MAGA Report Cards — Texas

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

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

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

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

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

How the spending breaks down

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

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

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

Nearly three-quarters of the money is an attack

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the man writing the checks wanted

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

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

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

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

Why this matters where you live

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

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

What the filings show

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

Source

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

Brandon Herrera Compared Women's Weight to Whales, Elephants and Nuclear Bombs. He Wants the Seat a Congressman Quit During a Sexual Misconduct Investigation.

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:06:37 +0000

For years, Brandon Herrera made a running joke out of how much women weigh. He put it in his videos, on his podcast appearances, and on stage at a campaign rally.

Cold War nuclear bombs, he told his audience in 2023, weighed "approximately four times as much as the average Austin feminist." In a 2024 video he compared the weight of "angry blue-haired" feminists to killer whales and elephants. This summer he said that when "a blue hair on the news says that a semi-automatic AR-15 is an assault rifle, she is both fat and wrong."

Those are three of the many examples CNN published on September 9, 2026, after reviewing the videos, podcasts and social media posts of the gun YouTuber known online as "The AK Guy" — the man Republicans have nominated for an open congressional seat in South and West Texas.

Herrera's answer, given to CNN in a statement, is that they were jokes.

What he actually said

Herrera has more than 4 million subscribers on YouTube. The material CNN reviewed spans at least seven years, and the same bit comes back over and over.

At a March 2024 rally in San Antonio with former Rep. Matt Gaetz, Herrera told the crowd that the amount of fentanyl needed to kill everyone on the planet weighed about the same as "26 Austin feminists."
In a 2023 video he said a gun range dummy's empty head was "full of mush — much like the average Austin feminist."
In a video where he shot bottles of ranch dressing and rubbed it on his arm, he said it would "make me irresistible to the fat b*tches."
On a podcast he said "there's no ugly women in Norway" because "the Vikings didn't take the ugly ones," then said that is why women in Siberia "are built like f*cking refrigerators."
In a 2019 video he said he wore a wedding ring, despite not being married, as "thot repellant" — using a crude term for a promiscuous woman. In another he shouted "be gone, thot" at a picture of a cartoonishly sexualized young model inside a gun safe, adding that "she's probably got diseases I can't pronounce."
He told his audience he had named one of his guns after the adult film star Stormy Daniels, "because it's been through so much hell and abuse and we've run the shit out of it to just abuse it thoroughly." Months later he bragged that his team had buried the gun, blown it up, and been "an asshole" to it — still using her name.

He also went after women who work on gun violence. He mocked members of Moms Demand Action as not attractive enough, and used a sexual slur to describe the children of the group's founder, Shannon Watts. We wrote about that one when it resurfaced in July, along with the three Texas Republicans in Congress who walked away from a reporter rather than answer for it.

The seat he is running for

This is not a random open seat.

Texas's 23rd came open because Rep. Tony Gonzales resigned in April, in the middle of a House Ethics Committee investigation into whether he "engaged in sexual misconduct towards an individual employed in his congressional office." Gonzales had admitted on the radio to an affair with a woman who worked for him, after calling the rumors "completely untruthful" four months earlier. The staffer died in 2025. We laid out the whole sequence, including how long House leadership let it sit, in our piece on Mike Johnson's two standards.

So the district's last representative left over how he treated a woman who worked for him. The party's replacement built an audience partly on rating women's bodies. And the Democrat he faces in November, Katy Padilla Stout, is a woman — a former teacher and attorney.

The expert CNN asked

CNN showed its findings to Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who runs the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab at American University. The lab studies how hate and extremism spread, and has a research track on gendered violence.

She said comparing women to animals is a "way to put women in their place, to diminish their power, their authority, to belittle or degrade." She added: "If you're referred to as an animal, you're not actually even fully human, right?"

Pointing to her lab's research, she told CNN that spreading misogynistic statements can feed extremists who are willing to commit real violence.

"I think if we want a safer society overall, we should also be worried about candidates like this who help normalize things that we know are reliable predictors of political violence."

His response was to attack his opponent's client

Herrera did not apologize. He called the remarks jokes, and then went after Stout's legal work.

CNN reported that Stout represented a father last year who was trying to restore his parental rights after a domestic abuse allegation. Herrera's statement to CNN put it this way:

"It's disappointing that CNN would allow someone to allege that jokes about feminism lead to violence when Stout is fighting to return children to the parent convicted of abusing them."

Read that carefully. Herrera says "convicted." CNN described an allegation. And Stout's campaign told CNN she did not pick the client at all — she was appointed by the court to handle the appeal, and her "ethical obligation was to represent her client." Her campaign added that "there is simply no comparison to the career Katy has dedicated to serving children and families, and the career Brandon Herrera has made mocking them."

That is a court-appointed lawyer doing the job a judge assigned her. Herrera turned it into an accusation, and upgraded an allegation to a conviction while he was at it.

Shannon Watts, who has been on the receiving end of Herrera's posts for years, told CNN the online abuse she faces from both sides of the aisle is "worse than it's ever been."

"When I started Moms Demand Action, I had no idea I would receive threats of death and sexual violence. What I noticed right away was the attacks on me were much different than men who supported gun safety. It was obviously very gendered and misogynistic."

Republican leaders knew, and backed him anyway

Herrera's record was public well before CNN went looking.

Trump endorsed Herrera on Truth Social, writing that "Brandon is strongly supported by many Highly Respected MAGA Warriors in Texas" and promising voters that "HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!" Speaker Mike Johnson rallied with him in San Antonio this summer — after spending 2024 helping fund the campaign against him. We covered that reversal in August.

Even now, some Republicans will not go along. The Republican Jewish Coalition, which in 2024 announced a $400,000 ad buy for his primary opponent and called him "a goose-stepping extremist who pals around with online Nazis," told Politico it "has a longstanding policy of speaking out against those who traffic in Nazi ideology, and this is another case."

Herrera expects the videos to keep coming up, and argues voters will weigh other things more heavily. "For better or worse, my entire life is on the internet. So, I am an open book in that regard," he told the Los Angeles Times, arguing people will vote on guns and the border instead.

He may be wrong about that. Trump carried this district by 15 points in 2024, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee still put it on its target list last month and sent money to Stout — because of him.

What the job actually decides

The videos are why people are talking about this race. The votes are what would change lives in it.

Herrera campaigns on Trump's endorsement, and the last section of his issues page is headed "Standing with President Trump." Trump's agenda has already hit the 23rd District:

Trump's budget bill cut Medicaid. Counting those cuts and the pandemic-era Affordable Care Act subsidies that expired alongside them, the Joint Economic Committee's House minority puts more than 41,000 people in TX-23 on track to lose health coverage by 2034.
The same bill made the largest cut to food assistance in history. More than 31,000 households in TX-23 used SNAP to buy groceries in 2024.

What the record shows

CNN found years of videos, posts and podcasts in which the Republican nominee in Texas's 23rd District compared women's weight to nuclear bombs, killer whales and elephants, called a woman on the news "both fat and wrong," and used sexual slurs against a gun safety advocate and her children. He called it comedy and answered by accusing his opponent — a court-appointed lawyer — of returning children to an abuser, saying "convicted" where CNN reported an allegation. He is running for a seat that came open because the last congressman to hold it resigned during a sexual misconduct investigation, and Trump and Speaker Johnson are backing him.

Source

This post is based on CNN's September 9, 2026 review of Brandon Herrera's videos, social media and podcasts by Allison Gordon, with Morgan Leason contributing, and on the San Antonio Current's contemporaneous report, linked above. Photo of Brandon Herrera in Somerset, Texas, February 26, by Brenda Bazán/AP.

State of the State: Texas Is 40th Overall. Greg Abbott and Texan Republicans in Congress Aren't Helping.

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:59:28 +0000

Texas is big and Texas is rich. But on the things that decide whether a Texas family gets by — enough food on the table, safe care for a pregnant woman, a fair start for a kid — Texas keeps landing near the bottom.

Click for sources

Add up the 17 measures we track across all 50 states and Texas ranks 40th. That number describes where the state already is. It does not, by itself, prove any one politician put it there.

Greg Abbott has been governor since 2015, and many of the decisions behind those numbers are his rather than Washington's: whether Texas expands health coverage, who regulates the grid, where school money goes, what a doctor is allowed to do for a miscarrying patient.

Republicans also hold 24 of Texas's 37 filled U.S. House seats, both of its Senate seats and the attorney general's office. One House seat is empty, and that's a story too. Here is what all of them did on top of the numbers above, and what each has been busy with instead.

What Texas's Republicans in Congress voted to cut

Texas is already 49th of 50 states on food insecurity, from the USDA's own data — second-worst in the country at feeding people — and it already has the highest uninsured rate of any state, for children and adults alike. Its Republicans in Congress then voted for a budget bill that cut both health coverage and food assistance. Take them one at a time.

KFF's allocation of the Congressional Budget Office's estimates projects that Trump's budget bill will leave 480,000 more Texans without health insurance by 2034 — 1.4 million once you count the Affordable Care Act premium tax credits that expired at the end of 2025 and that the bill did not extend. Texas also stands to lose $27.9 billion in federal Medicaid funding over ten years.

That lands on a state where, in 2024, the Census Bureau's American Community Survey put 13.6% of Texas children and 21.6% of working-age Texas adults without any coverage at all — the highest rate in the country in both cases, against national rates of 6.0% and 11.3%. And the hole is not only Washington's doing. Texas, under Abbott, is one of the few states that never expanded Medicaid, which the Texas Tribune reports has contributed to that rate. Turning the expansion down was a decision made in Austin, and it is his.

Another $10 billion is stuck on top of that. The Trump administration is holding up Medicaid payments Texas hospitals were counting on, which the Texas Hospital Association counts at $27 million a day. Ken Paxton fought that exact case against the Biden administration, won it, and put out a news release calling it a "major nationwide legal victory." Against this administration, he has filed nothing.

On food: 1 in 4 Texas kids faces hunger, and about 3.47 million Texans — 11% of the state — get SNAP benefits every month. The same bill squeezed that program too.

Every Texas House Republican named below voted for it.

What 49th on women's health looks like

Texas ranks 49th of 50 states on women's health and reproductive care, from the Commonwealth Fund's state scorecard. Second-worst in the country. Here is part of why.

Texas has a near-total abortion ban, and Abbott signed it. On May 19, 2021 he signed the law that banned abortion after about six weeks and paid members of the public at least $10,000 to sue any doctor who performed one. "Our creator endowed us with the right to life," he said at the signing ceremony. The law took effect that September. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe, a criminal law followed, threatening doctors with up to 99 years in prison.

Doctors then started waiting. ProPublica's statewide analysis of hospitalizations for second-trimester pregnancy loss found that after the ban, the rate of sepsis in those cases jumped more than 50%.

Josseli Barnica's case is what that waiting looked like. She was 28, a mother, and 17 weeks pregnant when she was admitted to a Houston hospital on September 3, 2021, days after the law took effect, with a miscarriage her doctors recorded as "in progress." More than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica that her doctors should have emptied her uterus then to head off an infection. Instead her husband arrived from a construction site to hear what she said the medical team had told her: "They had to wait until there was no heartbeat. It would be a crime to give her an abortion."

She waited 40 hours. Three days after she delivered, she died of an infection — sepsis, her autopsy said, with "retained products of conception." The experts who reviewed her records called her death preventable, and called the case "horrific," "astounding" and "egregious."

Barnica never asked for an abortion. Neither did Nevaeh Crain, who was 18, or Porsha Ngumezi. Texas's own Medical Board has since disciplined three doctors over the care those last two received — one for discharging Crain while she had a 103-degree fever and had screened positive for sepsis. Each doctor was ordered to take eight hours of continuing education.

Even the Republican-led Legislature conceded something was wrong and passed a bill to clarify the ban's medical exceptions. The ban itself stands.

The data centers

The biggest new fight in Texas isn't in Washington. It's over giant warehouses full of computers that run artificial intelligence, and the electricity and water they drink.

Greg Abbott spent years bringing them here. In November 2025 he stood next to Google's CEO and called Texas "the epicenter of AI development." The grid operator now says companies have asked to pull 474 gigawatts off the Texas grid — more than five times the most electricity Texas has ever used at once — and about 90% of those requests are data centers. We laid out that record here.

Then, in August of an election year, Abbott announced a pause and an audit. Regulators set the delivery date for the report at December 10. Election Day in Texas is November 3. Texans vote 37 days before the state tells them what it found.

Texas's own Agriculture Commissioner, a Republican, called the pause "smoke and mirrors" and said Abbott is stalling so his donors' projects can be grandfathered in.

The public schools

More than nine in ten Texas kids sit in a public school. The state spent this year moving money the other way.

The private school voucher program is Abbott's. He campaigned on it, and on May 3, 2025 he signed the $1 billion bill creating it, telling the crowd he had promised school choice when he ran for reelection in 2022. Texas launched the program for 2026-27 with that $1 billion. In September 2026 the state's comptroller, Don Huffines, asked the Legislature to double the program's base funding to more than $2 billion. Nearly 110,000 students have been funded and more than 106,000 families are on the waitlist. Paying for the waitlist too, the comptroller's office said, would come to about $4 billion over two years.

Here is the part that decides who this is for. State data shows that 70% of the families who have joined the program or hold pending invitations were already in private school or home-schooling. This is not mostly money helping kids leave a failing public school. It is mostly money for families who had already left.

Meanwhile the public schools are cutting. The Legislature put nearly $8.5 billion into schools last year, earmarked for teacher pay, educator training and special education, and districts told a Capitol hearing in June that it did not stop the cuts. Austin ISD is closing a $181 million shortfall. El Paso's district is short nearly $53 million. Before last year's bill, Texas students had gone six years with no comprehensive funding increase at all.

And Texas is short of teachers. The state employs more educators on H-1B visas than any state in the country, and districts use those visas for jobs they have already tried and failed to fill locally — above all bilingual education, which sits on Texas's own official teacher shortage list, in the state with the largest share of students learning English in the country. Abbott says he wants "exactly zero", and he wants it to reach the teachers already standing in Texas classrooms. In the rooms Texas cannot staff, it would become illegal to keep the teacher who took the job.

Three of the Texans below — Keith Self, Randy Weber and Brandon Gill — went a step further and cosponsored a one-sentence bill to abolish the Department of Education outright.

Texans are still paying for the last grid failure

Before the data centers, there was Winter Storm Uri. 246 people died. Craig Goldman chaired the Texas House Energy Resources committee in the session that followed, and his committee advanced a bill that put $3.5 billion of the gas companies' storm costs onto customers' bills through April 2039. The weatherization rules passed after the storm have caught almost nothing, and a 2025 state audit found why: regulators issued two violations across 8,732 inspections, and never compared what companies actually did to the state's own best practices. The gas companies set their own standard, and passed.

Texans will be paying that off for another 13 years, while the grid takes on the biggest new load in its history.

The agency that let that happen is Abbott's too. He appoints the Public Utility Commission's board, which was expanded from three members to five after Uri, and the Tribune reported that he took over the search for the grid operator's chief executive — a process he has no formal role in — with one person involved saying he had "total veto power."

What it costs to live here

On September 4, 2026, in Lubbock, Abbott named the thing Texans tell pollsters they care about most and promised to fix it. "Now I want to make Texas number one for affordability," he said. He has been governor since January 2015. Here is what those eleven years did to three of the bills that arrive at a Texas house.

Property taxes. Abbott signed an $18 billion package in 2023 and called it the largest property tax cut in state history. By the comptroller's own count, statewide property tax levies were $51.2 billion in his first year in office and $89.4 billion in 2025. He is now running on cutting them in half by zeroing out school property taxes on homesteads, a promise that does nothing for the 39% of homesteads that already owe no school tax and nothing for the state's 4.1 million renters.

Homeowners insurance. "The average annual homeowners' insurance premium in Texas has risen 79 percent in six years," Abbott said on August 24, 2026, ordering the insurance commissioner he appointed to do something about it. In 2025 the Legislature killed both bills that would have addressed it: a roof-hardening grant program that passed the House, and a rate-approval bill that passed the Senate. Insurance was not among the seven emergency items Abbott named that February, and not among the eighteen reported on his summer special session call either.

The electric bill. The data centers above run on a sales-tax exemption the comptroller's office says will cost the state $3.2 billion over two years, and the grid operator's own $33 billion transmission expansion shifts long-term costs onto ratepayers. Abbott now says data centers "must operate in ways that reduce costs for residential electricity customers." He also wants to break up the San Antonio utility that says it has the cheapest residential rates in the state, on behalf of retail providers whose political action committees have given his campaign at least $230,000.

Three bills, one shape. The problem built for a decade while he held the office that could act on it, and the answer arrived in the campaign.

The seat that isn't being filled

On April 14, 2026, Republican Tony Gonzales resigned from Texas's 23rd District. He quit amid allegations that he had a sexual relationship with a staffer who later took her own life, an affair he had denied and then essentially admitted in a talk-show interview. Abbott has still not called a special election, and the seat is not on track to be filled until January — roughly 260 days empty. A Democrat resigned in California the same day. Voters there have already picked his replacement.

That is the empty seat: about 800,000 Texans with nobody voting for them.

The Republican nominee waiting for that seat is Brandon Herrera, a gun YouTuber who called a child a "c*m trophy" while attacking Shannon Watts, who founded Moms Demand Action after the Sandy Hook shooting. When reporters asked Texas Republicans about it, they walked away. He has also called Social Security "a joke" after his own campaign website promised to protect it.

The rules of the election itself

Texas ranks 46th of 50 on voter turnout. Its Republicans have spent the year working on the map and the polling places rather than the turnout.

In 2025 the Legislature redrew the congressional map mid-decade to target five Democratic-held seats. Two federal judges blocked it, finding "substantial evidence" that it was racially gerrymandered in a 160-page opinion. The Supreme Court cleared it for use in the 2026 midterms anyway, over the dissents of Justices Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson.

Underneath that, the same work is happening county by county. Galveston County held its March primary under one map and adopted a different one in June, telling a court the reason was to "increase partisan performance." Tarrant County's Republican majority voted to cut 92 Election Day polling places, taking the state's biggest swing county from 316 sites in 2022 to 224 this November.

The rolls themselves are moving too. More than 1.2 million Texans sit on the state's voter suspense list, over 6% of all registered voters, with the election weeks away. Abbott has said Texas caught 6,500 noncitizens on its voter rolls. His own office had confirmed 581.

The candidates up for reelection

Texas sends 24 Republicans to the U.S. House. The seventeen running for reelection in 2026 have a report card on this site. Here's something about each of them:

August Pfluger chairs the Republican Study Committee and wrote the blueprint for the next budget bill, saying the point of the process is that Democrats can't block it.
Beth Van Duyne called this "the golden age of DOGE." The Government Accountability Office then reported that DOGE couldn't show its work on 96% of its claimed grant savings.
Brandon Gill filed a bill to stop people from buying a hot meal with food stamps. The option he calls a loophole exists for SNAP recipients who are elderly, disabled or homeless.
Brian Babin's campaign paid the Federal Election Commission $26,700 after a donor pleaded guilty to funneling $37,000 in corporate money to it through his own employees.
Craig Goldman — the Uri bill above. His one law in Congress so far killed an efficiency rule the Energy Department said would save $1.3 billion.
Jake Ellzey announced a "historic investment" in rural health care. He voted twice for the law that made it necessary, which cuts $137 billion from rural Medicaid.
John Carter's last in-person town hall was in 2013. When 150 constituents held one for him, they brought a life-size cutout.
Keith Self calls the national debt "an existential threat to our Republic," voted for the $3.4 trillion bill, then introduced a bill to stop bills like it.
Lance Gooden is under House Ethics investigation. The committee won't say what it's about; Gooden says it's his spending. His first move was to call the investigators "dishonest unelected bureaucrats."
Michael Cloud wrote a bill that would put every federal agency on a countdown to abolition — including the ones that warn Texas about hurricanes.
Monica De La Cruz told donors on leaked audio that "it's not that people don't like me, it's that people don't know me yet." She has never held an in-person town hall.
Nathaniel Moran spoke against site-neutral Medicare payment, the one change that would lower what patients pay for the same service. The hospital lobby has given him $20,000.
Pat Fallon sits on the Oversight panel built to work hand in hand with DOGE and went on Fox Business to call it a chance to "fix our Republic".
Pete Sessions put it in writing that a $7 billion Ponzi schemer was "a man of great strength, character and financial stability".
Randy Weber has represented the Texas coast for 13 years. He called $5 million for the Ike Dike a win; the barrier carries a $35 to $57 billion price tag.
Roger Williams, a second-generation auto dealer, slipped an exemption for car dealers into a rental-car safety law at midnight. It got him an ethics investigation and was stripped out.
Ronny Jackson kept paying for a private Amarillo dining club with campaign money after the ethics office told him to stop, and changed what he called it.

And the party's Senate nominee is Ken Paxton, the sitting attorney general, whose own party's voters picked him over a record of indictments, an impeachment and abuse-of-office findings that we laid out in full.

Above them all on the ballot is Greg Abbott, who has been the Governor of Texas since 2015. He signed the six-week abortion ban that pays strangers $10,000 to sue a doctor, in the state that ranks 49th on women's health. He signed the $1 billion voucher bill, where 70% of the families taking the money had already left the public schools. He spent years recruiting the data centers, then flip-flopped when it became politically convenient. And he is running on affordability after property tax levies rose from $51.2 billion in his first year to $89.4 billion, and home insurance premiums rose 79%.

Compare Texas to Other States →

Greg Abbott Left Home Insurance Off His List of Seven Emergency Priorities. Eighteen Months Later He Says Premiums Are Up 79%.

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:11:21 +0000

On August 24, 2026, Greg Abbott sent a letter to the Texas Department of Insurance ordering it to bring down what Texans pay to insure their homes. He explained why in a single sentence.

"The average annual homeowners' insurance premium in Texas has risen 79 percent in six years," Abbott said. "High insurance costs hit Texas families hard."

That is his number, not ours. Six years is 2020 through 2026. Abbott has been governor of Texas for every month of it, and for five years before that.

What Texans are actually paying

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas ran the comparison in April 2026. The median Texas homeowner paid 60% more for home insurance in 2024 than in 2019. Nationally, the increase over those same years was 30%. Texas homeowners absorbed twice the national rate of increase.

The Dallas Fed pointed at three causes, none of which are anybody's fault: construction costs after the pandemic, more severe weather, and the rising price insurers pay to insure themselves. Billion-dollar disasters in Texas grew 250% between 2017 and 2024.

So nobody is claiming a governor can stop hurricanes. The question is what the state did with the years in between, and there is a clear record of that, because in 2025 Texas lawmakers tried twice.

Both fixes died in 2025

Heading into the 2025 session, lawmakers said home insurance would be a priority. Two serious bills came out of it, one from each chamber, both authored by Republicans.

The roof bill. State Representative Tom Oliverson, a Cypress Republican, wrote House Bill 1576 to create a state grant program helping homeowners rebuild roofs to a national standard called Fortified, the kind that survives a storm instead of becoming a claim. The House passed it on April 30, 2025, by a tally Texas Policy Research recorded as 120-21. It went to the Senate Business and Commerce Committee the next day and never got a hearing. Oliverson asked budget writers for $500 million to start the program. They gave him nothing.

The insurance industry was not the obstacle. At the House hearing on Oliverson's bill, insurers overwhelmingly supported creating the program.

The rate bill. State Senator Charles Schwertner, a Georgetown Republican, wrote Senate Bill 1643 to require insurers to get approval before raising rates more than 10%. The bill's own subject line names what Texas does not currently require: prior approval of a rate increase. Schwertner also filed a bill to put the insurance department under a three-member commission that would include a consumer advocate, saying it would "return consumers to the forefront of their mission."

Both of Schwertner's bills passed the Senate over strong industry opposition. Both stalled in a House committee. His rate bill was left pending on May 20, 2025 and died there. The chairman of the House insurance committee, Representative Jay Dean, did not respond to the Houston Chronicle's interview request about it.

Oliverson, a Republican describing his own party's session, put it plainly: "I would argue that nothing was done to lower property and casualty rates for the average homeowner."

He went further. "I would think that people back home may look back on it and say that one of the major missed opportunities of this session is that we failed to act," he said. "And as a result, people got zero relief for the rising cost of insurance."

Insurance was not one of Abbott's seven emergencies

A Texas governor gets a specific power at the start of every session. He names emergency items, and lawmakers can pass those in the first sixty days, before anything else moves. It is the strongest signal a governor sends about what he actually wants done.

On February 2, 2025, Abbott named seven: property tax relief, education savings accounts, teacher pay, water infrastructure, bail reform, career training and a state cyber command.

Home insurance was not on the list. By then Texas premiums had already risen sharply, and the state was still paying for Hurricane Beryl, which had torn through Houston the previous July.

The session ended in June with both big bills dead. Lawmakers did pass smaller consumer changes, barring insurers from raising a widow's rates after a spouse's death and making them refresh a credit report used in underwriting. Neither touches what a rate can be. Abbott then called lawmakers back that summer, which is a power only he holds, and only he sets the agenda for. His July 9 call carried 18 items: flood warning systems, redistricting the state's congressional map in the middle of the decade, hemp THC regulation, a bathroom bill, abortion pill restrictions, property tax relief. Not one of the eighteen was about insurance. Lawmakers sat through two special sessions that summer on the agendas he set.

Texas is the only Gulf Coast state that doesn't do this

The Fortified idea Oliverson was pushing is not experimental, and Texas is the outlier for not having it. Every other Gulf Coast state offers homeowners some combination of grants and required insurance discounts for building to withstand storms. Texas offers neither, despite leading the country in losses from catastrophic weather.

Alabama pairs grants for stronger roofs with a legal requirement that insurers discount the policies on them. Experts credit that program with stabilizing Alabama's home insurance market.

Now it is an election year

Abbott's August 24 letter went to a commissioner he chose. Amanda Crawford was appointed Texas insurance commissioner by Abbott in January 2026; the governor names whoever runs that department. Nothing in the five directives he issued required a legislative session, a committee chairman or a vote. He asked the department to count Fortified roofs in rate calculations, stop insurers from denying policies over a home's age, ban the practice his own order calls "price optimization," which it defines as insurers using personal data unrelated to insured risk to set prices, start a fraud task force, and study inflated claims costs.

Eleven days later, on September 4 in Lubbock, he built it into a campaign platform. Alongside a plan to cut property taxes in half, Abbott pitched a fortified roof program and a good-driver discount as his answer to insurance costs.

The roof program is Oliverson's, the one the Senate killed. Abbott's version puts $400 million behind it and offers up to $10,000 per homeowner. The savings his own proposal claims are up to 8% on an annual premium.

Eight percent, against 79%.

The timing keeps repeating

This is the fourth time we have watched Abbott run the same sequence.

He spent years selling Texas to data centers, then announced a pause and an audit in August of an election year, with the findings due 37 days after Texans vote. He is running on cutting property taxes in half after eleven years in which statewide property tax levies rose from $51.2 billion to $89.4 billion. And he wants to break up the San Antonio utility with the cheapest residential rates in Texas, on behalf of retail providers whose PACs have given his campaign at least $230,000.

Each one arrives the same way. A problem builds for years while he holds the office that could act on it, and the action shows up in the campaign.

What the record shows

Greg Abbott says the average Texas homeowner's insurance premium has risen 79% in six years, all six of them on his watch. In 2025 his own party's legislators passed a roof-hardening bill through the House 120-21 and a rate-approval bill through the Senate, and both died in committee in the other chamber. Abbott named seven emergency items that February and eighteen special session items that July, and homeowners insurance was on neither list. In August of an election year he ordered the commissioner he appointed to act, and in September he began campaigning on a grant program his own Legislature had already killed, one his proposal says would save homeowners up to 8%.

Source

Mateo Rosiles, USA TODAY NETWORK, Texas Gov. Abbott pitches 50% property tax cut in affordability plan, September 8, 2026, and the Houston Chronicle's reporting on the 2025 session, Texas lawmakers push off big home insurance relief: 'Nothing was done'. Photo: Raquel Natalicchio / Houston Chronicle, a home in Meadowcreek Village after Hurricane Beryl, July 16, 2024.

Greg Abbott Signed the 'Largest Property Tax Cut in Texas History.' Texans' Property Tax Bills Went From $51 Billion to $89 Billion.

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:00:04 +0000

On September 4, 2026, in Lubbock, Greg Abbott stood in front of cameras and made Texans a promise about the thing they say they care about most: what it costs to live here.

"Texas ranks number one in the United States for the most jobs," he said. "We rank number one as the best economy in the United States. Now I want to make Texas number one for affordability."

The centerpiece is property taxes. Abbott says he will cut them by half. He would do it by requiring two-thirds voter approval before any local tax increase, letting voters roll back taxes, capping how fast a property's appraised value can grow at 3% a year, and above all by wiping out school district property taxes for homeowners entirely.

"What I say is, the state of Texas should assume that full responsibility of funding public education, not your homestead," Abbott said. "Instead of you paying whatever you pay right now for your homestead for public schools, that amount should be zero going forward, ensuring that your property taxes will be cut by more than half."

It is a big promise. He has made a version of it before.

He already signed the "largest property tax cut in Texas history"

On August 9, 2023, Abbott signed an $18 billion package and said this: "Today, I am signing a law that will ensure more than $18 billion in property tax cuts—the largest property tax cut in Texas history."

His office put a number on what it would do for you. Senate Bill 2, the release said, would "save the average Texas homestead owner over $1,200" for tax year 2023, and over $1,400 for homestead owners over 65 or with a disability.

His campaign is still running on it. The affordability page on his own website leads with the claim that he "delivered the largest property tax cut in Texas history — $18 billion," alongside raising the school homestead exemption from $100,000 to $140,000.

So the question is not whether Abbott has tried this. It is what happened after he did.

What actually happened to the bills

The Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts tracks how much every taxing unit in the state collects. Here is what Texans were billed, in total:

Year	Statewide property tax levy
2015, Abbott's first year in office	$51.2 billion
2019	$66.5 billion
2023, the year of the "largest cut in history"	$81.4 billion
2025	$89.4 billion

Those are the comptroller's own figures, compiled by Texas Policy Research, a group that describes its work as "independent analysis based on liberty principles" and lists "Eliminate Property Taxes" as one of the ten planks in its platform. This is not a critique from the left.

Texas has grown, and prices have risen, and much of that increase is simply more people in more houses. But not all of it. The same analysis ran the comparison: "If levies had simply tracked population growth and inflation, 2025 collections would be roughly $58 billion. Instead they are $89.4 billion." Over the longer run, it found levies up more than 378% since 1998 against population and inflation growth of about 210%.

Abbott does not set local tax rates, and he will tell you so. That is the point. He has spent eleven years promising a cut the state cannot actually deliver, because the bill that lands in your mailbox is set by school districts, cities, counties and special districts, and it kept going up anyway.

Nearly 4 in 10 homesteads already pay zero

The headline promise is that your school property tax goes to zero. For a lot of Texans, it already is.

In the first week of September 2026, the office of state Senator Paul Bettencourt, the Houston Republican who chairs the Senate Local Government Committee, presented that committee with data his staff had spent about four months pulling from all 254 Texas counties. It found that 39% of Texas homesteads now owe no school district property tax at all. Among homeowners 65 and older or with disabilities, it is roughly 61%.

That is what the $140,000 homestead exemption already did. And it is why the next step buys less than it sounds like it does. Once a home's value is fully covered by the exemption, raising the exemption again does nothing for that household. That was the concern raised at the hearing by state Senator Molly Cook and by nonprofit representatives: diminishing returns for the homes already exempt, and nothing at all for renters, who get no homestead exemption in the first place.

Texas has 4.1 million renters. The plan skips every one of them.

Abbott's proposal covers homesteads. A homestead exemption is something you can only claim on a house you own.

Texas has 4.1 million renters, and more than half of them are now cost-burdened, meaning rent eats more than 30% of their income. Before the pandemic that share was about 48%. Median rent in Texas grew 9.1% after inflation between the five-year periods ending in 2019 and 2024. Renters are the Texans losing the affordability race fastest, and they are outside this plan.

They would also keep paying. The Texas Tribune noted that under Abbott's proposal, owners of apartments, stores, factories and warehouses would still owe school property taxes. Apartment buildings are business property. The tax on them does not disappear. It stays on the building the renter lives in.

Where the $17.5 billion comes from

If homeowners stop paying for schools, someone else starts.

The Legislative Budget Board put the cost of replacing all school property taxes at $39.5 billion in tax year 2023. Abbott is not proposing that. He is proposing to zero out the share paid by single-family homeowners, which the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association put at about $17.5 billion in the same year. Every Texan, running the numbers on the current version of the plan, estimates a hole of roughly $20 billion a year, or $40 billion every two-year budget cycle.

Abbott says the money is already there. He has said there is no reason to raise the sales tax, and that Texas has the money to cut property taxes right now.

Every Texan cites the Texas Taxpayers and Research Association's calculation of what the sales tax route would actually take: raising it from 8.25% to 13.63%. That is a tax that falls hardest on people with the least, which is the same group that doesn't own the homestead being exempted.

The experts who study this for a living are not persuaded that the money is sitting there. Adam Langley, associate director of tax policy at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, called the package "basically a collection of the worst types of policies meant to constrain property taxes." Shannon Halbrook, a fiscal policy expert at Every Texan, said the proposal may be in Abbott's platform "for the purpose of messaging, but is not a realistic proposal."

The appraisal cap is the part that lasts

The other half of the plan gets less attention and would reshape more. Abbott wants to drop the annual cap on how much a property's taxable value can rise from 10% to 3%, extend it to every kind of property, and reappraise only once every five years.

Tax policy experts told the Texas Tribune the idea strongly resembles California's Proposition 13, the 1970s ballot initiative that put tight limits on property value growth and tax rates there. Manish Bhatt, senior tax policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, a conservative group, put it plainly: "Bringing California-style property tax reform to Texas is just not sound policy." Langley described what it produced there. "It's very common to see identical, side-by-side homes with one person paying taxes that are more than five times higher than their neighbors."

The reason is simple. A cap on value growth rewards whoever has owned longest and punishes whoever bought most recently, because the new buyer resets to market value while the neighbor stays frozen. Neva Butkus, a senior analyst at the left-leaning Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, called it "a pretty anti-family policy," one that hinders young families trying to buy a first home.

"The state should assume full responsibility of funding public education"

That is the sentence to hold onto, because Abbott has been governor for eleven years and Texas has not done it.

Texas has had a chance. The state's teachers union kept a running tally of what he did with it: sitting on a record $33 billion surplus, Abbott "was holding public schools hostage to his voucher priority", and when the vouchers failed the extra school funding died with them. At that point the basic allotment, the per-student money a district can actually spend on staff, buses and keeping the lights on, sat at $6,160 and had not been raised since 2019.

He got the vouchers. On May 3, 2025 he signed the $1 billion law creating the program, telling the crowd he had promised school choice when he ran for reelection in 2022. In September 2026 the state comptroller asked the Legislature to more than double it to over $2 billion, with nearly 110,000 students funded and more than 106,000 families waitlisted. Seventy percent of the families who joined or hold pending invitations were already in private school or home schooling.

Meanwhile the public schools are still cutting. The Legislature put nearly $8.5 billion into schools last year, earmarked for teacher pay, training and special education — it raised the basic allotment by $55 a student — and districts told a Capitol hearing in June that it did not stop the cuts. Austin ISD is closing a $181 million shortfall. El Paso's district is short nearly $53 million. And the classrooms Texas cannot staff are the ones Abbott wants to make harder to staff: Texas schools employ more teachers on work visas than any state in the country, and he says he wants "exactly zero".

A governor asking to be trusted with the entire cost of educating Texas's public school children is asking on a record of withholding their funding to win a different fight.

He is taking credit on data centers too

The property tax promise was not the only one Abbott made in Lubbock. He also took credit for protecting Texans from the electricity costs of data centers, saying he had put in place the most comprehensive data center rules and guardrails of any governor in the country.

Texas Democratic Party spokesman Jacob Long answered that one directly: "You don't get to give data centers some of the largest tax breaks in the nation and vow to turn Texas into an AI epicenter, then shrug your shoulders and play dumb once Texas communities start asking legitimate questions."

We have written up that record three times. Abbott spent years selling Texas to the data centers before asking for credit for slowing them down. The audit he ordered to answer Texans' questions about them reports 37 days after Texans vote. And Texas's own Republican agriculture commissioner said the pause is stalling so Abbott's donors can get grandfathered in.

What the record shows

Greg Abbott has been governor of Texas since January 2015. In that first year Texans were billed $51.2 billion in property taxes. In 2025 they were billed $89.4 billion, about $31 billion more than population growth and inflation would explain, two years after he signed what he called the largest property tax cut in state history. He is now running on cutting property taxes in half by ending school property taxes on homesteads, a change that does nothing for the 39% of homesteads that already owe no school tax and nothing for the 4.1 million Texans who rent, and that leaves the state owing schools roughly $20 billion a year, which he says is already sitting in the budget and which the analysts who have run the numbers say is not.

Source

Mateo Rosiles, USA TODAY NETWORK, Texas Gov. Abbott pitches 50% property tax cut in affordability plan, September 8, 2026. Photo: USA Today Network.

Republican Billionaires Didn't Want to Touch Ken Paxton. Trump and Elon Musk Are Trying to Buy Him the Seat Anyway.

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:15:22 +0000

On Saturday, September 5, 2026, a filing with the Federal Election Commission showed that President Donald Trump's super PAC, MAGA Inc., had bought $10 million of advertising in the Texas Senate race.

Half of it is positive ads for Ken Paxton. The other half is negative ads about his Democratic opponent, state Representative James Talarico. Reuters reported the split the same day: $5 million to praise Paxton, $5 million to attack the other guy.

It is the first money MAGA Inc. has spent on the fall campaign anywhere in the country. Trump's operation looked at every competitive Senate race in America and decided the first check should go to Texas.

That is not a compliment to Paxton. It is a rescue.

His own campaign has barely spent anything on ads

Here is the number that explains why the cavalry showed up.

Talarico's campaign has spent $40.1 million on general-election advertising, according to the tracking firm AdImpact. Paxton's campaign has spent about $264,000, most of it on digital platforms, the Texas Tribune reported.

The fundraising gap is just as wide. In the second quarter of 2026, Talarico raised more than $30 million. Paxton raised more than $9 million.

So when Texas Republicans say the state is at risk, this is what they mean. Their nominee cannot pay for his own campaign, and outside money has to do it for him.

We already knew why the money wasn't coming

Back in July we wrote about Ken Paxton cold-calling wealthy Republicans and getting turned down. The Wall Street Journal reported that the day after Paxton beat Senator John Cornyn in the May 26 runoff, his campaign called billionaire Bob Rowling — a man who had given more than $750,000 to groups backing Cornyn — and Rowling initially said no. He had been turned off by the reporting on Paxton's personal conduct.

That was the story of the summer. Some of the party's biggest donors knew the record and did not want their names on it. And the record is long: three felony counts including securities fraud that he dragged out for nearly nine years before settling, a bribery complaint to the FBI from eight of his own senior deputies, and an impeachment by the Texas House, 121 to 23.

Nothing about that record changed between July and September. What changed is who is paying.

Musk is in too

Elon Musk's America PAC has now spent $1.4 million against Talarico on digital media and printing, the Tribune reported. Musk lives in Texas. He reportedly authorized his PAC last November to spend more than $100 million this cycle, and gave more than a quarter-billion dollars in 2024 to elect Trump and other Republicans.

Paxton was already being carried by outside groups before either man arrived. Lone Star Liberty PAC, the main pro-Paxton super PAC, has spent $18.9 million. A dark-money group called Preserve Texas Inc. is in. So is an outside group funded by West Texas billionaire Tim Dunn.

As of the day of the buy, before any MAGA Inc. ad had run, Republicans had spent $24.3 million on advertising in this race — and almost none of it was Paxton's.

What that money buys

The MAGA Inc. ads are about taxes. "Talarico? Higher taxes," one says. "Paxton? Lower taxes. A clear choice."

Trump told reporters on Friday, September 4, that he has close to $1 billion under his control across various PACs and nonprofits, and expects to spend $400 million to $500 million on the midterms. MAGA Inc. alone had more than $400 million on hand at last count.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, whose own aligned super PAC has put nothing into Texas in the general election, went on Fox in the days before the buy and asked the president to step in.

"All of our allies out there, including the president and his team and their resources, need to be brought to bear on Texas, because it's not one that we can lose if we're going to hang on to a Republican majority. We flat have to win there."

Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana was blunter on Fox the weekend before that. Senate Republicans, he said, "don't have the money budgeted for Texas" — and he was hoping Trump would spend "$100 or $200 million" there.

That is the party talking about a nominee its own leaders will not fund out of their own committee.

The part Texans should hold onto

A senator who owes his seat to two men owes those two men. Paxton's campaign is not paying for the ads that will elect him. Trump's super PAC is, and Musk's is, and a handful of billionaires' groups are.

Texans are already finding out what a Paxton attorney general's office does when the White House costs them money. Trump is holding back $10 billion from Texas hospitals, the same fight Paxton once sued Joe Biden over and won, in a case his own office announced as a "major nationwide legal victory," and Paxton has not filed anything. Texas hospitals say they are losing $27 million a day.

He was silent then, before he owed Trump $10 million.

What the filings show

Trump's MAGA Inc. put $10 million into Ken Paxton's Senate race in an FEC filing dated September 5, 2026, and Elon Musk's America PAC has spent $1.4 million more against Paxton's opponent. Paxton's own campaign has spent about $264,000 on advertising, against his opponent's $40.1 million. Two months ago Republican mega-donors were refusing his phone calls over his scandals; those scandals have not changed, only the people willing to pay for him.

Source

Trump's MAGA Inc gives $10 million to Paxton's Senate campaign ahead of midterms, Reuters, September 5, 2026, and Trump's PAC spending $10 million for Paxton in Texas, The Texas Tribune. Photo: Johnathan Johnson for The Texas Tribune.

Troy Downing Wrote a Bill to Cut Off Every HUD Housing Grant to Cities That Limit ICE Cooperation. Nineteen Republicans We Cover Signed On.

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 05:55:09 +0000

On September 2, 2026, Troy Downing of Montana introduced a bill that would strip every dollar of federal housing grant money from any city, county or state that limits how much its police help federal immigration agents.

Not immigration money. Housing money.

H.R. 10222, the No HUD Funding for Sanctuary Cities Act, says a "sanctuary jurisdiction" is "ineligible for any grant funds distributed by the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for use in such jurisdiction."

Any grant. All of them.

What that money actually pays for

The Department of Housing and Urban Development does not hand out one grant. It hands out many, and they are the backbone of how communities keep people off the street.

In Montana, the state's homelessness grant is worth about $7.2 million. Montana Free Press has described what it covers: "permanent supportive housing, rapid rehousing rental assistance, supportive services, transitional housing, youth homelessness programs and the state's database that housing providers use to place homeless people into housing programs and connect them to other resources."

That is the money Downing's bill would switch off — not for the people who wrote a city resolution, but for whoever is currently sleeping in a shelter it pays for.

How wide the net is

Read the definition carefully. The trigger is refusal. A place loses its housing money for what it declines to do, not for anything it does. Downing's bill covers any "State or political subdivision of a State" that has a law, an ordinance, a policy or even a "practice" telling its officials not to:

share information about someone's citizenship or immigration status with a federal, state or local agency, or
hold someone in jail past their release date when Homeland Security asks, or tell federal agents when that person is let go.

Decline either one and the entire jurisdiction is a sanctuary jurisdiction. The word "State" is in there. Under this bill an entire state can be declared a sanctuary jurisdiction and lose every HUD grant inside its borders. And the decision doesn't go to a court — HUD would consult with the Department of Homeland Security to decide who qualifies.

The Montana communities in the crosshairs

Downing has said what he thinks:

"If a sanctuary city is not complying with federal law, we should not allocate American taxpayers' hard-earned money to those areas."

He posted a sharper version on social media: "If a city refuses to cooperate with federal immigration law, it should not receive a dime in HUD funding."

Montana Free Press asked him a specific question — what would this bill have done to Helena? Helena passed a noncooperation resolution in January 2026, then rescinded it after Attorney General Austin Knudsen threatened to sue. Bozeman police say their job is public safety, not immigration enforcement. Missoula police don't ask about immigration status.

Downing did not respond.

That is the whole problem with the bill in one exchange. He will say the principle. He will not say which Montana towns lose their housing money under it, or how much.

Nineteen Republicans on this site signed it

Downing didn't do this alone. Nineteen of the Republicans we track cosponsored the bill within two days of introduction:

Warren Davidson (Ohio) · Pete Sessions (Texas) · Scott Fitzgerald (Wisconsin) · Rich McCormick (Georgia)
Scott Perry (Pennsylvania) · Michael Cloud (Texas) · Barry Moore (Alabama) · Harriet Hageman (Wyoming)
Ben Cline (Virginia) · Randy Weber (Texas) · Josh Brecheen (Oklahoma) · Sheri Biggs (South Carolina)
Andy Harris (Maryland) · Brian Babin (Texas) · Michael Rulli (Ohio) · Keith Self (Texas)
Tim Moore (North Carolina) · Andy Barr (Kentucky) · Pete Stauber (Minnesota)

Barry Loudermilk and Buddy Carter, both of Georgia, also signed; we don't have pages for them.

All but two of those names are printed in the bill's own text as introduced on September 2. Andy Barr and Pete Stauber added theirs the next day. Twenty-one Republicans in total. Not one Democrat.

The part nobody is saying out loud

There is a straightforward argument for making cities cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. Six in 10 Montanans support local police working with ICE, according to Montana Free Press polling. Downing could make that argument on its merits and put it to a vote.

This bill doesn't do that. It takes housing assistance hostage.

The person who loses is not the city council member who voted for the resolution. It's the family in rapid rehousing, the teenager in a youth homelessness program, the person in permanent supportive housing who would otherwise be outside. None of them had a vote on the resolution. All of them are the leverage.

What the bill does

Troy Downing's bill would make any city, county or state that limits police cooperation with immigration agents ineligible for every housing grant the federal government gives out — homeless shelter money, rapid rehousing, youth homelessness programs and the rest. In Montana the homelessness grant alone is about $7.2 million. Nineteen Republicans we cover cosponsored it within two days, along with two more we do not track. Downing declined to say which Montana communities it would hit.

Sources

Tom Lutey, Downing proposes HUD cuts for cities noncompliant with ICE, Montana Free Press (September 4, 2026).
H.R. 10222, the No HUD Funding for Sanctuary Cities Act — full text and cosponsors, 119th Congress.
Katie Fairbanks, Montana could lose millions for low-income housing under new federal policy, Montana Free Press (November 26, 2025).

Twelve Republican Attorneys General Fought for a Rule That Would Let the Post Office Refuse to Deliver Their Own Voters' Ballots. Eleven Filed Nothing Saying Their States Could Comply.

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 07:29:12 +0000

There is a rule on the books that would let the U.S. Postal Service stop delivering your ballot.

It works like this. Before a state can mail out ballots, it has to send the design of its ballot envelopes to the Postal Service for approval, with a unique barcode on each one. It also has to upload the name and address of every single voter who asked for a mail ballot into a federal computer system. If the state doesn't get the approval, or doesn't upload the list, mail carriers won't deliver its ballots.

On Friday, September 4, 2026 — 60 days before the midterms — a federal judge blocked that rule from taking effect this fall.

Twelve Republican attorneys general were in that courtroom arguing the other way.

What the judge found

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Massachusetts issued a 49-page preliminary injunction. She ruled the Postal Service had no power to write the rule in the first place:

"Unauthorized by the Elections Clause, the Final Rule clashes with Congress's statutory scheme, and is unconstitutional where it intrudes not only on Congress's Elections Clause powers but also that power left to the States."

Then she weighed the harm on each side. On one side, she wrote, "immediate implementation of the Final Rule issued less than seventy days before the November 2026 election threatens disenfranchisement of millions of United States citizens who seek to vote by mail." On the other side, she found, "the record includes no evidence relating to fraudulent mail voting to support the rushed implementation of the Final Rule."

That is the whole case in two clauses. Millions of people could lose their ballots. Nobody put any evidence of the fraud in front of her.

She was blunt about what the rule would do to real people: "any minor malfunction will result in the denial of mail ballots," which made disenfranchisement for the plaintiffs' members "practically inevitable."

Twelve Republican states asked to be the test case

Back on April 21, 2026, Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway announced that she was leading a coalition of 12 states into the case to defend President Trump's March executive order. Her press release names them: "Attorneys General from the following states joined the Missouri-led filing: Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Texas."

"We thank President Trump for issuing a vital, protective executive order," Hanaway said. The coalition told the courts the order simply gave states "optional resources."

It stopped being optional. By last week the Postal Service had turned it into a binding rule, and at Thursday's hearing the twelve states' lawyer, Missouri Solicitor General Louis J. Capozzi III, made a specific request: if the judge was going to block the rule, she should at least not block it in their states. Letting states like Texas and Missouri go ahead, he argued, would show how the system works in the real world.

Talwani did not take that well.

"So, we're going to do a test run on this election?"

"In some states," Capozzi answered.

"We're not talking about an intellectual puzzle game. We're talking about people's right to vote."

She pressed him on what his own states would actually get out of it. According to CBS News, she asked: "How does USPS holding up the ballots help you? You want the voters in your state to be disenfranchised?"

She refused the request. Had she granted it, the Postal Service could have refused to deliver ballots in those twelve states if they fell short of the new requirements.

Eleven of them wouldn't put it in writing

Here is the part that gives the game away.

Twelve states went to court to say this rule is workable. Between them, they filed one piece of sworn evidence saying so — a single page from the Missouri Secretary of State.

Davin Rosborough, the ACLU lawyer for the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, laid it out after the hearing:

"The only evidence that the states who intervened on the defendant's side put in [the record] was a single one-page declaration from the Missouri Secretary of State saying, in vague terms, 'I think we can comply.' Alabama, Texas, none of the other states put in anything…"

"I think the failure to put anything in writing — and under penalty of perjury — speaks volumes," he added.

A court declaration is signed under penalty of perjury. Eleven attorneys general were willing to argue in court that their states could handle this. Not one of them was willing to swear to it.

Texas argued for it. Texas election officials swore against it.

Texas is one of the twelve. Its attorney general is Ken Paxton, who is also running for the U.S. Senate this year.

While his office was on the side defending the rule, local election officials from Texas's own Travis and Harris counties — home to Austin and Houston — filed sworn declarations telling the judge the rule would result in disenfranchised voters. Talwani pointed that out from the bench.

This is the same attorney general who has spent years telling Texans that people who shouldn't be voting are voting. He spent more than a year hunting for noncitizens on the rolls, and NBC News found the whole effort produced three prosecutions statewide — only one of them from the list of 53 names his office was handed. At least five people on that list of 53 had already been listed as American citizens in earlier court records. In August he also won back a Texas mail-ballot ID rule that got the application or ballot of roughly one in seven mail voters thrown out in the 2022 primary, and called it a "major win."

So Texas's top lawyer fought in federal court for a rule his own counties' election administrators had sworn would cost voters their ballots — and filed nothing under oath saying his state could run it.

The fraud isn't there

The Justice Department and the Postal Service say the rule standardizes election mail and stops noncitizens from voting. The judge looked at what they actually submitted and found no evidence of mail voting fraud in the record. CBS News reports flatly that the administration "has not put forth evidence of widespread voter fraud."

President Trump has voted by mail in Florida this year.

What happens next

The Justice Department appealed to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals the same day the injunction came down, and this is widely expected to reach the Supreme Court again. It already went there once: on August 24 the justices lifted an earlier block on procedural grounds, saying the states had sued before the rule was final. The Postal Service had issued that final rule three days earlier, on August 21 — which Talwani found violated her earlier order, though she declined to hold anyone in contempt given the Supreme Court's ruling.

Her new order carries teeth. It requires the government's lawyers to give written notice to Postal Service officials and to tell them they will be held in contempt if they violate it.

Meanwhile, a federal official inside the Postal Service has told Congress the ballot system the agency built to run all this was assembled so badly it could "derail the midterm elections". At Thursday's hearing, the government's declaration about the system's readiness didn't address that warning at all. "We've seen no denial from the Postal Service that the whistleblower said anything that was inaccurate," said David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research.

Even Republican election administrators want no part of it. "Election officials across the country from both parties are holding our breath today," said Utah Lt. Gov. Deirdre Henderson, a Republican and her state's chief election officer. "It's hard to describe the level of chaos, confusion, and uncertainty we experienced during the 36 hours the rule was briefly in effect last week."

What the record shows

Twelve Republican attorneys general, including Texas's Ken Paxton, intervened in federal court to defend a rule that would let the Postal Service refuse to deliver mail ballots in states that don't comply — and asked the judge to let it run in their own states as a test 60 days before an election. Eleven of the twelve filed no sworn statement that their state could comply. The judge found the record contained no evidence of mail voting fraud, and found that putting the rule into effect now would disenfranchise millions of Americans.

Source

Jacob Knutson and Jim Saksa, "In major win for voters, judge blocks Trump's mail voting restrictions for midterms," Democracy Docket, September 4, 2026. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images.

Ken Paxton Sued Biden Over Exactly This and Called It a 'Major Nationwide Legal Victory.' Trump Is Now Holding Back $10 Billion From Texas Hospitals and Paxton Has Said Nothing.

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 06:57:18 +0000

Texas hospitals are losing $27 million a day, the Texas Hospital Association says.

The Trump administration is holding up $10 billion in Medicaid payments the state's hospitals were counting on. The money comes from a federal program that tops up what hospitals are paid for treating Medicaid patients, because the base rate does not cover what the care costs.

Three years ago, the Biden administration threatened to withhold the same money over the same legal objection. Ken Paxton took that fight to federal court and won.

Last year he put out a news release calling it a "major nationwide legal victory."

"This is not only a win for the integrity of Texas health care, but it's also a defeat of Joe Biden's unlawful overreach. This rule is just one example of the Biden administration's misuse of CMS, which was employed to target conservative states."

This week, with the identical dispute and a Republican in the White House, the Texas Tribune reported that Paxton has not filed a lawsuit, has not said whether he intends to, and has not commented at all. Neither has his campaign.

What the fight is actually about

Texas hospitals pay about $4.2 billion a year in local taxes, which the state uses as its share of the program. Since 2013, state law has also let hospitals make informal agreements with one another, so a hospital hit harder by the Medicaid shortfall can be helped out by one in better shape.

Federal regulators say a tax has to be broad-based and applied uniformly. Their objection, both times, is that those agreements effectively shield some hospitals from the tax.

Texas has argued that the agreements are private contracts and the federal government has no business policing them. That argument won in federal court last September, in a case Texas itself had brought against CMS in 2023. Here is how his office described the win in last year's news release:

"These agreements were permitted by the Legislature in 2013 and are allowed by federal law... Biden's CMS attempted to force Texas and other states to police purely private contracts, imposing unlawful federal overreach that could have led to a massive cut in critical Medicaid funding."

Every word of that applies to what the Trump administration is doing now. This time the demand goes further — regulators appear to want Texas to rewrite its tax structure entirely, which state officials say is unnecessary.

Paxton has not answered whether he will sue.

Even Greg Abbott is fighting this one

Governor Greg Abbott, who is not known for crossing Trump, has publicly backed the state's position. His spokesperson said on Wednesday that Texas was not backing down. That is a rare thing in Texas — a Republican in office publicly fighting for Medicaid.

Brandon Rottinghaus, a political scientist at the University of Houston, told the Tribune he is not surprised Paxton is the one staying quiet. Paxton is in a close race against Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, early voting begins October 19, and the Republican midterm convention opens in Dallas next week.

"He's in a very politically delicate situation, and he doesn't want the story to be, Trump versus Paxton. He's biding his time in a way that is useful as a delay tactic to not make this a story that could splash back up on him."

Rottinghaus also said the money is too big to walk away from. "It's gonna be politically messy for the Republicans, especially for Greg Abbott and for Ken Paxton, but it's a fight that they have to have."

One of them is having it.

What the money pays for

Medicaid covers 4 million Texans, most of them low income. About a third of all children in Texas are on it. So are two-thirds of Texans in nursing homes.

The Texas Hospital Association says that without this funding stream, hospitals are at risk of shutting down their neonatal intensive care units and maternity wards. Those are among the most expensive services a hospital runs.

At Parkland Health in Dallas, where a third of the patients at Parkland Memorial Hospital are on Medicaid, chief executive Dr. Frederick Cerise told Dallas County commissioners on Tuesday what the number looks like for one hospital system: $528,000 every day for the coming fiscal year, which starts October 1.

He said there are no immediate service cuts, but that the first casualty will be capital improvements, and that it gets worse the longer the standoff lasts. He does not expect the state to fill the hole.

"The state depends heavily on this as a financing mechanism and... it's hard to imagine the state's going to backfill that with general revenue."

He is also less hopeful than usual that it gets sorted out. In the past, he said, the funding has been approved late and applied retroactively. "There's a lot more uncertainty right now than we've ever had."

The job he is running to leave

Paxton is the attorney general of Texas. Suing the federal government over Medicaid funding is not a favor he does for hospitals; it is the work of the office he currently holds, and it is work he has already done successfully on this exact question against a different president.

He is asking Texans to promote him to the Senate. The argument for doing that rests on his record as the state's lawyer.

His record on this dispute, so far, is silence.

Voters have seen this shape before. We wrote about him investigating America's pediatricians for taking money from donors, and about the Republican mega-donors who will not touch his campaign.

What the record shows

Ken Paxton sued the Biden administration to stop it from withholding this exact Medicaid funding, won, and issued a news release calling it a major nationwide legal victory and an act of unlawful federal overreach. The Trump administration is now withholding the same $10 billion on the same legal theory, at a cost of $27 million a day to Texas hospitals and $528,000 a day to Parkland Health alone. Governor Greg Abbott has publicly backed the state's position. The attorney general has filed nothing and said nothing, six weeks before early voting begins in his Senate race.

Source

Ken Paxton quiet about Texas' $10B Medicaid cut, by Terri Langford, The Texas Tribune, September 4, 2026. Photo by Shelby Tauber for The Texas Tribune.

Ken Paxton Told the Senate He Owns Seven Homes and Earns Nothing From Any of Them. Six of the Seven Were Listed for Rent.

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 06:56:16 +0000

Ken Paxton is the Republican nominee for the United States Senate in Texas. In August he filed the financial disclosure that federal law requires of Senate candidates. ProPublica and The Texas Tribune checked it against public records.

What they found, published September 4, is that the form appears to break federal ethics law in at least three separate ways.

"It reflects either pure sloppiness on Paxton's part or a deliberate effort to conceal some of his investments and property holdings," said Craig Holman of the nonpartisan watchdog group Public Citizen.

Seven houses, no rent

Paxton reported owning seven homes. For each one, on a form that requires real estate income to be listed, he checked the box that says "None (or less than $201)."

All but one of those homes was listed for rent during the periods the form covers. Reporters found recent rental listings for six of them: two houses in Ocala, Florida; a house and a condo in Austin; a house in College Station; and a five-bedroom vacation lodge in Broken Bow, Oklahoma.

Then they went and looked.

A tenant confirmed she lives in one of the Florida houses. A next-door neighbor at the Austin condo complex said Paxton's unit has a renter. The Oklahoma lodge is advertised online as a short-term rental at up to $1,200 a night, with fall bookings filling up.

Three ethics experts told the newsrooms that receiving income and not reporting it violates federal disclosure law.

Four condos at a golf resort, and $1.3 million in loans he did not list

Federal law requires a Senate candidate who is not already in Congress to report every loan over $10,000, except loans on a personal residence.

Paxton bought three condos at the Black Desert Resort in southwest Utah in February. He did not report the mortgages on them, which total $1.3 million. Reporters found the loan documents in county land records.

Each of those mortgages carries an addendum used for rental properties. A New Jersey real estate lawyer, Daniel M. Shlufman, explained what the addendum does: it removes the requirement that the owner live in the unit, and it lets the lender collect rent straight from tenants if the borrower defaults.

Paxton bought a fourth condo at the same resort in 2025 and did disclose that one, along with its $640,000 mortgage.

"It's kind of mind-boggling to think about having four homes at one resort property and imagining those are for personal use," said Cynthia Brown, a senior lawyer at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

A plot of land he valued at $50,000 that his partner says is worth $1 million

Paxton owns a 20 percent stake in 42 acres of undeveloped land in Johnson County, south of Fort Worth. Last year he told the Senate it was worth between $15,001 and $50,000.

Rob Orr, who manages the investment and served with Paxton in the Texas House, told reporters that Paxton's share is worth about $1 million and has been for years.

"It would have been around a million for quite a while, probably the last four or five years," Orr said. "It has increased in value because of zoning and because of time."

The county assesses the land as farmland worth $20,008. Its estimated market value is $2.9 million. Federal disclosure law requires property to be listed at fair market value. The Senate Ethics Committee lets a filer start from a county assessment, but he has to adjust it up to market when the assessment comes in below.

Paxton did the same thing with the Oklahoma lodge. Last year he valued it at between $100,001 and $250,000, the county's assessment being $176,000. Real estate sites put its market value above $1.5 million.

This year both figures jumped. The lodge and the Johnson County land are each now reported at between $1 million and $5 million.

Nothing was bought. The numbers simply changed.

Revaluation, not acquisition, is why Paxton's reported net worth swung from a range of negative $1.9 million to $11.1 million a year ago, to a range of $1 million to $27 million now.

Margaret Dylus-Yukins of the Campaign Legal Center, who spent six years reviewing executive branch officials' disclosures at the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, called the change "very strange," and said her old agency would have asked for a written explanation.

"When you have public officials that appear to be fudging the numbers on their disclosure forms, and the Senate Ethics Committee is letting that slide, then you're not only eroding trust in the committee but the candidate himself."

How a government lawyer bought more than a dozen properties

Paxton's state disclosure for 2001, before he entered the Legislature, listed assets of no more than $170,000. By 2015 his household net worth was $5.4 million, according to records that lawmakers subpoenaed when they impeached him in 2023 on charges he took bribes from an Austin real estate investor. The Senate acquitted him.

Those records show a portfolio built out of a cellphone tower, an HVAC company, a cement supplier and a police body camera manufacturer. When Motorola bought the body camera company in 2019, Paxton netted $2.2 million on his 2019 tax return.

Then he bought six properties in Oklahoma, Florida, Utah and Hawaii.

His salary as attorney general through most of this was $153,750.

Some of that portfolio has surfaced here before. We wrote about the cell tower on the campus of a hospital whose board he sat on — his own company got the tower, and it became one of his largest sources of income.

He also began putting many of these properties on his state disclosures only after the Texas Ethics Commission closed a loophole in 2024 that he had been citing to leave them off.

What happens next

Almost certainly nothing.

A candidate or senator who knowingly falsifies a financial disclosure can be fined up to $50,000 or prosecuted for a felony false statement. The Senate Ethics Committee rarely investigates senators and has not formally sanctioned one in 19 years. It did not respond to the newsrooms' requests for comment.

Paxton declined an interview. His campaign spokesperson said he "has had a long and successful career outside of public service" and called the reporting "a bad attempt to manufacture controversy where none exists."

And Paxton does not have to file another federal disclosure before Election Day.

Texas voters get one chance to judge him on the version he already filed. A University of Texas / Texas Politics Project poll released last week found a third of respondents consider him honest and trustworthy. His opponent, state Rep. James Talarico, went into September with a narrow polling lead in a state where Republicans have not lost a statewide race in 32 years. Talarico's own disclosure puts his net worth between $67,000 and $305,000.

What the filings show

Ken Paxton reported seven homes to the Senate and no income from any of them, while six of the seven were listed for rent and tenants were living in at least two. He left $1.3 million in mortgages off the form entirely, and valued a stake in Texas land at up to $50,000 that his own business partner says has been worth about $1 million for years. Three ethics experts say collecting rent and not reporting it is a violation of federal law. He bought more than a dozen properties in five states on a government salary of $153,750, and no federal disclosure of his is due again before voters decide.

Source

Ken Paxton's financial disclosures appear to violate ethics law, by Zach Despart, Kayla Guo and Alexandra Glorioso, The Texas Tribune, co-published with ProPublica, September 4, 2026. Photo collage by ProPublica, source imagery by The Texas Tribune.

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

Brandon Gill Filed a Bill to Stop People From Buying a Hot Meal With Food Stamps. The 'Loophole' He Wants Closed Exists for People Who Are Elderly, Disabled or Homeless.

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 06:48:40 +0000

On September 3, 2026, Brandon Gill introduced the Ending Restaurant Purchases with SNAP Act of 2026. It would bar people on food assistance from using their benefits at a restaurant.

Here is how he described the thing he is ending:

"Taxpayers are footing the bill for fast food through SNAP. More than $524 MILLION was spent at restaurants through this loophole in just two years. Today, I introduced legislation to end the fast-food loophole and refocus SNAP on nutritious groceries for struggling Americans."

The word doing the work in that sentence is "loophole." A loophole is a gap somebody slipped through. This isn't one.

It has a name, and it was built on purpose

The thing Gill is describing is the Restaurant Meals Program. It is a state option under federal law, written into the rules deliberately, and it exists for a specific reason that Gill's statement does not mention.

It is for SNAP recipients who cannot cook or store food. The U.S. Department of Agriculture limits it to people who are elderly, who have a disability, or who are homeless — plus their spouses.

That is the entire population of the program. Someone who is housed, able-bodied and under 60 cannot use their benefits at a restaurant in any state. There is no loophole for them to slip through, because the rule already excludes them.

So what the bill actually does is take prepared meals away from a person in a wheelchair who cannot stand at a stove, an 80-year-old whose kitchen is a hot plate, and someone sleeping in a car with nowhere to keep a bag of groceries. Nine states run the program: Arizona, California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Rhode Island and Virginia. Texas, which Gill represents, is not one of them.

The $524 million, in context

The number comes from Sen. Joni Ernst's office, which told Fox News that "from June 2023 to May 2025, more than $475 million in taxpayer dollars funded Restaurant Meals Program meals at fast-food establishments" and that "$524 million in taxpayer funds were spent through the Restaurant Meals Program overall" in the same window. Two years, nine states.

Now put it next to a vote he cast.

On July 3, 2025, Gill voted "Aye" on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Trump's budget bill. The Congressional Budget Office scores that law as cutting food assistance by nearly $187 billion — the largest cut to food assistance in American history. Four million people are no longer receiving food aid.

The cut he voted for is roughly 350 times the spending he is now filing legislation to stop. He was not worried about the food budget fourteen months ago. He is worried about it now that the target is disabled people ordering lunch.

"Do the American people need Coca-Cola to survive?"

The line is not from this week. Gill said it on June 25, 2026, at a hearing his own Oversight subcommittee held on "Combating Waste, Fraud, and Abuse in SNAP", pressing the Democrats' witness — Gina Plata-Nino, the Director of SNAP Policy and Advocacy at the Food Research and Action Center. "Do the American people need Coca-Cola to survive?" he asked her. When she did not answer it the way he wanted, he answered it himself: "I think most people can rationally say that you don't need Coca-Cola to survive."

Nobody claims otherwise. The question is not whether a soda is necessary. The question is what a homeless person is supposed to do with a package of raw chicken. A month after that hearing Gill signed a letter led by Sen. Joni Ernst objecting to SNAP benefits being spent on fast food. The bill came in September.

This is the shape these bills always take. A rule that sounds like common sense to a person with a kitchen becomes a wall for a person without one. We saw the mirror image of it earlier this year, when Rick Crawford — who voted for the same $187 billion cut — won a 384-35 bipartisan vote for an amendment letting SNAP recipients buy a rotisserie chicken while it was still warm. One party takes the food away in the budget and then legislates, loudly, about the temperature of what's left.

Gill has now filed a bill that would take the warm meal back.

The pattern in his district

Gill represents Texas's 26th District. He has spent a lot of his first term on hearings and task forces about other places and other people's programs — he held a hearing about Ohio's Medicaid and blocked every Ohio Democrat who asked to speak, and he runs a task force on "DEI" while his own district waits.

The Restaurant Meals Program is the same move. It does not operate in Texas. Not one of his constituents uses it. The bill costs him nothing at home and takes a hot meal from disabled and homeless people in nine states he does not represent.

What the record shows

Brandon Gill introduced a bill to end SNAP purchases at restaurants, calling it a "fast-food loophole." The program is the Restaurant Meals Program, a deliberate federal option limited to SNAP recipients who are elderly, disabled or homeless and cannot cook or store food, and it runs in nine states that do not include his own. Sen. Joni Ernst's office puts its spending at $524 million over two years. Gill voted in July 2025 for a budget bill that cut food assistance by nearly $187 billion — about 350 times as much.

Source

Brandon Gill introduces bill to ban SNAP benefits at restaurants — David Zimmermann, Washington Examiner, September 3, 2026.

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

Brandon Gill Chairs a Task Force on 'Defending Constitutional Rights.' A Colleague Told His Hearing He Fears Gill Will Try to Revoke His Citizenship.

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:52:26 +0000

Brandon Gill, the Republican congressman from Texas, chairs the House Oversight Committee's Task Force on Defending Constitutional Rights and Exposing Institutional Abuses.

On Tuesday, September 1, 2026, a Democrat on that task force used his five minutes to explain, on the record, why he does not believe the chairman means it.

What Rep. Dave Min said

Min was questioning Steven A. Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies. He started with two questions about the Constitution, then turned to the man running the hearing:

"Well, the chair of this task force, Brandon Gill, tried to revoke the citizenship of one of our congressional colleagues last year, circulating a petition to try to pressure the Trump administration to deport Representative Ilhan Omar because he did not agree with some of her comments and her actions. I would just note that's the opposite of supporting and defending the Constitution.

Some might call it sedition. And this is all very deeply personal to me because I am myself a birthright citizen.

My parents were here in America on student visas when I was born. They had not become naturalized until after I was born.

And if Donald Trump and Brandon Gill had had their way, maybe my parents would have been denied their visas. Maybe they would have been deported. Maybe my citizenship would have been denied.

And maybe if I say something today or beyond that Brandon Gill doesn't like, he'll try to revoke my citizenship.

But thankfully, Brandon Gill does not get to decide who is a citizen, because that question is clearly laid out in the Constitution of the United States."

Min closed by noting that a task force "meant to, quote, defend constitutional rights is chaired by a person with no regard for the Constitution."

Gill's answer, from the chair: "Gentleman yields back. Don't worry, I won't try to revoke your citizenship, Mr. Min."

The petition Min is talking about is real

This is not an inflammatory characterization. It happened, and it is documented.

In February 2025, Gill's campaign sent out a fundraising email titled "Petition: Deport Ilhan Omar," asking supporters to sign a petition to have a sitting member of the U.S. House deported to Somalia.

The email said: "Friend, we should have never let Ilhan Omar into our country," and "America would be a much better place if she were to be sent back to Somalia." Gill posted the same thing publicly on X: "America would be a better place if @IlhanMN were deported back to Somalia."

Omar arrived in the United States as a refugee in 1995, during the Somali civil war. She has been an American citizen since 2000, when she was 17.

There is no lawful process by which the government deports a U.S. citizen for things she said. Gill raised money off proposing it anyway.

Omar's response at the time: "It is truly disgusting that members of the Republican party feel emboldened to engage in racist and quite frankly fascist remarks."

Why Min's own citizenship is the point

Min is a birthright citizen. His parents were in the United States on student visas when he was born, and did not naturalize until afterward. Under the Fourteenth Amendment, that makes him a citizen. Under the position Gill has been pushing, it might not have.

That is not a hypothetical about Gill. It is his actual portfolio.

We have already covered what he does with the gavel: Gill has subpoenaed "birth tourism companies" and floated "criminal conspiracy" charges against the businesses that arrange those births, as part of the Republican push to end birthright citizenship. Min is describing the version of that policy where he personally is on the wrong side of the line.

So when a member says out loud that he is worried the chairman might come after his citizenship for saying the wrong thing, he is pointing at a specific record: a chairman who tried it on a colleague, and who runs the birthright citizenship investigation.

The task force's name is doing a lot of work

Gill's task force is called "Defending Constitutional Rights and Exposing Institutional Abuses."

Under his chairmanship it has gone after birthright citizenship, which is written into the Fourteenth Amendment. Its chairman has circulated a petition to deport an American citizen who is also an elected member of the House. Confronted with it from the dais, he made a joke.

Gill is also not the only Republican pointing this weapon at Americans by name. Georgia's Andrew Clyde posted "No more Islamic immigration. Denaturalize, deport, repeat," then made the same demand — "Denaturalize. Deport. Defend 2A." — about a Virginia state senator he blamed for a gun law he did not like.

And Gill's own record on who counts as American is not limited to citizenship law. His answer to being called racist was that the accusation has lost its power. Told by a colleague that the reason is his calling Indian Americans "7-Eleven workers," he said nothing back.

What the record shows

Brandon Gill chairs a House task force named for defending constitutional rights. In February 2025 he circulated a campaign petition to deport Rep. Ilhan Omar, an American citizen since 2000, to Somalia over things she had said. On September 1, 2026, Rep. Dave Min — a birthright citizen whose parents were on student visas when he was born — told Gill's own hearing that he fears Gill would try to revoke his citizenship for saying something Gill dislikes. Gill's response was a one-line joke.

Source

Kathianne Boniello, "House Dem Suggests GOP Colleague Will Try to 'Revoke' His Citizenship After Threatening to Deport a Witness", Mediaite, September 1, 2026, with hearing video via C-SPAN. Petition details: Newsweek, February 13, 2025. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Trump Told Towns That Don't Want a Data Center They Want to Be 'Backwards and Poor.' He Signed the Order Giving Data Centers Federal Land, Fast-Tracked Permits and Taxpayer Loan Guarantees.

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:34:03 +0000

A data center is a warehouse full of computers that run artificial intelligence. It drinks electricity and water on a scale most towns have never had to plan for, and somebody has to build the power plants and power lines that feed it. That somebody is everybody else on the grid.

All over the country, people have been showing up at county meetings to say no. Not activists — county commissioners, farmers, retirees, parents worried about a well.

On Monday morning, August 31, 2026, President Donald Trump answered them on Truth Social:

"The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor. If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign. The good news is that there are plenty of other places that want them. If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame. China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement. Actually, they can't believe it is happening!"

That is the whole argument. Not "here is why your electric bill won't go up." Not "here is what the company has to pay for." If you don't want one, you want to be poor, and China is glad you exist.

He is not describing a fringe

Gallup asked. Between March 2 and March 18, 2026, it found that 71% of Americans oppose building an AI data center in their area — including 48% who are strongly opposed. That is more opposition than a nuclear power plant next door gets, which is 53%.

It is not a partisan number, either. Gallup found majorities in every party opposed, and 39% of Republicans were strongly opposed — not merely against it, strongly against it. Those are his own voters.

And the number has been climbing. In mid-August, an Embold Research poll published by Heatmap put opposition at 75%.

You could see the same thing in his own replies. Truth Social exists because Trump owns it, and its users still told him he was wrong. "I have to disagree with this one," wrote one. Another wrote: "I don't think it's so much that we are against data centers. What we are against is our electric bill shooting through the roof and our water supply going low. And this is happening."

The order he signed

The reason this is not just a bad post is that Trump is not a spectator here. He is the person who put the federal government's thumb on the scale.

On July 23, 2025, he signed Executive Order 14318, "Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure." It applies to any project drawing more than 100 megawatts of new electricity for AI, to any project whose sponsor has committed at least $500 million, and to the transmission lines, gas pipelines and substations built to feed them. What it does for those projects:

Opens federal land. The Interior and Energy departments are directed to offer sites; the Defense Department can lease out land on military installations.
Cuts the environmental review. Agencies had ten days to list the "categorical exclusions" — the pre-approved reasons a project can skip a full environmental study — that could be used to speed data centers through.
Points developers at contaminated land. The EPA was ordered to identify brownfield and Superfund sites for reuse.
Puts public money behind it. The Commerce Secretary was told to launch an initiative to provide financial support that "could include loans and loan guarantees, grants, tax incentives, and offtake agreements."

Federal land, a shortened review, and taxpayer credit — for the companies. For the town, a phone number to call.

His EPA has kept going in the same direction. It is now proposing to scrap the federal rule that requires states to tell you when an air-polluting facility applies for a permit near your home, and to let developers start building before the permit is approved. The one mechanism that reliably gets an ordinary person to a county meeting in time is the notice — and the notice is what's on the chopping block.

And in May 2025, almost every House Republican voted for a ten-year ban on any state, city or county enforcing a law that limits AI systems — a definition written broadly enough to cover the buildings, the cooling and the power hookups. The Senate stripped it out 99–1. The House vote still happened.

So when Trump says communities that don't want data centers should go ahead and be poor, he is talking about communities whose ability to say no he has spent the past year narrowing.

"China could not be happier"

The China line is not new, and it is not his alone. We have already written about the seven Republicans who decided the neighbors objecting to a data center might be on a foreign payroll — including four who asked federal law enforcement to open a file on them.

It is not an argument every Republican is making. Greg Abbott, who branded Texas "the epicenter of AI development" and whose state hands data centers a sales-tax break the comptroller now expects to cost $3.3 billion in a single budget cycle, says Chinese propaganda is not why Americans oppose these things. On August 3, 2026, Abbott paused new data center hookups in Texas pending a state audit — after years of selling the state to them.

Trump's response to that pause, in an August interview with Punchbowl News, was to call it a mistake:

"I saw Texas the other day sort of is against data centers. I think it's a mistake. And I'm not taking positions, I just think it's a mistake, because there are other communities that want it. When a community wants it, it means a lot of money is going to come into that community."

He also told Punchbowl data centers could be "bigger than oil."

The part about your bill

Vice President JD Vance was asked about the post on Monday and gave a more honest answer than the president did:

"I think probably 99% of the backlash to data centers has come in areas where building a data center means higher utility and higher electricity for the people on the ground."

That is the whole objection, stated by the administration's own vice president. His fix was deregulation — "if you build a data center, you should be putting power back into the grid, not taking it out."

Nothing in the executive order requires that. The order accelerates the building. The power plants are somebody else's problem.

Meanwhile the federal government's own forecasters are saying out loud what the county meetings are about. The Energy Information Administration expects U.S. electricity demand to rise for a fourth straight year — the strongest four-year growth since 2000 — and names the cause as "increasing demand from large computing facilities, including data centers." It forecasts residential electricity at 18.2 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2026, a nearly 5% increase over 2025, with parts of the East Coast rising as fast as 7% a year for two years running. In 2027, for the first time, commercial electricity use — the category that holds the hyperscalers — is expected to pass residential.

Republicans running for office have noticed, even where the president hasn't. Ohio Senator Jon Husted is the clearest case: his own party's Senate campaign committee wrote a memo calling his data center record an "anchor" on his campaign and told AI companies that fixing the public's view of data centers was up to them if he was to survive November.

The bottom line

Seven in ten Americans — including 39% of Republicans who are strongly opposed — don't want a data center built near them, mostly because of what the things use up: half of Gallup's opponents named data centers' excessive use of resources, and 18% each named their water and their energy. Trump's answer on Monday was that they are choosing to be "backwards and poor" and that China is delighted with them. Thirteen months earlier he had signed an executive order handing those same projects federal land, a shortcut around environmental review, and taxpayer-backed loans and loan guarantees — while his EPA moves to end the public notice that tells a town one is coming, and residential electricity heads to 18.2 cents a kilowatt-hour.

Source

Emily Chang, "'Let Data Reign': Trump goes all in on controversial data centers," ABC News, August 31, 2026. Additional reporting from Matt Novak, "Trump to Communities Fighting Data Centers: Have Fun Being Poor," Gizmodo, August 31, 2026. Photo: Kent Nishimura / AFP via Getty Images.

Randy Fine Asked Where the 'Moderate Muslims' in Our Political System Are. Four of Them Serve in the House With Him.

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 06:56:43 +0000

On Sunday, August 30, 2026, at the Republican Jewish Coalition's annual summit inside the Venetian resort in Las Vegas, Florida congressman Randy Fine told the room he wanted to talk about what he called "the elephant in the room: the rise of Islam in America."

Then he asked a question.

"We are constantly told that the problem is not mainstream Islam, but radical Islamism. But where are the so-called moderate Muslims in our political system?"

Four of them are in the House of Representatives, in the same chamber Fine sits in. According to the Pew Research Center's count of this Congress, the House has four Muslim members: André Carson of Indiana, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Lateefah Simon of California. Fine votes on the same floor as all four.

He was not asking a research question. He answered it himself, talking to reporters after the program:

"The fact that not all Muslims are bad does not mean that no Muslims are bad. People are unwilling to have that discussion, and if we don't have it we're going to have real problems in this country."

The second speaker said it more plainly

Texas congressman Brandon Gill spoke at the same summit and did not bother with the framing. Islam, he said, is "fundamentally incompatible with our way of life," and he warned about the "Islamization of Texas."

Gill then tied it to immigration: "If we want to fight antisemitism, we need to start with our immigration policy," he said, arguing that "importing people whose values are incompatible with our own" would weaken the country.

Fine's response to Gill, according to the Times of Israel: "I give him credit."

Neither man named a Muslim American who had done anything. They named politicians. The targets on stage were New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, and streamer Hasan Piker — one elected official, one candidate, and one streamer.

This is not just what they say. It is what they have written.

A speech at a donor summit is easy to wave off as red meat. This one is not, because both men had already turned it into legislation.

On September 19, 2025, Fine introduced H.R. 5512, the "No Shari'a Act". Gill is one of its 33 cosponsors.

The bill claims to be about "foreign law" in general. Its definitions section reaches broadly: "foreign law" means "any law, legal code, or system derived from a jurisdiction outside the United States or its territories, including religious law when invoked as a substitute for State or Federal law."

But read the bill as introduced and one faith is the only one in it. Its stated purpose is to "prohibit the enforcement of Shari'a or any foreign law that infringes on constitutional rights." Section 5 is headed "APPLICATION OF SHARI'A." The word appears seven times across five pages. No other religion, and no other religion's law, is named anywhere in the text.

American courts already cannot enforce a foreign or religious code that violates the Constitution. That is what the Supremacy Clause does, and the bill's own findings section says so in its first sentence. What the bill would add is a federal statute with the name of one religion in the title. It was referred to the Judiciary Committee the day it was introduced and has had no action since.

A civil rights group calls their caucus a hate group

Fine and Gill both belong to the House "Sharia-Free America Caucus," launched on December 18, 2025 by Texas congressmen Keith Self and Chip Roy.

In February 2026, the Council on American-Islamic Relations designated that caucus an anti-Muslim hate group — the first time in the organization's 32-year history it had applied that label to a congressional caucus. At the time, the caucus had 40 members from 19 states, with Texas and Florida the two biggest delegations.

CAIR's analysis named Fine's bill directly, arguing that H.R. 5512 and two of Chip Roy's bills — the PAUSE Act of 2025 and the Preserving a Sharia-Free America Act — "would deny adherents of the world's second-largest faith basic civil rights such as free speech, freedom of religion and equal protection under the law using their choice of faith as the disfavored characteristic."

"Congressmen Randy Fine, Chip Roy, Keith Self, and other members of this so-called caucus have appointed themselves as religious police with the power to tell Americans how to worship," CAIR research and advocacy director Corey Saylor said. "Islam is an American faith, present for over 250 years."

There is no takeover to stop

The thing these bills are written against keeps turning out not to exist.

We traced the 2026 panic back to its origin. A hate group's blog post about a subdivision in Little Rock became a viral Facebook post on April 4, 2026, then a state bill, then a statement from Arkansas's governor in July. The caucus came first — Self and Roy launched it in December 2025, and NPR counted 50 members in it on March 14, 2026, seventeen days before the blog post ran. The subdivision is five houses that have been there for about two decades, and two of them are occupied by Christians.

The money tells the same story. Republicans spent more than $10 million on TV ads mentioning Sharia or Islam negatively heading into the 2026 midterms — roughly ten times what was spent in each of the last four cycles — and a pollster who studies it found anti-Muslim sentiment spikes during election cycles, not after terrorist attacks.

Las Vegas in August is an election cycle.

Both men have been here before

This is not a first offense for either of them.

Fine went on television in July and said "a Muslim terrorist runs the city of New York," blaming the mayor for a stabbing that police were investigating as a possible hate crime by a man they said may have had mental health issues. CAIR notes he has also "compared Muslims unfavorably to dogs," and the JTA reported he has said Gazans should "starve away" until the Israeli hostages were released.

Gill posted in July that "Calling us racist doesn't work anymore". Rep. Shri Thanedar, an Indian American Democrat, replied that people call him racist because he referred to Indian Americans as "7-Eleven workers." Gill never answered him — his position was that the word has lost its power, not that it was untrue.

What the record shows

Randy Fine asked a Republican donor audience where the moderate Muslims in American politics are, when four Muslims serve in the House with him. Brandon Gill told the same room that Islam is "fundamentally incompatible with our way of life." In September 2025, Fine had written a bill that would put one religion's name in federal law — seven times, including as a section heading — and Gill had signed onto it as one of 33 cosponsors. The caucus they both joined has been designated an anti-Muslim hate group by the country's largest Muslim civil rights organization — the first congressional caucus it has ever labeled that way in 32 years.

Source

Rep. Randy Fine blasts 'rise of Islam' and Muslim politicians at Jewish GOP confab — The Times of Israel, August 31, 2026. Photo: The Jerusalem Post.

Three Houses, Three Mortgages Each Calling Itself His Primary Home. Ken Paxton Blames a Texas Rule Scrapped in 2015.

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 11:47:05 +0000

On Sunday, August 30, 2026, Fox News anchor Jacqui Heinrich asked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton about something that has followed him through his Senate campaign: the fifteen homes he owns, worth roughly $9 million, on an attorney general's salary of $153,000 a year — and specifically about the three of them whose mortgages each say the house is his primary residence.

Heinrich did not soften the question. She pointed out that the Trump administration went after New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Adam Schiff and Lisa Cook over "exactly the same substance," and asked Paxton whether the reporting on him was wrong.

Paxton had an answer ready. It was the state constitution's fault.

"So in Texas, the constitution used to require that you — if you're a statewide office holder — you have to move to the capital. So I used to live in Collin County. When I became attorney general, I bought a condo in Austin so that I could live in the capital pursuant to what the constitution required."

He went on: his wife became a state senator, they bought a house, "that became my primary residence because it was required by the constitution." Then the constitution was changed, and he moved back to Collin County. "So, this idea that somehow that's fraudulent, they, of course, aren't following Texas law."

"Thank you for clearing that up," Heinrich said.

The rule he is blaming was repealed in his first year as attorney general

Texas did once require certain statewide officeholders to live in the capital. That requirement, on the books since 1876, was wiped out by Proposition 3, which Texas voters approved on November 3, 2015. The attorney general was one of the offices freed by it.

Ken Paxton was sworn in as attorney general in January 2015. The rule he says forced him into an Austin condo and then an Austin house was gone before his first year in office was over — nearly eleven years ago.

And when it went away, his office said he wasn't going anywhere. Three weeks after the vote, the Texas Tribune asked every affected officeholder whether they would leave Austin. Paxton's spokeswoman answered: "The attorney general has no plans to move." She said he kept residences in both Austin and McKinney, and that Travis County — Austin — was his "home county."

So the sequence Paxton described on Fox News, in which the constitution pushed him into Austin and its repeal pulled him back to Collin County, does not match what his own office said at the time.

His answer skips the two houses that are actually rented out

Even taken at face value, Paxton's explanation covers only the Austin properties. The Associated Press investigation that produced this story — published in July 2025 by Brian Slodysko — found two more problems that the Texas Constitution has never had an opinion about.

The mortgage on the Paxtons' house in College Station states that the property is for their exclusive use and cannot be rented out, and that renting it would be grounds for terminating the loan. The AP found it has been listed for rent on real estate websites on and off since at least 2022.

Paxton also holds a $1.2 million mortgage on a "5 bedroom luxury cabin" in Broken Bow, Oklahoma. That mortgage also says the property cannot be rented. It is listed on Airbnb and other short-term rental sites.

Broken Bow is in Oklahoma. No reading of the Texas Constitution required Ken Paxton to buy a cabin there, and none of it explains why two mortgages that forbid renting are attached to houses that get rented.

The AP also found that in 2018 the Paxtons simultaneously collected homestead property tax breaks — a benefit a homeowner may claim on only one home — on both the suburban Dallas house and a $1.1 million home in Austin. Travis County appraisal officials said that particular break had transferred to the Paxtons from the home's previous owner for the duration of that year.

Why the primary-residence label is worth money

This is not paperwork pedantry. Lenders charge noticeably lower interest on a mortgage for a house you actually live in than on a second home or an investment property. Legal experts told the AP that the three primary-residence designations will save the Paxtons tens of thousands of dollars over the life of the loans.

Knowingly making a false statement on a mortgage document is a federal and a state crime. Arif Lawji, a veteran Texas real estate attorney, told the AP: "If he filled out lender documents knowing that they were false, then that is a false statement to obtain a mortgage on favorable terms. That would be actionable. He's the chief enforcement officer. You have to be accountable for stuff you do that's wrong."

The chief enforcement officer part matters. Paxton's office is one of the primary agencies in Texas tasked with investigating mortgage fraud. He would be the person a referral went to.

He asked for exactly this scrutiny — of someone else

Heinrich's comparison to Letitia James was not a gotcha; it was the obvious question. The Trump administration has pursued James and Schiff over mortgage paperwork. In June 2025, Paxton weighed in on the James investigation, telling supporters: "I hope that if she's done something wrong, I hope that she's actually held accountable."

The AP noted one difference between them that cuts against Paxton. In 2020, Schiff formally re-designated his Maryland property as a second home. That is the step available to anyone who realizes a mortgage says something no longer true. It is a step, the AP wrote, that Paxton has not taken.

This is also not the first time Paxton's answer to "where do you actually live?" has landed him in trouble. A Texas Tribune and ProPublica investigation found he appears to have voted six times from a home he no longer lives in — and state law directs the secretary of state to refer a complaint like the one filed against him to his own office if there is reasonable cause to suspect a crime. This is a man who has built a career on prosecuting other people over voting paperwork.

The bottom line

Asked on Fox News why three of his fifteen homes each carry a mortgage saying it is his primary residence, Ken Paxton said the Texas Constitution required a statewide officeholder to live in Austin. Texas voters repealed that requirement on November 3, 2015 — his first year as attorney general — and three weeks later his own spokeswoman said he had no plans to move and called Travis County his home county. His explanation also says nothing about the College Station house or the $1.2 million Oklahoma cabin, both carrying mortgages that forbid renting, both of which the Associated Press found listed for rent. The office that investigates mortgage fraud in Texas is his.

Source

Ken Paxton Tells Fox News Anchor He Was 'Just Following Texas Law' When He Claimed 3 Primary Residences — Jennifer Bowers Bahney, Mediaite, August 30, 2026. The underlying investigation is by Brian Slodysko of the Associated Press. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

Greg Abbott Has Left 800,000 Texans Without a Vote in Congress for More Than 130 Days. California Has Already Voted to Fill the Seat That Went Empty the Same Day.

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 07:11:11 +0000

On April 14, 2026, two members of Congress resigned on the same day. Republican Tony Gonzales of Texas quit under pressure from House Republicans amid a sex scandal. Democrat Eric Swalwell of California quit the same day.

California has already picked a replacement. Voters there elected Democrat Aisha Wahab last week to serve out Swalwell's term.

Texas's seat is still empty. It has been empty for more than 130 days, and it is not on track to be filled until January.

Who is going without

The 23rd Congressional District runs from northwest San Antonio all the way to El Paso, across most of the Texas border with Mexico. About 800,000 people live in it. Since April, none of them has had a vote in the U.S. House.

Greg Abbott has the sole power to call the special election that would fix that. He has not called one, and he has not said why.

This is not against the law. Congress leaves it to the states to set special elections, and there is no federal deadline. That is precisely the point: nothing forced Abbott's hand, and nothing stopped him. Leaving 800,000 Texans unrepresented for most of a year was a choice he made and has continued making every day since April.

For scale: over the last four years, congressional vacancies have been filled in less than 180 days on average. If this seat waits until January, it will have been vacant roughly 260 days.

He has done it before, and worse

This is Abbott's second long vacancy in two years, and the first one was longer.

When U.S. Rep. Sylvester Turner died in March 2025, Abbott left Houston's 18th Congressional District — a heavily Democratic seat — vacant for 334 days. Nearly a full year with no vote in Congress for one of the largest cities in America.

Christian Menefee, the Democrat who eventually won that seat, has filed legislation to force governors to move faster. "When a member passes away or resigns, their communities should have their voice restored as soon as possible," he said when he introduced the bill.

Abbott is not alone in this. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis never set a special election either to replace Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a Democrat who also resigned in April — in a district that leans heavily Democratic.

The math that explains the silence

Abbott hasn't given a reason, so consider what the delay buys.

Republicans will hold the House 219–214 once Wahab and the winner of Georgia's special election are sworn in. That is a five-seat margin. The 23rd District has been in Republican hands for over a decade — but Democrats have been overperforming in special elections across the country this year, including in places Republicans usually win comfortably.

An election Abbott doesn't call is an election Republicans cannot lose. It is also one seat of margin the House majority never has to defend, in a chamber where a handful of votes decides whether a bill passes.

What the district is missing right now

This is not an abstraction about representation. There is a fight happening in the 23rd District at this moment, and the district has nobody in the House to fight it.

A border security construction project inside Big Bend National Park — which sits in the district — has drawn bipartisan outrage. Abbott himself pressured the Department of Homeland Security to pause it. But the landowners and residents who live next to it have no member of Congress to push back on their behalf, no vote on appropriations, no seat at any hearing.

The House Clerk's office has kept staff in place to handle constituent services — chasing down a Social Security check, helping with veterans' benefits. That is the part of the job a caretaker can do. Nobody can cast the votes.

The pattern

Abbott has a habit of arranging the calendar so voters get information, or a voice, after it can no longer affect an outcome. He ordered an audit of Texas data centers to answer voters' questions, then set the deadline 37 days after they vote. He said Texas had caught 6,500 noncitizens on its voter rolls when his own office had confirmed 581.

In November, Republican Brandon Herrera faces Democrat Katy Padilla Stout for the seat. Whoever wins takes office in January — nine months after it fell vacant.

What the record shows

Tony Gonzales resigned on April 14, 2026. More than 130 days later, Greg Abbott has still not called the special election that only he can call, leaving about 800,000 Texans from San Antonio to El Paso with no vote in the U.S. House — on track for a vacancy of roughly 260 days against a national average under 180. Abbott has offered no explanation. A Democrat who resigned the same day in California has already had a successor elected, and the last seat Abbott left open, in Houston, sat empty for 334 days.

Source

Gov. Abbott leaves nearly a million Texans without a vote in Congress — NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth, August 29, 2026, carrying Jeremy Wallace's August 26 reporting, credited by NBC to The Dallas Morning News and published the same week in the Houston Chronicle. Photo: Imagn Images via NBC 5.

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.

Ken Paxton Didn't Defend Texas's In-State Tuition Law. He Asked the Judge to Block It the Same Day the Trump Administration Sued.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:38:00 +0000

On August 27, 2026, the Justice Department sued Arizona, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington over laws letting immigrants without legal status pay in-state tuition at public colleges. That brings the Trump administration to 21 states sued over the same kind of law.

Five of those laws are already dead. In four of the five states — Texas, Kentucky, Nebraska and Oklahoma — the state's own lawyers agreed with the federal government that the state's law should be struck down. Illinois was the only one that defended its own statute.

Texas was first, and Texas is the clearest look at how this works.

The law a Republican governor signed

Texas was the first state in the country to let certain undocumented students pay in-state tuition. Lawmakers passed the Texas Dream Act in 2001 with little debate and broad, bipartisan support, and Republican Governor Rick Perry signed it.

It was not a blanket benefit. To qualify, a student had to:

graduate from a Texas high school or earn an equivalent diploma in Texas,
have lived in the state for at least three years before graduating, and
sign an affidavit promising to seek permanent residency as soon as they were eligible.

Lawyers for the groups defending the law told the court it opened higher education to more than 57,000 students. These were kids who had graduated from Texas high schools.

One day is not a legal fight

State lawmakers tried repeatedly to repeal the Texas Dream Act and failed. So in June 2025 the Justice Department sued Texas, arguing the law violated a 1996 federal immigration statute.

What happened next is the part worth sitting with. Ken Paxton's office did not defend the law. It quickly agreed with the Justice Department that the law conflicted with federal law, and asked the judge to block it. U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor — a George W. Bush appointee in Wichita Falls — approved the agreement and struck the law down the same day.

Plaintiff and defendant wanted the same outcome. There was no adversary. A statute that had survived twenty-four years and multiple repeal attempts in the Texas Legislature was gone in an afternoon, with nobody in the courtroom arguing for it.

Thomas Saenz of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund told the 5th Circuit at oral argument in June 2026 that this is the heart of the problem:

It is "important to emphasize here how extraordinary that it all occurred as quickly as it did. The court needs to look at whether this extraordinary situation violated due process rights held by students for affordable tuition and the other students who benefited or would benefit in the future."

Lawyers for the students put it more bluntly in a brief: "The people of Texas are entitled to genuine litigation before a federal court invalidates their democratically enacted statute."

The students were told they couldn't argue either

Because Paxton wouldn't defend the law, the people who relied on it tried to. Students for Affordable Tuition, the immigrant-rights group La Unión del Pueblo Entero, Austin Community College, and Oscar Silva — a University of North Texas graduate student who had qualified under the law — all asked to step into the case.

O'Connor said no. In July 2026 a 5th Circuit panel agreed, 2–1, ruling they could not intervene because the law was preempted anyway. Judge Jerry Smith, a Reagan appointee, wrote the majority; Judge Don Willett, a Trump appointee, joined; Judge Irma Carrillo Ramirez, a Biden appointee, dissented.

The Justice Department's own argument for keeping the students out was that letting them defend the law would be "legally futile." Its lawyer told the appeals court: "We opposed intervention … only on the grounds that it's legally futile because the statutes are preempted."

On August 24, 2026, LUPE asked the full 5th Circuit to reconsider. That petition is pending.

Greg Abbott's reaction to the July ruling, posted on X, was that Texas and the Trump administration's Justice Department "just secured another major victory for the rule of law."

What it has cost so far

The damage was not theoretical and it did not wait for appeals.

Lawyers for LUPE, Austin Community College and Silva told the court the end of the law could cost Texas hundreds of millions of dollars a year in reduced wages, earnings and consumer spending. ACC said it expected lost revenue, administrative burdens, and harm to its programs.

And the rollout was a mess. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board told colleges to reclassify students who are not lawfully present as nonresidents, but did not tell them how to identify those students. Students for Affordable Tuition told the 5th Circuit that several Texas colleges then charged DACA recipients out-of-state rates — even though Texas's own lawyers said DACA students should still qualify for in-state tuition.

Luis Castillo Vela of LUPE, as students went back to school this month:

"As college students prepare to start school this week across the state, we are thinking about all of those who are having to put their dream of a higher education on hold because of the financial hurdles resulting from the repeal of the Texas Dream Act."

What the record shows

The Texas Dream Act was signed by a Republican governor in 2001 and survived twenty-four years and repeated repeal attempts in the Legislature. When the Trump administration sued to kill it in June 2025, Ken Paxton's office did not defend it — it agreed the law was illegal and asked the judge to block it, which he did the same day. The students and colleges who relied on it were then told they could not defend it either. Lawyers in the case say the law had opened college to more than 57,000 Texas high school graduates. The Justice Department has now brought the same suit against 21 states, and in three others besides Texas the state's own lawyers agreed to lose.

Source

Shauneen Miranda, US Justice Department challenges 4 more states over in-state tuition for immigrants, States Newsroom / Ohio Capital Journal, August 28, 2026. Texas background and quotes from Eva-Marie Ayala, New hearing sought in fight over Texas law that gave undocumented students in-state tuition, The Texas Tribune / KERA, August 25, 2026. Photo: Antranik Tavitian / The Texas Tribune.

Greg Abbott's Appointees Turned a $1 Car Insurance Fee Into 3,200 Surveillance Cameras. He Shut It Off the Night Before the Story Ran.

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 20:55:41 +0000

In 2023, Texas lawmakers added a dollar to every car insurance policy in the state. The reason was specific and it was written into the law: catalytic converter theft. A Harris County deputy named Darren Almendarez had been shot to death in a grocery store parking lot after interrupting catalytic converter thieves, and the bill was named for him. It passed the House and the Senate without a single vote against it, and Greg Abbott signed it on May 29, 2023.

The law says what the dollar is for. The extra money can be used "only for coordinated regulatory and law enforcement activities intended to detect and prevent catalytic converter theft."

Three years later, The Texas Tribune found that a state board whose members Abbott appoints has spent at least $30 million of that money building an artificial-intelligence surveillance network that tracks where Texans drive — at least 3,200 cameras, from El Paso to the Louisiana border.

On Thursday night, Abbott ordered every state agency to stop paying for them. The Tribune published its investigation on Friday.

What the dollar actually bought

The fee has raised an estimated $81 million. The Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority — a small agency run by a Department of Public Safety official and six board members the governor appoints — has pushed $50.8 million of it out the door in 234 grants.

At least 95 of those grants went to helping police departments buy and maintain roughly 2,000 Flock cameras. Another $15.9 million went to a three-year contract putting almost 1,200 more of them in the hands of DPS. In early August, with the money still flowing, the board approved $3 million more for 583 additional cameras along Texas tollways.

The grants ranged from $7,000 for two cameras in Bellmead, near Waco, to nearly $1.7 million for 201 cameras in Dallas. Some cities got their entire network for free: 165 cameras in Laredo, 150 in El Paso. In Temple, 84% of the city's Flock cameras were paid for by the state. In Cibolo, a town of 36,000 north of San Antonio, a grant took the camera count from 11 to 52.

A Flock camera is not a speed trap. It uses artificial intelligence to build what the company calls a "vehicle fingerprint" — your plate, your make, model and color, your bumper stickers, your dents — and stores it in a database that police departments across the country can search without a warrant. DeFlock, a watchdog group that maps the cameras, counts about 13,000 in Texas. By that count, the insurance fee paid for one in four of them.

The agency does not publish how much of its grant money went to cameras. The Tribune had to reconstruct it from board minutes and the agendas of 101 city councils and county commissions. Another 124 grants have no clear public record of what they bought at all, which means the real number is probably higher than $30 million.

The lawmakers who voted for it say they were never told

The senator who wrote the fee into law found out what it was paying for from a reporter.

State Sen. Carol Alvarado, who wrote the bill, and Rep. Jeff Leach, who sponsored it in the House, both told the Tribune that surveillance cameras were never discussed while the bill was being considered. "I did not have that in mind when we passed the bill," Alvarado said. "When I think of combating crime, I'm thinking … more boots on the ground, hiring more officers to tackle the crime or some type of undercover work."

Rep. Brian Harrison, a Midlothian Republican who voted for the bill, was blunter:

"In a million years, I never could have even contemplated that this would be used to fund what is effectively warrantless surveillance. Otherwise, I can't imagine it would have gotten unanimous support. I sure as hell wouldn't have voted for it if I knew some bureaucrat was going to redirect the money to Flock cameras."

Harrison also said he was "shocked and dismayed" that so few Republicans had spoken up, and said the governor should act. Rep. Mitch Little, a Lewisville Republican, told the Tribune the volume of data collected is "not something that is entertained, in my view, by the Fourth Amendment."

This is not a partisan complaint. The Democrat who wrote the bill, the Republican who carried it in the House, and a Republican who voted for it all say the same thing: the cameras were never part of the deal.

"There's nothing that they can tell us"

The board's chairman, Laredo Police Chief Miguel Rodriguez, told his own board in August 2023 that he hoped to use the fee money to "cover the entire state" with cameras.

By this year, a growing list of Texas cities and counties — Austin, Bandera, Hood County — had canceled their Flock contracts after residents objected. Rodriguez had an answer for that too. In April, discussing the DPS contract, he suggested putting state cameras on state roads inside the towns that had said no:

"I think that if for whatever reason you are within those jurisdictions that do not want Flock, let's get together with DPS, [so] that, you know, we can put those in state right-of-way. And there's nothing that they can tell us."

That is the chairman of a board whose members the governor appoints, explaining how to route around a city council that voted the other way. Rodriguez told the Tribune the state network provides a needed crime-fighting tool in areas hostile to the cameras.

The board's DPS member, Major Sharon Jones, who described herself as "pro Flock" and left the post on August 1, told a July grant meeting that the agency "must put a stamp on those who are spreading false information on license plate readers."

The misuse is not hypothetical

On August 21, an Angelina County grand jury indicted a Lufkin police officer on 100 counts of misusing official information, accusing him of using the area's Flock cameras to track 11 people for more than a year. Lufkin suspended its Flock program. In the past month alone, officers in at least six Texas departments and sheriff's offices have been put on leave, investigated, or charged over how they used the system.

Meanwhile, the crime the dollar was collected to fight is only part of what the cameras do. The authority's own report says the license plate readers were searched 62,000 times in 2025, and credits them with clearing about 1,660 catalytic converter theft cases. Police officials told the board the grant-funded cameras have stretched well past converter cases: a tire theft ring in Dallas, a hit and run, a "pattern of life assessment" built with Homeland Security to find a fugitive.

The pause arrived on deadline

Abbott's order came Thursday night. The Tribune had already sent his office questions about its findings. The story ran Friday.

Earlier that week, his Democratic opponent, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, had released an ad running in Texas college towns: "There's only 10,000 Flock cameras reading your plate, logging where you sleep and pray. No warrant needed in Greg Abbott's Texas."

And when Abbott's office finally responded, it did not say the state had made a mistake. The first thing it did was point somewhere else. "To the extent that cities get any funding for those cameras, most of it comes from the federal government. To the extent any funding comes from Texas agencies, those agencies are clarifying that those funds cannot be used for Flock cameras," spokesperson Andrew Mahaleris said. The Tribune's reporting is about the state's share: at least $30 million in grants from an agency the governor's appointees control, plus a separate $28.5 million Flock contract held by DPS.

On Glenn Beck's radio show Friday morning, Abbott described a "crackdown" already underway and said the cameras "are being reduced dramatically." The crackdown he was describing was city councils canceling contracts and a county grand jury handing up an indictment — other people's decisions, in the same weeks his own board was approving $3 million for 583 more cameras.

Texans have seen this exact sequence from Abbott before. He spent eleven years courting data centers and letting their tax break balloon, then announced a pause in August of an election year that rural Republicans in his own state called "smoke and mirrors." When he ordered a study to answer Texans' questions about those data centers, the state's grid operator told regulators it was aiming for December 10 — 37 days after Election Day. The pattern is the same each time: preside over the thing for years, stop it the month the voters are looking, and take credit for the stopping.

He knows what his agencies are doing

The most telling word in this story is Harrison's: "bureaucrat."

Abbott is not a governor who loses track of his agencies. In June 2018, he ordered state agencies to run proposed rules past his office before they are published for public comment — a level of control nothing in the Texas Government Code requires him to have. He appoints six of the seven people on the vehicle authority's board. That board voted on the Flock grants in public meetings, year after year, since 2023. Its chairman announced the plan to blanket the state in 2023.

And Abbott's interest in what Texans do and where they go is not new either. His own reelection campaign is running an app that reads your phone's address book and tells you which of your contacts are Democrats, how often they've voted since 2016, and whether they've voted yet this year.

What the record shows

Texas lawmakers unanimously added $1 to every car insurance policy in the state to fight catalytic converter theft, and the law they passed says the money can be used only for that. A board that Greg Abbott appoints six of the seven members to has spent at least $30 million of it on 3,200 AI cameras that log where Texans drive and let police nationwide search that record without a warrant — including a $15.9 million state contract meant in part to put cameras within reach of towns that had refused them. The Democrat who wrote the law, the Republican who sponsored it, and a Republican who voted for it all say nobody ever mentioned surveillance. Abbott stopped the spending on a Thursday night, after a reporter called for comment and days after his opponent put the cameras in a campaign ad.

Source

Ayden Runnels and Alex Ford, "Abbott blocks state agencies from spending money on Flock cameras" and "How a $1 Texas insurance fee funded thousands of Flock cameras", The Texas Tribune, August 28, 2026. Photo: A Flock camera records drivers on Allen Parkway near downtown Houston, Aug. 24, 2026, by Jon Shapley for The Texas Tribune.

Greg Abbott Said Texas Caught 6,500 Noncitizens on Its Voter Rolls. His Own Office Had Confirmed 581.

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 07:07:11 +0000

More than 1.2 million Texans are on something called the voter suspense list. That is more than 6% of the state's 18 million registered voters, and it is happening barely two months before the November 3 election.

The Dallas Morning News first reported the number, and it is not evenly spread. Dallas County has more than 129,000 suspended voters. Tarrant County has more than 73,000. Collin County and Denton County have nearly 56,000 each.

Many of the people on that list have no idea they are on it.

What "suspense" actually means

Being on the suspense list is not the same as being removed from the rolls. Here is the honest version.

Your county puts you on suspense when it cannot confirm your address. Usually that happens because a voter registration card or a jury summons came back in the mail marked undeliverable. New registration cards go out every two years to whatever address the county has on file. If you moved, or if the mail carrier got it wrong, or if you live somewhere the post office has trouble with, you can end up on the list without doing anything at all.

You can still vote while you are on it. You fill out a form called a statement of residence at the polling place. If you moved to a different county, it gets harder — you may have to vote in your old county or cast a provisional ballot that only counts if officials can find you on the rolls.

But the list is also the front end of a pipeline. Stay on suspense through two general elections without voting or updating your address, and you get cancelled.

The deadline to fix it is October 5. That is the same day registration closes for the November election. You can check and update your registration on the Texas Secretary of State's website, by mail, or in person at your county elections office. You will need your driver's license or ID number, your Social Security number, and your voter ID number.

If you live in Texas, stop reading and go check. Then come back, because the rest of this is about the two Republicans on the November ballot and what they have done with lists exactly like this one.

Greg Abbott turned removals into a press release

In August 2024, Greg Abbott put out a news release announcing that Texas had removed more than a million people from its voter rolls since he signed the state's 2021 election law. He listed the categories. The biggest single category in it was the suspense list — the same list 1.2 million Texans are sitting on right now. More than 463,000 of the removals he counted were people on that list.

The first item on his list was 6,500 noncitizens.

That is not what his own office had found. A joint investigation by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and Votebeat obtained the report the secretary of state's office actually gave the governor. That report identified 581 people as noncitizens — not 6,500.

So where did the rest come from? The secretary of state's office had separately told the governor's office how many people were dropped for not answering a letter asking about their citizenship. Abbott's release added the two numbers together and called the total noncitizens. By subtraction, roughly 5,900 of the 6,500 were people who never responded to a piece of mail.

Two days after the release went out, Abbott's office quietly edited it to insert the word "potential" in front of "noncitizens." The original number was already everywhere by then.

At least nine of them were American citizens

The reporters did not stop at the arithmetic. They tried to reach more than 70 of the people caught in the sweep, and confirmed at least nine U.S. citizens in three Texas counties who were wrongly labeled noncitizens or dropped from the rolls.

Jakylah Ockleberry, 21, of Travis County, was born in Texas. She produced her birth certificate and asked the reporters, "How would something like that happen?"
Justin Comer, 29, was born in Harris County and grew up in Montgomery County. He got flagged in 2023 by a jury-summons response that recorded him as not a citizen; he assumes he clicked the wrong button answering it online. "I've lived in Texas my whole life," he said. "It was never a question for me."
Diana Colon of El Paso County was born in Puerto Rico, which makes her a U.S. citizen by birth. She was removed after she apparently failed to answer a question about her citizenship. Her reaction: "That's crazy."

Nobody in this story committed fraud. They got mail they didn't answer, or a clerk checked a wrong box. That is the same kind of mix-up that puts people on the suspense list — an address the state can't confirm, a letter that didn't come back.

Ken Paxton spent a decade hunting the same problem and barely found it

The other man on the ballot in November is Ken Paxton, the attorney general running for U.S. Senate. He has built his career on chasing voter fraud.

The numbers on that career are thin. Paxton's office spent more than 22,000 staff hours on voter fraud in 2020 and resolved 16 prosecutions. Every one was a Harris County resident who put a false address on a registration form. Not one of them went to jail.

The ACLU of Texas found that at least 72% of the prosecutions his unit brought since 2015 appear to have been against Black and Latinx Texans, and at least 45% against Black and Latina women.

And Paxton has said out loud what he thinks is going on. In August 2024 he told a radio show: "There's a reason Joe Biden brought people here illegally. I'm convinced that that's how they're going to do it this time, they're going to use the illegal vote." He also claimed immigrants were being handed Social Security numbers at the border. There is no evidence of that, and no evidence that noncitizens cast ballots in any significant numbers.

What that looked like at one woman's front door

On the morning of August 20, 2024, Paxton's office executed search warrants in Frio, Atascosa and Bexar counties. One of them was served on Lidia Martinez, 87, a San Antonio native and a LULAC volunteer of 35 years who registers seniors to vote.

Up early as usual to water her plants, she answered a knock at her door at 6 a.m. She said nine officers with badges, riot shields and a warrant came in. She asked to change out of her nightgown and was told to sit in her dining room instead, with two officers standing over her, while the rest went through her house for four hours.

"They searched everything. My underwear, my brassieres, my nightgowns, everything. They went into my garage. They opened up my car. They went through my whole car, my whole garage, my refrigerator, my kitchen cabinets, everything."

For about half an hour she was made to stand outside where her neighbors could see her, still in her nightgown. Nobody would tell her what they were looking for.

They left with her appointment book, her cellphone, her laptop, her blank voter registration cards, and her certificate for completing a voter registration course.

Her family asked her to quit volunteering, because they were afraid she would go to jail.

"They're trying to stop us from registering voters, and helping, especially the seniors. If I don't go out there, and their voter registration is expired, some of them are in wheelchairs. They don't have a way to be going to the elections office."

The warrant on her home authorized seizing every electronic device in the house, opening election-related documents, and swabbing for DNA. At another home that morning, officers woke a family with two young daughters and searched for seven hours, leaving with nearly 65 cellphones and 41 computers and storage devices.

Paxton is also the man who voted six times from a Collin County address he appears to have moved out of, while running a tip line for Texans to report suspicious voting. Collin County, where he is registered, has nearly 56,000 people on the suspense list. Denton County, where reporting places his actual home, has nearly 56,000 more.

Then Texas handed the whole list to Washington

On December 23, 2025, the Texas Secretary of State's office gave the U.S. Justice Department the state's entire voter registration file — roughly 18.4 million voters, with dates of birth, driver's license numbers and the last four digits of Social Security numbers.

The Justice Department had asked all 50 states. Thirteen agreed to hand the data over voluntarily. Texas was one of them. The department has sued 23 states and Washington, D.C. for refusing. The stated purpose is to help states find and remove ineligible voters.

Texas is not alone in volunteering. In Pennsylvania, state treasurer Stacy Garrity would not say Trump lost in 2020 and said she would "absolutely" be more cooperative with the federal request for that state's rolls. And the same Justice Department has been warning local election officials they could face criminal prosecution over noncitizen voters — a problem research shows is vanishingly rare.

Why this election, specifically

Paxton is on the November ballot against Democratic state Representative James Talarico, and The New Republic notes Talarico holds a narrow polling edge. Abbott is on the same ballot, running for another term as governor.

A suspense list is not a purge, and 1.2 million suspended registrations are not 1.2 million lost votes. Most of those people can still vote if they show up and fill out a form. But every extra step is a place where someone gives up, and the two Republicans on the ballot have spent years showing what they do with a list of names the state says it cannot verify.

What the record shows

Greg Abbott announced that Texas had cut more than a million people from its voter rolls, and told the public 6,500 of them were noncitizens when his own office had confirmed 581 — a number he corrected only after it had circulated for two days. Reporters found at least nine American citizens among the people swept up. Ken Paxton's office burned 22,000 staff hours in 2020 to resolve 16 address cases, sent officers to search an 87-year-old volunteer's house for four hours, and he is now registered to vote at an address he appears to have moved out of. Texas gave 18.4 million voters' personal data to the Justice Department in December. And 1.2 million Texans have until October 5 to make sure their registration is in order.

Source

Reporting from the San Antonio Current by Stephanie Koithan and The New Republic. Photo: San Antonio Current.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jay Obernolte wrote the bill that does the preempting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carlos De La Cruz was outspent by his own backers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What it looks like where you live

None of this stays in Washington.

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

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

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

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

What the money shows

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

Ken Paxton Has Dodged Sworn Testimony for a Decade. Two Depositions Where He Couldn't Are Sealed in a Collin County Courthouse.

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:11:22 +0000

Ken Paxton has been Texas Attorney General since 2015. In that time he has been indicted, impeached, investigated by his own senior staff, and sued repeatedly. He has almost never had to answer a question about any of it under oath.

There are two known exceptions. Both are sealed.

On Wednesday, August 26, 2026, the campaign of Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico said it would ask a Collin County court to unseal them, as the Texas Tribune's Kayla Guo reported.

What the depositions are from

The case is a tangle, so here it is in order.

In 2016, North Texas businessman Charles Loper III — the man who oversees Paxton's blind trust — sued an energy company called Unity Resources and two of its investors, Byron Cook and Joel Hochberg. Loper accused them of defrauding him, in part through a scheme to profit off a Unity investment fund.

Cook and Hochberg fired back with an accusation of their own: that Loper and Paxton were conspiring to smear them because they were set to be key witnesses in a separate criminal securities fraud case against Paxton.

Paxton is not a bystander in the Unity story. He had served as a lawyer and a board member for Unity, and he invested in it.

In that separate criminal case, Cook and Hochberg accused Paxton of steering them into investing in a McKinney technology company without telling them he was collecting a commission from the firm. He was indicted in 2015. Prosecutors dropped the charges before trial in 2024, under a deal that required him to pay restitution and take legal ethics courses.

Paxton sat for depositions in the Loper case in 2019 and 2022. As the Tribune put it, these "mark exceedingly rare occasions of Paxton being forced to answer questions about his conduct under oath."

What one of them appears to show

The transcripts have never been made public. But the Wall Street Journal reported on the 2019 deposition earlier this year, and what it described is why this filing exists.

According to the Journal's account, Paxton acknowledged in that deposition that he had provided records from Unity — his former client — to his own lawyer, Mitch Little, who was at the time representing Loper in the suit against Unity.

Paxton's former client's records, handed to the lawyer suing his former client.

Little is now a Republican state lawmaker from Lewisville. He also represented Paxton at his 2023 impeachment trial on bribery and abuse of office charges, where the Republican-controlled state Senate acquitted him.

Both men dispute the framing. Paxton campaign spokesperson Nick Maddux called the Journal's reporting "blatant lies" and a violation of a court order. Little told the Journal there was no conflict of interest and that the records Paxton shared were not privileged.

Why they've stayed sealed

Not because a court weighed the public interest and decided against it.

The Collin County district judge presiding over the case, Republican Cynthia Wheless, put the matter on ice for more than four years. The case settled in 2023. The transcripts never came out.

What Talarico's lawyers are arguing

From a draft of the filing:

"The right of Texans to see these depositions matters more than ever. Existing public reporting suggests that Paxton's testimony raises substantial ethical questions. Texans have the right to know what Paxton said under oath in these proceedings and see the whole story before they go to the polls in November."

They argue the issue is "of immense public importance given Paxton's candidacy in a sharply competitive election for U.S. Senate," and that the reporting indicates the transcripts "directly implicate Paxton's fitness for office."

The legal hook is a Texas law entitling the public to access discovery — the evidence exchanged before trial, depositions included — when it concerns matters with "a probable adverse effect upon" either "the administration of public office, or the operation of government."

This is a campaign filing by an opponent, and it should be read as one. But the underlying question isn't partisan: a man who wants to be a United States senator has answered questions under oath on two known occasions in ten years, and Texans aren't allowed to see either answer.

The pattern

Avoiding sworn testimony is not incidental to Paxton's career. It is close to the method.

Texas Republicans nominated him anyway. When they did, we walked through the record they signed off on — the indictment, the impeachment, the whistleblower suit brought by his own top deputies. His own office has offered a man who admitted molesting a boy a one-day jail sentence while he campaigned against local prosecutors as soft on crime. And after the primary, Republican mega-donors were reluctant enough about his scandals that he was scrambling to win them back.

Every one of those stories ends the same way: the record is public, the testimony isn't.

What the records show

Ken Paxton sat for depositions in 2019 and 2022 in a securities fraud dispute involving a company he had served as lawyer, board member and investor — two of the only times in a decade of indictment, impeachment and investigation that he has answered questions under oath. The Wall Street Journal reported the 2019 transcript shows he gave a former client's records to his own attorney, who was suing that client; Paxton's campaign called that report "blatant lies." The judge sat on the case for more than four years and it settled in 2023 with the transcripts sealed. On August 26, 2026, his Senate opponent's campaign said it would ask a Collin County court to open them before Texans vote in November.

Source

Talarico campaign will ask court to unseal Paxton depositions — Kayla Guo, The Texas Tribune, August 26, 2026.

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

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

Joe Wilson wrote it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ohio said no in 2011. Jim Jordan signed anyway.

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

Jim Jordan is Ohio's signature on this bill.

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

Pennsylvania sent five signatures on a law it never wanted

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

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

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

What it costs a paycheck

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

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

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

This is not a one-off

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

Greg Abbott Ordered a Data Center Audit to Answer Texans' Questions. The Answers Arrive 37 Days After They Vote.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:03:45 +0000

On Thursday, August 20, 2026, Texas regulators quietly settled the only question about Greg Abbott's data center crackdown that actually matters.

Not what the audit will find. When.

The state's grid operator told the Public Utility Commission it aims to hand in its report on the roughly 300 data center projects lined up to plug into the Texas grid by December 10. The commission signed off on that schedule.

Election Day in Texas is November 3.

So Texans will vote on whether to give Greg Abbott a fourth term 37 days before the state tells them what it learned about the industry he spent eleven years bringing here.

What He Said He Was Doing

On August 3, Abbott sent a letter to the two agencies that run the Texas grid and told them to stop approving new data center hookups until the state audited how much power and water these things use, what tax breaks they're getting, and who actually owns them.

We laid out his record the next day: he branded Texas "the epicenter of AI development," stood next to Google's CEO to announce a $40 billion buildout, and presided over a sales tax break for data centers that started out costing the state an estimated $5.4 million in 2014 and, by this year, was letting $1.3 billion a year go uncollected.

Then, in August of an election year, he announced he was the one protecting us from all of it.

This week he described that as a virtue.

"Texans appreciate the level-headed approach that I've brought to the data center equation."

The Reason He Gave for the Pause Is the Reason to Doubt It

Abbott's own explanation for why the audit was necessary is that the data center companies won't tell the state anything.

"We got less than a 10% response, so that would be like giving you a 100-piece puzzle and saying solve it using only nine pieces of the puzzle," he said this week. "That's the situation ERCOT was in, and it was untenable for them to move forward with such lack of information."

He's describing something real. It also did not start this month, and he has known about it for a while.

Texas already has a law on the books requiring data centers to report their water use. The Texas Water Development Board found 341 data centers in the state and surveyed all of them last year. About 17% wrote back. Two years earlier the board had counted 22 data centers in Texas. By last year it was 341 — and five out of six of them ignored a survey they are legally required to answer.

Republican lawmakers found out in June and were furious about it. Rep. Brad Buckley, at a House hearing:

"So we're building a state water plan off of a 17% response rate. Is that an overstatement? I mean, that is a terrible response rate."

Rep. Trent Ashby, at the same hearing, called the state's reliance on those numbers a "broken system":

"When you're talking about massive water usage, especially groundwater, and the state can't calculate how much water is being [used], I think we can all understand why Texans are rightfully concerned about making sure that we have enough water ... to meet our future demand."

Rep. Cody Harris said the industry's habit of refusing to answer anybody is exactly why people are angry:

"When new developers like Diode Ventures enter a residential neighborhood intent on building a new data center and refuses to do any community town halls, refuses to discuss their water and electricity uses, and refuses to testify before this committee, then Texans rightfully get upset."

Harris's conclusion: "The transparency of utilization of resources shouldn't be optional."

Here's the part that shows how seriously Texas actually takes this. Blowing off that water survey is a crime — a Class C misdemeanor. But the Water Development Board doesn't enforce it. Enforcement would have to come from a local prosecutor or some other agency. So nobody does it.

A law nobody enforces isn't a law. It's a suggestion. The companies figured that out.

So His Fix Is to Ask Them Again

Knowing all of that, look at what the audit actually is.

The grid operator will send information requests to the big projects in late August and early September. Then, possibly, more rounds through October and November. Then it writes up what it got and files the report on December 10.

That's it. The same companies that ignored a legally required state survey are being asked more questions, on a longer timeline, by an agency with no more power to make them answer than the water board had.

The chairman of the Public Utility Commission, Thomas Gleeson, described the community-impact survey that goes with it in three words: "a fact-finding mission."

Nothing in that schedule creates a penalty. Nothing in it makes a single company hand over a number it doesn't want to hand over. And it reports back after the votes are counted.

The Calendar Keeps Doing Abbott Favors

Notice what the pause actually moved.

Before Abbott's letter, the grid operator expected to finish its study of that first group of projects — and start approving them — in April 2027. Abbott's order pushed the paperwork to December and the approvals to some unnamed date after that. The projects were already months away from getting the green light. Nothing was about to be built in October that isn't going to be built now.

Meanwhile, the Texas Legislature doesn't come back until January. Anything lawmakers pass on data centers — ending the tax break, setting water rules, deciding where these things can go — wouldn't take effect until well after that. Until then, the rules are the generous ones Abbott presided over.

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, a Republican elected statewide the same year Abbott was, says that is the entire point. He accused Abbott of giving "a wink and a nod to his data center people saying 'Hey, you have plenty of time to get grandfathered in, then we'll put the screws on all your competition.'" Miller called the crackdown "smoke and mirrors and campaign fluff to gain votes." He says he asked Abbott for a one-year pause, for a special session, and for the return of campaign money from data center companies, and got nothing back.

That money is not hypothetical. Black Mountain Power, a Fort Worth firm building a 430-acre data center campus in southeast Fort Worth, gave Abbott's campaign $500,000 in November 2025 — and its founder and CEO gave another $500,000 in March 2026.

Why the Delay Costs You Either Way

While the state gathers facts, the line keeps growing. Roughly 90% of everything now waiting to connect to the Texas grid is a data center.

Somebody pays to build the power plants and the giant transmission lines that serve all that new demand. Across the country, that somebody has turned out to be regular customers — the people whose only role in the AI boom is the bill at the end of the month. In Texas it's the same grid that collapsed in 2021 and killed at least 210 people.

The water is worse, because you can't build more of it. The state's long-range water plan is being written off a 17% response rate, and the industry drawing from the aquifers still won't say how much it's taking.

Abbott's Own Voters Already Called It

Rural Texans didn't need the December 10 filing date to figure this out. They'd reached the verdict weeks ago — lifelong Republicans in Hood County and Tom Green County describing the pause as "smoke and mirrors" and "just covering his butt." One woman who says she can't remember ever voting for a Democrat put it plainly: "He sold Texans out to big business, and I just don't trust him anymore."

His Democratic opponent, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, has spent the campaign trying to seize on that backlash.

An audit that reports after the election isn't information. It's a receipt handed to you on the way out.

Greg Abbott had eleven years to ask these questions. He asked them in August of an election year, and set the answers to arrive in December. We deserve better.

Source

Benjamin Wermund, Greg Abbott's data center audit won't be done before the election, The Dallas Morning News, August 20, 2026. Photo: Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman.

Tampa Electric's Rates Are Up 86%. Ohio's Bills Are Up 53%. These Five Republicans Took the Utilities' Money and Handed Data Centers the Grid.

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:58:01 +0000

An AI data center is, from the power grid's point of view, a small city that never sleeps and never leaves.

A typical new one runs 100 to 1,000 megawatts — a load equal to a new neighborhood of 80,000 to 800,000 average homes, around the clock. Hundreds of them are being built. And the grid they're plugging into is the same one your house is on.

That leaves exactly one question, and it is not a technical one: who pays to build the extra power?

There are only two possible answers. Either the companies that want the electricity pay the full cost of the poles, wires, plants and substations needed to serve them — or the cost gets spread across everybody's bill, and your neighbor with a fixed income helps finance a server farm.

We've already written about the Republicans who accused their own constituents of working for China for objecting to a data center, and the eight who took the industry's money and then discovered concerns.

This one is about the money coming out of your account every month.

Greg Abbott gave away $3.2 billion and put the bill on the grid

Texas already knows what a fragile grid costs. In 2021 it collapsed and hundreds of people died.

Since then, Greg Abbott has branded Texas "the epicenter of AI development," personally announcing deals like a $40 billion Google build-out.

What he gave them:

A sales-tax exemption the comptroller's office says will cost $3.2 billion in forgone sales-tax revenue over two years — already one of the state's costliest incentive programs, and soon to be the most expensive of its kind in the nation.
A regulatory door held open. ERCOT expects Texas power demand to nearly double by 2030, with large-load projects wanting up to 56,458 more megawatts queued for its approval. Texas now has more data centers under construction than any other state — 142, against Virginia's 141.

What Texans got:

The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that data-center demand could push wholesale electricity prices at ERCOT's North hub roughly 79% higher than otherwise expected by 2027.
A $33 billion transmission build-out — ERCOT's own estimate for its 765-kV expansion plan — that shifts long-term costs onto ratepayers.

And now, in an election year, with voters in both parties turning on Big Tech, Abbott has suddenly proposed new restrictions and started saying data centers "must operate in ways that reduce costs for residential electricity customers."

He invited the build-out. He's campaigning against the consequences.

Ashley Moody spent six years as Florida's top lawyer and never once fought a rate hike

Between December 2020 and January 2026, Florida households watched this happen:

Tampa Electric: up 86%
Duke Energy: up 49%
Florida Power & Light: up 45%

Ashley Moody was Florida's Attorney General for six years, until January 2025 — an office with standing to walk into a utility rate case and fight on behalf of customers.

She never did it. Not once.

That is not how the job used to work. As the Florida Phoenix documented, previous Florida attorneys general — Republicans Bill McCollum and Charlie Crist among them — intervened against rate increases and won multi-year rate freezes for customers.

A possible explanation sits in her own filings. Moody has taken $431,000 in career campaign money from Florida's investor-owned utilities. This cycle she has raised more from electric utilities than any other Senate candidate in the country.

Florida just passed a data-center law, SB 484, that is supposed to make big customers pay their own way. Her party's front-runner for governor promised it means rates "will not go up." PolitiFact checked that promise and found the law directs a process, not a result.

Vivek Ramaswamy is running for the office that picks who pays

Ohio electricity bills have climbed 53% since 2021. In the year ending May 31, AEP's Ohio Power disconnected 15% of its customers — the worst rate of any utility in the state.

Here is what Ohio's governor actually does: appoints all five members of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and designates its chair. That's the body that sets electricity rates and decides who pays for data centers.

Vivek Ramaswamy is running for that job, and the industry has noticed. Utility, gas, oil and solar PACs gave his campaign $97,468.91 during 2026. AEP's own political committee gave $17,000 of it.

His opponent, Amy Acton, received nothing from those PACs.

And when a watchdog exposed the utility money in May, it didn't stop — it doubled. Another $65,603 arrived over the following ten weeks, from a wider set of companies. The largest checks landed on July 31, the final day of the reporting period: $16,615.67 from the Utility Scale Solar Energy Coalition of Ohio — matching Ohio's per-election ceiling to the penny — plus $16,615 from Vistra's employee PAC and $10,000 from Diversified Gas & Oil.

The man who would appoint every rate regulator in Ohio is being funded by the companies those regulators oversee.

Rick Jackson owns a piece of one and wants them to pay no property tax

Rick Jackson, the billionaire running for governor of Georgia, has an unusually direct stake in this fight.

At the Georgia Chamber of Commerce's luncheon in August, he told more than a thousand business leaders that counties should be able to host data centers with no property tax bill at all.

He is personally invested in a data center in Texas.

Property tax is the money that pays for the county's schools, roads, fire department and water system — the local services a data center's construction and power demand put pressure on. Jackson's proposal is that the facility contributes nothing to any of it, and everyone else in the county covers the difference.

At the same luncheon, he ruled out expanding Medicaid in a state where 624,000 Georgians are projected to lose health coverage by 2034.

Gregg Hull's answer for a state running out of water is to cool them with fracking waste

New Mexico is drying up. At an Albuquerque Journal town hall on May 11, Gregg Hull, the Republican running for governor, faced a flurry of questions about whether he supports a moratorium on data centers. He said he is not opposed to them. What the state should explore instead, he said, is requiring developers to cool their servers with alternative water — brackish water, or produced water from oil and gas operations.

"I think there's some very creative ways we can work with these industries. Every time we tell an industry that we don't want them here or we push them out of the state without coming up with a way that we can actually work with those industries, we're sending a message out to the rest of the United States that we don't want those opportunities here."

Produced water is the wastewater that comes back up out of an oil and gas well. New Mexico's Water Quality Control Commission spent 18 months studying it and concluded it "contains hundreds of known and unknown chemicals, many of which are toxic to human health and the environment" — that no technology can treat it safely at scale, and that the state has no surface water quality standards for at least 180 of the potentially toxic chemicals in it. In May 2025 the commission banned discharging it into New Mexico's ground and surface water.

That ban is now under attack. In May 2026 — the same month Hull was answering the Journal's questions — the commission voted 7–4 to open a rulemaking on an industry petition that would let the wastewater back into surface and ground water and into agriculture.

Hull's own platform is on the industry's side of that fight: rules on produced water handling, he writes, are "overly complex and drive up costs without clear safety benefits. I support streamlining these rules so water can be safely treated and reused only within the industry while protecting our freshwater resources." And the next governor appoints the Environment Department that petitioned for the ban in the first place.

So: a state running out of water, a candidate for governor who won't back a pause on data centers, and an answer that points them at the fracking industry's leftovers — from a man who wants the rules on that waste streamlined.

The pattern

Five states, five Republicans, and the same arrangement underneath all of it.

The tech companies get the tax exemptions, the interconnection, the water and the political cover. The politicians get the ribbon-cuttings and the checks — $431,000 to Moody, $97,468 to Ramaswamy, a data center stake in Jackson's own portfolio, $3.2 billion in Abbott's giveaways.

And the cost of the extra generation, the extra transmission, the extra everything lands in the one place nobody negotiated on behalf of: the line at the bottom of your bill.

None of this is an argument against data centers. They will get built. Somebody will build them.

The argument is about who pays — and every one of these five had a chance to say "the companies that want the power," and said something else instead.

You will find out what they chose the same way most people do. When the bill comes.

Sources

The build-out. The scale of a single facility is EPRI's, from Powering Intelligence 2026, executive summary, updated Feb. 25, 2026: "A typical new data center of 100 to 1000 megawatts represents a load equal to that of a new neighborhood of 80,000 to 800,000 average homes."

Texas. The 2021 blackout death toll is from Andrew Weber and Mose Buchele, "Texas has an official death count from the 2021 blackout. The true toll may never be known," KUT via Texas Standard, Aug. 5, 2022 — the state's official count is 246, which researchers call a severe undercount. Paul Cobler and Apurva Mahajan, "Texas losing a billion dollars a year on data center tax break," Texas Tribune, April 8, 2026 — the comptroller's $3.2 billion two-year estimate, the tax break as "soon to be the most expensive of its kind in the nation," and the 142-to-141 count of data centers under construction against Virginia's. The interconnection queue and ERCOT's demand forecast are from Kayla Guo, "Data centers are booming in Texas. What does that mean for the grid?" Texas Tribune, Jan. 24, 2025. The price forecast is Robert Walton, "Data center demand spike could drive 79% ERCOT price hike in 2027: EIA," Utility Dive, March 16, 2026 — EIA's 78.9% is for the ERCOT North hub under a high-demand scenario. ERCOT's $32.99 billion estimate for its 765-kV Strategic Transmission Expansion Plan is reported in Paige Feild, "Permian Basin Power Fix Becomes $33 Billion Statewide Project," Texas Scorecard, Oct. 28, 2025. Abbott's directive to the PUC and ERCOT: Sarah Davis, "Abbott seeks new limits on Texas data centers," The Hill, June 11, 2026. The "epicenter of AI development" quote and the $40 billion Google announcement are from the governor's own press release.

Florida. Mitch Perry, "Florida's GOP AGs used to intervene in utility rate cases, but no longer," Florida Phoenix, June 17, 2026 — the Tampa Electric, Duke and FPL increases from December 2020 to January 2026 (Food & Water Watch), Moody's $431,000 in career money from the investor-owned utilities (CLEO Institute), her lead among Senate candidates in electric-utility fundraising (OpenSecrets), and the McCollum and Crist rate-case interventions. On SB 484: Samantha Putterman, "Donalds says FL law will prevent electric bill hikes from data centers. That's not guaranteed," PolitiFact, Aug. 7, 2026.

Ohio. Bonnie Lucas, "Ramaswamy takes nearly $100K from energy PACs as bills soar," TiffinOhio.net, Aug. 6, 2026 — the $97,468.91 total, the $65,603.24 that arrived after the Energy and Policy Institute flagged the giving, the July 31 checks, the governor's five PUCO appointments, Ohio's 53% rise in electricity bills since 2021, and AEP Ohio Power's 15% disconnection rate, first reported by Canary Media.

Georgia. Ross Williams, "Bottoms, Jackson offer competing visions on data centers, Medicaid expansion at business luncheon," Georgia Recorder, Aug. 5, 2026 — the luncheon, the property-tax proposal, the Medicaid answer and Jackson's stake in a Texas data center. His net worth is from Forbes. The 566,000 projection is the Joint Economic Committee's fact sheet on district-level impacts of health care cuts.

New Mexico. Joshua Bowling, "NM GOP governor candidate Gregg Hull touts experience leading, growing Rio Rancho," Source New Mexico, May 12, 2026, reporting the Albuquerque Journal town hall of May 11. On produced water, the Western Environmental Law Center's releases of May 14, 2025 and May 12, 2026. Hull's regulatory position is from his own campaign site.

Brandon Herrera Says a $174,000 Congressional Salary Would Be a '90+% Pay Cut.' He Told the House Clerk He Earned $80,000.

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:40:10 +0000

Every candidate for Congress has to file one document telling the public where their money comes from. It is called a financial disclosure. It exists so voters can see who might own a piece of the person asking for their vote.

Brandon Herrera filed his. It says he earned $80,000 in 2024.

Herrera also says he is a millionaire. He has said it repeatedly. He told the San Antonio Express-News earlier this year that his businesses have brought in around $2 million in revenue. And he has said that taking a seat in the U.S. House — which pays $174,000 a year — would be a "90+% pay cut."

Do that arithmetic. If $174,000 is a 90-percent-plus cut from what he makes now, he is making at least $1.74 million a year.

He told the House clerk $80,000.

He said he'd fix it. That was in July.

Punchbowl News flagged the $80,000 figure in early July. Herrera's campaign said at the time that his team was working to submit a revised report "within the coming weeks."

That was roughly six weeks ago. As the Express-News reported on August 21, the corrected filing still isn't in, with under three months to Election Day.

His campaign manager, Kimmie Gonzalez, now explains the original filing this way: it was prepared by a friend of Herrera's who "did not have the experience needed for this level of reporting." The campaign has since hired the Washington law firm Holtzman Vogel to redo it.

Asked when the fixed version arrives, Gonzalez said she has no date and no timeline. Just "soon."

What the filing does and doesn't say

The disclosure lists his earned income as coming from The AK Guy, Inc. — his Kalashnikov-style firearms company, which Herrera has described as a passion project. He has also said "ninety-nine percent of my income comes from other sources."

The form does show he was paid more than $5,000 by each of seven different entities, including Google AdSense payments for YouTube, creator payouts, and merchandise sales. His YouTube channel has 4.26 million subscribers.

And here is the part that ought to stop people: he disclosed no assets at all.

Not a retirement account. Not a stake in any of the companies he owns — the gun manufacturer, the podcast, the streaming service Pepperbox TV, the merchandise retailer, the energy drink company.

A man who calls himself a millionaire reported not a single asset to the federal government.

This is also not the first time. His 2023 filing for this same seat reported the prior year's income at about $84,000.

"Is this candidate a truth teller or not?"

Doug Spencer, a University of Colorado law professor who studies campaign finance regulation, told the Express-News that candidates do often resubmit filings after catching a mistake — but that Herrera's case looks like more than a clerical slip.

His framing of the question is the right one:

"It's really an error that highlights the very nature of who this candidate is. Is this candidate a truth teller or not? Is this candidate wealthy or not?"

Both answers can't be yes. If the filing is accurate, then the millionaire talk and the "90+% pay cut" line were not true. If the millionaire talk is accurate, then the document he filed with the House of Representatives is not.

And here is the wrinkle that makes the delay matter: Herrera is legally required to file a disclosure, but as a candidate he is not required to refile it when problems turn up. Nothing forces the corrected version out before Election Day. Voters in Texas's 23rd District may well cast their ballots with the $80,000 number as the only official statement of his finances they ever get.

This keeps happening with his money

Herrera's finances have been hard to see through all year.

The Campaign Legal Center found that 99.4% of his campaign's spending went to a single company — one with no website and no registration anywhere we could find. Millions of dollars, one vendor, no paper trail.

Now his personal disclosure and his own account of his income sit something like $1.6 million apart, with no assets listed, and the fix has been "coming soon" for six weeks.

The district he wants to represent stretches from San Antonio through Uvalde and across a huge piece of West Texas. It opened up when Rep. Tony Gonzales stepped down this year. Republicans nominated Herrera — and in doing so, put a district Trump won by 15 points into play.

The people of the 23rd are entitled to know who pays the man who wants to vote for them. That is the entire reason the form exists.

He's had since July. It's a form.

Source

Brandon Herrera says he's a millionaire. His filings don't show it. — San Antonio Express-News, August 21, 2026. Photo: Katina Zentz/San Antonio Express-News.