MAGA Report Cards — Virginia

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.

Morgan Griffith Hasn't Held an In-Person Town Hall in Over Ten Years. Now He Won't Debate His Opponent Either.

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:16:10 +0000

On Monday, August 24, 2026, Joy Powers wrote to the man she is running against and asked him to debate her three times: once in far Southwest Virginia, once in the New River Valley, and once on the eastern edge of the district. She proposed that the two campaigns jointly pick the hosts, the venues, the moderators and the format, with the questions coming from voters.

On Friday, September 4, Morgan Griffith wrote back and said no.

"I do not need a jointly negotiated format to tell voters what I believe. They already know. I would rather spend the fall listening to them and fighting for them than trading rehearsed lines with you on a stage."

His campaign shared the letter with The Roanoke Times, which reported the refusal on September 6.

"They already know" is doing a lot of work

Griffith has represented Virginia's 9th District since January 2011 — fifteen years, and he is in his eighth term. His claim is that voters in Southwest Virginia already know where he stands, so a debate would add nothing.

There is a straightforward test of that claim, and Griffith has been failing it for a decade.

In March 2025, he told the Kingsport Times News, in writing, "I have not done brick-and-mortar town halls in more than ten years." He called in-person town halls inefficient and dismissed complaints about their absence as "Democratic talking points." He prefers telephone town halls — where constituents without a landline have to call a district office in advance to opt in.

His predecessor in that seat, Rick Boucher, told the same paper that "most years while I was in Congress, I held 70 or more in-person town halls across the district."

When constituents in Abingdon got tired of waiting, they held their own town hall in April 2025 and left a chair empty for him. He did not come. In February 2025, about 20 people turned up at his staff's monthly office hours at the Bedford Municipal Building to demand one in person. "He does not come to the district, he does not listen to his constituents," the organizer, Karen Nuzzo, told WSET. Griffith was in Washington; his staffers took notes.

So the record is: no in-person town halls for more than ten years, no appearance at the one his constituents organized for him, and now no debates.

He asked for details, then said no to them

There is one more piece worth putting in order, because it undercuts his stated reason.

When a reporter asked him about the debate challenge at a Virginia Tech event on August 28, Griffith said "one of the problems" was that Powers' challenge lacked specifics.

"Where are they going to be? Who is the moderator going to be? What's the format? What's going to happen? I mean, all of this has to be negotiated."

Powers' letter had already said the two campaigns "should jointly agree on hosts, venues, moderators, and format, with questions coming directly from voters across the Ninth District." That is an offer to negotiate exactly the things he said needed negotiating.

A week later he turned it down on the grounds that he did "not need a jointly negotiated format."

The safe seat is the point

The 9th is the most conservative congressional district in Virginia. Griffith won it in 2024 by 45 percentage points. He has also raised nearly six times more money in 2026 than all three of his Democratic challengers combined, the Roanoke Times has reported.

That is the actual answer. He does not have to show up, so he does not.

Powers, a 34-year-old cattle farmer from Bedford County who is new to politics, put it this way in her response:

"After 16 years in Washington, he should be able to stand in front of the people he represents and answer for his record. A debate is not a favor to me. It is something he and I owe to the people asking us to represent them."

Answering for the record is the part that costs something. In July, eight school-based health clinics closed across his district, and Virginia's community health centers wrote to him asking him to intervene — he chairs the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health. We wrote about that letter last month. Those are the questions a moderator asks and a telephone town hall screener does not have to.

The short version

Morgan Griffith has told his constituents in writing that he has not held an in-person town hall in more than ten years, skipped the empty-chair town hall they organized for him in 2025, and on September 4, 2026 declined all three debates his opponent proposed. He has held the seat for fifteen years, won it last time by 45 points, and has out-raised his challengers by roughly six to one. His stated reason for refusing to debate is that voters already know what he believes.

Source

Rep. Morgan Griffith turns down debates with 9th District challenger Powers by Ben Orner, The Roanoke Times, September 6, 2026.

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).

John McGuire Told a TV Station 'I Don't Even Do Trades.' His Own Filings Report Ten — Including Nvidia, Bought Nine Days Earlier, Before Anyone Knew About Its $12.9 Billion AI Deal.

Sun, 06 Sep 2026 05:49:04 +0000

On August 27, 2026, John McGuire sat down with ABC13 in Lynchburg. His Democratic opponent, Tom Perriello, had accused him of insider trading. McGuire wanted an apology before he would agree to a debate.

Here is what he said:

"I don't even do trades."

Nine days earlier, on August 18, between $1,001 and $15,000 of Nvidia stock had been bought in the retirement account McGuire discloses for his spouse.

He disclosed that purchase in early September, in a filing with the Clerk of the House. The next day, Nvidia confirmed it was buying the AI company Hugging Face for $12.9 billion — the second-largest acquisition in the company's history, after the $20 billion purchase of Groq's assets.

The timeline

The order matters, so let's lay it out plainly.

August 18, 2026 — Nvidia stock is bought in the account McGuire discloses.
The weekend before August 26 — Business Insider reports that Hugging Face is drawing takeover interest. This is the first the public hears of it.
August 26 — The Information reports Nvidia has agreed to the deal. TechCrunch picks it up that night.
August 27 — McGuire tells ABC13, "I don't even do trades."
September 2 — Nvidia signs the definitive agreement, per its own filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
September 3 — Nvidia announces the $12.9 billion purchase publicly.

The purchase came before any of it was public. Not by a day. By four days — and by eight before Nvidia was named as the buyer.

We are not saying he broke the law

We said this the last time we wrote about McGuire's trades, and it is still true. There is no evidence he traded on information the public didn't have. The purchase was disclosed. Buying Nvidia in August 2026 was, frankly, what half the country was doing.

The problem is not the trade. The problem is the sentence.

"I don't even do trades" is not a defense, a spin, or a difference of opinion. It is a claim about a documented fact, and the documents are filed under his own name with the House of Representatives.

Ten trades, eight companies

The Augusta Free Press has been going through McGuire's disclosures all summer, and Nvidia is not an isolated entry. The filings he has signed since June show:

Dell — sold on June 4, 2026.
Meta — bought on June 4, 2026.
SpaceX — bought on June 15, 2026, three days after the company went public.
BlackRock — sold on July 7, July 10 and July 14, 2026.
Applied Materials — bought on July 15, 2026.
Palo Alto Networks — sold on July 31, 2026.
Apple — sold on August 18, 2026, the same day as the Nvidia purchase.

That is seven different companies in under three months, and Nvidia makes eight. Every one of them is marked "SP" on the form — the spouse — in a Merrill Lynch retirement or brokerage account that McGuire is required by law to report and does report, over his own signature. According to Quiver Quantitative, his net worth has risen by roughly $390,000 since he announced his run for Virginia's 5th District in 2024.

A person who does not do trades does not file ten of them.

The committees make it worse

McGuire sits on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, including its subcommittees dealing with cybersecurity, information technology and military affairs. He also sits on House Armed Services.

Those are the panels that write and review the federal technology and defense policy that Nvidia, SpaceX and Palo Alto Networks all live inside. Nvidia's chips are the subject of export-control fights, federal AI procurement, and national-security reviews that run straight through the committees he serves on.

Nobody outside the room can tell what he knew or when. That is exactly the point. It is why ethics groups keep saying members should not own individual stocks in industries they oversee, and why we have now counted 45 Republicans on this site who couldn't even file their trades on time.

McGuire filed his on time. He just told a television audience they didn't exist.

The debate he won't have

The whole exchange happened because McGuire is refusing to debate Tom Perriello until Perriello apologizes for raising the trades.

"Like I said, if he wants to publicly apologize for telling the people of the Fifth that I did insider trading, we'll have that discussion."

So the condition McGuire has set for debating his opponent is an apology for describing his stock trading — which he then denied doing, while his own filings said otherwise.

Voters in Virginia's 5th District are not getting a debate. They are getting a demand for an apology, built on a statement that isn't true.

What the filings show

Nvidia stock was bought in the account McGuire discloses on August 18, 2026, about a week before the public learned Nvidia was buying Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. Nine days after that purchase, he told a Lynchburg television station "I don't even do trades," while his own House filings recorded ten trades across eight companies since June — including stock in firms regulated by the committees he sits on. He is refusing to debate his opponent until his opponent apologizes for bringing it up.

Source

Chris Graham, John McGuire bought NVIDIA stock before NVIDIA made a $12.9 billion AI deal, Augusta Free Press (September 5, 2026). Photo: Payllik/Adobe Stock and The Old Major/Shutterstock.
Chris Graham, John McGuire fights back at insider trading jab: 'I don't even do trades', Augusta Free Press (August 28, 2026).

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

Rob Wittman Bragged About Voting 60 Times to Repeal the Affordable Care Act. Asked This Week Whether He'd Vote to Repeal It Again, He Wouldn't Say.

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 06:45:32 +0000

Back in 2017, Rob Wittman was proud of the number. He had voted to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act 60 times, and he said so.

Nearly a decade later, on January 8, 2026, he did something different. He was one of just 17 Republicans in the entire House to vote for a three-year extension of the ACA's enhanced premium subsidies. The bill passed 230 to 196 over the objections of Speaker Mike Johnson. Then the Senate let it die, and the subsidies stayed expired.

Virginia Mercury's Charlotte Rene Woods put the two facts next to each other this week and asked Wittman the obvious follow-up: would he back a future repeal effort?

He didn't answer.

What he said instead

Asked to explain the January vote, Wittman gave a reason about his own constituents. "I did not believe families should face dramatic increases in their health insurance costs without a transition," he said.

Asked whether he'd vote to repeal the law again, he offered a paragraph of goals instead of a yes or a no — competition, patient choice, price transparency, "greater control over their healthcare decisions."

That is not a small dodge. The whole question voters in Virginia's 1st District have to answer this November is which Rob Wittman they are electing: the one who counted 60 repeal votes as an accomplishment, or the one who cast a single vote the other way nine years later. He was asked directly and he would not say.

University of Virginia's Larry Sabato read the January vote as a calculation rather than a conversion. Wittman's district, he said, is "competitive enough that he can't stick to (President Donald) Trump and GOP congressional positions 100% of the time."

The vote came after the damage was locked in

Timing matters here, and it does not flatter him.

The enhanced subsidies expired on December 31, 2025. Wittman's vote to extend them came on January 8, 2026 — eight days after they were already gone, in a bill his own party's leadership opposed and the Senate never brought to a vote. A similar measure had already failed in the Senate on December 11, when a cloture motion on S. 3385 was rejected 51 to 48.

Since last year, 94,000 Virginians have dropped their ACA insurance. That is the number of people who looked at what a plan cost without the subsidies and walked away.

Nationally, about 2.6 million people have lost ACA coverage as the same math played out in nearly every state — New Mexico, which replaced the federal subsidies with its own, was the only one where enrollment went up. Virginia's 94,000 is Virginia's share of a bill that Congress chose not to pay.

The other health care vote he did cast

While the subsidy vote was one vote against his party, Wittman's vote on Trump's budget bill was one with it — and it is the vote with the bigger price tag.

He and Representative Jen Kiggans both pushed back on parts of the bill while it was being debated. Both then voted for it.

What that bill does to Virginia, per Virginia Mercury's reporting:

About 300,000 Virginians are at risk of losing Medicaid coverage next year.
5,800 lawful immigrants are guaranteed to lose it next month.
A projected $31 billion cut to the state's Medicaid funding over the next decade.
Changes to how hospitals are paid that may push rural hospitals toward closing or cutting services.

This is also not the first time Wittman's stated position and his recorded vote have pointed in opposite directions on Medicaid. In April 2025 he signed a letter promising he would not support any bill that reduced coverage for vulnerable people, told a columnist a month later that Virginians were protected, and then voted yes.

"A different pathway" that analysts read as another repeal

Wittman has also backed the Lower Health Care Premiums For All Americans Act, which passed the House last December and has not become law. It would let small businesses and self-employed people band together to buy insurance through association health plans.

Wittman describes it as bulk buying. "Anything that you buy in bulk or in mass quantities, you get a reduction in price," he said.

Some analysts describe it as a way to chip away at the ACA. The reason is not complicated. Since the ACA passed, insurers have not been allowed to charge you more because of your health. Pooling healthy people separately from sick people undoes that quietly, without a repeal vote.

Georgetown researcher Sabrina Corlette explained why the shared pool is the point. "We all get older and sicker," she said. The Democrats' approach "is recognizing that you might be subsidizing a sicker person today, but someone else will be subsidizing you down the road."

His Democratic opponent, prosecutor Shannon Taylor, put the political read plainly: "Now, with an election around the corner and families facing higher premiums, he wants to try and change his tune."

What the record shows

Rob Wittman touted 60 votes to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, then cast one vote to extend its subsidies eight days after they had already expired, in a bill that died in the Senate. Asked this week whether he would vote to repeal the law again, he would not answer. In between, he voted for Trump's budget bill, which puts about 300,000 Virginians at risk of losing Medicaid and cuts a projected $31 billion from the state's Medicaid funding over ten years, and 94,000 Virginians have already dropped their insurance since the subsidies lapsed.

Source

Wittman voted 60 times to undo the Affordable Care Act. Then he backed extending its subsidies. — Charlotte Rene Woods, Virginia Mercury, September 3, 2026. Photo by Charlotte Rene Woods / Virginia Mercury.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the SAVE America Act would actually do to voters

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

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

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

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

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

The emergency the resolution describes

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

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

It cites a federal investigation that charged four people.

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

What was actually in front of them that week

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

Outside the chamber:

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

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

In their own words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 189 who voted yes

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

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho — Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas — Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi — Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey — Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

The number nine is not in the Constitution

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

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

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

What they were actually voting on

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

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

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

The timing

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

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

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

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

Who pushed it

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who voted to freeze the Court

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

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

Alaska: Nick Begich

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

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

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

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

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

Idaho: Mike Simpson, Russ Fulcher

Illinois: Darin LaHood, Mike Bost

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

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

Kansas: Derek Schmidt, Ron Estes, Tracey Mann

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

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

Maryland: Andy Harris

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

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

Mississippi: Michael Guest, Mike Ezell, Trent Kelly

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

Montana: Troy Downing

Nebraska: Adrian Smith, Mike Flood

New Jersey: Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew

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

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

North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon: Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

Utah: Blake Moore, Celeste Maloy, Mike Kennedy

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

Washington: Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The man who quit over this said so at the time

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

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

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

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

The 188 who voted yes

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

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

The four who voted no

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

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

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

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

What the record shows

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

How they voted

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

Jen Kiggans Co-Sponsored a Bill to Stop the Labor Department From Giving Outdoor Workers Water, Shade and Rest Breaks

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:06:59 +0000

Coastal Virginia in August is not a metaphor. It is the kind of heat and humidity that makes the air feel like a wet towel, and thousands of people in Virginia's 2nd District work all day out in it — roofers, landscapers, dock workers, farm hands, delivery drivers, and the people loading trucks in warehouses that don't have air conditioning.

There is a federal rule waiting to be finished that would require their employers to give them cool drinking water, access to shade, and mandatory rest breaks when the heat gets dangerous.

Jen Kiggans co-sponsored a bill to stop it.

What HR 6213 does

The bill is H.R. 6213, the Heat Workforce Standards Act of 2025, introduced by Rep. Mark Messmer of Indiana on November 20, 2025. It would bar the Secretary of Labor from finalizing, implementing, or enforcing the proposed federal heat standard.

Kiggans signed on as a co-sponsor the same day it was introduced — November 20, 2025. She is one of 64 co-sponsors.

On July 21, 2026, the House Education and Workforce Committee voted the bill out of committee, 18 to 15, along party lines.

The rule it targets is not exotic. As Dani Loesch and John Luker laid out in the Daily Press — Loesch is a Kroger receiver and a member of UFCW Local 400, Luker chairs the Sierra Club's Coastal Virginia Group — the standard would require employers to provide water, shade, and rest breaks when temperatures become hazardous.

Water. Shade. A break.

What the heat is already doing

The federal numbers come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and OSHA's proposed rule collects them: an average of 3,389 heat-related injuries and illnesses a year serious enough to cost a worker days away from work, across 2011 through 2020, and an average of 34 deaths a year from heat on the job between 1992 and 2022 — 43 of them in 2022 alone.

Those numbers are almost certainly low. Heat kills indirectly — it triggers the heart attack, it causes the fall from the ladder, it clouds the judgment before the machine takes the hand. Those get recorded as cardiac events and falls and machine accidents. OSHA says so itself in the rule: a heat death "may be historically excluded" from the federal count because "cause of death is listed as cardiac arrest," or because "a worker faints due to heat exposure, falls from a height, and subsequently suffers a fatal traumatic injury." Heat also impairs "complex cognitive function" and decision-making, and the resulting injuries "are not currently factored into official statistics." The agency's conclusion is that the reported figures "likely do not capture the true magnitude."

There is no federal heat standard right now. That is what the proposed rule would fix, and that is what H.R. 6213 would stop.

Who asked for this

Not workers. Nobody who spends a July afternoon on a roof in Virginia Beach is lobbying Congress for the right to be denied a water break.

The bill is an employer bill. Blocking the rule means employers face no federal requirement to provide shade or paid rest time on a 100-degree day, and no federal enforcement if they don't. The cost of the rule falls on employers. The cost of killing it falls on the people working outside.

Kiggans is not alone in this. Byron Donalds, running for governor of Florida, co-sponsored the same bill — he signed on in January 2026. All 64 co-sponsors are Republicans, and Virginia's 2nd District is on the wrong end of it.

The rest of her record on this

Kiggans has built a reputation as a moderate in a swing district. On the things that decide whether her constituents can afford to live, the record is less moderate than the branding.

She voted for Trump's budget bill, which the Daily Press column notes cut clean energy investment and raised healthcare costs. As a Virginia state senator in 2020 she was one of 16 votes against capping payday and title loan rates at 36%, in a region built around the Navy. And in July she claimed her opponent made $21 million insider trading — an accusation her campaign could not back up when the New York Times asked about it.

Now she's on a bill to keep the federal government from telling an employer to hand a worker a bottle of water.

What this looks like in the 2nd District

Virginia Beach and Norfolk are getting hotter and staying hotter longer. The people most exposed are the ones with the least power to ask for a break — hourly workers, day laborers, people without a union contract, people who can be replaced by lunchtime for complaining.

A federal standard exists precisely for those workers. An employer who already gives people shade and water loses nothing under the rule. The rule only bites where somebody isn't doing it.

Kiggans co-sponsored the bill to make sure nobody has to.

What the record shows

Jen Kiggans co-sponsored H.R. 6213 on November 20, 2025, the day it was introduced. The bill would bar the Secretary of Labor from finalizing, implementing, or enforcing the first federal workplace heat standard — a rule requiring cool water, shade, and mandatory rest breaks when heat becomes hazardous. The committee advanced it 18-15 on party lines in July 2026. Federal data counts an average of 3,389 heat-related injuries and illnesses a year that cost workers days away from work, and an average of 34 heat deaths a year on the job, and OSHA says both figures are undercounts.

Sources

Column: Heat threatens workers' health. Kiggans wants to block relief. — Dani Loesch and John Luker, Daily Press, August 24, 2026 (guest opinion column). Photo via Daily Press.

H.R. 6213, Heat Workforce Standards Act of 2025 — sponsor, co-sponsors, dates and committee vote, Congress.gov.

Heat Injury and Illness Prevention in Outdoor and Indoor Work Settings — OSHA proposed rule, 89 Fed. Reg. 70698, August 30, 2024.

Ben Cline Says He's Listening to Farmers. Virginia's Cattlemen Called Trump's Beef Deal 'Bad Policy' 90 Minutes Later.

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 10:06:00 +0000

On Sunday afternoon, Ben Cline posted about a listening session with the Virginia Farm Bureau. He said he would "hear directly from the farmers who feed and fuel our Commonwealth," and committed to giving Virginia's farmers "support, resources, and certainty."

Ninety minutes later, the Virginia Cattlemen's Association posted something else.

What the cattlemen said

The VCA is headquartered in Daleville — about a ten-minute drive from Cline's home, and inside the 6th District he represents.

At 3:21 p.m., it posted a statement describing widespread industry concern about the administration's plan to flood the market with imported ground beef. The association called it "bad policy that will do more to hurt cattle producers than help consumers."

Its president, Bill McDonald, spelled out why. The policy, he said, "undermines the market from encouraging cattle producers to retain more females to grow the USA herd, which in the long run will make for an affordable and secure national food supply."

That's the technical version. The plain version: when the government dumps cheap foreign beef into the market, ranchers stop holding back heifers to build their herds — and the American cattle supply shrinks, which makes beef more expensive later, not less.

The association urged people to contact their elected officials.

Cline is their elected official. His post about listening never mentioned it.

What Trump actually did

On August 21, 2026, Trump announced he was waiving the tariff on imported ground beef that normally kicks in once foreign shipments pass a set limit. That clears the way for up to 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef over 90 days, at a promised 25% below market price.

Cattle futures dropped that same morning.

So American cattle producers now face a market being deliberately undercut by their own government — while the steel and equipment tariffs that drove up the cost of running a farm are still in place.

Cline told Virginians they had it coming

Cline has been asked about the tariffs before. He was clear.

As the 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico took effect, he told Charlottesville's WVIR that Virginians shouldn't complain: "These are all things that they voted for in November." He said the tariffs were how Trump would "attack inflation."

They did not attack inflation. They raised costs on the farms he now says he is listening to.

And he voted to take away Congress's say

This is the part that goes beyond a photo op.

There is a law — the National Emergencies Act — that lets any member of Congress force a vote to end a national emergency a president has declared. Trump used emergency powers to impose the tariffs on February 1, 2025, which started that clock.

House Republicans turned the clock off. They buried a provision inside H. Res. 211, the rule for a government funding bill, saying that each remaining day of that session of Congress "shall not constitute a calendar day" for the purpose of ending that emergency. No days, no clock, no forced vote.

On March 11, 2025, the House adopted that rule 216–214. Ben Cline voted aye. He also voted aye on the procedural motion that cut off debate on it minutes earlier.

We wrote about the Minnesota Republican who managed that rule on the floor. Cline wasn't the manager. He was one of the 216 votes that made it work.

So when farmers in the Shenandoah Valley asked Congress to do something about tariffs, the answer was that their congressman had already voted to make sure Congress couldn't.

Not a Virginia problem — a Republican one

The same squeeze is hitting farm country everywhere Republicans hold a seat and won't cross the president. Ohio farmers watched their senator vote three separate times, over three days in October 2025, to keep the tariffs that drove up their input costs. Indiana growers lost $607 million in exports. Michigan soybean farmers lost the Chinese market outright.

Meanwhile, in Cline's district, 31,685 households — about 10% of all households in VA-06 — rely on SNAP, according to USDA data. Cheaper beef at the register was the pitch. It isn't reaching them, and it's costing the people who raise the cattle.

What the record shows

Ben Cline posted about listening to Virginia farmers on Sunday afternoon. Ninety minutes later, the cattlemen's association based ten minutes from his house called the administration's 300,000-metric-ton beef import plan "bad policy that will do more to hurt cattle producers than help consumers." Cline told Virginians the tariffs squeezing those same farms were "things that they voted for," and on March 11, 2025 he voted for the rule that declared days would stop counting so the House could not vote to end the tariff emergency for the rest of that session.

Source

Ben Cline pretends to listen to farmers, as Valley beef industry struggles to keep up — Chris Graham, Augusta Free Press, August 23, 2026. Photo via Augusta Free Press.

Jen Kiggans Says Elaine Luria Made $21 Million Insider Trading. Luria Reported Two Stock Transactions in Four Years, and Left Congress No Richer.

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 10:04:35 +0000

Jen Kiggans represents Virginia's 2nd District. She won the seat in 2022 by beating Elaine Luria, and in November she faces Luria again.

In July, Kiggans posted on social media that Luria "made over $21 million through insider stock trading while serving in Congress," and that Luria "opposes banning members of Congress from trading stocks."

Both halves of that are wrong.

What Luria's disclosures actually show

Members of Congress have to report their stock trades. Luria's filings are public, and American Journal News reported what they show.

Across her four years in office, Luria reported two transactions: one stock sale and one purchase. Her husband reported two more.

That is four transactions total, for a household, over four years. It is not a trading operation.

Her net worth went down

The $21 million figure has to come from somewhere. It is not what her net-worth filings show.

When Luria joined Congress, she reported a net worth between $3.7 million and $13.6 million
When she left, she reported between $3.4 million and $12.9 million

Both the floor and the ceiling moved down. Comparing the two filings, that is a potential loss in value of about $720,000.

Kiggans's claim is not an exaggeration of something that happened. Luria left office reporting less than she came in with.

Fox News had to append a note to the same story

Kiggans isn't the only one who has pushed this. Fox News reported in June that Luria's net worth "skyrocketed during her time in office," and later added an editor's note to the piece. The note corrects the story's claim about her Alibaba shares — she sold them in early 2021, not, as the article had said, holding them until she left office — and clarifies the net worth figures: the value "skyrocketed during her term in office before returning to roughly its original value."

Which is the same thing her filings show. It is not $21 million, and it is not insider trading.

Her campaign couldn't name a single instance

On August 14, the New York Times reported the accusation and asked her campaign about it. Kiggans's campaign "did not point to any instances of insider trading, which is illegal, when asked about the allegations."

What it pointed to instead, the Times reported, was two things. That Luria used to oppose a congressional stock trading ban. And that she owns between $5 million and $25 million in NVIDIA stock, which she held while voting for the 2022 CHIPS Act, the law that put tens of billions of dollars into American computer-chip manufacturing. (That is what the Times says she owns now. It does not say what the stake was worth when she cast the vote.)

So: a holding she disclosed, and a vote in the public record. Insider trading means trading on information the public doesn't have. There is no trade here at all. Luria's spokesman called the attacks "lies" and said the bill did not increase the value of her stock.

Owning stock in an industry your vote can move is a real problem. It is the whole reason a trading ban is on the table, and it is a fair thing to run against someone for. Kiggans didn't run that argument. She said Luria made $21 million committing a federal crime.

A campaign can get a number wrong. This is not that. It is an accusation of a crime, levelled at a Navy veteran and former member of Congress, that her own campaign could not back with one example.

The second half of the claim is wrong too

Kiggans also said Luria opposes banning members of Congress from trading stocks.

Luria has been skeptical of a ban in the past. She isn't now. Her campaign website today: "No one should profit off of holding office… I support banning members of Congress and their families from trading individual stocks while holding office."

That is the position Kiggans says she doesn't hold.

This is a pattern, not a slip

Kiggans has a habit of saying things and then declining to answer for them.

She called DOGE cuts "so necessary," and then her district lost at least 70 federal contracts with veteran-owned businesses — and she only said she was working to reverse them after Politico counted the damage.

She voted against capping 299% payday and title loans in the most military-heavy district in America, and when a reporter asked her why eleven times, she wouldn't say.

And when a radio host told the highest-ranking Black man in Congress to get his "cotton-picking hands" off Virginia, Kiggans answered "That's right. Ditto." The NAACP asked for a real apology. She has never given one.

The short version

Jen Kiggans told voters that her opponent made more than $21 million insider trading in Congress. Elaine Luria's public disclosures show two transactions in four years, plus two by her husband, and a net worth that fell by as much as $720,000 between entering and leaving office. Fox News appended a note to a story making a similar claim, clarifying that her net worth returned to roughly its original value. And when the New York Times asked about the insider trading accusation, Kiggans's campaign pointed to no instance of it — only to a stock Luria has disclosed all along, and to a vote in the public record.

Source

Kiggans pushes false $21 million claim about Elaine Luria — Jesse Valentine, American Journal News, August 25, 2026. Photo via American Journal News/AP.

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

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

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

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

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

What the bill actually does

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

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

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

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

Joe Wilson wrote it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ohio said no in 2011. Jim Jordan signed anyway.

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

Jim Jordan is Ohio's signature on this bill.

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

Pennsylvania sent five signatures on a law it never wanted

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

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

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

What it costs a paycheck

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

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

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

This is not a one-off

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bill Is Three Phrases Long

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

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

", and individuals applying for or receiving,"

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

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

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

That limit is exactly what the bill removes.

These Teams Are Already Very Good at the Job They Have

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who's Behind It

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

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

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

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

Their Argument, and the Numbers Under It

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

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

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

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

Now Put That Next to What They Did to Medicaid

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

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

So hold the two numbers side by side:


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

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

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

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

What It Would Feel Like to You

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is actually being taken away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And TSA screeners got the same treatment

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

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

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

The House had a bill to end it permanently

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

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

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

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

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

The 20 Republicans who voted yes

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

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

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

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

The 195 who voted no

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

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

Alaska — Nick Begich

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

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

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

Colorado — Lauren Boebert, Jeff Crank, Jeff Hurd

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

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

Idaho — Russ Fulcher, Mike Simpson

Illinois — Darin LaHood, Mary Miller

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

Iowa — Ashley Hinson

Kansas — Ron Estes, Tracey Mann, Derek Schmidt

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

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

Maryland — Andy Harris

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

Minnesota — Tom Emmer, Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach

Mississippi — Mike Ezell, Michael Guest, Trent Kelly

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

Montana — Troy Downing

Nebraska — Mike Flood, Adrian Smith

New York — Nick Langworthy, Claudia Tenney

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

North Dakota — Julie Fedorchak

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

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

Oregon — Cliff Bentz

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

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

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

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

Utah — Mike Kennedy, Celeste Maloy, Blake Moore

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

Washington — Michael Baumgartner

West Virginia — Carol Miller, Riley Moore

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

Wyoming — Harriet Hageman

The Senate has done nothing for eight months

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

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

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

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

This is not a fringe position they're protecting

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

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

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

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

We deserve better.

How they voted

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two of them were sworn in before Reagan was inaugurated

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

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

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

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

Here is the part that should end the argument.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why they don't leave: eleven of thirteen gavels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ones who won't even stand in a room

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

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

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

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

And then there's Grassley

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

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

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

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

This was supposed to be a job you leave

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

Black Lung Just Hit a Near-50-Year High in Appalachia's Coalfields, Including Morgan Griffith's. He'll "Look Forward to Studying Various Proposals."

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 07:46:16 +0000

Vonda Robinson and her husband John know a 28-year-old coal miner. He has spent about a decade underground, and he already has black lung disease.

Vonda Robinson is vice president of the National Black Lung Association. This is what she told the Virginia Mercury about the young miners now turning up sick, in its reporting on new research showing black lung among Appalachian coal miners has reached its highest level in nearly 50 years:

"It upsets me because they have small children and they're probably not going to see their children graduate high school or meet grandkids."

The congressman for that coal country is Morgan Griffith, who has represented Virginia's 9th District since 2011 and chairs the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health.

Asked where he stands on the two bills before Congress to help miners with black lung and their widows, Griffith neither endorsed nor opposed them. He emailed the Virginia Mercury that he looks "forward to studying various proposals and determining the best course of Congressional action on this issue."

Fifteen years in Congress. Miners in his district getting an incurable disease earlier in their careers than they used to. He is studying it.

What the research actually found

The numbers come from a peer-reviewed research letter from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine:

Black lung rates are back where they were in the 1970s.
A third of central Appalachian miners who have worked 25 or more years underground now have the disease.
Cases are rising among miners with less experience — meaning, as the researchers wrote, the burden "is affecting younger miners and not confined to the most experienced workers."

Black lung is incurable. It is also preventable — it comes from breathing dust, and dust can be controlled.

The reason younger miners are getting sick is that the work changed. John Robinson, a longtime miner diagnosed a little over a decade ago, described drilling through rock for years before ever reaching coal:

"It took us two and a half years to get to the coal seam. We basically breathed rock for two and a half years."

Cutting rock throws off silica — a carcinogen far more damaging to lungs than coal dust alone.

There was a rule for exactly this. It has been frozen for 16 months.

This is the part Griffith is "studying."

On April 18, 2024, the Mine Safety and Health Administration published a rule lowering the permissible exposure limit for silica dust in coal and other mines — roughly cutting it in half. The Department of Labor estimated at the time that the rule would mean more than 1,000 fewer deaths and 3,746 fewer cases of silica-related illness.

It was set to take effect for coal mines on April 14, 2025.

It never did. The mining industry challenged it, and on April 11, 2025 — three days before the deadline — the Eighth Circuit put the rule on hold. The compliance deadlines have been stayed indefinitely ever since.

Two things about how that happened:

The Trump administration did not defend its own government's rule. As the Virginia Mercury reports, the administration declined to defend the rule in court — and then petitioned the court to block the labor unions and the Black Lung Association from stepping in to defend it themselves. The miners were not allowed to argue for the standard the government had already finalized.

The industry's own lobby says it supports the lower limits. The Mercury notes that a National Mining Association spokesman told The New York Times late last year that the group is "absolutely supportive of the new lower levels." What the association argues for instead is that respirators should be enough. It did not answer the Mercury's questions.

Miners say respirators are not enough. Quenton King of Appalachian Voices explained why: in a mine loud with running drills, workers struggle to keep them on, and "if you aren't trying to have a dust-free environment, respirators will clog up multiple times in a shift."

The program that produced the research is one DOGE tried to shut down

Griffith told the Virginia Mercury that the surge in cases "merit federal attention," and pointed to federal funding for a black lung clinic in his district.

Here is the awkward part. The research letter he is responding to came from NIOSH — and NIOSH's black lung work was nearly destroyed last year.

In March 2025, DOGE announced it would end the leases on as many as three dozen MSHA field offices — the offices that inspect mines for dust. In April, nearly 900 NIOSH workers, about two-thirds of the agency, were terminated. The Coal Workers' Health Surveillance Program, which sends free mobile screening clinics out to miners, stopped operating.

What brought it back was not Congress. It was a lawsuit filed on behalf of Harry Wiley, a West Virginia coal miner diagnosed with black lung in 2024. On May 13, 2025, U.S. District Judge Irene Berger ordered the program restored, and the fired workers went back.

A miner with black lung had to sue the federal government to get his own screening program turned back on.

And Griffith's position on the cuts that did it? He has said he believes the House will codify DOGE's cuts — write them permanently into law. He did not say which ones. "Some of them we will," he said. "Some of them we won't." He called many of the cuts well intentioned, and Elon Musk a "genius."

Where he does move fast

Griffith is not a man without opinions about the coal industry.

On August 7 he wrote to Governor Abigail Spanberger asking her to keep Dominion's Wise County coal plant open — a plant Dominion's own filings say will cost ratepayers at least $472 million this decade while running at a fraction of its capacity. Dominion's PAC has given him $32,500 since 2019.

So the record reads like this. Asked to protect a utility's coal plant: a letter, within days. Asked where he stands on helping miners with an incurable lung disease that is spiking in his own district: he'll study it.

This is the same pattern we found when eight school health clinics closed in his district in July and Virginia's community health centers wrote to ask him to intervene. The chairman of the House health subcommittee has a district full of health emergencies and a habit of arriving after they're over.

What the miners are asking for

Two bills. The Black Lung Benefits Improvement Act, to fix a benefits process that can take years and draws litigation from coal companies. And the Relief for Survivors of Miners Act, for the spouses left behind. Virginia Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine have carried both. Neither has passed either chamber.

Vonda Robinson says what's needed is bipartisanship, and she has been in touch with her own congressman about it. That congressman is Griffith. His answer was that he looks forward to studying various proposals.

She has also written to Vice President J.D. Vance, partly because of his family's Appalachian roots, hoping he can get Congress moving. When your own representative gives you a non-answer, you start writing to strangers.

"Trump can say 'drill baby drill,' but if we aren't taking care of our miners, there isn't going to be any drilling going on."

Griffith has been in Congress for 15 years. He runs the health subcommittee. Black lung across the central Appalachian coalfields, his district's included, is at a level not seen since the 1970s, the rule written to stop it is sitting frozen in an appeals court because the administration would not defend it, and the screening program that found the problem had to be restored by a federal judge.

There is nothing left to study.

Source

Virginia Mercury, "Black lung cases surging again in Southwest Va., Appalachia; miners blame blocked regulations" by Charlotte Rene Woods (August 17, 2026). Photo by Monty Rakusen/Getty Images.

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

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

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

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

What the state parties wrote down

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

Another section goes after surrogacy directly:

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

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

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

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

The SAFE KIDS Act

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who signed it

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

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

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

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

The part they don't put in the press release

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why surrogacy, and why now

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

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

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

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

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

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

What this costs real people

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

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

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

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the 60 Plus Association actually wants

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who took the award

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

Taking it this year:

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

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

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

The vote that already happened

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

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

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

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

The one who wouldn't answer the question

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

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

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

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

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

This is a pattern, not an accident

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

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

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

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

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

Then they went back to trading.

The gap nobody mentions

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

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

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

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

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

Max Miller — traded the same day he voted

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

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

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

Michael Rulli — still trading in August

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

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

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

Kevin Hern — $34 million in volume

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diana Harshbarger — 700 late trades, and still going

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

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

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

David Taylor — 210 trades in a first term

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the vote was actually for

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One said yes.

The tally

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

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

Husted is the one to look at

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

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

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

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

What Van Orden said

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

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

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

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

The pattern, not the exception

None of this is new behavior around Max Miller.

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

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

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

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

Why it matters where you live

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

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

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the judge did

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

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

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

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

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

What the letter asks for

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

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

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

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

The man who led it sells the products

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

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

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

Who signed

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

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

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

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

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

What registration was actually doing

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

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

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

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

The pattern

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

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

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

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the gloves are

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

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

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

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

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

The warnings come from the company that sells them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congress wrote guardrails. They were about equipment.

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

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

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

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

Two votes made this possible

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

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

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

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

The 201 with report cards on this site

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

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

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

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

Source

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

Three Hospitals in John McGuire's District Are at Risk of Closing. He Calls the Bill That Did It 'the Biggest Investment in Rural Hospitals in History.'

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:29:12 +0000

Southside Community Hospital in Farmville. Halifax Regional Hospital in South Boston. Community Memorial Hospital in South Hill.

Those are three hospitals in Virginia's 5th District that a Public Citizen analysis lists as at risk of closing because of the budget bill John McGuire voted for. Medicare classifies all three as Sole Community Hospitals — meaning each one is the only place to get short-term inpatient care for miles in every direction.

McGuire's response to this, as C-VILLE Weekly reported in June, is that the law he voted for "provides the biggest investment in rural hospitals in history, end of story."

It is not the end of the story. It isn't close.

What he voted for

On July 3, 2025, the House passed H.R. 1 — the law Republicans call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The Clerk of the House records the roll call. McGuire voted Aye.

The bill squeezes Medicaid in two ways that land directly on hospitals.

First, the provider tax. Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government pays 90 percent of the cost of covering adults through Medicaid expansion. Virginia raises its 10 percent share with a tax on hospitals. Hospitals agreed to that deal because expansion meant fewer uninsured patients showing up in the ER with bills nobody could pay. It worked: Julian Walker of the Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association told C-VILLE that hospitals lost more than $713 million on charity care in 2018, the year before Virginia expanded Medicaid, and about $457 million by 2024 — roughly a 36 percent drop.

H.R. 1 steps the maximum provider tax down from 6 percent to 3.5 percent. That sounds like a break for hospitals. What it actually means is that Virginia's state government has to find the money somewhere else.

Second, state directed payments. Medicaid pays hospitals less than care costs — about 72 cents on the dollar, per Walker. States have been allowed to draw down federal dollars to narrow that gap. H.R. 1 caps those payments at the Medicare rate, which the American Hospital Association put at roughly 90 cents on the dollar for 2026. Better than Medicaid alone, worse than what many hospitals were getting.

And here is the cruel part of the design. The hospital tax is based on revenue, so bigger and richer hospitals pay more of it. The state directed payments are based on how many Medicaid patients a hospital serves. So when those payments shrink, the hospitals that lose the most are the ones treating the most poor people — which in Virginia means the rural ones.

What it does to the 5th District

The 5th District is not a place with slack in the system.

It is the worst region in Virginia for primary care shortages. In 2025, just over half its population lived in an area with roughly one primary care doctor for every 3,000 to 3,500-plus people. The national average is 9.5 percent of the population. Virginia's average is 14.5 percent. The next-worst district in the state, VA-9, is at 31.3 percent.
It has the fewest hospitals per square mile in Virginia — one hospital for every 787 square miles, more than twice the state average.
Fifteen of its counties — Nelson, Amherst, Buckingham, Cumberland, Powhatan, Fluvanna, Louisa, Goochland, Appomattox, Charlotte, Amelia, Nottoway, Campbell, Pittsylvania and Lunenburg — were classified as maternal care deserts by the March of Dimes as of 2022. No hospital in any of them provides OB-GYN care.

That picture got worse after the vote. In December 2025, Centra Southside Hospital in Farmville closed its obstetrics and gynecology department. Centra named declining patient volumes as the main reason, but also cited "significant financial and operational challenges, including recently enacted reductions in federal healthcare funding." Patients who need a checkup or need to give birth now drive about an hour.

A June 2026 draft report from Virginia's Joint Commission on Health Care found five of Virginia's 36 rural hospitals at immediate risk of closure, with Halifax Regional on that list. Eight more were deemed at risk, including Community Memorial. A second model in the same report put Community Memorial at the highest risk of financial distress in the state, with Southside and Halifax in the next tier down.

The report's own summary of what "at risk" looks like is worth reading slowly: these hospitals "may continue to operate, but the range of services available to the community is becoming progressively narrower." They keep the emergency room and the outpatient clinic. Surgery goes. Obstetrics goes. That is how a county becomes a maternal care desert without a single hospital ever technically closing.

This is also a jobs story

Health care and social assistance is the single largest category of jobs in VA-5 — 49,506 people as of the most recent Census data, about one out of every six jobs in the district.

"Hospitals are some of the largest employers in Virginia," Walker said. "They directly employ about 138,000 to 140,000 people. For each hospital job in a community, there's a multiplier effect: Each hospital job supports two local economy jobs."

The Commonwealth Fund estimated in 2025 that H.R. 1 would cost Virginia 13,200 health care jobs by 2029.

Melanie Anne Egorin, a health policy expert at UVA's Batten School, described what that does to a small town: "Right now, hospitals are often the good-paying jobs in those communities. As those close, it furthers the cycle of job loss within our rural areas, in places where people really need health care. It isn't a place where somebody who goes to college can come back to as a nurse and serve their community if the hospital isn't there."

"End of story"

McGuire's defense rests on a $50 billion rural health fund written into the bill. Here is what that fund is actually worth.

Fifty billion dollars nationwide, paid out at $10 billion a year for five years. Sebastian Tello Trillo, a Medicaid policy expert and economist at UVA's Batten School, did the arithmetic for C-VILLE: "That is about 3 percent of all the cuts that they're making. So in some ways, they're saying, I'm going to take away $100, but I'm going to give you three back. Yes, three's something, great, but $3 once you took $100 out of me, that doesn't really solve all my problems."

For Virginia specifically: without the fund, the state's rural hospitals would lose nearly $2.1 billion between 2025 and 2034. The fund covers about 61 percent of that. Virginia's rural hospitals still come out $800 million poorer.

Meanwhile the American Hospital Association projects that 55,500 rural Medicaid patients in Virginia lose coverage under the law — the 10th largest coverage loss of any state in the country. The Joint Economic Committee estimates that more than 32,000 people in McGuire's district alone lose health coverage.

When someone loses coverage, they don't stop getting sick. They show up at the emergency room uninsured and the hospital absorbs the bill. That's the same charity-care hole Medicaid expansion had just spent six years filling.

The number he didn't want to talk about

McGuire also told C-VILLE that only 7 percent of Medicaid spending goes to rural hospitals — his argument that Medicaid was never really propping them up in the first place.

That figure traces back to the Trump White House, and it has been passed around at the highest levels — Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. used it at an August 2025 Cabinet meeting, and Medicare chief Mehmet Oz repeated it at a Senate Republican press conference three weeks later. When FactCheck.org tried to pin it down, it got a White House memo saying the number came from the CMS Office of the Actuary — and then, in its own words, "HHS didn't respond to our request for more information about the figure."

C-VILLE invited McGuire and his staff to respond to apparent factual errors and disputed data in his statements. They declined.

That is the pattern with this congressman and this subject. He will say it on friendly television — he went on Newsmax and called the COVID vaccine a "BLT sandwich of fetus baby parts" — and then decline to answer when a reporter asks him to back up a number. When Virginia's public radio network tried to ask about rising health care costs at a five-minute press conference, he dodged. His town halls are held over the telephone, and constituents who called in with criticism told the Daily Progress they were screened out; in April 2025 about a thousand constituents showed up to an "empty-seat" town hall he didn't attend.

He is not alone in the shape of this problem. Missouri's Mark Alford voted for the same bill and then, eight months later, introduced a bill to help keep rural hospitals open. At least Alford noticed there was a fire.

McGuire is still calling it the biggest investment in history. End of story.

The people of Farmville, South Boston and South Hill get to find out whether it is.

We deserve better.

Source

Nathan Alderman, "John McGuire vs. Hospitals", C-VILLE Weekly, June 10, 2026. (Photo: C-VILLE Weekly)

Ben Cline Called Defunding the Police 'Reckless.' His New Bill Would Defund Any Police Department That Won't Work for ICE.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:39:00 +0000

In June 2020, Ben Cline put his name on a resolution condemning the movement to defund the police, and said this about it:

"The United States is grounded in the Rule of Law and calls from the left to 'Defund the Police' are reckless and antithetical to any functioning society... The brutal killing of George Floyd was a tragedy but dismantling our police departments is simply not the answer."

That's from the press release announcing the resolution, dated June 15, 2020.

Nearly six years later, on March 25, 2026, Cline introduced a bill to take federal police funding away from police departments.

Not all of them. Just the ones that won't sign a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

What the bill actually says

It's called H.R. 8077, the 287(g) Cooperation Act of 2026. It is barely a page long, and the operative paragraph reads:

"Any State or political subdivision of a State that maintains a law enforcement agency that, not later than 180 days after the date of enactment... has not entered into a written memorandum of agreement with the Secretary of Homeland Security under this subsection is ineligible to apply for or receive any grant under the 'Community Oriented Policing Services' program or any successor program administered by the Department of Justice."

Read that carefully, because the reach is bigger than it first looks.

It isn't limited to sanctuary cities. It isn't limited to Virginia. Every state, and every county, city and town in the country that runs a police department, gets 180 days to sign an agreement handing some of its officers' time over to federal immigration enforcement. Miss the deadline and the whole jurisdiction is cut off from any COPS grant. The bill applies to fiscal year 2027 "and each fiscal year thereafter," and it tells the Attorney General to set up procedures for checking, before any grant is awarded, whether the agency has signed.

What COPS money actually pays for

The Community Oriented Policing Services office is the part of the Justice Department that helps local departments hire cops. By its own account it has invested over $20 billion in policing since Congress created it in 1994, and its flagship program, the COPS Hiring Program, exists to pay for hiring or rehiring full-time sworn officers at state, local, tribal and territorial agencies.

That is the money Cline's bill would use as a lever. Sign with ICE, or lose your officer-hiring grants.

Almost every police department in America would be on the wrong side of it

Here's the scale.

There were 17,541 state and local law enforcement agencies in the United States when the Justice Department last counted them, in 2018.

As of August 6, 2026, the date stamped on its own count, ICE reported it had signed 2,179 memorandums of agreement under 287(g), covering 39 states and 2 territories. Some agencies hold more than one, so the number of participating departments is smaller still — and eleven states have none at all.

So the overwhelming majority of police departments in this country have not signed a 287(g) agreement. Under Cline's bill, all of them lose access to federal hiring grants unless they sign one inside six months.

That is a plan to defund the police. It's just conditional.

The reason he wrote it

On February 4, 2026, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger issued Executive Directive One, ending the 287(g) agreements that state law enforcement agencies had entered under her predecessor.

Her reasoning, as she put it: "Taking Virginia law enforcement state agency personnel and basically giving them over to ICE is something that ends today."

The directive covered four state agencies — the Virginia State Police, the Department of Corrections, the Department of Wildlife and the Marine Resources Commission. It did not touch local sheriffs. Nearly two dozen local Virginia agencies kept their agreements, untouched.

Cline's response was a bill aimed at every local police department in the United States.

He was explicit about the mechanism. Speaking to WHSV, he said:

"Using the power of the purse, Congress can dictate how funds that they give to localities are used and what, if any, contingencies are put in place."

And:

"We're going to make sure that they can't receive these federal funds unless they're entering into these kinds of 287(g) agreements."

Cline sits on the House Appropriations Committee. The power of the purse is not an abstraction for him; it is his committee assignment. He is describing, accurately, what he is in a position to do.

What the police chief in his own district says

The most striking thing in WHSV's story isn't Cline. It's the police chief in Harrisonburg — a city inside Cline's own district, and one where, by his own biography, Cline served as an assistant Commonwealth's Attorney from 2007 to 2013.

Chief Joe Tucker told WHSV in February, weeks before the bill existed:

"We'll continue to do what we have been doing for a number of years, and that's keeping all residents of Harrisonburg safe — regardless of immigration status, race, you know, any of that."

"My job is to make sure all of my officers are safe and all the citizens are safe, regardless of any of the other noise that is going on currently in America."

That is a local police chief saying his department will go on doing what it has been doing. Under H.R. 8077, that answer would cost Harrisonburg its eligibility for federal officer-hiring money.

There's a reason chiefs resist. Under 287(g), as The Conversation summarized the research, "local police officers can interview people to determine their immigration status" and "issue immigration detainers to jail people" until ICE takes custody. Big-city chiefs who moved their departments away from immigration enforcement gave the same reason: the trust that makes immigrant crime victims and witnesses willing to talk to police at all. And a 2018 Cato Institute study cited in that piece found no evidence the partnerships bring crime rates down.

So a chief who has spent years building that trust is being asked to trade it for a grant application.

What this looks like on the ground in Virginia

This isn't theoretical here.

ICE agents staked out the Chesterfield County courthouse and detained at least 14 people over several days as they showed up for minor matters. One man was picked up while paying a $130 traffic fine.

Cline has voted to expand all of it. He was one of the Republicans who put $70 billion into ICE's budget on a two-vote margin, and one of those who funded the agency's contract to monitor Americans' social media accounts.

Now he wants the local police in the middle of it, and he's willing to withhold their hiring money to get them there.

The through-line

Cline's 2020 statement said dismantling police departments "is simply not the answer."

His 2026 bill says federal support for police departments is conditional on doing immigration work — and that departments which decline, including one in his own district, should be cut off.

Both things can't be principle. One of them is leverage.

H.R. 8077 has 16 cosponsors and sits in the Judiciary Committee. It has not moved. But bills like this one tell you what a member would do with the power if he had it, and Cline, on Appropriations, is closer to that power than almost anyone.

Source

"Rep. Ben Cline proposes bill to reverse Gov. Spanberger's policies on ICE", WHSV, March 26, 2026. Photo: WHSV.

The Gun Industry Named Ben Cline Its Legislator of the Year. The Award Citation Is a Receipt.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:35:00 +0000

Most of the time, figuring out who a member of Congress actually works for takes digging. You pull the donor records. You match them against the votes. You read the bills nobody covered.

Every so often, someone just tells you.

On April 14, 2026, the National Shooting Sports Foundation — the trade association for the companies that make and sell guns and ammunition in this country — named Ben Cline its 2025 Legislator of the Year.

This is not a gun-owners' group. It is not a hunting club. NSSF is the industry. Its members are manufacturers, distributors and retailers, and its job is to make selling firearms easier and more profitable. When that organization picks one member of Congress out of 435 and calls him its legislator of the year, the citation it publishes is worth reading closely — because it is a list, in the industry's own words, of what he did for them.

Here is what NSSF senior vice president Lawrence G. Keane said:

"The list of legislative achievements by Congressman Cline to support the firearm industry is remarkable."

He's right. Let's go through it.

Achievement one: he helped delete the silencer tax

Since 1934, buying a gun silencer in America has meant paying a $200 federal tax stamp, registering the item, and submitting fingerprints. That law — the National Firearms Act — was written during the gangster era to put the most dangerous categories of weapon and accessory on a federal ledger.

Trump's budget bill wiped out the tax.

Buried inside the same enormous bill that cut Medicaid and food assistance was a provision zeroing out the $200 stamp for silencers, short-barreled rifles and short-barreled shotguns. It took effect January 1, 2026. The items still have to be registered — but the fee that had stood since 1934 is now zero.

NSSF credits Cline with helping get it in there, and does not leave the result to the imagination:

"Rep. Cline also served a key role in securing the historic win in the One Big Beautiful Bill zeroing out the NFA tax, which has resulted in tens of thousands of new suppressor applicants."

Tens of thousands of new applicants. That is the industry counting its winnings.

Achievement two: he leads the bill to pull silencers out of federal law entirely

Cline is the sponsor of H.R. 404, the Hearing Protection Act, which he introduced on January 15, 2025. NSSF praised him for taking the bill over after its previous sponsor retired and growing its cosponsor list; it now sits at 127 cosponsors.

The name sounds like a workplace-safety measure. Read the bill text and four things stand out:

Strikes silencers out of the National Firearms Act by removing "any silencer" from the law's definition of a firearm — which takes the whole 1934 framework off them.
Wipes the slate for anyone who already has one: they are "treated as meeting any registration and licensing requirements."
Overrides the states. Section 4 is headed "Preemption of certain State laws in relation to firearm silencers," and says any state marking, recordkeeping or registration requirement "shall have no force or effect."
Orders the records destroyed. Within 365 days of enactment, the Attorney General must destroy the existing silencer registrations.

That last one is not deregulation. It is erasure — taking a registry that exists and burning it. We've seen this move before: Andrew Clyde is pressing the ATF to destroy gun transaction records older than 20 years, and Michael Cloud's SHUSH Act strikes silencers out of the same 1934 law and preempts state law in nearly identical words — though even that bill stops short of ordering the existing records destroyed. Cline's goes further.

Cline talks constantly about federal overreach. He is a Freedom Caucus member. But when a state looks at silencers and writes its own rule, his bill reaches into that state from Washington and cancels it.

Achievement three: during the longest shutdown in American history, he wrote a bill about gun paperwork

This is the part that should stay with you.

The federal government shut down on October 1, 2025, and stayed shut for 43 days — the longest shutdown in U.S. history. Federal workers went unpaid. And on November 1, SNAP ran out of money for roughly 42 million Americans, with states scrambling to figure out how to feed people.

About 817,500 Virginians rely on SNAP every month. One in six Virginia children faces hunger.

On October 31, 2025 — day 31 of that shutdown — Cline introduced H.R. 5874, the Firearm Access During Shutdowns Act.

What it does: it takes federal gun functions — the background check system, the ATF's enforcement-programs office that processes silencer paperwork, and the offices that approve firearm export licenses — and declares them, by statute, to relate to

"an emergency involving the safety of human life or the protection of property"

so that the employees doing that work keep working through any future shutdown as "excepted employees."

Read that again. In the middle of a shutdown where food assistance was about to lapse for 42 million people, the bill Cline filed would write into federal law that processing silencer forms and approving gun exports counts as a life-safety emergency.

He did not stop at the bill. NSSF credits him with leading 29 colleagues in a letter pressing the ATF to keep processing National Firearms Act forms while the government was closed.

H.R. 5874 was referred to committee and went nowhere. But 54 members signed on, and the point isn't whether it passed. The point is what a member of Congress reaches for when the government stops and his constituents start calling. Cline reached for the gun forms.

What the industry pays him

The relationship is not one-directional.

NSSF's political action committee has given Cline's campaign money in every election cycle since 2020 — $28,500 in all, according to his own filings with the Federal Election Commission. The most recent check, for $3,000, is dated March 31, 2026.

The award came two weeks later.

NSSF also notes that Cline earned an "A+" on its 2024 congressional report card and made its inaugural "Dean's List" with a 100% record on the bills the industry cared about. A perfect score. Not one vote where he weighed the industry's ask against something else and came down the other way.

His report card here lists the same trade association among his top funders, alongside the Freedom Caucus Fund and Altria.

What it costs Virginia

Virginia has 12.8 gun deaths per 100,000 people — about 1,200 Virginians a year.

That is roughly three people a day, every day, in the state Cline represents. He sits on the Appropriations Committee, which decides where federal money actually goes, and he has been in Congress since 2019. In seven years he has had the power to move real money at that number.

Instead, the bills with his name on them run the other way: take silencers off the federal registry, destroy the records, override the states that said no, zero out the tax, and keep the export licenses moving when everything else in Washington stops.

The hearing-damage argument in his bill's title is real as far as it goes. Gunfire is loud. But hearing protection costs about thirty dollars at any sporting goods store. It does not require deleting a 92-year-old federal registry, and it does not require burning the records of who owns what.

The tell

Politicians usually work hard to look like they answer to their constituents. What makes this story unusual is that we don't have to guess.

The gun industry evaluated its options in Congress, picked Ben Cline, and published its reasoning. Every item on that list is something he did. Not one of them is something Virginians asked him for.

Source

National Shooting Sports Foundation, "NSSF Honors U.S. Rep. Ben Cline as 2025 Legislator of the Year", April 14, 2026. Photo: NSSF.

Morgan Griffith Wrote a Bill to End Citizenship for Babies Born in Guam. Exactly One of His 440 Colleagues Has Signed On.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:50:44 +0000

On July 16, 2026, Morgan Griffith introduced H.R. 9724, the End Birthright Citizenship for Territories Act.

The bill would strip automatic U.S. citizenship from children born on or after January 1, 2027 in Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, unless the child's parent is a U.S. citizen or a lawful permanent resident.

Six days later, The Guam Daily Post reported a detail the governor's office wanted people to notice. Of the 434 other voting members of the House and the six nonvoting delegates, the administration told the paper, not one had signed on as a cosponsor.

That was a day out of date when it ran, and it is the only thing in the story that was. The House record shows exactly one cosponsor — Ralph Norman of South Carolina, who added his name on July 21 — and he is still the only one.

One, out of 440. In a Republican conference that has spent two years competing to introduce the toughest immigration bill anyone can think of, Griffith wrote something that 439 of his colleagues looked at and walked away from.

We covered the bill's introduction alongside a similar effort from another Virginia Republican. What has happened since is that the Americans it would affect have been answering him — and he hasn't answered back.

Guam's leaders, across the aisle

Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero's administration told the Post it opposes H.R. 9724 and, in its own words, "We are actively working to have the bill withdrawn."

Asked what expectant parents on the island should know, the administration tried to calm people down: "Right now the security of their citizenship is the same. It remains legal. There is no change." It said it would "remain vigilant, proactive, and work collaboratively with fellow stakeholders to tamp this down" until Congress drops or defeats the bill.

That is a government having to reassure pregnant women that their babies will still be Americans.

Speaker Frank Blas Jr. is not a soft touch on immigration. He said plainly that he supports securing the border and prosecuting anyone who abuses birthright citizenship through illegal conduct. He still rejected Griffith's bill — because of the legal foundation it rests on.

"I wholeheartedly support the complete repeal of the Insular Cases."

The Insular Cases are the century-old Supreme Court rulings that let Congress treat the rights of people in the territories as optional. Griffith's argument for his bill depends on them: he contends that because citizenship in the territories comes from federal statute rather than the 14th Amendment, Congress can take it back.

Blas said he respects Griffith's aim of curbing immigration fraud but "cannot support reliance upon the Insular Cases as justification for legislation affecting Guam."

He also named the structural problem underneath the whole thing:

"That democratic deficit is unacceptable, and it is something to which I strenuously object."

Guam has no vote in Congress. Neither does Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands or the Northern Marianas. A congressman from Salem, Virginia can propose ending the citizenship of their newborns, and there is no one in the room who can vote against him on their behalf.

Sen. William Parkinson introduced a resolution condemning the measure. Del. James Moylan, Guam's own nonvoting delegate in the U.S. House, announced his opposition after public pressure to take a stronger stand.

The invitation

The most striking response came from Vice Speaker Tony Ada, an Army veteran, who didn't issue a condemnation. He sent Griffith a formal invitation to come to Guam.

"This invitation is about ensuring Guam's people are seen, heard, and respected."

Ada offered to arrange meetings with health care providers, veterans, business leaders and residents — covering not only citizenship but Medicaid funding, energy resilience, disaster recovery and federal maritime policy. He tied the request to the island's 82nd Liberation Day, honoring the CHamoru people who lived through the Japanese occupation and the servicemembers who ended it, and to Guam's enlistment rate.

"Guam has consistently answered our nation's call to serve."

"The strongest federal policies affecting Guam are developed with Guam, not simply for Guam. Guam is not just a point on a map; we are an American community with a unique history, deep service to our country, and a rightful place in the national conversation."

Ada asked Griffith to consider a visit during Congress's August district work period. That period is happening right now.

He never asked them, and he isn't answering

Two sentences from the Post's reporting do more work than anything else in this story.

The first: "Neither Griffith's office nor his July 16 release has addressed whether he consulted territorial delegates before introducing the bill."

The second: "The Post sent Griffith a list of questions about the bill's origins and his response to territorial opposition. His office had not replied as of press time."

He wrote legislation to end the citizenship of American babies in four American places. He apparently did not talk to any of them first. When their newspaper asked him about it, he didn't respond.

That is exactly the "democratic deficit" Blas was describing, demonstrated rather than argued.

Even the advocates say the drafting is bad

Right to Democracy, which works on territorial rights, launched a survey and an FAQ in July to help residents figure out what the bill would actually do to them.

Co-director Neil Weare called the measure poorly crafted and said the uncertainty about its real effect makes public understanding all the more important. His co-director, Adi Martínez-Román, was blunter about why people are confused:

"This bill has caused much concern and confusion, as it is even written in a sloppy way."

The bill sits before the House Judiciary Committee with no hearing scheduled.

What this does for Virginia's 9th District

Nothing.

Griffith frames H.R. 9724 as a crackdown on "birth tourism." Set aside whether that's the right description of what the bill does. The people who will live with it are in Hagåtña and San Juan and Charlotte Amalie. The people who elected him are in Wise County and Bristol and Salem, where eight school-based health clinics closed last month and three rural hospitals are on a watchlist for closure.

He chairs the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health. He is Co-Chair of the Coal Caucus. He has plenty of levers that touch his own district's actual problems.

Instead, he wrote a bill that exactly one other member of Congress will put his name on, aimed at Americans who have no vote, who have asked him to come talk to them, and who cannot get his office to answer the phone.

Source

Reported by Walter Ulloa for The Guam Daily Post: Guam leaders unite to oppose birthright citizenship measure (July 22, 2026). Photo: David Castro / The Guam Daily Post — U.S. and Guam flags at the 82nd Liberation Day observance, Asan Beach, War in the Pacific National Historical Park.

Dominion's PAC Gave Morgan Griffith $67,000. Last Week He Asked the Governor to Protect Dominion's Coal Plant.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:47:25 +0000

On Thursday, August 6, 2026, Governor Abigail Spanberger announced she would intervene in the case that will decide whether Florida's biggest utility gets to buy Virginia's.

No Virginia governor appears to have done it before. The State Corporation Commission's spokesman told VPM News he wasn't aware of a previous instance. Spanberger said she was doing it for three reasons: making energy more affordable for families and small businesses, protecting utility workers, and developing clean, local, affordable energy.

The next day, Morgan Griffith wrote her a letter asking her to use that intervention to protect a coal plant.

"I urge the Governor to work to ensure this merger does not prematurely close a world-class coal plant that supports Southwest Virginia communities."

The plant is the Virginia City Hybrid Energy Center in St. Paul, Wise County. Dominion Energy owns it.

Dominion Energy's political action committee has given Morgan Griffith's campaigns $67,000 since he was first elected, according to his own committee's FEC filings.

What the plant costs, and who pays

Here is the part Griffith's press release leaves out.

The Virginia City plant was built outside Dominion's own service territory. The people who pay for it are Dominion customers in eastern and central Virginia — as the Virginia Mercury put it, "the region doesn't bear the plant's costs."

And the costs are not small. Using Dominion's own estimates, the Sierra Club's Virginia chapter calculated in 2022 that keeping Virginia City running would cost ratepayers at least $472 million by the end of the decade — while producing only 6.3% of the power it is capable of generating.

That last number is the whole problem. The commission's own senior hearing examiner, Michael Thomas, put it plainly: "we have a facility that was designed and constructed to operate 80 percent of the year and it's operating somewhere down in the teens."

Virginians are being billed for a power plant that mostly sits idle.

Spanberger's stated reason for intervening is that she wants lower bills. Griffith's response was to ask her to keep that plant running.

The case for the plant, honestly stated

There is a real argument on the other side, and it deserves to be on the page.

The plant is a genuine economic anchor for Wise County. It put more than $8.9 million in property taxes into county coffers in 2020 — money that pays for schools and sheriff's deputies in a county that does not have many other sources of it. It employs people. And it burns waste coal from "gob piles," the heaps of mining leftovers scattered across coal country; Griffith's own statement notes it has "cleaned up millions of tons of waste coal."

Southwest Virginia has been left holding the bill for coal's decline for forty years. A congressman fighting for what's left of the tax base there is doing his job.

The question is what he's fighting for, and what he isn't.

Griffith is not asking Virginia to replace those jobs and that tax revenue with something that lasts. He is not asking for transition money, or for the site to be redeveloped, or for the county to be made whole whenever the plant does close. He is asking for the closure to be delayed, and for ratepayers elsewhere in the state to keep paying for the delay.

That is not a plan for Wise County. It is a stay of execution, billed to somebody else.

He is not a neutral party on coal

Griffith's own press release lists his credentials, and they're worth reading as he wrote them:

He is Co-Chair of the Congressional Coal Caucus.
In February 2026 he attended a White House event "touting Beautiful Clean Coal."
In April 2025 he attended the White House signing of executive orders to boost the coal industry.
Later in 2025 he voted to write one of those orders into law, reestablishing the National Coal Council.
In May 2025 he celebrated the Energy Department designating metallurgical coal a critical material.

His environmental record matches. The League of Conservation Voters scores him at 3% for 2025 and 6% for his career. And on February 1, 2017, he voted to wipe out the Stream Protection Rule — the Interior Department regulation that kept mining waste out of Appalachian streams and drinking water, in the same coalfields he is now defending a plant in.

The rest of the energy money

Dominion's PAC is not the only one. Over the same period, his filings show he has also taken:

$82,500 from Koch, Inc.'s PAC
$74,500 from the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association's PAC
$67,000 from Dominion Energy's PAC

Griffith sits on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the industry writing those checks. Since 2020, 68% of his campaign money has come from PACs — about $2.8 million of $4.2 million, by Who Bought My Rep's count. Roughly 3% comes from small grassroots donors, ranking him 381st out of 440 House members on that measure.

What the merger fight is actually about

Spanberger said at a press conference that the guarantees the utilities have offered — about $10 a month in bill credits for two years, and 18 months of job protection for Dominion employees — are "not sufficient yet."

"The benefits of this merger will last for far longer for the companies participating than two years, and so I'd want to see the benefit to Virginians last longer as well."

Public witness hearings are set for November 5, 9 and 10. The evidentiary hearing begins November 17. The commission has until January 11, 2027 to decide.

Into that fight, the member of Congress for Southwest Virginia has entered one request: keep the coal plant open.

Not lower bills for his constituents. Not a commitment to rebuild the Wise County tax base for the years after coal. One plant, owned by one company, which has given him $67,000.

Source

Griffith's letter and statement are on his official House website: Griffith Urges Spanberger to Protect SWVA Coal, Lower Energy Costs in Proposed NextEra Dominion Merger (August 7, 2026). Spanberger's intervention was reported by Patrick Larsen for VPM News. Photo: Virginia City Hybrid Energy Center, Virginia Mercury.

Eight School Health Clinics Just Closed in Morgan Griffith's District. The People Who Ran Them Wrote Him a Letter.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:44:47 +0000

On Thursday, July 9, 2026, the Virginia Community Healthcare Association sent a letter to Morgan Griffith.

The association represents the state's Federally Qualified Health Centers — the clinics that serve people who otherwise have nowhere to go. Its message was that a program in Southwest Virginia had just collapsed, and it wanted the congressman to do something about it.

Eight school-based health clinics had closed. The Virginia Mercury reported the list:

Northwood Middle School
Saltville Elementary School
Chilhowie Elementary School
Chilhowie Middle/High School
John S. Battle High School
Highpoint Elementary School
Virginia Elementary School
Virginia High School

All of them in Southwest Virginia — Smyth County, Washington County, Bristol. That's Griffith's territory, which is why the letter went to him. Putting a clinic inside a school is what you do in a region where, as the Mercury put it, "access to primary care is limited."

But the association didn't write to him only because he's the local congressman.

Morgan Griffith chairs the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health — the panel that writes federal drug-pricing and public-health law.

How the money worked, and why it stopped

The clinics were paid for out of savings from a federal drug-pricing program called 340B.

It works like this: hospitals and clinics that serve a lot of low-income patients can buy prescription drugs at a steep discount, bill insurers the normal rate, and keep the difference. The point of the arrangement is that safety-net providers, who operate on very thin margins, get money they can plow back into their communities.

In Southwest Virginia, that's what it paid for — clinics inside schools.

VCHA CEO Tracy Douglas wrote to Griffith about the shrinking 340B savings. The clinics' operator put a number on it. Southwest Virginia Community Health Systems says the money available for these services "has declined from approximately $2.7 million to $400,000" over the past four years — at the same time demand for care is going up. Its July 15 announcement describes the clinics as suspended for the 2026–2027 academic year; both affected school superintendents told WJHL they are looking for another provider for the year after that.

Douglas's summary of the situation:

"Because of the drama around the effectiveness of the program, we're forced to have to make tough decisions."

Demand is rising for a reason the Mercury spelled out. Enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies have expired, and the budget bill Congress passed last summer changed Medicaid and hospital funding. As people lose coverage, they show up at the clinics that are left — the FQHCs, the free clinics, and the emergency rooms.

So the safety net is being asked to catch more people at the exact moment its funding is shrinking. Eight school clinics are what fell through first.

What the chairman of the health subcommittee actually did

Griffith did not just watch this happen from Washington. He voted for the bill.

On July 3, 2025, he voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — the "Aye" is on the roll call — which cut Medicaid and hospital funding. He was also among the 197 Republicans who voted to let the enhanced ACA premium subsidies lapse rather than extend them.

Both of those decisions are upstream of the letter that landed on his desk in July.

And this is not the first warning he's had about health care in his own district. Three hospitals in Southwest Virginia — Dickenson Community Hospital, Buchanan County General Hospital and Tazewell Community Hospital — have been flagged as at risk of closure because of the same Medicaid cuts.

That is a subcommittee chairman with three hospitals on a closure watchlist and eight school clinics already gone, in the district he represents, from bills he voted for.

What "the drama around 340B" means

Douglas's phrase is diplomatic. Here's the plainer version.

340B is under attack from several directions at once. The Trump administration is pursuing regulatory changes to scale the program back. Sen. Bill Cassidy has released draft legislation that FQHCs say could hurt them by changing reimbursement timelines. Large pharmaceutical companies, pharmacies, hospital systems and smaller clinics are all offering competing views on how the program should be changed.

Drug pricing policy is Energy and Commerce's jurisdiction. The Health Subcommittee is where the House writes it. Griffith holds the gavel.

He is, in other words, one of the few people in the country positioned to settle the uncertainty that Douglas says forced the closures — either by protecting the savings small clinics depend on or by telling them plainly that he won't.

Who else has his ear

It's worth knowing which side of the 340B fight funds his campaigns.

According to FEC-derived contribution data compiled by Who Bought My Rep, which counts money raised from 2020 onward, Griffith has taken $40,000 from the Alliance for Pharmacy Compounding's PAC and $35,000 from the National Community Pharmacists Association's PAC — both with direct stakes in drug pricing policy before his subcommittee. He has also taken $40,000 from Altria's PAC and $30,000 from Reynolds American's PAC, the two largest tobacco companies regulated by his committee.

Overall, 68% of his campaign money comes from PACs — about $2.8 million of the $4.2 million his campaign has taken in over that period. Small grassroots donors account for roughly 3%, ranking him 381st out of 440 House members for grassroots support.

The community health centers that wrote him a letter do not have a PAC on that list.

Nobody can ask him about it in person

There is no in-person meeting where a parent from Chilhowie or Saltville can ask Griffith what happens to their kid's clinic. He calls in-person town halls "inefficient" and hasn't held one in more than a decade. When constituents organized their own in April 2025, they left a chair empty for him.

Griffith is on the ballot in November against Democrat Joy Powers, who won the primary on August 4. Eight clinics closed a month ago. The letter asking him to intervene is a matter of public record.

Source

Reported by Charlotte Rene Woods for the Virginia Mercury: Eight school-based health clinics close in Southwest Virginia as federal funding pressures mount (July 10, 2026). Photo: Charlotte Rene Woods / Virginia Mercury.