Nashville Banner reports she "was first inspired to get involved in politics after Roe v. Wade was overturned." She also ran against him in 2024 and lost by more than 40 points.

The Banner's own account of DesJarlais's record is one sentence long and needs no adjectives: he "weathered intense scrutiny early in his tenure in Congress when it was revealed that the pro-life Republican had encouraged multiple women, including a mistress who was one of his patients, to get abortions."

He weathered it. Seven general elections since the transcript surfaced, and a primary this month. That's not the same as it not being true.

Sources

Rep. DesJarlais secures GOP nod in redrawn TN 4th district, Nashville Banner, August 6, 2026 (photo: Billy Weeks/AP)
H.R. 722 — Life at Conception Act, full text and cosponsors, Congress.gov
Transcript Reveals Scott DesJarlais Urged Mistress to Have Abortion, Roll Call, October 10, 2012
Disciplinary Action Report, May 2013, Tennessee Department of Health — "Scott E. DesJarlais, M.D., Jasper, Tenn. Violation: Unprofessional conduct. Action: License reprimanded; assessed $500 civil penalty, plus costs"

The VA Tried to Close McMinnville's Only Clinic. Scott DesJarlais Found Out When Everybody Else Did.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:26:41 +0000

In the first week of March 2026, word got out that the only VA clinic in McMinnville, Tennessee was closing. The clinic confirmed it to WSMV on Wednesday, March 4; the Tennessee Department of Veterans Services announced it that Saturday. About 1,840 veterans got their primary care and mental health care there. The VA said it would shut the doors on May 31.

The congressman who represents McMinnville learned about it the same way everybody else did.

Scott DesJarlais wrote to VA Secretary Doug Collins on March 9. Here is what he told him:

"My office received no notice prior to the public disclosure that this facility was facing staffing shortages or that these shortages would lead to the shuttering of this important VA Outpatient Clinic in my district."

He went further. The clinic's leaders, he wrote, "did not consult with or inform my staff or myself about the issues facing this Clinic, and the answers they gave as to why this was happening and the information they have provided to the community have been woefully inadequate."

DesJarlais has represented Tennessee's 4th District since 2011. He is a physician. By his own account he once worked in a VA hospital. And more than 46,000 veterans live in his district.

Nobody called him.

What closing it would have meant

The nearest alternatives were the VA clinics in Tullahoma and Cookeville — both about 45 minutes away by the VA's own estimate, and 36 and 45 miles away by Military.com's. Roughly 200 veterans would have been sent to Nashville, Chattanooga, or Murfreesboro instead.

For a lot of the people who used that clinic, an hour each way isn't an inconvenience. It's the end of their health care.

Gary McComis, a Marine veteran, put it plainly to WSMV: "You depend on it. You got a lot of veterans that this is our only insurance, the only health insurance we have."

Kris Gore, who spent twenty years in the National Guard, told the same station: "We have to get this out into the community. We have to start doing something about this."

The VA's reason should have been a red flag years ago

The clinic was never staffed by the VA. It was run by a contracted staffing company, and the VA's own account of what went wrong is damning: the contractor "was unable to consistently staff the facility," and over five years the average patient had their assigned provider swapped about twenty times. Only 79% of patients said they trusted the clinic — below the VA's national average.

Twenty changes of provider in five years. That is not a sudden crisis. That is a facility that had been failing veterans for half a decade, in a district represented the whole time by a doctor who sits on the House Armed Services Committee.

The VA has an answer for why nobody told him, buried in the same FAQ: "pre-decisional information was shared ahead of schedule leading to confusion and misinformation within the local community," and the system had "anticipated informing Veterans in mid-March via phone calls, appointment letters, and at the March 20 town hall." In other words, the decision leaked before anyone had been told — the congressman included.

He says nobody told him. That may well be true. It is not obviously better than the alternative.

What he was doing while the VA shrank

Here is the part that doesn't appear in the press release.

Through all of 2025, DesJarlais was one of the loudest cheerleaders for shrinking the federal government. He sat down for a February 2025 interview on his own channel to talk up the House budget and DOGE. On April 2, 2025, he posted on X that the Labor Secretary was "working hard to root out waste, fraud and abuse by returning $1 BILLION in unused COVID funds," with three applause emoji and a link to a Fox News story headlined "Trump Labor Department secures eye-popping sum to return to taxpayers amid DOGE push."

While he was posting that, the VA was losing people. On July 7, 2025, the department announced it would shed nearly 30,000 employees by the end of the fiscal year — about 17,000 already gone between January and June, and another 12,000 expected by September 30. The mechanism was the governmentwide hiring freeze, deferred resignations, early retirements and attrition.

The VA has not said the McMinnville contractor's failure was caused by any of that, and we're not going to claim it was. What we will say is this: you cannot spend a year celebrating a campaign to make the federal government smaller and then act astonished when a federal health facility in your district can't find anybody to work in it.

DesJarlais didn't vote against any of it. He cheered it. Then he wrote a letter demanding to know why nobody warned him.

The victory lap

On May 14, 2026, DesJarlais announced that the clinic would stay open after all.

"After a multitude of meetings with Secretary Collins and the VA, I am excited to announce the McMinnville VA Clinic will be staying open."

Good. Genuinely — that's the right outcome, and his office worked for it.

But read on in the same statement:

"Under Secretary Collins' leadership the VA has been focused on ensuring our Nation's heroes get the best care possible that meet their needs and expectations."

That is DesJarlais praising the leadership of the same VA that, nine weeks earlier, he said had given his constituents answers that were "woefully inadequate" and had never bothered to pick up the phone.

The May release does mention the March letter — once, as "a formal letter and series of phone calls" — and never says a word about what it actually demanded. The March letter demanded accountability. The May release handed out thank-yous. Nothing in between explains what actually changed — not how the clinic will be staffed, not who is providing the doctors, not what happens when the contractor fails again. The VA simply reversed itself, and the congressman announced it.

Why nobody in McMinnville got to ask him about it

There was a public meeting about the closure. The VA held it on March 20. DesJarlais did not hold one.

That is not a one-off. According to a July 2025 op-ed by Victoria Broderick — who ran against him as the Democratic nominee in 2024, and so is hardly a neutral party, though he has never disputed the specific claim — DesJarlais has not held an in-person town hall since 2013. She wrote that he declined an invitation to one in Murfreesboro in June 2025.

Thirteen years is a long time to go without standing in a room and letting 46,000 veterans ask you a question.

Three weeks after the clinic reversal, DesJarlais got back to the work he does most: on June 4 he read out his subcommittee's piece of the defense bill, authorizing "full funding" for nuclear weapons modernization and a "historic increase" for the Space Force. The eleven weapons contractors whose programs that bill funds have given his campaign $94,000 this cycle.

The clinic in McMinnville stayed open because a contractor's failure finally got embarrassing enough to make the news. Not because anyone in Washington was watching.

Sources

Tennessee Lawmakers Concerned Over Planned VA Clinic Closure, Military.com, April 10, 2026 (photo: McMinnville VA Clinic, VA.gov)
DesJarlais Voices Concern to VA Secretary Over Closure of McMinnville Clinic, March 9, 2026
McMinnville VA Clinic Transition, VA Tennessee Valley Health Care

Scott DesJarlais Writes America's Nuclear Weapons Budget. Eleven Companies That Build the Weapons Gave Him $94,000.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:22:14 +0000

On June 4, 2026, Scott DesJarlais stood up at a House Armed Services Committee markup and read a short statement into the record. Almost nobody covered it. It is one of the most valuable pieces of paper in Washington.

DesJarlais chairs the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. That subcommittee holds the pen on nuclear weapons, strategic missiles, nuclear command and control, missile defense, military space systems, and the Energy Department programs that keep the nuclear stockpile running. He took the gavel in January 2025.

What that means in practice is simple. Once a year, DesJarlais decides which of these programs get more money and which ones don't. Then the full committee votes on what he wrote.

What he put in the bill

Here is what DesJarlais said his subcommittee's piece of the 2027 defense bill does, in his own words:

"The subcommittee's Fiscal Year 2027 mark is the product of bipartisan cooperation and continues many of our longstanding efforts, such as advancing nuclear modernization, reforming the national security space enterprise, and enhancing missile defense."

Then he got specific. The bill, he said, "authorizes full funding to keep modernizing the nation's nuclear forces," supports "significant increase in funding" for the Energy Department's nuclear production capabilities, and improves "acquisition flexibility for the Air Force's ICBM programs."

On missile defense, he named four things by name:

space-based sensing
development of the Next-Generation Interceptor
Standard Missile 3 – Block II-B procurement
accelerating the Glide Phase Interceptor program

And he closed by saying he was "happy to support the historic increase in funding for the Space Force specifically."

Those aren't abstractions. Every single one of them is a contract. And every single one of those contracts belongs to a company that writes checks to Scott DesJarlais.

Line by line, program to donor

Let's take his list in order.

The Next-Generation Interceptor — the missile meant to replace America's homeland missile-defense interceptors — belongs to Lockheed Martin, which beat Northrop Grumman for the job in 2024. Lockheed Martin's PAC has given DesJarlais $10,000 this election cycle, including a $5,000 check on February 25, 2026 — while he was writing this bill.

Standard Missile-3 is built by Raytheon, a division of RTX. RTX's PAC has given DesJarlais $10,000 this cycle. Its $5,000 check landed the same day Lockheed's did.

The Glide Phase Interceptor — the one the committee added money to accelerate — belongs to Northrop Grumman. Northrop's PAC has given him $10,000 this cycle, $5,000 of it on February 9, 2026. Northrop is also the prime contractor on the Air Force's Sentinel ICBM — the program whose "acquisition flexibility" his bill carries a legislative fix for.

Space-based sensing means missile-tracking satellites. L3Harris won a contract worth up to $843 million in December 2025 to build eighteen of them. L3Harris's PAC has given DesJarlais $8,000 this cycle, with its most recent check dated June 29 — twenty-five days after he read that statement.

The Energy Department's "production capabilities" he boosted are the nuclear weapons plants. One of them, the Kansas City National Security Campus, is run by Honeywell and makes about 80% of the non-nuclear components that go into the American nuclear stockpile. More than 7,000 people work there. Honeywell's PAC has given DesJarlais $10,000 this cycle.

The "historic increase" for the Space Force flows to the companies that launch and build for it. SpaceX's PAC has given him $5,000. Blue Origin's has given him $10,000.

Add in General Atomics ($10,000), Leidos ($10,000), Boeing ($8,500) and BWX Technologies ($2,500) — all of them Pentagon and nuclear contractors — and eleven weapons and aerospace companies have put $94,000 into DesJarlais's campaign account this cycle.

Why $94,000 is a lot of money to this particular congressman

For most members of Congress, $94,000 is a rounding error. For DesJarlais it isn't.

Since 2020 he has raised about $1.19 million — one of the smaller war chests in the House. More than half of it, $610,849, came from PACs rather than people. Just $8,659 came from small grassroots donors. That's seven-tenths of one percent. He ranks 224th out of 440 House members in grassroots funding.

So the arithmetic is this: eleven companies whose programs his own subcommittee's bill funds have given him, in this cycle alone, roughly eleven times what every small grassroots donor has given him since 2020.

This is a pattern, not an accident

DesJarlais isn't alone in this. It's how the defense budget gets written.

Ken Calvert, who chairs the subcommittee that drafts the entire Pentagon budget, took more than $200,000 from weapons makers in three months while Americans were dying in Trump's Iran war. John Carter, who writes the military construction budget, has eleven Pentagon contractors among his twenty biggest PAC donors. Brian Babin, who chairs the committee that writes NASA's marching orders, has taken $261,250 from six space and defense contractors.

The gavel is the product. The money follows the gavel.

What this costs the rest of us

Two months before DesJarlais authorized "full funding" for nuclear modernization and a "historic increase" for the Space Force, the veterans in his own district were told the VA was closing the McMinnville clinic — the one more than 2,000 of them used. He said his office got no warning, and the clinic was spared only after he spent two months lobbying the VA Secretary to reverse it.

That is the trade DesJarlais makes, and he has made it for fifteen years. Nothing in the record says he is wrong about the threats from China or Russia. But there is no version of this where a congressman writes a bill enriching eleven companies, takes $94,000 from those same eleven companies while he's writing it, and asks us to believe the two facts are unrelated.

He didn't disclose the overlap. He didn't recuse himself from anything. He just read the statement and moved on, because in Washington this isn't a scandal. It's the job.

It should be a scandal.

Sources

DesJarlais Opening Statement on the Strategic Forces Print of the FY27 NDAA, House Armed Services Committee, June 4, 2026
Friends of Scott DesJarlais receipts, Federal Election Commission
DesJarlais to chair House panel overseeing military space, nuclear programs, SpaceNews

Eighteen Executives at One Nuclear Company Gave Chuck Fleischmann $72,500 in Six Weeks. He Writes the Budget for the Agency Covering Up to Half the Cost of Their Reactor Project.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:40:55 +0000

Chuck Fleischmann chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development. In plain terms: he holds the pen on the Department of Energy's budget. This year that bill runs $58.5 billion.

There is a company called X-energy that builds advanced nuclear reactors and the fuel that runs them. Its fuel subsidiary, TRISO-X, is putting up a fuel fabrication campus in Oak Ridge, Tennessee — inside Fleischmann's district, and, after a 70-acre purchase announced on August 4, 2026, running to more than 180 acres. The Department of Energy is a partner in that project. Through its Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program, DOE provides "up to 50% cost sharing" with X-energy on the reactor program that the Oak Ridge fuel plant serves.

So: a company with a federal cost-share deal, in a congressman's district, funded out of a budget that same congressman writes.

Now here is what the Federal Election Commission's records show.

Six weeks, eighteen people, $72,500

Between January 26 and March 11, 2026, eighteen people who listed X-energy as their employer made 28 separate contributions to Fleischmann's campaign committee, totaling $72,500. You can pull the records yourself.

It was not the sales department. Working down the list of occupations they reported to the FEC:

The CEO
Two presidents — one of them Joel Duling, president of TRISO-X
The chief nuclear officer
The chief scientist
The chief technology officer
The chief information officer
The chief supply chain officer
The deputy chief commercial officer
Two deputy general counsels
Two senior vice presidents, two more vice presidents, a VP of quality, and the two who filed as a consultant and an attorney — X-energy's own leadership page lists them as its head of government affairs and its chief legal officer

Several of them gave $3,500 twice — once for the primary and once for the general election. Under FEC limits, $3,500 per election is the maximum an individual can give. Those donors gave everything the law allows.

Going back to 2018, people at X-energy have given Fleischmann $85,500 in total. Roughly 85 percent of it arrived inside that single six-week stretch this year.

What was happening during those six weeks

The window is narrow enough to line up against a calendar, so let's do that.

The first checks came in on January 26, 2026.

On February 13, 2026, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved TRISO-X's 40-year license to manufacture nuclear fuel at Oak Ridge — the first Category II fuel fabrication license the NRC has ever issued, and the first new fuel fabrication license of any kind in about 50 years. Checks from the chief technology officer (February 5), the CEO (February 8) and the chief nuclear officer (February 10) are all dated in the days right before that approval.

The last check came in on March 11.

Ten weeks later, on May 20, 2026, Fleischmann's subcommittee bill cleared the full Appropriations Committee. Among the things his committee listed as the bill's priorities: "Accelerating research, testing, and demonstration of advanced nuclear technologies" and "Advancing the Trump Administration's goal to quadruple nuclear energy capacity by 2050."

Fleischmann's own statement on it: the bill "prioritizing research and development in advanced nuclear and other baseload energy sources, securing critical domestic supply chains."

Advanced nuclear research and demonstration is the program category that cost-shares X-energy's reactor. Domestic fuel supply chain is the thing TRISO-X exists to be.

To be precise about what this is and isn't

Nobody has alleged a crime here, and this post isn't alleging one either. Corporate executives are allowed to give to campaigns. Fleischmann is allowed to accept the money. Nothing in the public record shows him promising anything in return, and a fuel plant in Oak Ridge that creates hundreds of jobs is, on its own terms, a good thing for his district.

What the record does show is a conflict of interest sitting in plain sight.

One man decides how much federal money flows to the Department of Energy programs that are paying for a company's project. In a six-week window, that company's entire executive suite maxes out to that man's campaign. Then he marks up the bill.

Even if every one of those eighteen people gave out of pure conviction about nuclear power, the arrangement is the problem. Anybody in the country would look at it and ask the obvious question. And the answer can't be "trust me," because we have no way to check.

This is the same structure we've written about elsewhere. Ken Calvert, who writes the Pentagon's budget, took $200,000 from defense contractors while the Iran war was being fought. In Iowa, Joe Mitchell took $10,000 from a pipeline executive and eight days later cast the only Republican vote against landowners. The names change. The shape doesn't.

The part that makes it worse

There is no venue where a constituent can raise any of this with him. The only mention of an in-person town hall anywhere on his congressional website dates to 2011, his first year in office, and he told the Chattanooga Times Free Press last year that he would "never" hold one.

Eighteen executives at one company got his attention in six weeks. Constituents who have spent years asking for a public meeting got "never."

Sources

Contribution records: FEC receipts for Fleischmann for Congress (C00461822), contributor employer "X-ENERGY". U.S. Department of Energy, "X-energy Starts Building Construction for Advanced Nuclear Fuel Facility", November 17, 2025, and "TRISO-X Receives NRC Special Nuclear Material License". House Appropriations Committee, "Committee Approves FY27 Energy and Water Development Appropriations Act", May 20, 2026. Photo: X-energy, via the U.S. Department of Energy.

Tennessee Split Its Only Majority-Black District Into Three. Chuck Fleischmann Said He Was "Thankful That the State Did What President Trump Asked Them to Do."

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:38:02 +0000

On May 7, 2026, Tennessee's Republican legislature passed a new congressional map. It carves up the Memphis-based 9th District — the only majority-Black congressional district in the state — and spreads its voters across three districts that stretch hundreds of miles east into rural Republican territory. It splits Nashville, the state's other Democratic city, into five.

Governor Bill Lee signed it. The effect, as NBC News reported it, is to put Republicans in position to pick up a House seat in November and take every single one of Tennessee's congressional districts.

The Tennessee House passed it without a single Republican speaking in defense of it. When one member finally rose to speak, the public gallery got so loud that the speaker simply called the vote while Democratic members stood up and walked off the floor. State troopers were ordered to clear the gallery. In the Senate, a member stood on a desk holding what looked like a bedsheet reading "No Jim Crow 2.0" and "Stop the TN Steal."

Chuck Fleischmann had a reaction to all of this. Here it is, as he gave it to WATE:

"I am thankful that the state did what President Trump asked them to do, which was to specifically redistrict the state map. They have done it, and I will certainly approve that. The best news about this is that the great people of Oak Ridge, and Anderson, and Roane counties kept me as their member of Congress."

Read that again, because there are two separate things in it.

Thing one: he said out loud why the map exists

Republicans defending mid-decade redistricting usually reach for something about population or communities of interest. The bill's sponsor in the state Senate, John Stevens, went with: "Tennessee is a conservative state. Its congressional delegation should reflect that."

Fleischmann skipped the reasoning entirely and named the actual cause. The state redrew the map because President Trump asked them to.

He's right about that. Tennessee became the ninth state to enact a new congressional map ahead of the midterms, in a mid-decade redistricting wave that began when Trump urged Republican-run states to redraw their lines to protect the party's thin House majority. A Supreme Court ruling days earlier had gutted the Voting Rights Act's protections against racial gerrymandering, and Tennessee moved within the week.

So the record now shows a sitting congressman saying, on camera, that his state redrew its congressional districts on the president's instruction — and that he is thankful for it.

We have written about this pattern in other states. In South Carolina, Sheri Biggs argued that a 7-0 Republican map reflects the state's "values" in a state where four in ten voters pick Democrats. In Utah, Blake Moore helped launch the anti-gerrymandering movement and then turned on it once a judge enforced what voters passed. Fleischmann's contribution is the plainest of the three: he didn't argue the map was fair. He thanked the president for ordering it.

Thing two: what he was actually worried about

The second half of his statement is the part worth sitting with.

Out of everything in that map — a majority-Black district dissolved, protesters cleared out of the Capitol by state troopers, a whole city's voters distributed into districts hundreds of miles away — the "best news," in Fleischmann's telling, was that Oak Ridge, Anderson County and Roane County "kept me as their member of Congress."

That was the piece he had a stake in. Fleischmann chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, and he told WATE that he appropriates about $10 billion each year into the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Reservation. Oak Ridge is his district's crown jewel: the national laboratory, the Y-12 National Security Complex, a growing nuclear industry.

When the redraw threatened to move that territory, the Oak Ridge City Council held a special meeting and passed a resolution opposing any map that didn't keep Anderson and Roane counties in the 3rd District — citing his importance to the local economy.

They got what they asked for. Oak Ridge stayed. Fleischmann's district instead gave up Morgan, Scott and Campbell counties and picked up Rhea and Meigs.

He told 6 News he would have kept supporting the local economy even if the area had moved into another district: "The funding was never imperiled, my representation of that area was."

His representation. That was the thing at risk.

What he had no problem with

Fleischmann was careful to say he had nothing to do with drawing the map. Just a handful of state lawmakers redrew Tennessee's districts, without any input from him, he told the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

Fine. He didn't draw it. But he was asked about it, on the day it passed, and he had a choice about what to say.

He could have said that splitting the only district in Tennessee where Black voters make up a majority is a bad way to run a state. He could have said mid-decade redistricting at a president's request is a bad precedent no matter which party does it. He could have said nothing at all.

What he said was thank you.

Memphis Democrat Raumesh Akbari, the state Senate minority leader, put the question to her colleagues on the floor this way: whether "those Black folks in Memphis who believe in this state, who pay their taxes, who work just like everyone else, have a right to be politically represented as well by folks who share their interest and who advocate for them on a federal level."

Tennessee's answer was no. Fleischmann's answer was that he was thankful, and that the best news was he kept his seat.

Last year he told a reporter he would "never" hold another town hall, and did not respond when a Chattanooga TV station asked his office to confirm it. So there is no room in the 3rd District where a voter gets to ask him to explain that answer.

Sources

NBC News, "Tennessee Republicans pass map dividing up state's lone majority-Black district", May 7, 2026, by Jane C. Timm. WATE 6 On Your Side, "Oak Ridge stays in Fleischmann's district under redrawn Congressional map", May 7, 2026, by Gregory Raucoules. Photo: Nicole Hester / The Tennessean / USA Today Network.

A Conservative Watchdog Group Has Named Chuck Fleischmann a "Porker of the Month" Three Times. The First Thing He Did in Congress Was Ban "Those Terrible Earmarks."

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:36:38 +0000

On May 28, 2026, a conservative anti-spending group called Citizens Against Government Waste handed out one of its regular awards. The group calls it "Porker of the Month," and it is not a compliment. It goes to officials the group says have "shown a blatant disregard for the taxpayers."

The winners that month were Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, and Chuck Fleischmann, the Republican who represents Tennessee's 3rd District.

For Fleischmann, it was the third time.

He won it in August 2023. He won it again in May 2024. And he won it a third time this past May.

Every time, for the same reason: earmarks. He takes more of them than anyone else in the House of Representatives.

What an earmark is, in plain English

An earmark is when a member of Congress writes a specific project in their own district into a spending bill. Not a formula, not a grant program anybody can apply for — a line that says this much money goes to this project here.

Congress banned the practice in 2011, in the middle of the Tea Party wave. It brought earmarks back in 2021 under new rules.

Fleischmann chairs the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development. That is the panel that writes the budgets for the Department of Energy and for the Army Corps of Engineers — the agency behind his own largest earmark. He is, in other words, one of the people holding the pen.

The numbers

Here is what the watchdog group found this year, in its own words:

"Rep. Fleischmann received 15 earmarks costing $251,378,000, the most in the House of Representatives. Rep. Fleischmann's earmarks included $213,000,000 for the Chickamauga Lock on the Tennessee River, the largest single earmark in Congress."

The largest single earmark in Congress. Not in Tennessee. In Congress.

Two years earlier it was the same story with bigger numbers. For fiscal 2024, the group reported that Fleischmann pulled in $273.3 million — a 855.6 percent increase over the $28.6 million he had secured the year before, and nearly 90 percent more than the second-highest member of the House.

The group's president, Tom Schatz, put it bluntly at the time: "Rep. Fleischmann is robbing taxpayers of their hard-earned money for his own parochial purposes."

That is not a Democratic attack line. Citizens Against Government Waste is a conservative group whose entire reason for existing is cutting federal spending. It is the same worldview Fleischmann campaigns on.

He used to agree with them

Fleischmann came to Congress in the 2010 wave, when running against earmarks was the whole point.

Here is what he said about it in 2014, in a quote the Chattanooga Times Free Press pulled out and put at the top of an editorial about his earmark record:

"I inherited a broken system. ... The first thing I did [when first elected in 2010] was we put a moratorium on those terrible earmarks."

Those terrible earmarks.

The paper's headline for that piece was "Fleischmann moves from vocal foe of earmarks to top of list for House members." That was two years ago. He has stayed on top of the list since.

This isn't about a lock

Let's be clear about what the actual problem is here, because it isn't the Chickamauga Lock.

The lock is real infrastructure. It's old, it needs replacing, barges move real freight through it, and a Tennessee congressman fighting for federal money to fix a Tennessee waterway is a congressman doing his job. Federal spending on things people need is not a scandal on this site. It's the point.

The problem is that Fleischmann does not apply that standard to anybody else.

The same congressman who secured the largest earmark in the entire Congress voted for Trump's budget bill on July 3, 2025 — the bill that, in Tennessee, is expected to strip health coverage from at least 110,000 Tennesseans, cut an estimated $7 billion from TennCare over ten years, and leave at least nine rural hospitals at risk of closing.

That same bill took food assistance away from families. About 696,100 Tennesseans rely on SNAP every month, and Fleischmann was one of the Tennessee Republicans who voted to cut it.

Two weeks later, on July 18, 2025, he voted for the measure that pushed through the Rescissions Act of 2025 — the law that cancelled $9 billion Congress had already approved for foreign aid and public broadcasting, including the money that keeps small public radio and TV stations on the air.

Nine billion dollars was too much to spend on public broadcasting and famine relief. Two hundred and thirteen million for one lock in his district was not too much to spend.

The pattern under it

There is a version of this where a member of Congress says, honestly: I believe the federal government should spend money on infrastructure and on people, and I'm going to fight for my district's share of both. That's a defensible position. Nobody would write this post about that member.

Fleischmann's position is the other one. Spending is waste when it puts food on a family's table or keeps a rural Tennessee hospital open. Spending is an investment when it runs through the subcommittee he chairs.

He is not alone in this. We've written about Aaron Bean, who co-founded the DOGE Caucus over the national debt and then voted for the bill that grew it, and about the Elon Musk cost-cutting operation that expired on July 4 with no final report and no proven savings while the members who cheered it went quiet.

What makes Fleischmann's case different is that he isn't just voting with the crowd. He is, by a conservative watchdog group's own count, the single biggest beneficiary in the House of the exact practice he came to Congress and banned — three separate times, publicly, with his name on it.

And when a reporter asked him last year whether he would ever hold a town hall so constituents could ask him questions like this one in person, his answer was "never".

Source

Citizens Against Government Waste, "Citizens Against Government Waste Names Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Chuck Fleischmann May 2026 Porkers of the Month", May 28, 2026. Photo: Official congressional portrait, 119th Congress.

Bill Hagerty Put His Name on a Bill to Fix America's Bridges. Then He Stalled the Senate for a Weekend and Voted Against the Law That Funded It.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 22:07:00 +0000

In May 2021, a bridge over the Mississippi River nearly fell down.

Inspectors found a crack in a critical steel support beam on the Interstate 40 Hernando de Soto Bridge at Memphis. They called 911. The bridge shut down completely — more than 40,000 vehicles a day, about 30 percent of them commercial trucks, suddenly had nowhere to go. It stayed closed for almost three months. Investigators later found the crack had been visible in a kayaker's photograph since at least 2016, missed by inspection after inspection.

Two weeks after that bridge closed, Bill Hagerty did something genuinely good. He put his name on a bill to fix bridges.

Eleven weeks after that, he shut down the United States Senate to delay the law that paid for it — and then voted against it.

This is the whole story, in order.

May 25, 2021: he signs on to the bridge bill

Hagerty was one of thirteen senators who joined Democrat Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the sponsor, as original cosponsors of the Bridge Investment Act. It created a competitive grant program to repair and replace deficient bridges and chip away at the national backlog of bridge repairs. It required American-made steel and iron in the projects it funded.

The price tag: $3.265 billion.

In the announcement, Hagerty pointed directly at what was happening back home:

"Tennesseans, particularly those in Memphis and the Mid-South, know all too well right now the necessity of maintaining our bridges..."

He was right. He named the ongoing I-40 closure as the reason the country needed to invest in its bridges. It's hard to argue with a senator making that case while a major river crossing sits closed in his own state.

August 2021: the bridge program goes into the infrastructure bill

Here's what happened to the bill he had signed on to. It didn't die in committee. It didn't get watered down. It got written into the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill essentially whole.

Go read the law. Section 11118 of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is titled "Bridge investment program." The law authorizes it at $600 million for 2022, $640 million for 2023, $650 million for 2024, $675 million for 2025, and $700 million for 2026.

Add those up: $3.265 billion — the exact figure from Hagerty's own press release.

The program he had cosponsored. Its number. Sitting in the law.

August 7–9, 2021: he grinds the Senate to a halt

The bill was headed for passage. More than a dozen Republicans had joined Democrats to clear the early hurdles. And then one freshman senator decided nobody was going anywhere.

The Associated Press described what he did: Hagerty "spent the weekend using a procedural maneuver to essentially grind the chamber to a halt." A final vote that could have happened days earlier was pushed into the following Tuesday. Senators lost a second straight summer weekend to it.

On August 7, he took the floor and laid out his objections: the bill wasn't really paid for, it was "a 2700-page bill going through no committees," and Democrats would hold it hostage in the House until a separate "multi-trillion-dollar socialist bill" passed.

His colleagues in both parties were not impressed.

Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota: "We have squandered not minutes, not hours, but several days."

Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah: "Criticism is expected. And, I note, criticism is also pretty easy," and then: "If you don't like this bill, what bill do you like instead? What would you do instead?"

Democratic Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, one of the lead negotiators, was blunter: "I think he's doing Trump's bidding. I don't think there's any doubt about it."

Tester wasn't guessing. According to the AP, Trump called Hagerty that Sunday morning. Later the same day Trump put out a statement egging him on: "Congratulations to Senator Bill Hagerty in remaining true to 'AMERICA FIRST!'"

Meanwhile, about 8 in 10 Americans supported spending more on roads, bridges, ports, and drinking water pipes, according to an AP-NORC poll taken at the time.

August 10, 2021: he votes no

The bill passed anyway, 69 to 30. Hagerty voted no.

So did his Tennessee colleague Marsha Blackburn.

Both of Tennessee's senators voted against the largest bridge investment since the interstate highway system was built — including the bridge program one of them had cosponsored three months earlier.

What Tennessee got anyway

The money came to Tennessee regardless, because that's how formula funding works. Tennessee was allocated $302 million for bridges over five years under the law's Bridge Formula Program, Nashville's Fox 17 reported in January 2022 — for a state with roughly 880 bridges rated in poor condition.

Tennessee was also allocated $813 million from the law's broadband program to extend high-speed internet to every remaining unserved and underserved home and business in the state by 2028.

None of that happened because of Bill Hagerty. It happened over his objection, after he'd spent a weekend making sure it took longer.

The part that doesn't add up

A senator can vote against a big bill and still be honest about it. Plenty of Republicans thought the price tag was too high and said so once, on the record, and moved on.

That's not what happened here.

Hagerty didn't just object. He pointed at a shut-down bridge in Memphis, put his name on a $3.265 billion program to fix bridges like it, watched Congress adopt that program word for word — and then used the Senate's rules to personally delay the vote, at the urging of a president who wanted the whole thing dead, before voting against the bill carrying it.

His stated reason was the deficit: he cited a CBO estimate that the bill would add about $256 billion over a decade. It's a real number, and reasonable people can care about it.

But watch what that principle does four years later. On July 1, 2025, Hagerty voted to pass Trump's budget bill — the one that cut health coverage and food aid to help pay for tax cuts, and added trillions to the debt doing it. The national debt has since climbed to about $39.9 trillion, roughly $3.7 trillion higher than when Republicans took full control in January 2025.

So the deficit was worth shutting down the Senate over when the money was for bridges. It wasn't worth a single procedural objection when the money was for tax cuts.

Tennessee has 880 bridges in poor condition. One of them nearly collapsed into the Mississippi River with people driving over it. Hagerty knew that better than almost anyone in the Senate — he said so himself, in writing, in May 2021.

Then in August he made everyone wait, and voted no.

Sources

AP: Infrastructure push slowed by Tennessee senator's objection (Brian Slodysko, August 9, 2021)
Hagerty, Senators Introduce Bipartisan "Bridge Investment Act" (May 25, 2021)
Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Public Law 117-58 — Sec. 11118, Bridge investment program
Senate Roll Call Vote 314 — passage of H.R. 3684, August 10, 2021 (Hagerty: Nay)
Hagerty Delivers Floor Remarks on Senate Infrastructure Bill (August 7, 2021)

Bill Hagerty Wrote the Crypto Industry's Law. Within Two Weeks of It Passing, Their CEOs Wrote Him Checks.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 22:04:00 +0000

On June 17, 2025, the U.S. Senate passed a bill called the GENIUS Act by a vote of 68 to 30. It was the first major federal law written for the cryptocurrency industry, and it created the rulebook for a product called a stablecoin — a digital token meant to hold a steady value, usually one dollar.

The senator who wrote that bill is Bill Hagerty of Tennessee.

Seven days after the Senate passed his bill, the CEO of Coinbase — the biggest crypto exchange in America — wrote a check to Hagerty's joint fundraising committee. Three days after that, so did the CEO of Ripple, another major crypto company. Three days after that, a Coinbase vice president.

Thirteen days. Three executives. $18,600, of which $13,300 was booked straight into Hagerty's own campaign account.

That's not a coincidence you have to squint at. It's in the public record, filed with the Federal Election Commission.

He didn't just vote for it. He wrote it.

This is the part that separates Hagerty from the other 67 senators who voted yes.

On February 4, 2025, Hagerty introduced the GENIUS Act with three colleagues. His own office called it legislation he was leading. In the announcement, he said the bill "establishes a safe and pro-growth regulatory framework that will unleash innovation," and that "from enhancing transaction efficiency to driving demand for U.S. Treasuries, the potential benefits of strong stablecoin innovation are immense."

Hagerty sits on the Senate Banking Committee — the committee that decides how financial products get regulated in this country. So he wasn't a backbencher casting a vote on someone else's idea. He was the author, working the committee that had jurisdiction over his own bill.

President Trump signed it into law on July 18, 2025.

What the law actually says about your money

Here is the sentence most people never read. It's in the final text of Hagerty's own bill:

"Payment stablecoins shall not be backed by the full faith and credit of the United States, guaranteed by the United States Government, subject to deposit insurance by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or subject to share insurance by the National Credit Union Administration."

Read that again, because it matters.

When you put money in a bank, the FDIC insures it. If the bank fails, you get your money back — up to $250,000, guaranteed by the United States government. That protection is why ordinary people can keep their savings somewhere other than under a mattress.

A stablecoin looks like a dollar. It's named to sound like a dollar. It's marketed as being as good as a dollar. And under the law Hagerty wrote, it carries none of a dollar's protection. If the company holding the reserves goes under, there is no federal backstop. You are an unsecured creditor in a bankruptcy, standing in line.

The financial watchdog group Better Markets has laid out why that's dangerous: "Unlike bank deposits, stablecoins carry no federal insurance." And because these tokens can be cashed out around the clock, the group warns they "reward whoever runs first" — meaning the moment anyone doubts the reserves are real, everyone races for the exit at once, and the slowest people lose. That's a bank run, minus the insurance that was invented to stop bank runs.

These aren't hypothetical worries. Stablecoins have broken their promise before — the token TerraUSD collapsed entirely in 2022, wiping out the people holding it.

Then came the checks

Now look at the timeline against the money. All of these are individual contributions from the executives themselves, given to Team Hagerty Victory — the joint fundraising committee that splits its take between Hagerty's campaign, his leadership PAC and the national Senate Republican committee — and reported to the FEC by both.

The Senate passed the GENIUS Act on June 17, 2025.

June 24, 2025 — Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase: $8,500, of which $3,200 went to the campaign
June 27, 2025 — Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple: $6,600, all of it to the campaign
June 30, 2025 — Jesse Pollak, a Coinbase vice president of engineering: $3,500, all of it to the campaign

Five months later, on December 1, 2025, Coinbase president Emilie Choi gave another $7,000, and $6,365 of it landed in the campaign account.

Zoom out and the pattern is bigger than those two weeks. People who work at Coinbase have given Hagerty's campaign $31,400. Ripple's CEO gave $6,600. Partners at Andreessen Horowitz — the venture capital firm that is one of crypto's biggest financial backers — gave $22,600, including Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz themselves. Coinbase's corporate PAC has chipped in another $7,000.

That's more than $67,000 from the industry whose federal rulebook he personally wrote.

The revolving door spins here too. A Washington Examiner investigation into crypto's lobbying push found that former staffers from a handful of key Senate offices had gone to work for crypto firms — reporting that "former staffers from the offices of key senators on the banking and agricultural committees — among them Sens. John Thune (R-SD), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Raphael Warnock (D-GA), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), and Cory Booker (D-NJ) — were also retained by crypto firms to plead their cases."

Who got protected, and who didn't

We've seen this exact shape before. Nebraska's Mike Flood wrote his state's crypto banking law, and the company that landed America's first digital asset bank charter under it planted itself in his hometown — its CEO one of his biggest donors. Different state, different chamber, same arrangement: write the rules for an industry, then collect from the industry you wrote them for.

And the rules keep getting friendlier. Since the law passed, federal regulators have been writing the fine print, and the American Prospect reported in June 2026 that the crypto industry got what it wanted — regulators fast-tracking preliminary trust bank charters for stablecoin issuers including Ripple, Circle, and Crypto.com — while President Trump's own crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, has an application of its own pending that two OCC staffers told NOTUS is all but guaranteed to be approved. The comptroller overseeing it explained the new posture plainly: "We don't have a zero risk tolerance anymore."

So the president's family business is in line for a charter under the framework, and the framework's author is a senator from Tennessee taking money from the industry it governs.

Meanwhile, nothing in Hagerty's law requires a stablecoin issuer to tell you plainly, at the moment you buy, that the thing in your hand isn't insured. It bars companies from claiming federal insurance — but that's not the same as making sure people understand they don't have it.

Tennesseans are not, by and large, crypto executives. They're people getting pitched a product that looks like a savings account and isn't one. The senator who decided how much protection they'd get is the same senator whose campaign the industry's CEOs funded within two weeks of his bill clearing the Senate.

He's not done

Hagerty is now pushing the next one. On August 4, 2026, on Fox Business, he pressed the Senate to move the CLARITY Act — a broader bill setting the rules for crypto markets. "We have to pass the CLARITY Act," he said. "I think we should put it through a vote on the floor of the United States Senate and find out where Democrats stand."

He's also on the ballot himself. Hagerty ran unopposed in Tennessee's Republican primary, and on August 6, 2026 Memphis environmental advocate Marquita Bradshaw won the Democratic nomination, setting up a rematch of the 2020 race he won by 27 points.

Before that vote, it's worth asking a simple question about the last one: when Bill Hagerty sat down to write the rules for a brand-new kind of money, whose interests was he protecting — the people who'd be holding it, or the people who'd be issuing it?

The law he wrote answers that. So does the calendar.